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Security

The Nuclear Bunker Where Wikileaks Will Be Located 187

Posted by CmdrTaco from the can-we-have-a-party-here dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Engadget has photos of 'Pionen White Mountains, the nuclear bunker in which Wikileaks will locate some of its servers. It was excavated 98 feet underground, in a rock hill in the center of Stockholm, Sweden, during the Cold War.' It looks like they hired the same interior designer who decorated Batman's lair."
Linux Business

Hemisphere Games Reveals Osmos Linux Sales Numbers 131

Posted by Soulskill from the more-than-a-little-less-than-a-lot dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Hemisphere Games analyzes the sales numbers for their Linux port of Osmos and ask themselves, 'Is it worth porting games to Linux?' The short, simple answer is 'yes.' Breakdown and details in the post." A few other interesting details: the port took them about two man-months of work, the day they released for Linux was their single best sales day ever, and they got a surprising amount of interest from Russia and Eastern Europe. Their data only reflects sales through their website, and they make the point that "the lack of a strong Linux portal makes it a much less 'competitive' OS for commercial development." Hopefully someday the rumored Steam Linux client will help to solve that.
Operating Systems

Canonical Developing Ubuntu OS For Tablets 228

Posted by timothy from the wheels-spinning-all-the-time dept.
snydeq writes "Canonical is preparing a version of the Ubuntu OS for tablet computers as the company looks to extend its presence in the mobile space, InfoWorld reports. The OS will be a lightweight version of Linux with a simplified, touch-friendly user interface, and tablets with the Ubuntu OS could become available late in winter 2011. The focus will be on developing an OS with a simplified user interface that provides quick access to the most-used applications. Development efforts will also focus on adding on-screen keyboard features and compatibility for multitouch drivers."
Software

PETA Creates New Animal-Friendly Software License 356

Posted by samzenpus from the no-animals-were-hurt-during-the-creation-of-this-story dept.
Anders writes "People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the largest animal rights organization in the world, endorse a new FLOSS license. From the article: 'The Harm-Less Permissive License (HPL) is a permissive, non copyleft, software license. It is based on the FreeBSD license but with one additional restriction; the "harm-less" clause. It prevents software, licensed under the HPL, to be used for harming humans or animals.'" I guess this leaves the bunny-fueled power plant in Stockholm out in the cold.

Comment Re:How far have we come? About a quarter-inch. (Score 2, Interesting) 276

by Jollyeugene (#31786948) Attached to: GNOME 2.30, End of the (2.x) Line

And the small, lean desktop apps of those days have been replaced with bloatware as well. Abiword and GNUCalc were fast and useful back in the GNOME days, Now they are a joke-- they crash as soon as you do anything with them.

Numerous little GNOME 1.4 applications existed (time trackers, media players and cd rippers) that were fast and light and that worked well. Every GNOME release one of these apps would get booted out in favor of some bloated project that was "new" and "great". The "new" and "great" always meant twice the memory size, unstable habits while running, and much less functionality-- provided in drop down windows and wizards.

GNOME ended up with HAL, BONOBO, and mono. And guess what? All that crap in 2.0 that they added over 10 years-- that is now going away again because it was all so piss poor to begin with. LOL.

Hopefully GNOME 3.x is more like GNOME 1.5x.

Hopefully GNOME stops trying to include default applications and goes back to providing the API's and the HID best user practices and requirements.

I don't want to hear that web browser X is out of GNOME, and IM client Y is now "blessed" to be in GNOME. That crap is retarded. When your GNOME package starts depending on this silly list of dorky applications it gets really annoying. Either the app meets the GNOME usability and code and API usage guidelines or it does not. Give it a gold star, or a silver star, or a black dot, or whatever. But making productivity apps a core part of the desktop, and then changing the apps in every release to reward whomever has kissed the most ass that release has pissed me off to no end these past 10 years.

Comment Ratpoison (Score 1) 276

by Jollyeugene (#31786844) Attached to: GNOME 2.30, End of the (2.x) Line

I am happy with an old version of RatPoison for serious work. Less distractions, more focus on the task at hand, and plenty of scripts and plug ins to get the job done.

When I don't care about productivity, GNOME with bells and whistles keeps me amused. Although, I do miss the 1.4 days.

Comment Look at the average Toyota Driver... (Score 4, Insightful) 776

by Jollyeugene (#31729592) Attached to: Toyota Accelerator Data Skewed Toward Elderly

According to TTAC, the number #1 vehicle for unintended acceleration is the Lincoln TownCar. The Ford Police cruiser is one of the lowest, however. Funny thing is that, mechanically-- they are the same car. The difference is the people who drive them-- one group being highly trained with fast reaction times, and the other group-- well not so much.

It is not just age distribution that they need to look at with Toyota, it is the complete demographic of the Toyota owner. Car enthusiasts do not usually buy Toyota's these days. Toyota's are incredibly boring in appearance and they handle like slugs. The are anti-exciting, right up there with a root canal. The average Toyota driver is the person in the fast lane doing 45mph and texting someone at the same time. For the average user, unintended acceleration happens everytime they touch that strange scary pedal on the right. When you add in that their brakes are likely shot because they drag them all the damn time while talking on their i-phone going down the road-- and never do routine maintenance on their vehicle: it is no wonder they can't stop.

Toyota's main problem is that they decided to make cars for idiots and got bit by that (granted that is a large market share, just ask Microsoft).
Books

Judge Chin Says He Will Cut the Google Book Settlement 38

Posted by timothy from the why-not-horizontally dept.
Miracle Jones writes "In a move that has shocked the publishing world, Judge Denny Chin has filed a brief saying that he has decided to cut the Google Book Settlement in half, letting Google host the first half of every book the company has scanned, and letting other interested stakeholders fight for the rights to the rest. 'We think this is a hard decision, but a fair one,' said John Peter Franks for Google. 'We would like to be able to host and control whole books, but at least we get the front half.'"
Linux Business

SoftMaker Office 2010 For Linux Nearing Release 110

Posted by timothy from the put-your-words-in-a-row dept.
martin-k writes "SoftMaker Office is a Microsoft-compatible office suite that competes with OpenOffice.org. Its creator, German software publisher SoftMaker, is nearing completion of the latest release, SoftMaker Office 2010 for Linux. This new release offers document tabs, high-quality filters for the Microsoft Office 2007 file formats DOCX and XLSX, and presentation-quality charts in the spreadsheet. It also brings integration into KDE and Gnome, using the system's colors and fonts. A release candidate is available as a free download."
The Courts

SCO v. Novell Goes To the Jury 67

Posted by timothy from the perhaps-it's-the-oj-jury dept.
Excelcia writes "Closing arguments in the six and a bit year old slander of title case between SCO and Novell occurred today and the case is finally in the hands of the jury. It's been an interesting case, with SCO alternately claiming that the copyrights to UNIX did get transferred to them, and that the copyrights should have been transferred to them. 'Judge Ted Stewart said, after the jury left to begin to deliberate, that in all his years on the bench, he's never seen such fine lawyering as in this case.' We're not going to find out the results until at least Tuesday, however, as one juror is taking a long weekend. Great lawyering notwithstanding, we can all hope next week that the Energizer bunny of all spurious lawsuits will finally go away."
Space

Nearby Star Forecast To Skirt Solar System 135

Posted by Soulskill from the we're-doomed dept.
PipianJ writes "A recent preprint posted on arXiv by Vadim Bobylev presents some startling new numbers about a future close pass of one of our stellar neighbors. Based on studies of the Hipparcos catalog, Bobylev suggests that the nearby orange dwarf Gliese 710 has an 86% chance of skirting the outer bounds of the Solar System and the hypothesized Oort Cloud in the next 1.5 million years. As the Oort Cloud is thought to be the source of many long-period comets, the gravitational effects of Gliese's passing could send a shower of comets into the inner Solar System, threatening Earth. This news about Gliese 710 isn't exactly new, but it's one of the first times the probability of this near-miss has been quantified."

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