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Submission + - Registration opens for LibrePlanet 2013: "commit change" (fsf.org)

Submitted by kxra
kxra writes: The Free Software Foundation's annual LibrePlanet conference is an event at the intersection of software, social justice, and media studies. They have announced the conference and a new jabber server for associate members at the same time. This years conference seems to be the most broad and diverse yet, with a lineup of speakers from various backgrounds between programming, activism, and academia.

Comment RouterStation PRO by ubiquity (Score 1) 334

It ships with (an old version of) OpenWRT preinstalled. It doesn't get better/friendlier than that :)

Add a nice case (for instance from netgate.com - they have them but the page for that product seems to be broken right now, sigh) and powersupply (48V DC, netgate has them too).

Finally, add up to three minipci wifi cards (and make sure to get pigtails and antennas). A good vendor for that stuff is pcengines.ch; the Wistron DNMA92 Atheros 802.11a/b/g/n card is cheap at $26 and it uses the ath9k driver (no binary blobs). PCengines also has cheap pigtails and antennas.

All in all this costs quite a bit more than your run of the mill access point, but this puppy is a lot more powerful than your average access point.

Comment Re:RT (Score 3, Informative) 321

by LinuxOnEveryDesktop (#27007547) Attached to: Best FOSS Help Desk Software For Small Firms?

We're at almost 200K tickets. RT scales fine, you just have to tune it a bit. And run it on PostgreSQL, and *definitely* tweak your PostgreSQL for performance.

In older versions, many indexes were missing by default. That may have been fixed more recently. Also, PostgreSQL 8.3 made a huge difference for us performance wise.

Government

FCC Commissioner Lauds DRM, ISP Filtering 217

Posted by kdawson from the by-some-definition-of-"effective" dept.
snydeq writes "Ars Technica's Nate Anderson and InfoWorld's Paul Venezia provide worthwhile commentary on a recent speech by FCC Commissioner Deborah Taylor Tate (PDF), in which she praised DRM as 'very effective' and raised a flag in favor of ISP filtering. Anderson: 'Having commissioners who feel that the government has a duty to partner with and back educational classroom content from the RIAA; who really believe that ISP filtering is so unproblematic we can stop considering objections; and who think that universities worry about file-swapping because tuition might be raised to pay for the needed "expansion of storage capabilities" (huh?) isn't good for the FCC and isn't good for America.' Venezia: 'Leave the ISPs out of it — it's not their job to protect a failing business model, and a movement toward a tiered and filtered Internet will do nothing to stem the tide of piracy, but will result in great restrictions on innovation, freedoms, and the general use of the Internet. There's nothing to be gained down that path other than possibly to expand the wallets of a few companies.'"
Linux Business

Source Claims 240K Kindles Sold 176

Posted by kdawson from the drm-and-all dept.
Naturalist writes "Exact data on (the Linux-powered) Kindle sales figures have been hard to come by. Amazon is notoriously tight-lipped about it, and although CEO Jeff Bezos did give some Kindle-related information back in July, the company has yet to break out how many readers it has sold to date. Now TechCrunch claims to have spoken to a source close to Amazon with direct knowledge of the company's sales figures. According to this unnamed source, Amazon has sold 240,000 Kindles to date, for an estimated hardware revenue between $86 million and $96 million; media sales would push the total above $100M." We've been following the Kindle since its launch nine months ago.
Republicans

Sen. Ted "Tubes" Stevens Is Indicted 553

Posted by kdawson from the eating-our-own-pork dept.
Many readers are letting us know about the indictment of Sen. Ted Stevens on seven counts of making false statements on his financial disclosure forms. We discussed the raid on the senator's house a while back. Everyone's favorite technologically challenged senator is the longest-serving Republican in the history of the upper house. An Alaskan paper gives deep background on the probe that has ensnared Stevens and a number of other Alaska political figures.
Microsoft

Fastest-Ever Windows HPC Cluster 216

Posted by timothy from the class-envy dept.
An anonymous reader links to an eWeek story which says that Microsoft's "fastest-yet homegrown supercomputer, running the U.S. company's new Windows HPC Server 2008, debuted in the top 25 of the world's top 500 fastest supercomputers, as tested and operated by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. ... Most of the cores were made up of Intel Xeon quad-core chips. Storage for the system was about 6 terabytes," and asks "I wonder how the uptime compares? When machines scale to this size, they tend to quirk out in weird ways."

Comment Re:I prefer Unicomp's Endurapro (Score 1) 383


Apparently, nobody makes a standalone pointing stick.

I'm desperate enough that I'm considering scooping up a few keyboards from trashed Thinkpads and figuring out how to solder them up to a USB controller.


That might not be *so* hard. Used old Thinkpad parts are a dime a dozen these days, and easy to find on ebay.

I share your frustration - the Endurapro was actually pretty much the only keyboard I could find with integrated mouse when I bought it a few years back. Why isn't there more innovation in this space?
Data Storage

What Web 2.0 Means for Hardware and the Datacenter 125

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the driving-the-bottom-line dept.
Tom's Hardware has a quick look at the changes being seen in the datacenter as more and more companies embrace a Web 2.0-style approach to hardware. So far, with Google leading the way, most companies have opted for a commodity server setup. HP and IBM however are betting that an even better setup exists and are striking out to find it. "IBM's Web 2.0 approach involves turning servers sideways and water cooling the rack so you can do away with air conditioning entirely. HP offers petabytes of storage at a fraction of the usual cost. Both say that when you have applications that expect hardware to fail, it's worth choosing systems that make it easier and cheaper to deal with those failures."
Businesses

Submission + - Silicon Mechanics to ship servers with coreboot (fsf.org)

Submitted by LinuxOnEveryDesktop
LinuxOnEveryDesktop writes: Silicon Mechanics, a manufacturer of server hardware, has committed to shipping servers with coreboot (formerly known as LinuxBIOS) preinstalled. Chris Watson at Silicon Mechanics says: We will commit to offering coreboot preinstallation on the Rackform nServ A236 with a specific set of hardware and software. In the future, we may expand the program to additional platforms based on customer interest. We will include a message about coreboot support on the platform page in the next few days with instructions to contact sales for additional information.
Software

ISO Takes Control Of OOXML 260

Posted by Soulskill from the down-to-business dept.
mikkl666 writes "Alex Brown, head of the ISO work group responsible for OOXML, has posted a summary of their latest meeting, and he also comments on the resolutions discussed there. The basic message is that ISO now has 'full responsibility for the standard,' and that several workgroups will be established to work on OOXML. An interesting point here is that 'setting up a maintance[sic] procedure for ODF, and then working on cross-standard initiatives' is one of the explicit goals. On a side note, they also reacted to the very emotional discussion on OOXML by posting an open letter: 'We the undersigned participants ... wish to make it clear that we deplore the personal attacks that have been made ... in recent months. We believe standards debate should always be carried out with respect for all parties, even when they strongly disagree.' As Brown correctly points out, 'This content speaks for itself.' We discussed the approval of OOXML earlier this month."
Music

Collective Licensing for Web-Based Music Distribution 236

Posted by Soulskill from the thinking-hard-so-you-don't-have-to dept.
Two weeks ago we discussed a proposal from music industry veteran Jim Griffin to implement a monthly fee from ISPs in exchange for the legal distribution of copyrighted music. Now, quinthar brings news that Warner Music Group has hired Griffin with the intention to make that proposal a reality. Warner wants Griffin to establish a collective licensing deal with ISPs that would let the ISPs stop worrying about their legal responsibilities for file-sharing while contributing to a pool of money (potentially up to $20 billion per year) that would be distributed amongst the music industry. "Griffin says that in just the few weeks since Warner began working on this plan, the company has been approached by internet service providers 'who want to discharge their risk.' Eventually, advertising could subsidize the entire system, so that users who don't want to receive ads could pay the fee, and those who don't mind advertising wouldn't pay a dime. 'I.S.P.'s want to distinguish themselves with marketing," Griffin says. "You can only imagine that an I.S.P. that marketed a 'fair trade' network connection would see a marketing advantage.'"
Microsoft

Gates Explains Microsoft's Need for Yahoo 271

Posted by CmdrTaco from the let-me-explan-my-need-for-a-fresh-cup-of-coffee dept.
eldavojohn writes "Perhaps it's obvious to you and perhaps you'll be pleasantly surprised by his answer but Gates revealed to CNet why Microsoft needs Yahoo. From his response, "We have a strategy for competing in the search space that Google dominates today, that we'll pursue that we had before we made the Yahoo offer, and that we can pursue without that. It involves breakthrough engineering. We think that the combination with Yahoo would accelerate things in a very exciting way, because they do have great engineers, they have done a lot of great work. So, if you combine their work and our work, the speed at which you can innovate and get things done is just dramatically more rapid. So, it's really about the people there that want to join in and create a better search, better portal for a very broad set of customers. That's the vision that's behind saying, hey, wouldn't this be a great combination.""

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