MartinB - Slashdot User

Submission + - No closed video drivers for next Ubuntu release

Submitted by

lisah

on Tuesday February 13, 2007 @04:41PM

lisah writes: "Ubuntu's next release, Feisty Fawn, is due out in April and, according to company CTO Matt Zimmerman, proprietary video drivers failed to make the cut for the default install. Zimmerman told Linux.com that although, the software required for Composite support is not ready for prime-time and therefore will not be included in Feisty, Ubuntu hasn't given up entirely on the inclusion of video drivers in future releases. '[T]he winds aren't right yet. We will continue to track development and will revisit the decision if things change significantly.' Ambiguous or not, the decision to exclude proprietary drivers for now should satisfy at least some members of the Ubuntu Community. In other Feisty Fawn news, the Board also decided to downgrade support for Power PC due to a lack of funding."

Journal Journal: Lucas: 'Empire' Was the Worst of the Trilogy

Journal by anaesthetica on Tuesday February 13, 2007 @03:55PM

Entertainment blogger David Poland recently attended a Publicists' Guild luncheon which George Lucas attended. Lucas was present to give an award to Sid Ganis, the in-house publicist for Empire. Lucas credits Sid for creating the aura around Empire as the best of the three original Star Wars films, when, according to Lucas, "it was actually the worst one."

Auditors Report FBI Fails in Tracking Lost Laptops 76

Posted by Zonk on Tuesday February 13, 2007 @12:52PM from the keep-your-eye-on-the-prize dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The Department of Justice's Office of Inspector General is reporting that the FBI has lackluster performance when it comes to tracking data lost on missing laptops. In a recent 44-month audit (ending in Sept. 2005), the FBI reported 160 lost or stolen machines. Of those, ten were confirmed to have sensitive info. A startling 51 of these machines had unknown information — in other words the FBI never knew what they lost. Some of these machines likely contained some of the most sensitive security information the FBI has, as there were several in the bunch that belonged to members of the Counterintelligence and Counterterrorism Divisions. But the FBI was never able to properly respond to these losses because someone didn't fill out the right paperwork. The OIG has a copy of the audit (pdf) for public consumption."

Feed Language Fluency and Alzheimers (wired.com)

From feed by wiredfeed on Friday January 12, 2007 @08:12PM

A new Canadian study shows bilingualism may delay the onset of dementia. In Wired Science.

Submission + - New Outlook will not use IE to render HTML e-mails

Submitted by

loconet

on Friday January 12, 2007 @02:46PM

loconet writes: "From MSDN: "Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 uses the HTML parsing and rendering engine from Microsoft Office Word 2007 to display HTML message bodies. The same HTML and cascading style sheets (CSS) support available in Word 2007 is available in Outlook 2007." This means that HTML and CSS handling will be taken care by the Word engine rather than the IE engine as it has been in the past. Campaign monitor has a more detailed take (with screenshots) on the possible issues of this decision by Microsoft."

Submission + - Google Blinks - Responds to AdWords Accusations

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 08, 2006 @02:25AM

An anonymous reader writes: Based on the thoroughness of the statement and the use of the word "precedent" in the second sentence, it appears that the Google PR team huddled with the legal team and issued a statement on the Inside AdWords Blog.
"...it seems that the underlying issue here is Google's lack of transparency which is a recurring theme in how it runs its business."

Submission + - Detecting Conflict-Of-Interest on the Semantic Web

Submitted by

CexpTretical

on Friday December 08, 2006 @12:02AM

CexpTretical writes: "At the 15th International WWW Conference in Edinburgh Scotland, Refereed Track on Semantic Web accepted many thorough and interesting academic papers on semantic web research on subjects related to where the Web is in the Semantic Web? One such paper nominated for Best Paper Award, Semantic Analytics on Social Networks: Experiences in Addressing the Problem of Conflict of Interest Detection hits on the whole subject of validation and/or verification in the brave world of so called "Web 3.0" topologies/frameworks/architectures. The paper describes a "Semantic Web application that detects Conflict of Interest (COI) relationships"."

Submission + - Shortage of electricity drives data center siting

Submitted by

Engineer-Poet

on Thursday December 07, 2006 @11:52PM

Engineer-Poet writes: "Per the San Jose Mercury News, competitors such as Google and Yahoo are meeting to discuss the issue of electricity in Silicon Valley. How much of the USA's 4038 billion kWh/year goes into data centers? Enough to make a difference. Data centers are moving out of California to spread the load and avoid a single-point-of-failure scenario. This is a serious matter; as Andrew Karsner (assistant secretary of energy efficiency and renewable energy for the Department of Energy) asked, "What happens to national productivity when Google goes down for 72 hours?" I'm sure nobody wants to know. (Though setting up to generate another 5000 billion kWh/year or so would put the issue off for at least a decade or three.)"

Bookmark Vaporware: Why Apple Doesn't Blog (roughlydrafted.com)

by DECS on Thursday December 07, 2006 @09:48PM

RIAA Mischaracterizes Letter Received From AOL 287

Posted by CowboyNeal on Thursday December 07, 2006 @08:56PM from the guilty-until-proven-innocent dept.

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In Elektra v. Schwartz, an RIAA case against a Queens woman with Multiple Sclerosis who indicates that she had never even heard of file sharing until the RIAA came knocking on her door, the judge held that Ms. Schwartz's summary judgment request for dismissal was premature because the RIAA said it had a letter from AOL 'confirm[ing] that defendant owned an internet access account through which copyrighted sound recordings were downloaded and distributed.' When her lawyers got a copy of the actual AOL letter they saw that it had no such statement in it, and asked the judge to reconsider."

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