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Comment Re:Primary vs Secondary (Score 1) 399

by MartinB (#25148439) Attached to: Is Open Source Different In Europe Than In the US?

This isn't an XOR problem, so who cares which is "more important", especially when the result for using Open Source is the same either way?

Well, if you're trying to persuade someone/a group of people to adopt OSS, and you don't have the information about each individual's motivating factors, understanding which are the more likely is useful, no?

Particularly if you're spending money on communication channels, remembering the old quote of Half my ad spend is wasted. I wish I knew which half.

Upgrades

Submission + - No closed video drivers for next Ubuntu release

Submitted by
lisah
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."
Security

Auditors Report FBI Fails in Tracking Lost Laptops 76

Posted by Zonk 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."
Microsoft

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

Submitted by
loconet
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."
Google

Submission + - Google Blinks - Responds to AdWords Accusations

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
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."
Enlightenment

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

Submitted by
CexpTretical
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"."
The Internet

Submission + - Shortage of electricity drives data center siting

Submitted by
Engineer-Poet
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.)"

RIAA Mischaracterizes Letter Received From AOL 287

Posted by CowboyNeal 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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