Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
Oracle

Submission + - OpenOffice declare their independence from Oracle (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by Google85
Google85 writes: The OpenOffice.org Project has unveiled a major restructuring that separates itself from Oracle and that takes responsibility for OpenOffice away from a single company.
From now on, OpenOffice's development and direction will be decided by a steering committee of developers and national language project managers.
Driving home the changes, OpenOffice.org project is now The Document Foundation while the OpenOffice.org suite has been given the temporary name of LibreOffice.
Idle

Submission + - Cheerleader Wins Libel Suit... By Suing Wrong Site (techdirt.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: It appears that Cincinnati Bengals cheerleader Sarah Jones and her lawyer were so upset by a comment on the site TheDirty.com that they missed the "y" at the end of the name. Instead, they sued the owner of TheDirt.com, whose owner didn't respond to the lawsuit. The end result was a judge awarding $11 million, in part because of the failure to respond. Now, both the owners of TheDirty.com and TheDirt.com are complaining that they're being wrongfully written about in the press — one for not having had any content about Sarah Jones but being told it needs to pay $11 million, and the other for having the content and having the press say it lost a lawsuit, even though no lawsuit was ever actually filed against it.
Space

Submission + - Look For AI, Not Aliens (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by krou
krou writes: Writing in Acta Astronautica, Seti astronomer Seth Shostak argues that we should be looking for 'sentient machines' rather than biological life. In an interview with the BBC, he said, "If you look at the timescales for the development of technology, at some point you invent radio and then you go on the air and then we have a chance of finding you. But within a few hundred years of inventing radio — at least if we're any example — you invent thinking machines; we're probably going to do that in this century. So you've invented your successors and only for a few hundred years are you... a 'biological' intelligence." As a result, he says "we could spend at least a few percent of our time... looking in the directions that are maybe not the most attractive in terms of biological intelligence but maybe where sentient machines are hanging out."
Games

Submission + - Confirmed: Steam Not Coming To Linux (digitizor.com) 5

Submitted by dkd903
dkd903 writes: A rumor has been going around for about four months that Valve was working on a Linux version of Steam and this had a lot of people in the Linux community very excited. But, Valve has now officially killed the rumor. And it is not what people wants to hear – there is no Linux version of Steam in development. Doug Lombardi, the Marketing VP of Valve Corporation, in an interview, has put an end to all the rumors by saying that they are not working on Steam for Linux right now.
Games

Submission + - Portal 2 Gets Release Date (examiner.com)

Submitted by AndrewGOO9
AndrewGOO9 writes: After what has seemed like an eternity since Valve initially announced a sequel to their lauded puzzle title Portal, a release date has finally been attached to the game. Originally slated to be released before the end of the year in time for the holidays, Valve instead opted to delay the game citing reasons such as, "making games is hard" as well as continuing their tradition of releasing games when they're finished as opposed to rushing them out the door. Either way, mark your calendars for February 9th, 2011 and in the meantime, best brush up on thinking with portals.

Submission + - Zombie Ants and Killer Fungus (guardian.co.uk)

Submitted by nibbles2004
nibbles2004 writes: An article in the guardian newspaper shows how parasitic fungi evolved the ability to control the creatures they infect ultimately leading the ant to it's death. The fungus control's the ant's movement's to a suitable leaf and cause's the ant to grip onto the leaf's central stem, allowing the fungus to spore which will allow more ant's to become infected.
Patents

Submission + - Did The USPTO Let Amazon Patent Facebook?

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: After shelling out a reported $90MM to buy PlanetAll in 1998, Amazon.com shuttered the site in 2000, explaining that 'it seemed really superfluous to have it running beside Friends and Favorites.' But years later in a 2008 patent filing, Amazon described the acquired PlanetAll technology to the USPTO in very Facebook-like terms. And on Tuesday, the USPTO issued U.S. Patent No. 7,739,139 to Amazon for its invention, the Social Networking System, which Amazon describes thusly: 'A networked computer system provides various services for assisting users in locating, and establishing contact relationships with, other users. For example, in one embodiment, users can identify other users based on their affiliations with particular schools or other organizations. The system also provides a mechanism for a user to selectively establish contact relationships or connections with other users, and to grant permissions for such other users to view personal information of the user. The system may also include features for enabling users to identify contacts of their respective contacts. In addition, the system may automatically notify users of personal information updates made by their respective contacts.' So, should Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg worry about Amazon opening a can of patent whup-ass?
Education

Submission + - Modern Day Equivalent of Byte/Compute! Magazine?

Submitted by MochaMan
MochaMan writes: I grew up in the 80s on a steady diet of Byte and Compute! magazines, banging in page after page of code line-by-line, and figuring out how sound, graphics and input devices worked along the way. Since then, the personal computer market has obviously moved away from hobbyists intent on coding and understanding their machines down to the hardware, but I imagine there must still be a market for similar do-it-yourself articles. Perhaps the collective minds of Slashdot can divine some online sources of fun & educational mini-projects like "write your own assembler" or "roll your own bootloader".

Slashdot Top Deals

After the last of 16 mounting screws has been removed from an access cover, it will be discovered that the wrong access cover has been removed.

Close