Mith - Slashdot User

The Trouble With TiVo 369

Posted by Zonk on Friday July 27, 2007 @11:03AM from the cute-little-antenna-guy dept.

BobCratchit writes "Multichannel News has an interesting take on TiVo: The DVR company has incredible mindshare but is totally dependent on cable providers to survive. Cable does not have many good reasons to let TiVo thrive. As a result, TiVo is destined to fade away unless it can carve out a niche as the cool kids' DVR (a la Macintosh) with products like the $299 HD DVR it just announced. From the article: 'TiVo has long been a darling of consumer-tech reviewers -- check out, for example, these happy hosannas from BusinessWeek, New York Times and Wall Street Journal. These guys are constantly befuddled that TiVo hasn't been more successful. Yes, TiVos make cute little popping noises when you click the remote. And they definitely provide cool features, like suggesting shows you might be interested in. But the cognoscenti enamored with TiVo's whizziness ignore a certain reality. It's easier to get a DVR from your cable company. And most people prefer to rent, not own, a set-top.'"

Submission + - University of Kansas will not forward RIAA letters

Submitted by Bonewalker on Friday July 27, 2007 @10:29AM

Bonewalker writes: Looks like the University of Kansas may not be as pro-RIAA (or anti-student) as initially assumed last week from this recent Slashdot story. Of course, this doesn't make that "one-strike" policy any less flawed, but it shows that they aren't simply throwing their students under the RIAA bus, as one poster put it. As an alum, I am happy to see this. I wonder if they needed to get a story like this out to help combat the backlash and stigma from that previous article, though?

Intern Loses 800,000 Social Security Numbers 492

Posted by Zonk on Friday July 27, 2007 @09:41AM from the bad-day-bad-day dept.

destinyland writes "A 22-year-old intern said today he's the 'scapegoat' for the loss of over 800,000 social security numbers - or roughly 7.3% of the people in the entire state of Ohio. From the article: 'The extent of my instructions on what to do after I removed the tapes from the tape drive and took the tapes out of the building was, bring these back tomorrow.' Three months into his $10.50-an-hour internship, he left the tapes in his car overnight — unencrypted — and they were stolen. Interestingly, the intern reports to a $125-an-hour consultant — and was advised not to tell the police that sensitive information had been stolen, which initially resulted in his becoming the prime suspect for the theft. Ohio's Inspector General faults the lack of data encryption — and too many layers of consultants. But their investigation (pdf) revealed that Ohio's Office of Management and Budget had been using the exact same procedure for over eight years."

Submission + - Leonard Nimoy to play Spock in next Star Trek movi 1

Submitted by

mcgrew

on Friday July 27, 2007 @09:19AM

mcgrew writes: "The AP (via the Chicago Tribune) is reporting that Leonard Nimoy will 'don his famous pointy ears again' in the next Star Trek movie, due out Christmas of next year.

"This is really going to be a great movie. And I don't say things like that lightly," Nimoy told a gathering of 6,500 fans Thursday at Comic-Con, the nation's largest pop-culture convention.

He greeted the crowd with a Vulcan salute.

Nimoy was joined by the newly named young Spock, "Heroes" star Zachary Quinto, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Nimoy.

Both Spocks were introduced by the film's director and co-producer, J.J. Abrams.
I've lost track, is this an even numbered Trek movie or an odd numbered one?"

A Historical Look At The First Linux Kernel 173

Posted by CowboyNeal on Friday July 27, 2007 @07:49AM from the to-configure-simply-recompile dept.

LinuxFan writes "KernelTrap has a fascinating article about the first Linux kernel, version 0.01, complete with source code and photos of Linus Torvalds as a young man attending the University of Helsinki. Torvalds originally planned to call the kernel "Freax," and in his first announcement noted, "I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones." He also stressed that the kernel was very much tied to the i386 processor, "simply, I'd say that porting is impossible." Humble beginnings."

Submission + - Wikipedia infilitrated by intelligence agents?

Submitted by on Friday July 27, 2007 @07:32AM

An anonymous reader writes: International Humanitarian Law professor Ludwig Braeckeleer thinks so. In an article published yesterday in the Korean newspaper OhMyNews, he reveals a discovery he made while researching a story on the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland. It turns out that a Wikipedia administrator named "SlimVirgin" is actually Linda Mack, a woman who as a young graduate in the 1980s was hired by investigative reporter Pierre Salinger of ABC News to help with the investigation. Salinger later came to believe that Mack was actually working for Britain's MI5 on a mission to investigate the bombing and to infiltrate and monitor the news agency. Shortly after her Wikipedia identity was uncovered, many of her edits to articles related to the bombing were permanently removed from the database in an attempt to conceal her identity. This discovery comes only months after another Wikipedia admin was caught lying about his credentials to the press. What can Wikipedia do about those who would use it for their own purposes?

Cisco to Kill Linksys Brand Name 262

Posted by CowboyNeal on Thursday July 26, 2007 @10:02PM from the alas-we-hardly-knew-ye dept.

Mav sent in this article that opens, "In a roundtable with the European press, John Chambers confirmed the "end of life" of the Linksys name, being replaced by the new and redesigned Cisco branding." He explains, "It will all come over time into a Cisco brand. The reason we kept Linksys' brand because it was better known in the US than even Cisco was for the consumer. As you go globally there's very little advantage in that."

Journal Journal: Review of "Practical Rails Social Networking Sites"

Journal by beachdog on Thursday July 26, 2007 @03:11AM

Mini review: Practical Rails Social Networking Sites by Alan Bradburne, published by Apress, Berkeley, California 2007. US $44.99

Reviewed by Lee McK

Practical Rails Social Networking Sites has a cover subtitle "Learn how to implement a modern social networking web site using Rails, from design to deployment."

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