Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
Books

Amazon Culls "Offensive" Books From Search System 470

Posted by timothy from the streisand-effect dept.
Miracle Jones writes "Amazon has instituted an overnight policy that removes books that may be deemed offensive from their search system, despite the sales rank of the book and also irrespective of any complaints. Bloggers such as Ed Champion are calling for a 'link and book boycott,' asking people to remove links to Amazon from their web pages and stop buying books from them until the policy is reversed. Will this be bad business for Amazon, or will their new policies keep them out of trouble as they continue to grow and replace bookstores?"
Software

Norwegian Standards Body Members Resign Over OOXML 208

Posted by Soulskill from the take-this-job-and-shove-it dept.
tsa writes "Ars Technica reports that 13 of the 23 members from the technical committee of the Norwegian standards body, the organization that manages technical standards for the country, have resigned because of the way the OOXML standardization was handled. We've previously discussed Norway's protest and ISO's rejection of other appeals. From the article: 'The standardization process for Microsoft's office format has been plagued with controversy. Critics have challenged the validity of its ISO approval and allege that procedural irregularities and outright misconduct marred the voting process in national standards bodies around the world. Norway has faced particularly close scrutiny because the country reversed its vote against approval despite strong opposition to the format by a majority of the members who participated in the technical committee.'"
Software

An Open Source Legal Breakthrough 292

Posted by kdawson from the gpl-means-what-it-says dept.
jammag writes "Open source advocate Bruce Perens writes in Datamation about a major court victory for open source: 'An appeals court has erased most of the doubt around Open Source licensing, permanently, in a decision that was extremely favorable toward projects like GNU, Creative Commons, Wikipedia, and Linux.' The case, Jacobsen v. Katzer, revolved around free software coded by Bob Jacobsen that Katzer used in a proprietary application and then patented. When Katzer started sending invoices to Jacobsen (for what was essentially Jacobsen's own work), Jacobsen took the case to court and scored a victory that — for the first time — lays down a legal foundation for the protection of open source developers. The case hasn't generated as many headlines as it should."
Operating Systems

VMware ESXi Available For Free Starting Today 241

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the free-always-sounds-better dept.
Mierdaan writes "VMware's bare-metal hypervisor is available for free starting today. ESXi, which can either be installed or run from an embedded device available in certain servers, has a 32MB footprint and gives small businesses an easy way to get into the virtualization world, with easy upgrade paths to enterprise-level features such as (H)igh (A)vailability and (D)istributed (R)esource (S)cheduler. ESXi runs on most any hardware with a server-class disk controller, and previously retailed for $495. VMware is obviously shooting to prevent Microsoft's Hyper-V technology from gaining a foothold in the marketplace."
Caldera

Investors Bailing On SCO Stock, SCOX Plummets 368

Posted by kdawson from the is-it-wetter-underwater-than-when-it-rains dept.
HailDorothy writes "SCO's stock price is plummeting in the aftermath of Judge Kimball's ruling that Novell owns the UNIX copyrights, as we discussed earlier. '[W]e will continue to explore our options with respect to how we move forward from here,' SCO said in a public statement issued in a futile attempt to calm investors. SCO's stock price has fallen 70 percent during trading today, reaching a 52-week low. It looks like the end is near for SCO, which still owes Novell 95 percent of the SVRX UNIX royalties it collected from Microsoft and Sun through the SCOsource program. As Judge Kimbell noted in his ruling, it's unlikely that Novell will ever be able to collect on those royalties."

Feed Engadget: PMP / console emulator breaks a whole bunch of laws (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed

Filed under: Gaming, Handhelds, Portable Audio, Portable Video

Have you been searching for a device which will unify all of your complicated technological needs into one hideously ugly, totally generic package? Well, your search is over, because some completely unknown team working for an anonymous company which is definitely located in the heart of China has created the "Portable Media Player". While you're gestating on that name, get a load of what this "system" can do: NES, SNES, Sega MD and SMC support, AVI, MPEG-4, DivX, XviD, MP3, WMA, and FLAC playback, built-in 1.3 megapixel MPEG-4 video camera, MP3 voice recorder, E-Book reader, SD card support up to 4GB, and holographic multi-phasic projection mode (okay, we made that one up). Sure, you could carry around 12 or 13 separate devices to do all of the above, but why go to the trouble when one of these confused little puppies can be yours for just $109.68?

[Thanks, Craig]

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!
Linux Business

Submission + - SCO Wanted To Gag Torvalds

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Documents filed by IBM on Friday contain a copy of a letter from SCO to IBM's lawyers which state that they tried to keep Linus Torvalds from making disparaging public statements about SCO. The company also tried to silence Eben Moglen, a Columbia University professor who, until this month, was a director of the Free Software Foundation, and Eric Raymond, a controversial open-source advocate, saying they claimed to be IBM consultants.
The Courts

Cisco Sues Apple Over iPhone Trademark 556

Posted by samzenpus from the that-didn't-take-long dept.
lucabrasi999 writes "It appears that Apple may be running out of items that they can prefix with the letter "i". Cisco is suing Apple over trademark infringement. Cisco claims to own the rights to the "iPhone" trademark since they purchased Infogear in 2000. Infogear filed for the rights to the trademark in 1996."

10-Day Gentoo Installation Agony 540

Posted by kdawson from the rtfm-and-join-the-channel dept.
lisah writes, "The Linux distribution Gentoo has a hard-core following, and with good reason. Gentoo is known for its configurability and choices. It's not known, however, for its easy installation. NewsForge's Joe Barr outlined his painful installation experience with Gentoo in an article that explains why, after 10 days, he finally gave up and went with Debian Etch. From the article: '[B]ack in the day, Gentoo users first had to rip the source code from the bone with their teeth before compiling and installing it, but now the live CD had sissified the process to the point that anyone could do it... I exaggerated the ease of installing Gentoo.' And: 'Gentoo doesn't ask what it can do to make things easier, it asks you exactly what it is that you want it to do, and then does precisely and only that.'" Slashdot and NewsForge are both owned by OSTG.

Apple Announces New Open Source Efforts 323

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the on-the-road-again dept.
Today Apple announced a few expanded open source efforts. First, beginning with Mac OS X 10.4.7, the Darwin/Mac OS X kernel, known as "xnu", is again available as buildable source for the Intel platform, including EFI utilities. Second, iCal Server, Bonjour, and launchd are moving to Apache 2.0 licensing. And finally, Mac OS Forge has been launched, as the successor to OpenDarwin as a conduit for hosting projects such as WebKit that were formerly hosted by the OpenDarwin project's servers, such as WebKit. Mac OS Forge is sponsored by Apple. DarwinPorts has already moved to its own servers. Update: 08/08 01:43 GMT by J : The official Apple announcement is now out. Other fun news: Leopard will ship with Ruby on Rails.

Google Shies Away from Digital Music Sales 112

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the world-domination-keeping-them-busy dept.
mytrip writes to tell us that Google has announced that they will not be getting in on the digital music sales market anytime soon. Analysts have been predicting the response of a "GTunes" service for months but Chris Sacca, head of business development at Google, dispelled those rumors in a recent address at the annual National Association of Recording Merchandisers conference in Florida. Sacca emphasized the need for "ecosystem development" and partnerships within the industry stating that they were the "big opportunity" in the digital music business.

Pro PHP Security 105

Posted by samzenpus from the keep-it-secure dept.
Michael J. Ross writes "The global accessibility of Web sites is a double-edged sword: At the same time that your online e-commerce site is open for business to anyone with an Internet connection, it is also open to malicious attack. Web sites based upon the popular language PHP, are no exception. Thus, it is both astonishing and worrisome that there are currently so few books devoted to PHP security — particularly ones that go beyond the handful of typical security countermeasures discussed in articles. Fortunately, Pro PHP Security, written by Chris Snyder and Michael Southwell, is intended to fill this critical need." Read the rest of Michael's review.

What Game Developers Think about DirectX 10 115

Posted by Zonk from the shiiiiny dept.
mikemuch writes "In the last of his series of interviews with the stakeholders in Microsofts upcoming DirectX graphics API, Jason Cross speaks with the developers of Hellgate, Crysis, Flight Simulator X, and Age of Conan. They seem pretty stoked about the new technology's ability to get visual detail to a much higher level of realism, and to offload physics and AI to the CPU." From the article: "Without hardware, it is hard to evaluate which features will really make the biggest performance impact. The geometry shader looks pretty full of potential. So does the fact that you can write to buffers from any shader and then read them into another shader. Texture arrays look like they will make a big dent our batch count, which should lead to much better frame rates. At this point I feel like I'm looking at a shiny new toy through a shop window: I can't wait to get my hands on it and play with it, but I don't really know what it can do."

Slashdot Top Deals

1 1 was a race-horse, 2 2 was 1 2. When 1 1 1 1 race, 2 2 1 1 2.

Close