Economic Crisis Will Eliminate Open Source 753

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday October 22, 2008 @10:53AM from the why-so-gloomy dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The economic crisis will ultimately eliminate open source projects and the 'Web 2.0 free economy,' says Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur. Along with the economic downturn and record job loss, he says, we will see the elimination of projects including Wikipedia, CNN's iReport, and much of the blogosphere. Instead of users offering their services 'for free,' he says, we're about to see a 'sharp cultural shift in our attitude toward the economic value of our labor' and a rise of online media businesses that reward their contributors with cash. Companies that will survive, he says, include Hulu, iTunes, and Mahalo. 'The hungry and cold unemployed masses aren't going to continue giving away their intellectual labor on the Internet in the speculative hope that they might get some "back end" revenue,' says Keen."

Submission + - Wikimedia moves to Ubuntu (computerworld.com)

Submitted by

David Gerard

on Friday October 10, 2008 @06:23AM

David Gerard writes: "Wikimedia, the organisation that runs Wikipedia and associated sites, has moved its running-on-the-smell-of-an-oily-rag server infrastructure entirely to Ubuntu from a hodge-podge of Ubuntu, Red Hat and various Fedora versions. (There's also a small amount of OpenSolaris on the backend. All open source!)"

Submission + - French Judge tells ASUS to refund pre-installed XP (racketiciel.info) 3

Submitted by

Racketiciel

on Sunday May 18, 2008 @04:13AM

Racketiciel writes: "An French user asked for a refund after buying a ASUS computer that came with Windows XP and other softwares pre-installed. ASUS tried to apply a procedure which cost more money to the consumer that they will give back ... The court ruled in favor of the user who received back 130 Euro (~200 $) for the softwares. Here is the ruling (PDF, French). In France, this is the fourth victory for refund during last two years, and many persons are now starting procedures (in French). Two French associations (AFUL and April) published a press release on this victory the same day a important hearing happened."

Solar Tree Bears Fruit 106

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday December 29, 2007 @10:22AM from the functional-art dept.

Hugh Pickens writes "A prototype solar tree that recently went on display on a busy street in Vienna, Austria has passed a key test by providing light during the night-time even when the sun had been blocked by clouds for four days in a row. The branches of the solar tree were decorated with 10 solar lamps, each one powered by 36 solar cells. The tree included rechargeable batteries and electronic systems to measure the amount of light in the atmosphere and trigger the solar lamps to go on. 'Not just trees but other objects could be decorated with solar cells and so keep streets well lit at night time,' said Christina Werner from Cultural Project Management. Google uses a similar concept to light their parking lots with 3,000 solar panels that provide up to 10 percent of the Googleplex's power demand. We discussed Google's solar initiative last year."

Submission + - Vote to Eliminate Leap Seconds 6

Submitted by Mortimer.CA on Sunday November 18, 2007 @04:31PM

Mortimer.CA writes: As mentionted on Slahdot previously, there is a proposal to remove leap seconds from UTC (nee 'Greenwich' time). It wil be put to a vote to ITU member states, and if 70% agree, the leap second will be eliminated by 2013. There is some debate as to whether this change is a good or bad idea. One philosophical point opponents make is that the 'official' time on Earth should match the time of the sun and heavens. People with appliances that blink '12:00' can probably ignore this issue.

Comment Quantum cryptography and internet voting (Score 1) 91

by Zorglub1234 on Friday October 12, 2007 @03:40AM (#20950429) Attached to: Quantum Crypto in the Real World

This is mainly an advertising stunt. The State of Geneva has been promoting an evoting (internet) system for the past 6 years. They complain that citizens are not interested in the voting process, but every time computer scientists (mainly free software advocates) have indicated that they had doubts about the system (but noone except the State has access to the system), the criticisms were treated with disdain (to say the least !). Some background information about the system is at http://www.geneve.ch/evoting/english/welcome.asp (it does not talk about the criticisms, though).

Now, obviously, they can not link every citizen's computer with the central voting server with a quantum-encrypted link; here, they are just encrypting a 500 meters internal link between two servers of the State. This election does not use evoting; however, this is part of a general policy of showing "see, we do the best that's available, so our system is secure" -- they don't care about the fact that with evoting, the weakest link is the individual citizen's computer. Instead, they use quantum cryptography to protect an already secure link -- already secure, because votes are tabulated in the first center, so they get the results out from there on paper as well, which is pretty hard to hack...

Journal Journal: Watch Where you Watch 3

Journal by Morosoph on Thursday December 21, 2006 @03:20AM

An article in New Scientist Tech on recent patents reveals Philips's plan to subvert the intent of laws to protect copyright through technical means in order to apply anti-piracy laws to those who wish to watch DVDs from other regions.