arpy - Slashdot User

Submission + - Australia's National Broadband Network to go ahead (goodgearguide.com.au)

Submitted by

angry tapir

on Thursday September 09, 2010 @12:03AM

angry tapir writes: "After weeks of a hung parliament following the Australian federal election, the incumbent Labor Party has garnered enough support among independent MPs to form a minority government. Broadband was central to clinching the independents' support. Labor's victory means the $43 billion National Broadband Network (NBN) will push ahead. The policy has generally been popular among ISPs and telcos — though some rebel operators preferred a policy that emphasised wireless technologies, similar to the proposals put forward by Labor's opponents. The primarily fibre-based NBN is set to offer Australians 1Gbps broadband."

Submission + - CIA Officers are Warming to Intellipedia

Submitted by

Hugh Pickens

on Sunday June 14, 2009 @11:50PM

Hugh Pickens writes: "The CIA is adopting Web 2.0 tools like collaborative wikis but not without a struggle in an agency with an ingrained culture of secrecy. "We're still kind of in this early adoptive stage," says Sean Dennehy, a CIA analyst and self-described "evangelist" for Intellipedia, the US intelligence community's version of the popular user-curated online encyclopedia Wikipedia adding that "trying to implement these tools in the intelligence community is basically like telling people that their parents raised them wrong. It is a huge cultural change." Dennehy says Intellipedia, which runs on secure government intranets and is used by 16 US intelligence agencies, was started as a pilot project in 2005 and now has approximately 100,000 user accounts and gets about 4,000 edits a day. "Some people have (supported it) but there's still a lot of other folks kind of sitting on the fence." Dennehy says wikis are "a challenge to our culture because we grew up in this kind of 'need to know' culture and now we need a balance between 'need to know' and 'need to share.'" A desire to compartamentalize information is another problem. "Inevitably, every person, the first question we were asked is 'How do I lock down a page?' or 'How do I lock down a page so that just my five colleagues can access that?'" The growth of Intellipedia has so far largely been fueled by early adopters and enthusiasts says Chris Rasmussen, a social-software knowledge manager and trainer at the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. ""We are struggling to take it to the next level.""

Submission + - RubyOnRails.org Domain Registration Lost 1

Submitted by

Tyler Larson

on Thursday April 23, 2009 @05:56AM

Tyler Larson writes: "It seems that official Ruby On Rails website (rubyonrails.org) has turned into a parked advertising page. The WHOIS record for the domain lists the registrant as "Next Angle", administered by "BuyDomains.dk LLC". David Heinemeier Hansson filed two years ago for a trademark on the phrase "ruby on rails," and he may or may not be able to use it to reclaim the associated domain name. It seems clear, however, that if BuyDomains has legitimately taken ownership of the domain--which currently has a Google PageRank of 7/10--they will not let it go without either a drawn-out fight or a very large payment.

For many organizations, their domain name has become their identity. What precautions do you take to make sure it doesn't get taken from you? What sort of contingency plan can you implement in the case that it does?"

Submission + - How Nintendo killed hardcore gaming (goodgearguide.com.au)

Submitted by

angry tapir

on Thursday April 23, 2009 @01:33AM

angry tapir writes: "Chris Jager from the GoodGearGuide argues that the rise of casual gaming means near-certain death for hardcore gaming. The sales of casual "party-friendly" games are massively outstripping the sales of classic hardcore games, and the makers of other consoles are taking note of Nintendo's success in attracting non-traditional gamers to the Wii and DS. There is evidence that Sony and Microsoft are both trying to tap into the casual market, and it's only a matter of time before hardcore gaming goes the way of the Nintendo PowerGlove."

Submission + - Europe charges Microsoft with abuse of monopoly ag (goodgearguide.com.au)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 18, 2009 @10:32PM

An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft has been formally charged with monopoly abuse by Europe's top antitrust authority, the European Commission, over the way it bundles the Internet Explorer browser with Windows. The move follows an unsuccessful attempt by U.S. authorities nine years ago to strip Internet Explorer (IE) of its unfair advantage over competing browsers. European authorities were more successful in their prosecution of Microsoft over similar antitrust offenses five years ago, fining the company over EUR1.6 billion and ordering it to change the way it does business. (MS is also being sued by Wisconsin small business for allegedly misrepresenting the capabilities of its Live Communications Server, so not such a great week.)

Firefox Users Stay Ahead On the Update Curve 328

Posted by timothy on Monday July 07, 2008 @01:18AM from the not-altogether-surprising dept.

Reader Alex links to news of a study comparing the currency and patch level of various Web browsers, excerpting: "Firefox users were far and away the most likely to use the latest version, with an overwhelming 83.3 percent running an updated browser on any given day. However, despite Firefox's single click integrate auto-update functionality, 16.7 percent of Firefox users still continue to access the Web with an outdated version of the browser, researchers said. The study also revealed that the majority of Safari users (65.3) percent were likely to use the latest version of the browser between December 2007 and June 2008, after Safari version 3 became available. Meanwhile, Microsoft's Internet Explorer users ranked last in terms of safe browsing. Between January 2007 and June 2008, less than half of IE users — 47.6 percent — were running the most secure browser version during the same time period."

eBay'er Arrested For Attempting To Sell His Vote 501

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Friday July 04, 2008 @03:21PM from the probably-should-have-thought-this-one-through dept.

The Associated Press reports that Max P. Sanders, 19, is charged with a felony for attempting to auction off his vote on eBay for the upcoming presidential election. From the article: '"Fundamentally, we believe it is wrong to sell your vote," said John Aiken, a spokesman for the office. "There are people that have died for this country for our right to vote, and to take something that lightly, to say, 'I can be bought... It's a real shame"' Yes, that is a terrible shame, isn't it. Perhaps we should arrest, prosecute, and imprison everyone who sells their vote. The boy says it was all a joke, but prosecutors aren't laughing. Max faces up to 5 years in prison and $10,000 in fines if he is convicted.

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