bouchecl - Slashdot User

Comment Re:I can name the dinos (Score 1) 154

by bouchecl on Saturday June 19, 2010 @12:37AM (#32622528) Attached to: Alberta Scientists Discover Largest-Ever Cache of Dinosaur Bones

Some of them even moved to Ottawa, where they loosely roam around the city to this day.

I heard through the grapevine that a specimen of a late evolution of the Manningodactyle will someday be exposed at the Canadian Museum of Nature rather than at the Museum of Civilization, on the other side of the Ottawa river, in order to avoid controversy.

Comment Re:Integrated with Linux? (Score 1) 591

by bouchecl on Friday June 27, 2008 @02:44PM (#23971411) Attached to: Firefox 3 Already Rules the Roost

I'll bet most of the Firefox 3 users are Windows or Mac users. Not because Linux users don't love Firefox, but because the distros' repositories haven't made FF3 available.

Uhhhhhh? I've been running FF 3 on my Ubuntu and Fedora boxes since "Download Day". Both distros pushed the new release within hours.

Study Finds Instant Messaging Helps Productivity 149

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday June 11, 2008 @09:33AM from the you-gotta-be-kidding-me dept.

MojoKid writes "Researchers at Ohio State University and the University of California, Irvine conducted a telephone study by randomly surveying individuals employed full-time who use computers in an office environment at least five hours per week. They netted 912 respondents, of which 29.8 percent claimed to use IM in the workplace 'to keep connected with coworkers and clients.' Neither occupation, education, gender, nor age seem to have an impact on whether an individual is an IM user or not. The study theorizes that using IM enables individuals to 'flag their availability.' Doing so can limit when IM interruptions occur. Even if an IM interruption comes when it is not necessarily convenient to the recipient, it is 'often socially acceptable' to ignore an incoming message or respond with a terse reply stating that the recipient is too busy at the moment to properly respond." Also another study recently found that water is wet, and a third study found that most studies waste money.

Submission + - Canadian DMCA Introduction Delayed (michaelgeist.ca)

Submitted by on Monday December 10, 2007 @03:40PM

An anonymous reader writes: Follow up: "The word this afternoon is that Industry Minister Jim Prentice will not introduce the Canadian DMCA tomorrow."

Submission + - Linux is about to take over the low end of PCs (desktoplinux.com) 3

Submitted by on Sunday December 09, 2007 @02:03PM

An anonymous reader writes: Desktop Linux has a recent commentary on the inevitable growth of Linux on the cheaper end of the desktop market. According to the article, the availability of under-$500 usable hardware, combined with free a operating system, free desktop office products, and free or cheap "Software as a service" online applications, opens a new market in which Microsoft cannot compete. "Microsoft will fight this trend tooth and nail. It will cut prices to the point where it'll be bleeding ink on some of its product lines. And Windows XP is going to stick around much longer than Microsoft ever wanted it to. Still, it won't be enough. By attacking from the bottom, where Microsoft can no longer successfully compete, Linux will finally cut itself a large slice of the desktop market pie."

Submission + - BBC creates 'Perl on Rails' 2

Submitted by Bogtha on Friday November 30, 2007 @06:16PM

Bogtha writes: Long-time users of Perl for their public websites, and having successfully used Ruby on Rails for internal websites, the BBC have fused the two by creating a 'Perl on Rails' that has the advantages of rapid development that Rails brings, while performing well enough to be used for the Beeb's high-traffic public websites. This is already powering one of their websites, and is set to be used in the controversial iPlayer project as well.

Colbert Ballot Bid Shot Down 501

Posted by Zonk on Thursday November 01, 2007 @05:10PM from the can't-make-a-dishonest-living-no-more dept.

wizzard2k writes "Some of you may have seen Stephen Colbert's bid for the South Carolina Presidential Primary, however it seems his hopes to appear on the ballot as a candidate for the Democratic Party have been shot down. From the report: 'Stephen Colbert's bid to get on the ballot for the upcoming Democratic primary in his home state was shot down on Thursday (November 1) by the executive committee of the South Carolina Democratic Party. Colbert's bid was voted down 13-3 ... Using criteria such as whether the candidate was recognized in the national news media as a legitimate candidate and whether they'd actively campaigned in the state, the committee put the kibosh on the Colbert bid.'"

Submission + - Vista not as ready for modern desktop as Linux? 1

Submitted by

Pr0xY

on Wednesday October 31, 2007 @11:06PM

Pr0xY writes: "Recently I purchased my new "gaming rig." So I decided to just go for and loaded up a new Dell XPS 720 with the works. Among other things, I got 4GB of RAM. To my (and many others according to google) surprise, x86 Vista only reports 3 and change GB of RAM.
I do some systems programming, so I had a clue as to what was going on, my first reaction was "PAE must not be enabled." Here's what's going on. With traditional paging, there is 4GB of physical address space available to a 32-bit x86 processor. This includes memory mapped devices, for example, your shiny new video card with 768 Megs of RAM takes up that much space of physical RAM your system can use. The solution is to use either PAE or PSE36, both provide up to 64GB of physical memory to a 32-bit x86 system. The limit of what you can map into memory at a time is still 4GB, but this allows motherboards to relocate the RAM that got displaced by hardware above the 4GB and still be usable.
However, it turns out that first of all, Vista automatically enables PAE if you want DEP since it is necessary for the NX bit. And in addition to that, Microsoft deliberately doesn't use RAM above the 4GB mark even with PAE for "compatibility reasons." The main issue being that DMA can't touch RAM higher than 4GB on x86. Microsoft could have easily had a special pool for this "high memory" in order to make some use of it when you know it's safe. This isn't impractical as the server editions of Windows are in fact able to use upwards of 4GB on 32-bit systems as well.
Linux has no issue using all 4GB of my RAM once I build my kernel with PAE support. Microsoft also claims that they support 4GB of RAM in their documentation. All in all, I find this whole thing to be a bit deceptive on Microsoft's part. Microsoft's solution: "Get Vista x86-64""

Submission + - Al-Qaeda Declares Electronic Jihad 1

Submitted by

avicarmi

on Tuesday October 30, 2007 @08:04PM

avicarmi writes: "http://www.debka.com/headline.php?hid=4723 In a special Internet announcement in Arabic, Osama bin Laden's followers announced Monday, Oct. 29, the launching of Electronic Jihad. On Sunday, Nov. 11, al Qaeda's electronic experts will start attacking Western, Jewish, Israeli, Muslim apostate and Shiite Web sites."

Submission + - Microsoft forces desktop search on windows update (theregister.co.uk) 2

Submitted by on Thursday October 25, 2007 @04:44AM

An anonymous reader writes: The Register is reporting that the blogosphere is alight with accusations of Microsoft forcing Windows Desktop Search upon networks via the "automatic install" feature of windows update — even if they had configured it not to use the program.
This comes not too long after the DoJ saying that they will no longer oversee compliance with the anti-trust judgement against Microsoft.
Are they up to their old tricks again? Google may want to pay attention to their actions.
Full story here — http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10/25/windows_update_snafu/

Submission + - Samsung unveils 64Gbit flash memory chip (computerworld.com) 2

Submitted by

Lucas123

on Wednesday October 24, 2007 @04:23PM

Lucas123 writes: "The chips can be combined to create a 128GB flash storage device capable of holding up to 80 DVD movies or 32,000 MP3 music files. The chip was created using 30-nanometer processing technology that was developed with Samsung's self-aligned double patterning technology."

Submission + - First Patent Infringement Lawsuit Filed Against Li 2

Submitted by

walterbyrd

on Thursday October 11, 2007 @10:29PM

walterbyrd writes: "According to the blog post on groklaw: IP Innovation LLC has just filed a patent infringement claim against Red Hat and Novell. It was filed October 9, case no. 2:2007cv00447, IP Innovation, LLC et al v. Red Hat Inc. et al, in Texas. Where else? The patent troll magnet state — Texas."

Submission + - ZFS port in Leopard confirmed by Sun CEO (wired.com)

Submitted by

Rossi

on Wednesday June 06, 2007 @10:13PM

Rossi writes: "Jonathan Schwartz today confirmed that Apple has ported ZFS from the Open Solaris project and that the file system will be available in OS X 10.5. He also mentioned that Apple would make this announcement at the WWDC next week. Does this spoiler arrive suspiciously after Steve Jobs announced Java wouldn't be available on the iPhone?"

Submission + - Firefox Surfers More Likely Patched Than IE Users

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 16, 2007 @04:26PM

An anonymous reader writes: Secunia gives us some interesting statistics from some 4.9 million Windows applications scanned with its "software inspector" service, which looks at common apps for missing security updates. "Comparing browsers and looking at Firefox, Opera and Internet Explorer, we found out that Firefox 2 is the least vulnerable, as only 5.19% of all Firefox 2 installations miss security updates, whereas 11.96% of all Opera 9.x installations miss security updates, and the numbers for IE6 and IE7 are 9.61% and 5.4% respectively." The Washington Post's Security Fix blog says the stats suggest two conclusions: "One, that the auto-patching component built into Firefox 2.0 is somewhat more effective than Microsoft's approach, which gives users the option to decline updates. With Firefox 2.0, new updates are automatically installed....Secondly, it appears that while Opera fans are seemingly always quick to claim that theirs is the most secure and least-attacked of the major browsers, its user base may be a bit more complacent about applying security updates."

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