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Mozilla

Mozilla Rolls Out Firefox 3.6 RC, Nears Final 145

Posted by Soulskill from the onwards-and-upwards dept.
CWmike writes "Mozilla has shipped a release candidate build of Firefox 3.6 that, barring problems, will become the final, finished version of the upgrade. Firefox 3.6 RC1, which followed a run of betas that started in early November, features nearly 100 bug fixes from the fifth beta that Mozilla issued Dec. 17. The fixes resolved numerous crash bugs, including one that brought down the browser when it was steered to Yahoo's front page. Another fix removed a small amount of code owned by Microsoft from Firefox. The code was pointed out by a Mozilla contributor, and after digging, another developer found the original Microsoft license agreement. 'Amusingly enough, it's actually really permissive. Really the only part that's problematic is the agreement to "include the copyright notice ... on your product label and as a part of the sign-on message for your software product,"' wrote Kyle Huey on Mozilla's Bugzilla. Even so, others working on the bug said the code needed to be replaced with Mozilla's own."
Government

Network Neutrality Back In Congress For 3rd Time 248

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the moving-at-the-speed-of-government dept.
suraj.sun writes "Ed Markey has introduced his plan to legislate network neutrality into a third consecutive Congress, and he has a message for ISPs: upgrade your infrastructure and don't even think about blocking or degrading traffic. The war over network neutrality has been fought in the last two Congresses, and last week's introduction of the 'Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2009' [PDF] means that legislators will duke it out a third time. Should the bill pass, Internet service providers will not be able to 'block, interfere with, discriminate against, impair, or degrade' access to any lawful content from any lawful application or device. Rulemaking and enforcement of network neutrality would be given to the Federal Communications Commission, which would also be given the unenviable job of hashing out what constitutes 'reasonable network management' — something explicitly allowed by the bill. Neutrality would also not apply to the access and transfer of unlawful information, including 'theft of content,' so a mythical deep packet inspection device that could block illegal P2P transfers with 100 percent accuracy would still be allowed. If enacted, the bill would allow any US Internet user to file a neutrality complaint with the FCC and receive a ruling within 90 days."
Space

First Light Images From Herschel Satellite Released 35

Posted by Soulskill from the pretty-pictures dept.
davecl writes "The first images from the Herschel satellite have been released by ESA. The images are of the galaxy M51 and show a lot of structure and other features never seen before. Coverage of these results can be found on the ESA website and on the Herschel mission blog. There's a lot of work still to be done on tuning the satellite and instruments for optimum performance, but these very early results already show the promise of this mission. I work on this project and can say that these results are really impressive at this early stage!"

Comment Re:No its just that : (Score 1) 791

by cliffwoolley (#26711379) Attached to: Torvalds Rejects One-Size-Fits-All Linux

Agreed. A central desktop distro to rally around would be useful (perhaps unlikely, but useful).

Even more useful, though, in my opinion, would be a consistent package management system across distros. That way, we could choose a distro for a specialized-use case (e.g., servers, embedded systems, etc.) based on what packages it focuses its attention on and what its performance priorities are rather than based on which package management system it uses. Plus, bouncing back and forth between numerous different distributions -- one for each niche -- wouldn't be such a headache. (Now... which command was it that I use to update that package on this distro again? Argh.)

Space

Submission + - NOAA weather satellite may be lost

Submitted by
radioweather
radioweather writes: "The GOES East satellite (GOES 12) went through a station keeping maneuver yesterday, and then shortly afterwards communications ceased. GOES 12 is no longer delivering satellite imagery. This satellite is used for most eastern US weather forecasting, as well as tropical storm tracking and marine forecasting.

Here is the bulletin from NOAASIS:

A GOES-12 North-South Station Keeping maneuver was performed on Tuesday, December 4, 2007 at 1756 UTC. An anomaly is currently ongoing. NOAA is not receiving GOES-12 (EAST) data until further notice. FULL DISK images are being captured on GOES-11 (WEST) until the problem is resolved. Data Affected by the Outage: GOES-12 (East) Imaging and Soundings data Date and Time of the Outage:12/4/2007, 1715 UTC, 12:15 PM, EST.
And here is the current status report. The words "until further notice" are not at all comforting. If they cannot re-establish communications, the spacecraft will of course be lost."
Power

Submission + - Electric vehicles to back up the power grid 1

Submitted by holy_calamity
holy_calamity writes: Researchers in Delaware are working with electricity grid giant PJM on a scheme to use the batteries of electric vehicles to backup the grid while parked. Cars typically spend 23 hours a day off the road. During that time electric or plug-in hybrid vehicles can soak up excess generated power or trickle juice into the grid to smooth out mis-matches between supply and demand. Just 100 electric vehicles running the vehicle-to-grid software like their current prototype can provide 1MW of storage. City officials in Austin, Texas are keen to try the idea.
Microsoft

Submission + - Users, Web Developers Vent Over IE7's First Year (pcworld.com)

Submitted by outlando
outlando writes: After a year of IE7, Tony Chor at M$ has written a glowingly self-congratulatory entry in the IE blog. The comments, from various developers, designers and other industry professionals, tell a rather different story to the one outlined in the blog entry itself.
PC World's story is here: http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,140299/article.html

Unfortunately, PC World neglected to provide a link to the blog entry itself. You can find it at http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2007/11/30/the-first-year-of-ie7.aspx

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