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Submission + - Bill Gates Takes the Stand in WordPerfect Trial

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Remember WorldPerfect? Bill Gates took the witness stand to defend his company against a $1 billion antitrust lawsuit that claims Microsoft duped Novell into thinking he would include WordPerfect in the new Windows system, then backed out because he feared it was too good. Gates testified Monday that Microsoft was racing to put out Windows 95 when he dropped technical features that would no longer support the rival's word processor and that in making the decision about the code, he was concerned not about Novell but about one element of the program that could have caused computers to crash. That code, technically known as "name space extensions," had to do with the display of folders and files. Novell attorney Jeff Johnson concedes that Microsoft was under no legal obligation to provide advance access to Windows 95 so Novell could prepare a compatible version but contends that Microsoft enticed Novell to work on a version, only to withdraw support months before Windows 95 hit the market. "We got stabbed in the back.""

Submission + - UN Bigwig: 'The web" should have been patented and (boingboing.net)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Cory Doctorow over at BoingBoing has unearthed an amazing video where the head of WIPO, the UN agency responsible for "promoting" intellectual property, suggests that Tim Berners-Lee should have patented HTML and licensed it to all users. Amazingly this is done on camera and in front of the head of CERN and the Internet Society, who look on in disbelief.
The Internet

Submission + - Trumpet Winsock creator made little money (ycombinator.com) 1

Submitted by omast
omast writes: It appears that Peter Tattam, creator of Trumpet Winsock, got very little for this piece of software. For those of you who do not remember — or did not need it because were already outside the MS Windows world — Trumpet Winsock was a shareware program that provided TCP/IP functionality to Windows machines back in 1994-1995. It allowed millions to connect to the Internet back then; I was one of them.
According to the article, Tattam made very little money from the program as it was widely distributed but rarely paid for.
Android

Submission + - Android Devices Are Hives of License Violations (linuxplanet.com)

Submitted by inkscapee
inkscapee writes: Android developers are paying little attention to Free/Open Source software licenses and have a 71% violation rate. Come on folks, FOSS licenses are easy to comply with, certainly easier than proprietary software licenses, and less punitive. But it seems even the tiny hoops that FOSS requires are too much for devs eager to cash in.
Education

Submission + - Can For-Profit Tech Colleges Be Trusted? (infoworld.com)

Submitted by
snydeq
snydeq writes: "InfoWorld's Robert Scheier takes a closer look at for-profit IT-oriented colleges, questioning whether IT pros and employers can trust the quality of education on offer at institutions such as University of Phoenix, DeVry, ITT Tech, and Kaplan in the wake of increasing scrutiny for alleged deceptive practices that leave in high debt for jobs that pay little. 'For-profit schools carry a stigma in some eyes because of their reputation for hard sales pitches, aggressive marketing tactics, and saddling students with big loans for dubious degrees or certificates,' Scheier writes. 'Should IT pros looking to increase their skills, or people seeking to enter the IT profession, consider such for-profit schools? And should employers trust their graduates' skills?'"
Games

Submission + - Futureproofing artifacts-Spacewar! 1962 in HTML5 (oversigma.com)

Submitted by
trebonian
trebonian writes: "In 1997 we posted a playable version of the Spacewar!, the first graphical computer game. Spacewar! was written by Russell et al at MIT in the early 60s.

We did not re-implement the game. Rather, we found the original source code, rebuilt it to get an authentic binary and ran it on a PDP-1 emulator that we wrote in Java.

We chose Java to implement the PDP-1 because we believed at the time — correctly as it turned out — that a Java version would survive the browser wars. Also, it would not require any effort to keep it running on all platforms well past the turn of the millennium, and through the traffic peaks of Spacewar's 40th and 45th birthday.

It's now getting close to 15 years later. We would not want to bet that in another 15 years a Java program will still run on the latest popular platforms.

As a hedge to the future, and in an effort to continue the preservation of this significant digital artifact, we've now ported the PDP-1 emulator to Javascript/HTML5.

It's posted at http://spacewar.oversigma.com/html5/. This should see the game through Spacewar!'s 50th (and hopefully 60th) birthday.

Expect another update around 2025."
Government

Submission + - Feds Help You Find Your Fastest Internet Service (itworld.com)

Submitted by
jfruhlinger
jfruhlinger writes: "Slashdot previously covered the National Broadband Map, designed by the U.S. Federal government to illustrate where the "digital divide" between those with access to high-speed Internet and those who don't. But, as blogger Ryan Faas points out, you can use it for a much more individualistic purpose: to find your fastest local wired or wireless ISP. Just plug in your name and address and you'll soon see what your options are."
Chrome

Submission + - Google to support or oppose DRM on HTML5 video? (mozillazine.org)

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes: "Mozilla has committed to not implement DRM in Firefox for WebM HTML5 video even though it is theoretically possible. Microsoft has asked Google and the WebM community several other questions that still have not been answered, but this one seems more important: will Google commit to keeping WebM in Chrome DRM-free? Does our community think that is important for the open web and free software?"
Politics

Submission + - New mega-leak reveals Middle East peace process (guardian.co.uk)

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: There's been yet another mega-leak, this time of 1,600 papers describing the Israeli/Palestinian peace process negotiations. It's independent of Wikileaks and came to light via al-Jazeera, showing perhaps that the mega-leak meme is here to stay whatever happens to Assange. The papers show a weak Palestinian side offering ever greater concessions to Israel, which flatly rejected this as being insufficient: 'We do not like this suggestion because it does not meet our demands,' Israel's then foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, told the Palestinians, 'and probably it was not easy for you to think about it, but I really appreciate it'.
Firefox

Submission + - No Hardware Acceleration Firefox for Linux (osnews.com) 4

Submitted by devtty
devtty writes: Yesterday, the ninth Firefox 4.0 beta was released. One of the major new features in Firefox 4.0 is hardware acceleration for anything from canvas drawing to video rendering. Sadly, this feature won't make its way to the Linux version of Firefox 4.0. The reason? X' drivers are "disastrously buggy". Boris Zbarsky, long-time Mozilla developer, commented on the issue over at Hacks.Mozilla.org. The release notes for Firefox 4.0 beta 9 noted that it comes with hardware acceleration for Windows 7 and Vista via a combination of Direct2D, DirectX 9 and DirectX 10. Windows XP users will also enjoy hardware acceleration for many operations "using our new Layers infrastructure along with DX9". Furthermore, Mac OS X has excellent OpenGL support, they claim, so they've got that covered as well.

No mention of Linux, and there's a reason for that. "We tried enabling OpenGL on Linux, and discovered that most Linux drivers are so disastrously buggy (think 'crash the X server at the drop of a hat, and paint incorrectly the rest of the time' buggy) that we had to disable it for now," explains Zbarsky, "Heck, we're even disabling WebGL for most Linux drivers, last I checked..."
The Internet

Submission + - IETF celbrates 25th aniversary (networkworld.com)

Submitted by FranckMartin
FranckMartin writes: Little known to the general public the Internet standard body, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) celebrates its 25th birthday on the 16th January. DNSSEC, IDN, SIP, IPv6, HTTP, MPLS,.. all acronyms that were codified at the IETF. But little known, one can argue the IETF does not exist, it just happens that people meet 3 times a year in some hotel around the world and are on mailing lists in between. The openness of the IETF and its structure has inspired the way ICANN is run as well as the way the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) has been open to the civil society.

Submission + - Milky Way May Have Dark Matter Satellite Galaxies (nationalgeographic.com) 2

Submitted by rubycodez
rubycodez writes: Berkeley astronomer Sukanya Chakrabarti has detected perturbations in the gases surrounding our Milky Way and concludes there is a satellite "Galaxy X" 250,000 light years away that is mostly dark matter, but that may contain dwarf stars visible in infrared. She expects many more such dark matter satellites to the Milky Way to be discovered using her technique.
The Internet

Submission + - Bufferbloat: the submarine that's sinking the 'Net (wordpress.com)

Submitted by gottabeme
gottabeme writes: Jim Getty, one of the original X Window System developers and editor of the HTTP/1.1 spec, has posted a series of articles on his blog detailing his research on the relatively unknown problem of bufferbloat. Bufferbloat is affecting the entire Internet, slowly worsening as RAM prices drop and buffers enlarge, and is causing latency and jitter to spike, especially for home broadband users. Unchecked, this problem may continue to deteriorate the usability of interactive applications like VOIP and gaming, and being so widespread, will take years of engineering and education efforts to resolve. Being like "frogs in heating water," few people are even aware of the problem. Can bufferbloat be fixed before the Internet and 3G networks become nearly unusable for interactive apps?

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