jones_supa sends this quote from Phoronix: "David Herrmann has provided an update on his ambitious initiative to kill off the Linux kernel console. Herrmann has long been working on making the Linux kernel CONFIG_VT option unnecessary for providing a Linux console by punting it off to user-space. The Linux kernel VT console hasn't been changed much in the past two decades and Herrmann is hoping to see it replaced with a user-space solution he's been developing that would allow for multi-seat support, a hardware-accelerated console, full internalization, and other features."

Anon E. Muss writes "Just because you can put a camera somewhere doesn't mean you should. Apparently, the Department of Homeland Security doesn't grasp this concept. They've installed video cameras in urinals at Houston's Hobby Airport. At least they weren't sneaky about it — they posted a notice saying 'Automatic infrared flush sensors also provide video monitoring for security purposes.' (Insert bad joke about bashful bladder syndrome here)."

ruphus13 writes "Linux recently achieved 1% market share of the overall operating system market. But, does that statistic really mean anything useful? This article makes the case that it doesn't. It states, 'Framed in the "overall market share" terminology, the information (or how it was gathered and calculated) isn't necessarily questionable, it's more that it's meaningless. It's nebulous, even when one looks at several months worth of data. [How] Linux is used in various business settings answers an actual question — and the answer can be used to ask further questions, form opinions — and maybe one day even explain to some degree what 1% of the market share really means. ... Operating systems aren't immortal beings, and by rights, there can't be (there shouldn't be) only one. ... No one system can be everything to everyone, and no one system (however powerful, or stable) can do everything perfectly that just one person might require of it in the course of a day. While observing trends and measuring market share are important, the results (good or bad) shouldn't be any platform's measure of self-worth or validation. It's a data point to build on (we're weak in this area, strong in this area, our platform is being used a lot more this quarter, where did all of our users go?) in order to improve and stay relevant.'"

cheezitmike writes "This week in Washington, DC, a group of Sci-Fi writers is helping the US Department of Homeland Security envision the future at the 2009 Homeland Security Science & Technology Stakeholders Conference. The agency is hoping the interaction between writers and bureaucrats helps the government 'break old habits of thought' and 'help managers think more broadly about projects and their potential reactions and unintended consequences.' And, it's at minimal expense to taxpayers, since the writers are consulting pro bono."

hardsix writes "Despite the numerous films, books and plays, celebrating the brilliant achievements of the code-breakers at Bletchley Park, the UK government is still dragging its feet over providing proper support for the site. There has just been a debate in the House of Lords over whether the site should be given similar status to the UK's main WWII museum — the Imperial War Museum. But the government has brushed off the request, claiming that the site has received enough funding recently. However, as was shown by a visit to the site by UK actor, and Twitter-lover Stephen Fry, although devices such as Enigma have been restored many of the huts where the code-breaking work went on are in a bad state and more investment is needed."

The US Department of Homeland Security is studying lies, damned lies, and smells. They hope to prove that human body odor could be used to tell when people are lying. The department says they are already "conducting experiments in deceptive behavior and collecting human odor samples" and that the research it hopes to fund "will consist primarily of the analysis and study of the human odor samples collected to determine if a deception indicator can be found."

r2k writes "While the Apple rumours posted yesterday highlight some of the most commonly talked-about opinions, a writer for CNet UK sat down with Mahalo's Jason Calacanis, who told CNet he knew for a fact that Apple is developing fully networked LCD TV sets. As the writer points out, Apple dropped 'Computer' from its company name for a very good reason."

Ian Lamont recently asked Google if they planned to extend their transcription of books and other printed media to include public records, many of which were handwritten before word processors became ubiquitous. Google wouldn't talk about any potential plans, but Lamont found out a bit more about the limits of optical character recognition in the process: "Even though some CAPTCHA schemes have been cracked in the past year, a far more difficult challenge lies in using software to recognize handwritten text. Optical character recognition has been used for years to convert printed documents into text data, but the enormous variation in handwriting styles has thwarted large-scale OCR imports of handwritten public documents and historical records. Ancestry.com took a surprising approach to digitizing and converting all publicly released US census records from 1790 to 1930: It contracted the job to Chinese firms whose staff manually transcribed the names and other information. The Chinese staff are specially trained to read the cursive and other handwriting styles from digitized paper records and microfilm. The task is ongoing with other handwritten records, at a cost of approximately $10 million per year, the company's CEO says."

darkeye writes "I'm facing a difficult dilemma and looking for opinions. I've been contributing heavily to an open source project, making considerable changes to code organization and quality, but the work is unfinished at the moment. Now, a company is approaching me to continue my changes. They want to keep the improvements to themselves, which is possible since the project is published under the BSD license. That's fair, as they have all the rights to the work they pay for in full. However, they also want me to sign a non-competition clause, which would bar me from ever working on and publishing results for the original open source project itself, even if done separately, in my free time. How would you approach such a decision? On one side, they'd provide resources to work on an interesting project. On the other, it would make me an outcast in the project's community. Moreover, they would take ownership of not just what they paid for, but also my changes leading up to this moment, and I wouldn't be able to continue on my original codebase in an open source manner if I sign their contract."

Broadband writes "With a growing number of internet service providers imposing hard bandwidth caps, I too will soon find myself with a limit. In typical Slashdot fashion I use the Internet for everything from movie streaming to online backup and just realized I have no idea how much data traverses my pipes on a monthly basis. While I have wised up and installed a bandwidth monitoring solution, it'll be some time until I have a normalized average. So my question is: What is the average monthly data usage in your household? How many people share the connection and is there anything you've found essential yet bandwidth intensive that you couldn't live without? (E.g. VOIP, movie downloads, streaming audio, etc.)"

X0563511 alerts us to events in Minneapolis and St. Paul in advance of the Republican convention (which has been put on hold because of Hurricane Gustav). Local police backed by the FBI raided a number of homes and public buildings and confiscated computers and other material. From Salon.com: "Last night, members of the St. Paul police department and the Ramsey County sheriff's department handcuffed, photographed and detained dozens of people meeting at a public venue to plan a demonstration, charging them with no crime other than 'fire code violations,' and early this morning, the Sheriff's department sent teams of officers into at least four Minneapolis area homes where suspected protesters were staying. Jane Hamsher and I were at two of those homes this morning — one which had just been raided and one which was in the process of being raided." Here is local reporting from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune: "Aided by informants planted in protest groups, authorities raided at least six buildings across St. Paul and Minneapolis to stop an 'anarchist' plan to disrupt this week's Republican National Convention. From Friday night through Saturday afternoon, officers surrounded houses, broke down doors, handcuffed scores of people and confiscated suspected tools of civil disobedience ... A St. Paul City Council member described it as excessive, while activists, many of whom were detained and then released without charges, called it intimidation designed to quash free speech."

MojoKid writes "A recent study (PDF) by Richard Clayton at Cambridge University determined that the first letter of a someone's email address directly affects how much spam they receive. As shown in the graph at either link above, email addresses with numbers as their first characters receive even fewer spam emails. The corpus used in the study was 8 weeks' worth of email from the UK ISP Demon Internet, just over half a billion messages, of which 56% was deemed to be spam."

phaedo00 writes "Ars Technica has an in-depth review of the MacBook Pro that compares performance with a Dell Inspiron running a hacked version of OS X 10.4.4: 'Yes, you read that right. We at the Orbiting HQ were able to have some benchmarks run on an acquaintance's Dell Inspiron 9100 with a 3.2GHz Pentium 4 HT chip running OS X 10.4.4, and decided that including the benchmarks from this machine would prove to be both interesting if not illustrative of what non-Apple x86 machines may be capable of if they could run Mac OS X (legally). Please keep in mind that the data from the Dell laptop is for illustrative purposes only and that no one at the Ars Orbiting HQ hacked a machine. As David Letterman says, this is not a competition. No wagering.'"