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Submission + - First billion dollar open source software vendor (yahoo.com) 1

Submitted by
head_dunce
head_dunce writes: "Red Hat is coming out way on top in this economy. Total revenue and subscription revenue for this quarter is up 28% year-over-year. Jim Whitehurst, President and Chief Executive Officer of Red Hat said, "Based on the strong first half results, we believe Red Hat remains well positioned to finish fiscal 2012 as the first billion dollar open source software vendor.”"
Security

Submission + - Adobe Pushes Emergency Flash Player Security Fix (securityweek.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey
wiredmikey writes: As expected, Adobe today released a security update for its Flash Player. The out of cycle update addresses critical security issues in flash player as well as an important universal cross-site scripting issue.

Adobe reported that one of the vulnerabilities (CVE-2011-2444) is being exploited in the wild in active targeted attacks designed to trick the user into clicking on a malicious link delivered in an email message.

To illustrate the importance of keeping systems up to date, including Adobe Flash products, the fact that the RSA cyber attack was executed using a spear phishing attack with an embedded flash file should serve as a friendly reminder. RSA was breached after an employee opened a spreadsheet that contained a zero-day exploit that installed a backdoor through an Adobe Flash vulnerability.
Games

Submission + - An FPS minus the shooting (arstechnica.com) 1

Submitted by phaedrus5001
phaedrus5001 writes: Ars has a story about a first person shooter under development that involves no shooting on the part of the player; at least, not shooting bullets. The game, Warco, has the player in the role of a war correspondent. The object is to immerse yourself in dangerous situations armed only with a camera.

From the article: "Players will experience the process of filming conflicts, going into dangerous situations armed with nothing but a camera. They will then edit the footage into a compelling news story."

While an interesting and different concept, it should be even more interesting to see if the developers can actually convince a publisher to release the project.
Businesses

Submission + - Hewlett Packard's Cult Calculator Turns 30

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "The Wall Street Journal reports that Hewlet Packard's HP-12C financial calculator has remained outwardly unchanged since its introduction in 1981. "Once you learned it on the 12C, there was no need to change," says David Carter, chief investment officer of New York wealth-management firm Lenox Advisors, who has owned his 12C for 22 years and still keeps it on his desk. "It's not like the math was changing." The 12C, which costs $70 on HP's website, is HP's best-selling calculator of all time, though the company won't reveal how many units it has sold over the years and the 12C still uses on an unconventional mathematical notation called "Reverse Polish Notation," which eschews parentheses and equal signs in an effort to run long calculations more efficiently which may be one reason users are reluctant to switch and tends to render the calculator mystifying to the novice user. New employees in financial services businesses quickly learn that ignorance of the 12C can flash more warning signs than a scuffed pair of shoes. "The guy with the totally beat-up HP-12C — you know he's actually done things in business," says James Granberry, a student at Vanderbilt University's Owen Graduate School of Management. "And then there's the young guy who looks like he may have put on his suit for the first time—with a graphing calculator." The HP-12C is one of only four calculators permissible in the Chartered Financial Analyst exams, the others being its sister, the HP-12C Platinum, and the Texas Instruments BA II Plus and BA II Plus Professional."
Handhelds

Apple iPad Reviewed 443

Posted by samzenpus from the under-the-hood dept.
adeelarshad82 writes "Since the iPad's initial introduction back in January, many of us still wonder why we should drop hundreds of dollars for what is termed as a large iPod. Missing features like support for multitasking, a built-in camera for video chats, and Flash support in Safari only add to the dilemma. However, a recently published review of the iPad starts to clear up these doubts. To begin with, the iPad is packing some real quality gear under the hood. Even though the in-house-designed 1GHz A4 chip got little official comment from Apple, the touch screen's instantaneous responses prove that it is outstandingly fast. Furthermore, the iPad runs iPhone OS 3.2, and is currently the only device that runs this version of the operating system. iPad's graphics capabilities come from a PowerVR SGX GPU, similar to the one found in the iPhone 3GS and iPod Touch. It can render about 28 million polygons/second, which is more powerful than the Qualcomm Snapdragon found in devices like the HTC HD2. Also, iPad's extraordinary battery life is not just a myth. According to the lab tests, the battery netted a respectable 9 hours and 25 minutes, very close to Apple's claims of 10 hours."
GNOME

Gnome 2.30 Released 138

Posted by samzenpus from the new-and-improved dept.
Hypoon writes "The GNOME project is proud to release this new version of the GNOME desktop environment and developer platform. Among the hundreds of bug fixes and user-requested improvements, GNOME 2.30 has several highly visible changes: new features for advanced file management, better remote desktop experience, easier notes synchronization and a generally smoother user experience. Learn more about GNOME 2.30 through the detailed release notes and the press release."
Microsoft

Office Guardian Angel Worse Than Clippy 118

Posted by samzenpus from the you-never-knew-how-good-you-had-it dept.
ZWilder writes "Remember 'Clippy', the annoying anthropomorphic paper clip foisted upon unsuspecting users of Office? Well Microsoft has taken the concept behind Clippy and 'turned the dial up to 11' with its new, even more intrusive animated life-coach, known as 'Guardian Angel.' Patented in 2006, Guardian Angel is 'an intelligent personalized agent' that 'monitors and evaluates a user's environment to assist in decision-making processes on behalf of the user.' Like a manlier Fairy Godmother. Or a similarly omniscient HAL from '2001: A Space Oddysey.'"

Comment Re:How can xterm be improved? (Score 1) 419

by evolve75 (#30104728) Attached to: GNOME 3 Delayed Until September 2010

Quicksilver was purchased by Apple and put into OSX 10.3 several years ago.

Quicksilver was not purchased by Apple. In fact, the source code for QS is now open source (under an Apache license) and available at http://code.google.com/p/blacktree-alchemy/.

Apple's Spotlight is not a launcher per-se but more a system-wide search facility. It does work as a very simple application launcher (since apps are also indexed) - but definitely not a equivalent to QS or Gnome Do, which are essentially context sensitive mash-up of GUI based shells with a noun-verb model for operating on system objects such as applications (for launching, hiding, quitting etc.) and specific verb actions for tasks such as displaying contact info, opening chat sessions, operating on files etc.
The Almighty Buck

Stock Market Manipulation By Millisecond Trading 624

Posted by kdawson from the other-people's-money dept.
cfa22 writes "Nice piece in the NY Times today on ultra-fast trading on the NYSE and other markets. The 'algos' that make autonomous trading decisions have to be fast, but I wonder: Is network speed ever a bottleneck? Can anyone with inside experience with millisecond trading provide some details for the curious among us regarding hardware architectures and networking used for such trading systems?" According to the article, high-frequency traders generated about $21 billion in profits last year.
AT&T

T-Mobile Sues Starbucks Over Free Wi-Fi Deal 142

Posted by Soulskill from the hot-spot-flare-up dept.
Glenn Fleishman writes "T-Mobile sent me the text of a lawsuit they filed yesterday against Starbucks. The telecom firm alleges that Starbucks didn't involve it in any discussions to launch their free loyalty program Wi-Fi service this week with AT&T. AT&T is gradually taking over hot-spot operation from T-Mobile, market by market over the course of 2008. T-Mobile told me Starbucks is essentially giving away something that isn't theirs. T-Mobile has sued to halt the two-hours-a-day of free service, and is asking for money to cover losses. This might sound like sour grapes, but T-Mobile still operates most of the network, and says that the terms to which they agreed with Starbucks and AT&T for the transition and with AT&T for bilateral roaming don't cover this situation at all. Maybe free access in exchange for buying a cup of joe every 30 days was too good to be true (this soon)."
Operating Systems

Removing the Big Kernel Lock 222

Posted by CmdrTaco from the wait-i-thought-locks-made-it-secure dept.
Corrado writes "There is a big discussion going on over removing a bit of non-preemptable code from the Linux kernel. 'As some of the latency junkies on lkml already know, commit 8e3e076 in v2.6.26-rc2 removed the preemptable BKL feature and made the Big Kernel Lock a spinlock and thus turned it into non-preemptable code again. "This commit returned the BKL code to the 2.6.7 state of affairs in essence," began Ingo Molnar. He noted that this had a very negative effect on the real time kernel efforts, adding that Linux creator Linus Torvalds indicated the only acceptable way forward was to completely remove the BKL.'"
The Military

The World's Spookiest Weapons 224

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the criminally-insane-working-for-the-government dept.
DesScorp writes "Popular Science has a piece on some outrageous ideas for weapons; some came to fruition, and others didn't. And while some of the weapons (atom bombs, chemical weapons, bats with bombs strapped to them that seek out homes and buildings at night) are truly frightening, some of them are also kind of silly, such as the Gay Bomb, and the Frisbee bomb that was labeled the 'Modular Disc-Wing Urban Cruise Munition.'"
Math

Calculating the Date of Easter 336

Posted by kdawson from the computus-giganticus dept.
The God Plays Dice blog has an entertaining post on how the date of Easter is calculated. Wikipedia has all the messy details of course, but the blog makes a good introduction to the topic. "Easter is the date of the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after March 21... [T]he cycle of Easter dates repeat themselves every 5,700,000 years. The cycle of epacts (which encode the date of the full moon) in the Julian calendar repeat every nineteen years. There are two corrections made to the epact, each of which depend[s] only on the century; one repeats (modulo 30, which is what matters) every 120 centuries, the other every 375 centuries, so the [p]air of them repeat every 300,000 years. The days of the week are on a 400-year cycle, which doesn't matter because that's a factor of 300,000. So the Easter cycle has length the least common multiple of 19 and 300,000, which is 5,700,000 [years]."
Space

Astronomers Find Oldest Known Asteroids 72

Posted by Soulskill from the peaceful-and-benevolent-doomrocks dept.
Researchers from the University of Maryland have recently discovered three asteroids that appear to be roughly 4.55 billion years old, dating back to the formation of the Solar System. The scientists say that the asteroids have survived relatively unchanged since that time, and make good candidates for future space missions. "'The fall of the Allende meteorite in 1969 initiated a revolution in the study of the early Solar System,' said Tim McCoy, curator of the national meteorite collection at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. 'I find it amazing that it took us nearly 40 years to collect spectra of these [CAI-rich] objects and that those spectra would now initiate another revolution, pointing us to the asteroids that record this earliest stage in the history of our Solar System.'"

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