isenguard - Slashdot User

Copyright and Patent Laws Hurt the Economy 597

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday March 10, 2009 @06:40PM from the speaking-sense-to-power dept.

Norsefire writes "Two economists at Washington University in St. Louis are claiming that copyright and patent laws are 'killing innovation' and 'hurting [the] economy.' Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine state they would like to see copyright law abolished completely as there are other protections available to the creators of 'intellectual property' (a term they describe as 'propaganda,' and of recent origin). They are calling on Congress to grant patents only where an invention has social value, where the patent would not stifle innovation, and where the absence of a patent would damage cost-effectiveness."

How Long Should an Open Source Project Support Users? 272

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Thursday November 13, 2008 @09:24AM from the no-implied-support dept.

Ubuntu Kitten writes "Since October the community-generated database of cards known to work with Ndiswrapper has been down. This is apparently due to an on-going site redesign, but right now the usual URL simply directs to a stock Sourceforge page. Without the database, the software's usability is severely diminished but this raises an interesting question: Is an open source project obliged to provide support for its users? If so, for how long should the support last? Web servers cost money, especially for popular sites. While developers can sometimes find sponsorship, is it possible to get sponsorship simply for infrastructure and user services?"

Netflix Extends "Watch Instantly" To Mac Users 205

Posted by kdawson on Monday November 03, 2008 @03:19AM from the instant-grats dept.

CNet is reporting that Netflix has opened up its "Watch Instantly" feature to Mac users (here is Netflix's blog entry). They accomplished this by using Microsoft's Silverlight technology on both platforms, abandoning the Windows Media Player solution that had been employed in the first, Windows-only, version. Silverlight's DRM capabilities meet Netflix's needs, apparently. Netflix warns that this is beta software. Mac users can opt in here, then watch instantly with Safari or Firefox 2+, with the Silverlight plugin in place. Movie selection is somewhat limited.

Recovering Blurred Text Using Photoshop and JavaScript 157

Posted by timothy on Wednesday October 08, 2008 @05:31PM from the careful-how-you-hide-stuff dept.

An anonymous reader writes "There's been a lot of talk about recovering blurred or pixelated text, but here's an actual implementation using nothing but Photoshop and a little JavaScript. Includes a Hollywood-esque video showing the uncovered letters slowly appearing."

Comment Runs fine on my laptop with 192MB of RAM (Score 1) 566

by isenguard on Wednesday September 10, 2003 @09:35AM (#6921076) Attached to: Gnome 2.4 Release(d)

My laptop is a PIII-650 and has only 192MB of RAM (and no possibility of upgrading). I am currently running GNOME 2.2, and look forward to 2.4 partly because it's supposed to use even less memory than 2.2 does.

Currently my uptime is just over 5 days (it's a laptop, remember!), and I generally leave several gnome-terminal windows, rhythmbox, Evolution 1.4, Mozilla Firebird, emacs, a DVI viewer and GnomeGV running all the time. With these apps open (plus all the normal GNOME stuff such as the panel and Nautilus) I write, build and test code and work on my thesis. Obviously this runs into swap, but it doesn't make the computer particularly unresponsive.

Remember that Linux typically uses all the available RAM up and uses it for mystical kernel things like disk caching, so just because top says that all the memory is in use it isn't necessarily a bad thing.

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