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Books

Kindle Allowing Chinese Unfettered Access To Web 138

Posted by Soulskill from the not-for-long dept.
jcl-xen0n writes "Apparently, some Chinese Kindle owners have discovered that they are able to access banned sites such as Twitter and Facebook without a problem. The article speculates that Amazon may be operating a local equivalent to Amazon Whispernet with a Chinese 3G provider. Professor Lawrence Yeung Kwan, of the University of Hong Kong's electrical and electronic engineering department, told the paper that mainland internet patrols might have overlooked the gadget (perhaps because they consider it solely a tool to purchase books). How long before Kindle traffic is locked down?"
Cellphones

Submission + - 'Cellphone Effect' Could Skew Election Results

Submitted by
Ponca City
Ponca City writes: "A good deal of polling data suggest that Republicans may win the House of Representatives in Tuesday's mid-term elections. However Nate Silver writes in the NY Times that there are several factors that could skew the election allowing Democrats to outperform their polls and beat consensus expectations. Most prominent is the "cellphone effect." In 2003, just 3.2% of households were cell-only while in the 2010 election one-quarter of American adults have ditched their landlines and rely exclusively on their mobile phones, and a lot of pollsters don’t call mobile phones. Cellphone-only voters tend to be younger, more urban, and less white — all Democratic demographics — and a study by Pew Research suggests that the failure to include them might bias the polls by about 4 points against Democrats, even after demographic weighting is applied. Another factor that could skew results is the Robopoll effect where there are significant differences between the results shown by automated surveys and those which use live human interviewers — the ‘robopolls’ being 3 or 4 points more favorable to Republicans over all. It may be that only adults who are extremely engaged by politics (who are more likely to be Republican, especially this year) bother to respond to robocalls. Still when all is said and done "more likely than not, Republicans will indeed win the House, and will do so by a significant margin," writes Silver. "But just as Republicans could beat the consensus, Democrats could too, and nobody should be particularly shocked if they do.""
Operating Systems

OpenBSD 4.8 Released 176

Posted by Soulskill from the new-and-shiny dept.
Mortimer.CA writes "The release of OpenBSD 4.8 has been announced. Highlights include ACPI suspend/resume, better hardware support, OpenBGPD/OpenOSPFD/routing daemon improvements, inclusion of OpenSSH 5.5, etc. Nothing revolutionary, just the usual steady improving of the system. A detailed ChangeLog is available, as usual. Work, of course, has already started on the next release, which should be ready in May, according to the steady six-month release cycle."

Comment Re:Sign me up... (Score 1) 681

by jack455 (#29327417) Attached to: Microsoft Attacks Linux With Retail-Training Talking Points

I haven't tried it in a while as I'm on Fedora right now and otherwise use Arch, but I think deb is as bad as rpm/yum for local files. I occasionally download a rpm and do

$ su -c 'yum localinstall some.rpm'

I would like that built into a gui package manager. If not for me than for people I recommend linux to. How do you locally install a deb file that isn't in a repo?

I do have to say that yum uninstalls rpms better and more consistently than windows does for msi's

Comment Re:Biggest point of them all (Score 1) 681

by jack455 (#29325901) Attached to: Microsoft Attacks Linux With Retail-Training Talking Points

That's what I'd expect as a winxp sysadmin. Worst I have to do is delete a profile. But I can't resist since one of my laptops is the same hardware:

T60 Arch Linux rolling upgrade pacman -Syu
T60 Arch Linux rolling upgrade pacman -Syu
T60 Arch Linux rolling upgrade pacman -Syu
T60 Arch Linux rolling upgrade pacman -Syu
T60 Arch Linux rolling upgrade pacman -Syu

(ok, I obviously haven't had my T60 since 2005 but the point is that Arch doesn't have releases just continuous upgrades. That's a smooth upgrade experience.)

Comment Re:Sign me up... (Score 2, Insightful) 681

by jack455 (#29325797) Attached to: Microsoft Attacks Linux With Retail-Training Talking Points

Exactly. I have a sales background and think this is funny. They're implying that win7 vs linux is a reasonable choice. They're talking about built-in support for devices which people might remember having to install a cd to run. If people even know what Linux is I'm sure it was from someone (probably more knowledgable) saying Linux is more secure even if it was followed up by a critique of Linux. My friend that I work with as a sysadmin is very pro ms but wouldn't buy half the stuff in these slides.

Comment Re:Good stuff... (Score 1) 150

by jack455 (#29325539) Attached to: Musicians Oppose Anti-Piracy Measures In the UK

It's important to realize that boycotts aren't meant to put a company out of business (at least usually aren't). The goal is to force them to change their behaviour. Focus on, for instance, Bravia TVs. If a significant dent was made in sales to the point that it didn't look like statistical noise then that might start at dialog between two sony divisions something like, "Hey people don't want to watch DRM encumbered crap from an anti-consumer corporation on a sony TV. They know who we are and are choosing more consumer-friendly brands."

Actually though I'd ignore most sony divisions (like the PS3 or technical engineering that invents and creates CDs) and focus on the relevant ones like sony pictures and sony bmg. That would make it a little more obvious where the lost profits went and why.

Comment Re:Dear Pranknet (Score 1) 543

by jack455 (#29007553) Attached to: The Outing of Pranknet

"I'm not upper class. Currently lower, probably."
However the OP had the foresight to say "identify with" and not just assume you were rich. In arguments like this the rich don't even need to hurl the class warfare accusations, too many people anticipate their own wealth.

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