javipas - Slashdot User

Submission + - Offline Gmail launched (blogspot.com)

Submitted by

javipas

on Wednesday January 28, 2009 @06:48AM

javipas writes: "Google developers have announced a new feature part of Gmail Labs that everybody was waiting to see realized. Offline Gmail will allow users to have a partial copy of its Gmail account on their PCs, and access their messages while being offline. The magic of Google Gears comes to the rescue, but the process will not be complete. The syncronization will update the online and offline copies, but Google will use an algorithm that will determine the messages downloaded on each sync (the first being the most important) based on several parameters that point out that message's relevance. This measure will save the process from downloading pieces of information not quite valuable. US and UK english users can enjoy this feature through the Gmail Labs section."

Submission + - Linux kernel surpasses 10 million lines of code (heise-online.co.uk)

Submitted by

javipas

on Wednesday October 22, 2008 @12:56PM

javipas writes: "A simple analysis of the most updated version (a Git checkout) of the Linux kernel reveals that the number of lines of all its source code surpasses 10 million lines of code, but attention: this number includes blank lines, comments and text files. With a deeper analysis thanks to SLOCCount tool, you can get the real number of pure code lines: 6.399.191, with 96,4% of them developed in C, and 3,3% using assembler. The number grows clearly with each new version of the kernel, that seems to be launched each 90 days aproximately."

Submission + - Compact Disc turns 26, has a bright future (maximumpc.com)

Submitted by

javipas

on Thursday August 21, 2008 @11:56AM

javipas writes: "The Compact Disc was created 26 years ago, but apparently it is as healthy as 15 years ago, when computing versions of this format (CD-ROM, CD-R, CD-RW) literally make the market explode. Nowadays CD has been replaced in some segments, but not on the music industry, that continues to support it massively. The shy return of vinyl and the absence of real competitors make CD's future very bright, so it seems this birthday will not be by any means the last one we celebrate. Happy birthday!"

Submission + - A year of GPLv3 (blogspot.com)

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javipas

on Tuesday July 01, 2008 @09:46AM

javipas writes: "GPLv3 and LGPLv3 were released one year ago, on 29 June 2007. Palamida, who tracks Open Source projects, has made a study of the current situation of these licenses along with AGPLv3, which was released later, in November. The number of projects that have made the transition to these licenses has grown over the last months, and it seems than AGPLv3 has captured a great interest lately. Black Duck Software, a company that tracks Open Source projects too, has made its own study with similar results, and although GPLv3 and its variants have a good adoption rate, the interviews published on the Palamida site (Stallman, Chris Di Bona) show that the acceptance of GPLv3 has still a long way to walk."

Submission + - Happy birthday! x86 turns 30 years old (computerworld.com)

Submitted by

javipas

on Thursday June 05, 2008 @07:32AM

javipas writes: "On June 8th 1978 Intel introduced its first 16-bit microprocessor, the 8086. Intel used then the "the dawn of a new era" slogan, and they probably didn't know how certain they were. Thirty years later we've seen the evolution of PC architectures based on the x86 instruction set that has been the core of Intel, AMD or VIA processors. Legendary chips such as Intel 80386, 80486, Pentiums or AMD Athlon have a great debt with that original processor, and as recently was pointed out on Slashdot, x86 evolution still leads the revolution. Happy birthday and long live, x86."

Submission + - It's official: Toshiba quits HD DVD (reuters.com)

Submitted by

javipas

on Tuesday February 19, 2008 @05:33AM

javipas writes: ""We carefully assessed the long-term impact of continuing the so-called 'next-generation format war' and concluded that a swift decision will best help the market develop," Toshiba President and CEO Atsutoshi Nishida said in a statement.Toshiba officially quits HD DVD and leaves Blu-ray Disc as the winner of a long and tedious war that will have an impact on HD DVD early adopters. Hopefully for now on we'll be able to enjoy the benefits of having only one format to enjoy, which should improve the technology development and, of course, reduce costs. Toshiba will not adopt BD inmediately, but it'll be interesting how this company and its partners (like Microsoft) will change now their strategies."

Submission + - Linus Torvalds on Why Users Aren't Flocking to Lin (wired.com) 1

Submitted by

javipas

on Friday February 08, 2008 @06:49AM

javipas writes: "On an two-part (1, 2) interview with Linux Torvalds, the creator of Linux clearly explains the limited success of Linux on the desktop. "The desktop is also the thing where people get really upset if something changes, so it's really hard to enter the desktop market because people are used to whatever they used before, mostly Windows.", says Torvalds, which thinks that most people are too lazy to face changes on the desktop. There's even one quote that probably will remain: "better is worse if it's different"."

Submission + - The future of BitTorrent (torrentfreak.com)

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javipas

on Tuesday October 30, 2007 @06:36PM

javipas writes: "The people behind the popular BitTorrent tracker is working on a new version of the BitTorrent protocol that could become the successor to the current one, maintained by BitTorrent Inc. The company founded by Bram Cohen — original author of this protocol — now has decided to close the source for several new features in the BitTorrent protocol, and this "gives them too much power and influence". The new file format would be called .p2p, and would maintain backwards compatibility with current .torrent files."

Submission + - End of Moore's Law in 10-15 years? (wired.com) 1

Submitted by

javipas

on Wednesday September 19, 2007 @03:13AM

javipas writes: "In 1965 Gordon Moore — Intel's co-founder — predicted that the number of transistors on integrated circuits would double every two years. Moore's Law has been with us for over 40 years, but it seems that the limits of microelectronics are now not that far from us. Moore has predicted the end of his own law in 10 to 15 years, but he predicted that end before, and failed."

Submission + - Ophcrack, don't even think your password is secure (codinghorror.com)

Submitted by

javipas

on Monday September 10, 2007 @03:22AM

javipas writes: "An insightful article at Jeff Atwood's Coding Horror reveals the power inside Ophcrack, an Open Source program that is capable of discover virtually any password in Windows operating systems. The article explains how passwords get stored on Windows using hash functions, and how Ophcrack is capable of generate inmense tables of words and letter combinations that are compared to the password we want to obtain. The program is available in Windows, Mac OS and Linux, but be careful: the generated tables that Ophcrack uses are really big, and you should need up to 15 Gbytes to store these tables."

Submission + - Wikipedia corrects Enciclopaedia Britannica (wikipedia.org)

Submitted by

javipas

on Monday July 23, 2007 @08:27AM

javipas writes: "Despite all the controversy about Wikipedia's work model, no one can argue the potential of a project that has demonstrated the usefulness of the "wisdom of crowds" concept. And that wisdom has been able to detect several mistakes on one of the most relevant references on human knowledge: the Enciclopaedia Britannica. All kind of data has been spotted as wrong, such as the birthdate of Bill Clinton or the definition of NP problems in Mathematics."

Submission + - Torvalds vs Schwartz on GPL wars (sun.com)

Submitted by

javipas

on Wednesday June 13, 2007 @07:29AM

javipas writes: "The controversial messaged published by Linus Torvalds in the Linux Kernel Mailing List was from the beginning to the end an open attack to Sun and its Open Source strategy. Linus criticized Sun's real position on GPL, and claimed that Linux could be dangerous to Sun. Upon his words, "they may be talking a lot more [about Open Source] than they are or ever will be doing.". Jonathan Schwartz's blog has been updated today with a post that is a direct response to Linus claims, but in a much more elegant and coherent way. Sun's CEO notes that "Companies compete, communities simply fracture", and tries to explain why using GPL licenses is taking so long."

Submission + - No ZFS in Leopard (informationweek.com)

Submitted by

javipas

on Tuesday June 12, 2007 @11:05AM

javipas writes: "Despite recent rumors about the possible inclussion of ZFS as the filesystem of choice for MacOS X 10.5 'Leopard', an Apple executive has denied this possibility. As he says, Apple "had never said ZFS would be a part of Leopard", so users of the future operating system will have to keep working with HFS+, a filesystem that is almos ten years old now."

Submission + - 1 billion PCs by end of 2008 (cnet.com)

Submitted by

javipas

on Monday June 11, 2007 @10:42AM

javipas writes: "Acording to a study published by Forrester Research, 2008 will be the year in wich a psychological barrier will be surpassed. By the end of next year there will be 1.000.000.000 computers all around the world, a number that will double itself in just five more years. The reason: the emerging markets of countries such as Brazil, China, India or Russia, which will be responsible of 775 new PCs and laptop computers. Part of them, of course, coming from projects like the OLPC's one."

Submission + - Star Wars, 30 years old

Submitted by

javipas

on Friday May 25, 2007 @07:01AM

javipas writes: "On May 25th, 1977 the first (or fouth) film of the Star Wars Saga was on theaters for the first time, and that has led to many celebrations all around the globe. Wired has a series of articles entitled 'The empire at 30', and many fanboys are posting about this particular birthday. For example, you can see the best 30 clips made by fans to celebrate this anniversary. In Spain this day has been unofficially declared as 'Geek Pride Day', and there are several parties and events devoted to show basically... that geeks are cool."

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