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Piracy

Submission + - SOPA creator in TV/Film/Music industry's pocket. (opensecrets.org) 1

Submitted by en4bz
en4bz writes: Representative Lamar Smith, the creator of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), has been consistently receiving donations averaging $50 000 from the TV/Film/Music industry for each of his re-election campaigns for the past ten years. Smith has received roughly half a million dollars from the TV/Film/Music lobby over the past ten years according to www.opensecrets.org. Check out the source link for a full breakdown of donors to Smith's campaigns.
Linux

Submission + - Munich's Move to Linux Exceeds Target (h-online.com)

Submitted by
jrepin
jrepin writes: "In May 2003, Munich's city council resolved to migrate municipal workstations from Windows to Linux and open source. Munich's LiMux project has announced that it has exceeded its annual target for migrating the city's PCs to its LiMux client. To date in 2011, the project has migrated 9,000 systems; it had originally planned to migrate 8,500 of the 12,000-15,000 PC workstations used by city officials in Munich."
Microsoft

Submission + - How M$ Beats GNU/Linux in Schools. (boycottnovell.com)

Submitted by
twitter
twitter writes: "Ever wonder why schools still use Windows? Boycott Novell has extracted the details from 2002 M$ email presented in the Comes vrs Microsoft case and other leaks. What emerges is M$ desperate battle to "never lose to Linux." At stake for M$ is more than a billion dollars of annual revenue, vital user conditioning and governmental lock in that excludes competition, and software freedom for the rest of us. Education and Government Incentives [EDGI] and "Microsoft Unlimited Potential" are programs that allows vendors to sell Windows at zero cost. Don't take my word for it, go read the email for yourself.

M$'s nightmare scenario has already been realized in Indiana and other places. Windows is not really competitive and schools that switch save tens of millions of dollars. Because software is about as expensive as the hardware in these deals, the world could save up to $500 million each year by dumping M$. Now that the cat is out of the bag, it's hard to see what M$ can do other than what they did to Perter Quinn."
Privacy

Submission + - UK forces ISPs to keep details of all emails

Submitted by deltaromeo
deltaromeo writes: "Rules forcing internet companies to keep details of every e-mail sent in the UK are a waste of money and an attack on civil liberties, critics say.

From March all Internet Service Providers (ISPs) will by law have to keep information about every e-mail sent or received in the UK for a year. "

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7819230.stm

I'm wondering how ISP's will be able to keep the details of an email sent using webmail (eg. gmail) over https.
Software

Submission + - Software backs up human memory (computerworld.com)

Submitted by
CWmike
CWmike writes: "Ever try to remember who you bumped into at the store a few days back? Well, you're not alone. And IBM researchers are working on software that just may help you better recollect all the forgotten pieces of your life. This week, the company unveiled Pensieve, software that stores images, sounds, and text on everyday mobile devices, then allows the user extract them later on, to help them recall names, faces, conversations and events. IBM's project is akin to one that Gordon Bell and other scientists at Microsoft Research have been working on for the past nine years."
The Internet

Submission + - SPAM: ISPs experimenting with new P2P controls

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: Peer-to-peer traffic management was a hot topic at this year's NXTcomm convention in Las Vegas, as keynote speakers and telecom industry panelists highlighted new methods for handling P2P traffic crunches. ISPs' methods for managing P2P traffic have come under intense scrutiny in recent months after the Associated Press reported last year that Comcast was actively interfering with P2P users' ability to upload files by sending TCP RST packets that informed them that their connection would have to be reset. While speakers rejected that Comcast method, some said it was time to follow the lead of Comcast and begin implementing caps for individual users who are consuming disproportionately high amounts of bandwidth.
Link to Original Source

Visual Communication in Digital Design 49

Posted by samzenpus from the read-all-about-it dept.
stoolpigeon writes "I remember the first time I saw a program I had written after the interface had been revamped by a designer. I had been pretty happy with what I had made. It worked very well and met the client's requirements. It was extremely functional and I thought it didn't look bad either. But when I saw the new interface, not functionally different, just so much better looking, I was really blown away. My application had gone from useful to cool. (That might be a slight exaggeration, it was still just a database app but it sure looked cool to me.) Since then I've learned to primarily leave the user interface work to the experts in that arena, and I stick to the getting the functionality in place. But sometimes I don't have the luxury of a design team at my disposal. Or when I do, I still need to be able to talk to them and discuss what is going on. I found Dr. Ji Young Park's new book "Visual Communication in Design" to be a friendly and accessible introductory primer in visual design." Read below for the rest of JR's review.

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