Comment Yes (Score 1) 81
Yes, please! I logged out of twitter last November and have no plan to go back.
Comment Gates was lucky, not smart. (Score 1) 449
IBM slipped up and let Gates keep rights to DOS. This unexpectedly made him a billionaire. Not his smarts. Being a billionaire he was able to keep a crappy company afloat with predatory tactics. The first edition of The Road Ahead hardly mentioned the Internet. When others were already well on their way with it. A year later, he finally caught on, and in the paperback edition there were, as I recall, three chapters on the Internet. A leader? No! In my following of Microsoft, they have stolen or bought up every important new product, and usually make a mess of it until the N-teenth version. Bill Gates a visionary? I laugh every time I heat that. When he makes predictions I turn the page or turn the channel. Nothing interesting to read or hear.
Droid X Gets Rooted 97
An anonymous reader writes "The Droid X forums have posted a procedure to root the new Motorola Droid X, putting to rest Andoid fans' fears that they would never gain access to the device's secrets due to a reported eFuse that would brick the phone if certain boot files were tampered with. Rooting the phone is the first step in gaining complete control over the device."
Open Source OCR That Makes Searchable PDFs 133
An anonymous reader writes "In my job all of our multifunction copiers scan to PDF but many of our users want and expect those PDFs to be text searchable. I looked around for software that would create text searchable pdfs but most are very expensive and I couldn't find any that were open source (free). I did find some open source packages like CuneiForm and Exactimage that could in theory do the job, but they were hard to install and difficult to set up and use over a network. Then I stumbled upon WatchOCR. This is a Live CD distro that can easily create a server on your network that provides an OCR service using watched folders. Now all my scanners scan to a watched folder, WatchOCR picks up those files and OCRs them, and then spits them out into another folder. It uses CuneiForm and ExactImage but it is all configured and ready to deploy. It can even be remotely managed via the Web interface. Hope this proves helpful to someone else who has this same situation."
Comment LoJack for laptops (Score 2, Informative) 765
http://www.absolute.com/en/lojackforlaptops/home.aspx
This company (based in Canada as I recall) has software you install on a laptop (could be a desktop) that logs where you log in each time you connect to the Internet. You can log in to their server and see it yourself. If it is stolen, they promise legal assistance to get the computer back. At a seminar years ago, they said that they relied on a network of retired law enforcement people, among others. And they said that usually when someone came to their door and insisted they had a stolen computer in their house, they usually returned it, saying they'd bought it on ebay, rather than face unknown consequences. They also have some relationship with ISPs apparently to get home addresses. Anyway, consider them for your next computer. Maybe give them a call or email with your information and ask if you can pay them to "work their magic". You seem to have the data they need. (and no, they aren't limited to Canada for retrievals, they also do the USA).
3rd-Grader Busted For Jolly Rancher Possession 804
theodp writes "A third-grader in a small Texas school district received a week's detention for merely possessing a Jolly Rancher. Leighann Adair, 10, was eating lunch Monday when a teacher confiscated the candy. Her parents said she was in tears when she arrived home later that afternoon and handed them the detention notice. But school officials are defending the sentence, saying the school was abiding by a state guideline that banned 'minimal nutrition' foods. 'Whether or not I agree with the guidelines, we have to follow the rules,' said school superintendent Jack Ellis."
SCO v. Novell Goes To the Jury 67
Excelcia writes "Closing arguments in the six and a bit year old slander of title case between SCO and Novell occurred today and the case is finally in the hands of the jury. It's been an interesting case, with SCO alternately claiming that the copyrights to UNIX did get transferred to them, and that the copyrights should have been transferred to them. 'Judge Ted Stewart said, after the jury left to begin to deliberate, that in all his years on the bench, he's never seen such fine lawyering as in this case.' We're not going to find out the results until at least Tuesday, however, as one juror is taking a long weekend. Great lawyering notwithstanding, we can all hope next week that the Energizer bunny of all spurious lawsuits will finally go away."
Mining EXIF Data From Camera Phones 175
emeitner notes that folks at the Internet Storm Center wrote scripts that harvested 15,291 images from Twitpic and analyzed the EXIF information. This reader adds, "While mining EXIF data from images is nothing new, how many people would allow this data to leave their cell phone if they knew what it contained? The source code for the scripts is also available from the article." "399 images included the location of the camera at the time the image was taken, and 102 images included the name of the photographer. ... The iPhone is including the most EXIF information among the images we found. ... It not only includes the phone's location, but also accelerometer data showing if the phone was moved at the time the picture was taken and the readout from the [built-]in compass showing in which direction the phone was pointed at the time."
Dying Man Shares Unseen Challenger Video 266
longacre writes "An amateur video of the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger explosion has been made public for the first time. The Florida man who filmed it from his front yard on his new Betamax camcorder turned the tape over to an educational organization a week before he died this past December. The Space Exploration Archive has since published the video into the public domain in time for the 24th anniversary of the catastrophe. Despite being shot from about 70 miles from Cape Canaveral, the shuttle and the explosion can be seen quite clearly. It is unclear why he never shared the footage with NASA or the media. NASA officials say they were not aware of the video, but are interested in examining it now that it has been made available."
Man Uses Drake Equation To Explain Girlfriend Woes 538
artemis67 writes "A man studying in London has taken a mathematical equation that predicts the possibility of alien life in the universe to explain why he can't find a girlfriend. Peter Backus, a native of Seattle and PhD candidate and Teaching Fellow in the Department of Economics at the University of Warwick, near London, in his paper, 'Why I don't have a girlfriend: An application of the Drake Equation to love in the UK,' used math to estimate the number of potential girlfriends in the UK. In describing the paper on the university Web site he wrote 'the results are not encouraging. The probability of finding love in the UK is only about 100 times better than the probability of finding intelligent life in our galaxy.'"
Attractive Open Source Search Interfaces? 65
An anonymous reader writes "I work for a company that manages an online database for the political market. We add to this DB daily with updates from a variety of sources and our customers then search through this content via our Solr/Lucene search engine. My problem is, our search interface is a little, well, basic and I would love to know if there are any feature-rich open source alternatives out there. The only one I can find is Flamenco, and while that seems strong on categorisation, that seems to be about the height of it."
Comment Post-Suicide Account Cracking? (Score 1) 812
It seems to me the accounts are the deceased's property, and could be subject to the family getting a power of attorney over them. I don't know the precedents, but it sounds like they would exist. Having the power of attorney over the deceased's property should compel any agency to "give up the goods".
