lorque - Slashdot User

RIAA Now Filing Suits Against Consumers Who Rip CDs 403

Posted by Zonk on Sunday December 30, 2007 @01:31AM from the because-we-needed-another-reason-to-be-cranky-at-them dept.

mrneutron2003 writes "With this past week's announcement by Warner to release its entire catalog to Amazon in MP3 format with no Digital Rights Management, you would think that the organization that represents them, The RIAA, would begin changing its tune. Instead, they are pressing on in their campaign against consumers by suing individuals who merely rip CDs they've purchased legally. 'The industry's lawyer in the case, Ira Schwartz, argues in a brief filed earlier this month that the MP3 files Howell made on his computer from legally bought CDs are "unauthorized copies" of copyrighted recordings.'"

Submission + - Are Relational Databases Obsolete?

Submitted by jpkunst on Thursday September 06, 2007 @09:13AM

jpkunst writes: Computerworld reports that Michael Stonebraker, who co-created the Ingres and Postgres technology as a researcher at UC Berkeley in the early 1970s, argues in The Database Column that the current major relational DBMSs (DB2, SQLserver, Oracle) "should be considered legacy technology, more than a quarter of century in age and 'long in the tooth'.". His prediction is "that column stores will take over the warehouse market over time, completely displacing row stores".

Submission + - Destroying Sandboxes (beskerming.com)

Submitted by

SkiifGeek

on Sunday July 15, 2007 @09:11AM

SkiifGeek writes: "Many anti-malware applications use a sandbox as a tool to help identify potentially malicious software. It appears that knowledge is slowly spreading about techniques and methods that can allow sandboxed software to target the sandbox itself (and by extension the application that applied it).

While attacks that specifically target sandboxing applications are probably a little way off, this technology can be considered the logical extension of techniques and procedures to identify the presence of hosted systems (VMWare, Virtual PC, etc)."

Submission + - Will pervasive multithreading make a comeback? (google.com)

Submitted by

exigentsky

on Sunday July 15, 2007 @03:43AM

exigentsky writes: "Having looked at BeOS technology, it is clear that like NeXTSTEP, it was ahead of its time. Most remarkable to me is the incredible responsiveness of the whole OS. On relatively slow hardware, BeOS could run eight movies simultaneously while still being responsive in all of its GUI controls and launching programs almost instantaneously. Today, more than ten years after BeOS's introduction, its legendary responsiveness is still unmatched. There is simply no other OS (major) that has pervasive multithreading from the lowest level up (requiring no programmer tricks). Is it likely, or at least possible that future versions of Windows or OS X could become pervasively multithreaded without creating an entirely new OS?"

Submission + - Programs cannot be uninstalled in Vista

Submitted by

Corson

on Sunday July 15, 2007 @12:44AM

Corson writes: "I am surprised nobody seems to have reported this on /. yet. Possibly after one of the latest updates in Windows Vista, two strange things happened: first, the Uninstall option is no longer available in the Control Panel when you right-click on older programs (most likely, those installed prior to the update in question, because uninstall works fine for recently installed programs; the Uninstall button is also missing on the toolbar at the top); second, some programs are no longer shown on the applications list in Control panel (e.g., Yahoo Messenger). A Google search returns quite a few hits on this issue (e.g., here, here, here, and here) but everybody seems to be waiting patiently for a sign from Microsoft. But M$ seem to have no clue or they would have fixed it already. I am just curious how many of you are experiencing this nuisance."

Submission + - Firefox now serious threat to IE in Europe

Submitted by Tookis on Sunday July 15, 2007 @12:14AM

Tookis writes: Mozilla's Firefox (FF) web browser has made dramatic gains on Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) throughout Europe in the past year with a marked upturn in FF use compared to IE over the past four months, according to French web monitoring service XiTiMonitor. A study of nearly 96,000 websites carried out during the week of July 2 to July 8 found that FF had 27.8% market share across Eastern and Western Europe, IE had 66.5%, with other browsers including Safari and Opera making up the remaining 5.7%. In some key European markets FF has already reached parity is threatening to overtake IE as the market leading browser. http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/13517/53/

Submission + - Music industry demanding money from coffee shops (floridatoday.com)

Submitted by realjd on Sunday July 08, 2007 @11:00AM

realjd writes: The music industry has started demanding "protection money" from coffee shops with live music. One was even fined for having the TV on while the Monday Night Football theme played. And the owners pay up to one licensing company, all of the others start harassing them demanding payment too. What's a small business to do? It sounds like they don't even check whether any copyright violations occurred, they're just sending bills to any business that may or may not have live music.

Submission + - Are 80 columns enough? 1

Submitted by ThinkGeek on Friday July 06, 2007 @05:36PM

ThinkGeek writes: Dating back to the venerable DEC VT100, the 80 column terminal has served us well for over 25 years. Even now, many open source projects and common conventions require lines of code and documentation to fit on that terminal. I am not alone, judging by code I've seen in and out of the open source world, in finding that number insufficient for coding, much less more verbose writing. Given that modern graphical displays (and all popular editors) are capable of far more, is it time we came up with a new standard-sized terminal? If so, what should the new standard be?

Submission + - The First Thing IT Managers Do in the Morning?

Submitted by on Thursday July 05, 2007 @09:50AM

An anonymous reader writes: When I was a wee-little IT Manager, I interviewed for a IT management position at an online CRM provider in San Francisco, a job I certainly was qualified for, at least on paper. One of the interviewer's questions was "What is the first thing you do when you get to work in the morning." I thought saying "Read Slashdot" wouldn't be what he was looking for — so I made up something, I'm sure, equally lame. Needless to say, I didn't get the job. But the question has stuck with me over the years. What do real IT and MIS managers do when they walk in to the office in the morning? What web sites or tools do they look at or use the first thing? Tell me. And remember, this is for posterity, so be honest.

Submission + - Vista is watching you!

Submitted by greengrass on Sunday July 01, 2007 @05:13PM

greengrass writes: Are you using Windows Vista? Then you might as well know that the licensed operating system installed on your machine is harvesting a healthy volume of information for Microsoft. In this context, a program such as the Windows Genuine Advantage is the last of your concerns. In fact, in excess of 20 Windows Vista features and services are hard at work collecting and transmitting your personal data to the Redmond company.

more a Softpedia

Submission + - ATT&T iPhone Activation Hell (thomashawk.com)

Submitted by

Thomas Hawk

on Sunday July 01, 2007 @02:29PM

Thomas Hawk writes: "Unfortunately it appears that the activations with Apple's new iPhone have gone FUBAR. After waiting in line 36 hours (number 8 in line) on Thursday and Friday I'm still unable to activate my phone. I'm documenting the AT&T circus call by call on my blog. http://thomashawk.com/2007/06/activating-new-iphon e-thus-far-is-pain.html I've had my hold calls dropped, been patched into other users unable to activate their phone instead of AT&T customer service reps, been told that my wife must get a new phone and that the family plan can't work for me. I've been told that the problem is that I'm not putting a new chip into my iPhone in the slot on the left side of my phone when no slot there exists. PR Blogger Steve Rubel has also been documenting his problems on his Twitterstream http://twitter.com/steverubel. According to an unscientific poll being conducted by Engadget about half of the people who bought iPhones have had activation trouble with about 38% of problems still unresolved. http://www.engadget.com/2007/07/01/poll-got-iphone -activation-problems/. We've been documenting the last 36 hours or so of iPhone activation hell live on ZooomrTV. http://zooomr.com/tv."

Submission + - 100 times faster hard drives use laser

Submitted by

Gary

on Saturday June 30, 2007 @09:07AM

Gary writes: "In the race to make computers more powerful, magnets may be out and lasers may be in. Ultra-rapid pulses of polarized light fired from lasers, new tests show, can outperform conventional magnetic data writers by as much as two orders of magnitude. The researchers managed to transfer data at intervals of about 40 femtoseconds, or quadrillionths of a second, about 100 times faster than conventional magnetic transfers,"

Submission + - Data storm caused nuclear-plant shutdown ..

Submitted by

rs232

on Saturday May 19, 2007 @11:00AM

rs232 writes: "'The U.S. House of Representative's Committee on Homeland Security called this week for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to further investigate the cause of excessive network traffic that shut down an Alabama nuclear plant'

http://www.securityfocus.com/news/11465"

Submission + - Pidgin 2.0 Released

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 04, 2007 @05:53AM

An anonymous reader writes: After nearly two years of development, Pidgin 2.0 has finally been released! Originally called Gaim, Pidgin is a powerful and robust open source instant messaging client that supports many protocols. Pidgin 2.0 features a completely redesigned interface with attractive new icons and and a new status management system that was designed for optimal usability. Pidgin 2.0 also adds support for universal buddy icon management and smooth-scroll functionality for conversation windows. A comprehensive review at Ars Technica explores the new features in Pidgin 2.0 and demonstrates how to use the new D-Bus bindings with Python to make Pidgin's status system send updates to Twitter.

Submission + - Congress Asks Universities to Curb "Piracy"

Submitted by

The Illegal Subset of the Integers

on Thursday May 03, 2007 @09:45PM

The Illegal Subset of the Integers writes: "According to Ars Technica, Congress has sent letters to 19 universities identified by the RIAA and MPAA has havens for copyright infringement. In it, they not only seek to discover what these universities are doing to dissuade students from infringing activities, but give the implied threat. House Judiciary Committee member Lamar Smith (R-TX) was quoted as saying, "If we do not receive acceptable answers, Congress will be forced to act." One wonders, though, what the universities are supposed to due when international disrespect for imaginary property rights is so widespread that there are currently over two million hits on Google for a certain oft-posted illegal number, up from the three hundred thousand hits from sometime yesterday."

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