madkow - Slashdot User

Red Hat Settles Patent Case 76

Posted by Soulskill on Monday October 04, 2010 @06:45PM from the making-it-go-away dept.

darthcamaro writes "Red Hat has settled another patent case with patent holding firm Acacia. This time the patent is US Patent #6,163,776, 'System and method for exchanging data and commands between an object oriented system and relational system.' While it's great that Red Hat has ended this particular patent threat, it's not yet clear how they've settled this case. The last time Red Hat tangled with Acacia they won in an Texas jury trial. 'Red Hat routinely addresses attempts to impede the innovative forces of open source via allegations of patent infringement,' Red Hat said in a statement. 'We can confirm that Red Hat, Inc and Software Tree LLC have settled patent litigation that was pending in federal court in the Eastern District of Texas.'"

Man Repairs Crumbling Walls With Legos 106

Posted by samzenpus on Tuesday July 13, 2010 @11:57AM from the one-block-at-a-time dept.

Lanxon writes "German-born artist Jan Vormann, 27, has spent the past three years traveling the world repairing crumbling walls and monuments with Lego, reports Wired. His "Dispatchwork" began in 2007 in the small village of Bocchignano, Italy, as part of the contemporary art festival 20 Eventi. Developing the work in situ, he became intrigued by the makeshift repairs that had been made to the crumbling walls. The approach favored function over appearance, reminding Vormann of the haphazard Lego designs created by children."

US Air Force To Suffer From PS3 Update 349

Posted by Soulskill on Thursday May 13, 2010 @06:45AM from the sounds-like-an-act-of-terrorism-to-me dept.

tlhIngan writes "The US Air Force, having purchased PS3s for supercomputing research, is now the latest victim of Sony's removal of the Install Other OS feature. It turns out that while their PS3s don't need the firmware update, it will be impossible to replace PS3s that fail. PS3s with the Other OS feature are no longer produced since the Slim was introduced, so replacements will have to come from the existing stock of used PS3s. However, as most gamers have probably updated their PS3s, that used stock is no longer suitable for the USAF's research. In addition, smaller educational clusters using PS3s will share the same fate — unable to replace machines that die in their clusters." In related news, Sony has been hit with two more lawsuits over this issue.

OpenSSL 1.0.0 Released 105

Posted by Soulskill on Monday March 29, 2010 @04:31PM from the sweet-when-is-2.0 dept.

hardaker writes "After over 11 years of development since the start of the OpenSSL Project (1998-12-23), OpenSSL version 1.0.0 has finally hit the shelves of the free-for-all store."

After Learning Java Syntax, What Next? 293

Posted by timothy on Sunday February 21, 2010 @09:31AM from the nice-hot-bath dept.

Niris writes "I'm currently taking a course called Advanced Java Programming, which is using the text book Absolute Java, 4th edition, by Walter Savitch. As I work at night as a security guard in the middle of nowhere, I've had enough time to read through the entire course part of the book, finish all eleven chapter quizzes, and do all of the assignments within a month, so all that's left is a group assignment that won't be ready until late April. I'm trying to figure out what else to read that's Java related aside from the usual 'This is how to create a tree. This is recursion. This is how to implement an interface and make an anonymous object,' and wanted to see what Slashdotters have to suggest. So far I'm looking at reading Beginning Algorithms, by Simon Harris and James Ross."

Former Exec Says Electronic Arts "Is In the Wrong Business" 180

Posted by Soulskill on Friday January 15, 2010 @07:18AM from the inspiring-internet-outrage-is-a-bad-business-model dept.

Mitch Lasky was the executive vice president of Mobile and Online at Electronic Arts until leaving the publisher to work at an investment firm. He now has some harsh things to say about how EA has been run over the past several years, in particular criticizing the decisions of CEO John Riccitiello. Quoting: "EA is in the wrong business, with the wrong cost structure and the wrong team, but somehow they seem to think that it is going to be a smooth, two-year transition from packaged goods to digital. Think again. ... by far the greatest failure of Riccitiello's strategy has been the EA Games division. JR bet his tenure on EA's ability to 'grow their way through the transition' to digital/online with hit packaged goods titles. They honestly believed that they had a decade to make this transition (I think it's more like 2-3 years). Since the recurring-revenue sports titles were already 'booked' (i.e., fully accounted for in the Wall Street estimates) it fell to EA Games to make hits that could move the needle. It's been a very ugly scene, indeed. From Spore, to Dead Space, to Mirror's Edge, to Need for Speed: Undercover, it's been one expensive commercial disappointment for EA Games after another. Not to mention the shut-down of Pandemic, half of the justification for EA's $850MM acquisition of Bioware-Pandemic. And don't think that Dante's Inferno, or Knights of the Old Republic, is going to make it all better. It's a bankrupt strategy."

An Open Source Compiler From CUDA To X86-Multicore 71

Posted by timothy on Wednesday December 23, 2009 @03:06PM from the abstraction-gains-a-layer dept.

Gregory Diamos writes "An open source project, Ocelot, has recently released a just-in-time compiler for CUDA, allowing the same programs to be run on NVIDIA GPUs or x86 CPUs and providing an alternative to OpenCL. A description of the compiler was recently posted on the NVIDIA forums. The compiler works by translating GPU instructions to LLVM and then generating native code for any LLVM target. It has been validated against over 100 CUDA applications. All of the code is available under the New BSD license."

Super-Earths Discovered Orbiting Nearby, Sun-Like Star 242

Posted by Soulskill on Monday December 14, 2009 @05:52PM from the i-for-one dept.

likuidkewl writes "Two super-earths, 5 and 7.5 times the size of our home, were found to be orbiting 61 Virginis a mere 28 light years away. 'These detections indicate that low-mass planets are quite common around nearby stars. The discovery of potentially habitable nearby worlds may be just a few years away,' said Steven Vogt, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UCSC. Among hundreds of our nearest stellar neighbors, 61 Vir stands out as being the most nearly similar to the Sun in terms of age, mass, and other essential properties."

Linux Kernel 2.6.32 Released 195

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday December 03, 2009 @11:04AM from the download-compile-reboot-repeat dept.

diegocg writes "Linus Torvalds has officially released the version 2.6.32 of the Linux kernel. New features include virtualization memory de-duplication, a rewrite of the writeback code faster and more scalable, many important Btrfs improvements and speedups, ATI R600/R700 3D and KMS support and other graphic improvements, a CFQ low latency mode, tracing improvements including a 'perf timechart' tool that tries to be a better bootchart, soft limits in the memory controller, support for the S+Core architecture, support for Intel Moorestown and its new firmware interface, run-time power management support, and many other improvements and new drivers. See the full changelog for more details."

Comment Re:I'm always taken back by this (Score 2, Interesting) 184

by madkow on Saturday July 11, 2009 @06:55AM (#28658893) Attached to: Memristor Minds, the Future of Artificial Intelligence

And actually the sooner we create Skynet - the better the chance we have to beat it. Because if we wait too long - that super fast hardware it will be running will could make it too hard to beat. ;)

Or the better chance we have to learn live with it. James Hogan's 1979 book "The Two Faces of Tomorrow" details a plan to deliberately goad a small version of a self aware computer (named Spartacus) into self defense before they built the big version. When Spartacus learned that humans were even more frail than he and equally motivated by self preservation he chose to unilaterally lay down arms.

Comment curious (Score 1) 715

by madkow on Monday April 27, 2009 @04:10PM (#27735543) Attached to: RMS Says "Software As a Service" Is Non-free

it's even harder for you to patch the program that's running on someone else's server than it is to patch a binary copy of a program running on your own computer Then I wonder which is less evil -- a proprietary binary running on your computer or SAAS based on open source running on someone else's computer.

Comment Now if that isn't (Score 1) 631

by madkow on Monday November 21, 2005 @01:54PM (#14083135) Attached to: President of RIAA Says Sony-BMG Did Nothing Wrong

The pot calling the kettle white.

New Berkeley DB Release Includes Replication 7

Posted by timothy on Tuesday December 04, 2001 @07:35PM from the cats-reproduce-by-default dept.

Chairman writes: "Sleepycat Software (disclaimer -- I work there) just released version 4.0 of Berkeley DB. This version adds support for replication, so apps can survive single- or multi-node hardware or software failures without interruption in service. With the interest in replication by users of MySQL and other SQL databases, an embedded engine that provides the same services might be interesting to Slashdot readers."

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