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Sci-Fi

Red Dwarf Returns In a 3-Part Showing 161

Posted by timothy from the parts-the-first-through-third dept.
Logrusweaver writes "It looks like Red Dwarf is finally returning! Red Dwarf: Back to Earth is airing in 3 parts in the UK starting this Friday. It seems to be a 3-parter followed by a 'Making Of' special. Not trying to give away any more of the plot than the title does, but it does involve the crew finally returning to Earth. (Just hope it's not a bombed out planet with 'space angels' running around...)"
Government

German Court Bans E-Voting As Currently Employed 82

Posted by timothy from the grandfathered-in dept.
Kleiba writes "The highest German Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht, Federal Constitutional Court) ruled that electronic voting machines like Nedap ESD1 and ESD2 are not permissible in Germany. Der Spiegel, a well-known German newspaper, is featuring article on today's decision (in German; Babelfish translation here) which was the result of a lawsuit by physicist Ulrich Wiesner and his father Joachim Wiesner, a professor emeritus of political science. The main argument against the voting machines in the eyes of the Court is that they conflict with the principle of transparency. 2009 is a major election year for Germany, with parliamentary elections in the fall." Reader Dr. Hok writes "Voting machines are not illegal per se, but with these machines it wasn't possible to verify the results after the votes were cast. The verification procedure by the German authorities was flawed, too: only specimens were tested, not the machines actually used in the elections, and the detailed results (including the source code) were not made public. The results of the election remain legally valid, though."
The Internet

Researchers Warn of Possible BitTorrent Meltdown 294

Posted by kdawson from the domino-effect dept.
secmartin writes "Researchers at Delft University warn that large parts of the BitTorrent network might collapse if The Pirate Bay is forced to shut down. A large part of the available torrents use The Pirate Bay as tracker, and other available trackers will probably be overloaded if all traffic is shifted there. TPB is currently using eight servers for their trackers. According to the researchers, even trackerless torrents using the DHT protocol will face problems: 'One bug in a DHT sorting routine ensures that it can only "stumble upon success", meaning torrent downloads will not start in seconds or minutes if Pirate Bay goes down in flames.'"
Portables

Notebook Sales Outpace Desktop Sales 207

Posted by Soulskill from the year-of-laptop-on-the-desktop dept.
mikesd81 writes "Eweek reports that notebook sales have surpassed desktop sales for the first time in history. 'In the third quarter of 2008, notebook PC shipments rose almost 40 percent compared with the same period of 2007 to reach 38.6 million units. Conversely, desktop PC shipments declined by 1.3 percent for the same period to 38.5 million units. "Momentum has been building in the notebook market for some time, so it's not a complete surprise that shipments have surpassed those of desktops," said iSuppli principal analyst for computer platforms Matthew Wilkins. "However, this marks a major event in the PC market because it marks the start of the age of the notebook." ... The FBI's National Crime Information Center reported that the number of reported laptop thefts increased almost 48 percent over the last two years, to nearly 109,000 from 73,700.'"
The Courts

Judge Excludes 3 "John Does" From RIAA Subpoena 225

Posted by kdawson from the sue-doe-actions dept.
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In one of the RIAA's 'John Doe' cases targeting Boston University students, after the University wrote to the Court saying that it could not identify three of the John Does 'to a reasonable degree of technical certainty,' Judge Nancy Gertner deemed the University's letter a 'motion to quash,' and granted it, quashing the subpoena as to those defendants. In the very brief docket entry (PDF) containing her decision, she noted that 'compliance with the subpoena as to the IP addresses represented by these Defendants would expose innocent parties to intrusive discovery.' There is an important lesson to be learned from this ruling: if the IT departments of the colleges and universities targeted by the RIAA would be honest, and explain to the Courts the problems with the identification and other technical issues, there is a good chance the subpoenas will be vacated. Certainly, there is now a judicial precedent for that principle. One commentator asks whether this holding 'represents the death knell to some, if not all, of the RIAA's efforts to use American university staff as copyright cops.'"
The Internet

Wikimedia Simplifies By Moving To Ubuntu 215

Posted by kdawson from the all-eggs-one-basket dept.
David Gerard writes "Wikimedia, the organization that runs Wikipedia and associated sites, has moved its server infrastructure entirely to Ubuntu 8.04 from a hodge-podge of Ubuntu, Red Hat, and various Fedora versions. 400 servers were involved and the project has been going on for 2 years. (There's also a small amount of OpenSolaris on the backend. All open source!)"
Microsoft

Microsoft Adding jQuery To Visual Studio 67

Posted by CmdrTaco from the well-isn't-that-special dept.
Tim Anderson writes "Microsoft's Scott Guthrie, Corporate VP of the .NET developer division, announced that the open source jQuery Javascript library will be integrated into Visual Studio, the main Windows development tool. Further, Microsoft will treat jQuery as a supported product within technical support contracts, and will use jQuery to build new controls for ASP.NET, its web platform."
Programming

Getting Paid To Abandon an Open Source Project? 654

Posted by Soulskill from the money-vs.-warm-fuzzies dept.
darkeye writes "I'm facing a difficult dilemma and looking for opinions. I've been contributing heavily to an open source project, making considerable changes to code organization and quality, but the work is unfinished at the moment. Now, a company is approaching me to continue my changes. They want to keep the improvements to themselves, which is possible since the project is published under the BSD license. That's fair, as they have all the rights to the work they pay for in full. However, they also want me to sign a non-competition clause, which would bar me from ever working on and publishing results for the original open source project itself, even if done separately, in my free time. How would you approach such a decision? On one side, they'd provide resources to work on an interesting project. On the other, it would make me an outcast in the project's community. Moreover, they would take ownership of not just what they paid for, but also my changes leading up to this moment, and I wouldn't be able to continue on my original codebase in an open source manner if I sign their contract."
Science

Magpies Are Self-Aware 591

Posted by kdawson from the who-you-callin'-birdbrain dept.
FireStormZ writes "Magpies can recognize themselves in a mirror, confounding the notion that self-awareness is the exclusive preserve of humans and a few higher mammals. It had been thought only four species of apes, bottlenose dolphins, and Asian elephants shared the human ability to recognize their own bodies in a mirror. But German scientists reported on Tuesday that magpies, a species with a brain structure very different from mammals, could also identify themselves. It had been thought that the neocortex brain area found in mammals was crucial to self-recognition. Yet birds, which last shared a common ancestor with mammals 300 million years ago, don't have a neocortex, suggesting that higher cognitive skills can develop in other ways."
PHP

Changes In Store For PHP V6 368

Posted by kdawson from the ready-or-not dept.
An anonymous reader sends in an IBM DeveloperWorks article detailing the changes coming in PHP V6 — from namespaces, to Web 2.0 built-ins, to a few features that are being removed.
Data Storage

A Yottabyte of Storage Per Year by 2013 246

Posted by CmdrTaco from the more-bits-please dept.
Lucas123 writes "David Roberson, general manager of Hewlett-Packard's StorageWorks division, predicts that by 2013 the storage industry will be shipping a yottabyte (a billion gigabytes) of storage capacity annually. Roberson made the comment in conjunction with HP introducing a new rack system that clusters together four blade servers and three storage arrays with 820TB of capacity. Many vendors are moving toward this kind of platform, including IBM, with its recent acquisition of Israeli startup XIV, according to Enterprise Strategy Group analyst Mark Peters."
Windows

Details On Windows XP SP3 Leaked 140

Posted by kdawson from the man-on-the-inside dept.
crazyeyes notes the leak of 7 pages of secret Microsoft information on the upcoming Service Pack for Windows XP. Quoting: "We were the first to break the news on the release of Windows Vista Service Pack 1 and the final RTM schedule of Windows XP Service Pack 3. Now, we will be the first to release the full details on Microsoft's Windows XP Service Pack 3, which as we know will be available for manual update on April 29, 2008."

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