nerdrew - Slashdot User

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."

User Interface of Major Oscilliscope Brands? 281

Posted by timothy on Thursday October 23, 2008 @06:11PM from the dots-and-squiggles dept.

teddaw152 writes "I've been tasked with ordering an oscilloscope and a logic analyzer for use in a university physics lab, and have found several models that will likely suit our technical needs from the major manufacturers (Agilent, Tektronix, and LeCroy). However, I personally have only used legacy HP scopes, and thus I have no idea what modern features are must haves and which brand's user interface is the most intuitive. Is there anyone out there that has used modern Tektronix/Agilent/LeCroy scopes side by side and can comment on their thoughts from the purely subjective side?"

Comment Acid2 Website Problems? (Score 2, Interesting) 555

by nerdrew on Wednesday December 19, 2007 @07:15PM (#21758126) Attached to: IE 8 Passes Acid2 Test

Is anyone else having trouble with the acid2 page? Safari and Firefox 3.0 beta 1 are failing to render it in the same way.

Submission + - Loophole found in Windows Random Number Generator (iacr.org)

Submitted by

Invisible Pink Unicorn

on Monday November 12, 2007 @11:11AM

Invisible Pink Unicorn writes: "A security loophole in the pseudo-random number generator used by Windows was recently detailed in a paper presented by researchers at the University of Haifa. The team found a way to decipher how the number generator works, and thus compute previous and future encryption keys used by the computer, and eavesdrop on private communication. Their conclusion is that Microsoft needs to improve the way it encodes information. They recommend that Microsoft publish the code of their random number generators as well as of other elements of the Windows security system to enable computer security experts outside Microsoft to evaluate their effectiveness. Although they only checked Windows 2000, they assume that XP and Vista use similar random number generators and may also be vulnerable. The full text of the paper is available in PDF format."

Submission + - Book copies Wikipedia; Publisher aggressive on IP. (wikipedia.org) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 12, 2007 @06:41AM

An anonymous reader writes: Two pages of a book, Black Gold: The New Frontier in Oil for Investors, consist of a direct copy from the English Wikipedia article on the Khobar Towers Bombing. The book is published by John Wiley and Sons, the same publisher who, earlier this year, threatened a blogger with legal action over a clear case of fair use commentary.

Submission + - Mass OLPC Production Begins (physorg.com)

Submitted by

eldavojohn

on Wednesday November 07, 2007 @01:12PM

eldavojohn writes: "Mass production of the first XO laptops has officially started."

Submission + - Massive Data Loss Bug in Leopard (tomkarpik.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 05, 2007 @04:16PM

An anonymous reader writes: Leopard's Finder has a glaring bug in its directory-moving code, leading to horrendous data loss if a destination volume disappears while a move operation is in action. This author first came across it when Samba crashed while he was moving a directory from his desktop over to a Samba mount on his FreeBSD server.

Submission + - First RIAA case victim finally speaks out. (p2pnet.net)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 02, 2007 @02:31PM

An anonymous reader writes: It’s, “no secret that the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has responded to the growth of online file sharing with a wave of copyright infringement litigation,” wrote James Alonso, Marc Friedenberg, Michael Nguyen, Shawn Oakley and Sarah Calvert from The Columbia Science & Technology Law Review.

“Often, the individuals targeted by the RIAA fear the overwhelming costs of defending themselves in court, and many have agreed to pay large settlements.”

Often, but not always.

Now, inspired by the examples of people such as the five very reluctant heroines mentioned below, increasing numbers of victims are deciding not to let themselves be terrorised into settling.

The five, courageous in every sense of the word, are:

Patti Santangelo, a New York mother of five children, two of whom have now become RIAA targets

Rae-Jay Schwartz, another mother, bound to a wheelchair by multiple sclerosis, the terrible central nervous system disease

Marie Lindor, a 57-year-old home health aid whose knowledge of computers and computer systems is zero

Tanya Andersen, a disabled mother living off a disability pension

Jammie Thomas, a young mother of two from Minnesota

But it’s Thomas, the first of the American RIAA victims to actually appear in court, who’s caught the attention of the international mainstream media for more than just a day or two.

Horrified by the negative (for them) PR the case has been generating, using their connections, political power and influence, the labels are doing their best to distort facts and spin Thomas as a cold schemer whose depredations forced the RIAA to take her to court.

Cary Sherman, the organisation’s chief spin doctor, said he was “surprised it took this long for one of the industry lawsuits to go to trial” when in fact, the organisation has done everything it can to stop any of these cases actually reaching a judge and jury.

Thomas has also achieved two other firsts:

As far as I know, she’s the first to launch her own forum, and for the first time since she was forced into the limelight, she’s telling her own story, in her own words.

One of the subjects she touches on was that it wasn't her decision to replace the harddrive. This fact was a major decision in her persecution.

also never dreamt how large of a story my case would become. Before I went to court, no one except those close to me knew of this situation I was dealing with. Now, I can Google my name and read articles about me. A very odd and surreal feeling for me as I never wanted this much notoriety, ever. Unfortunately, a lot of the articles I’ve read are full of half-truths, conjectures, and right out lies. I can understand media outlets having a deadline to meet, but I cannot understand media outlets filling the holes in their stories with incorrect information.

‘Best Buy made the decision to replace the hard drive’

I would like to now talk about some of that incorrect information which has plagued news articles and comments. First, I will finally set straight the issue with my computer hard drive, when it was replaced, why it was replaced, who replaced it and what might have happened to the old drive. I have read many comments and articles that I had my hard drive replaced after I learned of my suit. This could not be further from the truth. What most people don’t know, if I did have my hard drive replaced after I was served the initial complaint to this suit, that would be considered spoliation of evidence, which is a criminally prosecutable offense. All the following dates, keep in mind so you can see the timeline yourself.

Why Apple Should Acquire Adobe 410

Posted by Zonk on Friday November 02, 2007 @01:14PM from the maybe-one-day-they'll-care-about-games-too dept.

aabode writes "OSWeekly.com's Brandon Watts suggests that Apple should acquire Adobe. Why? 'While Apple has done a great job of developing media applications for beginners (the iLife suite is a good example of this), they could use a boost on the professional side. Granted, Final Cut Studio has become the standard when it comes to professional video editing, and Logic Studio is a great professional solution for editing audio, but what about the graphics and Web design segments of the market? If people want tools to support these interests on the Mac, then they turn to Adobe.'"

OOXML Vote and the CPI Corruption Index 190

Posted by kdawson on Wednesday September 05, 2007 @09:25AM from the voting-on-the-merits dept.

Tapani Tarvainen writes "It turns out there's an interesting correlation between Transparency International's 'corruption perceptions index' and voting behavior in ISO's OOXML decision. Countries with a lower score (more corruption) on the 2006 CPI were more likely to vote in favor of OOXML, and those with a higher score were less likely. According to the analysis, 'This statistics supports with a P value of 0.07328 the hypothesis that the corrupted countries were more likely to vote for approval (one-tailed Fisher's Exact test). In other words, simplified a bit: the likelihood that there was no positive correlation between the corruption level and probability of an approval vote, that is, this is just a random effect, is about 7%.' Of course, correlation doesn't prove causality."

Submission + - "Viacom hit me for infringing my own copyright (blogspot.com) 2

Submitted by

Chris Knight

on Wednesday August 29, 2007 @02:23PM

Chris Knight writes: "Long story short: I ran for school board where I live this past fall and created some TV commercials including this one with a "Star Wars" theme. A few months ago VH1 grabbed the commercial from YouTube and featured it in a segment of its show "Web Junk 2.0". Neither VH1 or its parent company Viacom told me they were doing this or asked my permission to use it, but I didn't mind it if they did. It was great to see the commercial was being enjoyed by a far wider audience than I'd expected. I was honored that they chose to use it and thought that Aries Spears's commentary about it was pretty hilarious, so I posted a clip of VH1's segment on YouTube so that I could put it on my blog. This morning I got an e-mail from YouTube saying that the video has been pulled because Viacom is claiming that I'm violating its copyright. Viacom used my video without permission on their commercial television show, and now says that I am infringing on THEIR copyright for showing the clip of the work that Viacom made in violation of my own copyright! Talk about chutzpah! Needless to say, I would like to fight this: not for any kind of monetary compensation, but just for the right to employ my own self-created material per Fair Use."

Open Source Community's Double Standard 336

Posted by kdawson on Monday August 13, 2007 @03:41PM from the wax-fecund-and-celebrate dept.

AlexGr writes to point out a really good point Matt Asay raises in his CNET News Blog: Why do we praise closed source companies who open up a little bit, but damn open source companies who close down a little bit? "Deja vu. Remember 2002? That's when Red Hat decided to split its code into Red Hat Advanced Server (now Red Hat Enterprise Linux) and Fedora. Howls of protest and endless hand-wringing ensued: How dare Red Hat not give everything away for free? Enter 2007. MySQL decides to comply with the GNU General Public License and only give its tested, certified Enterprise code to those who pay for the service underlying that code (gasp!). Immediately cries of protest are raised, How dare MySQL not give everything away for free?"

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