ooutland - Slashdot User

Comment The last $$ I will earn from my out of print books (Score 1) 218

by ooutland on Friday February 05, 2010 @12:00PM (#31035144) Attached to: Once Again, US DoJ Opposes Google Book Search

will come from the Google Book Settlement, into which I've "opted in." Call me naive but I don't see how it would benefit me or anyone else to see those books remain in their static state, unavailable save as used books, from which sales I never see a dime. IANA Lawyer but I don't see why Google couldn't break this up into waves, wherein all of us who've opted in can get our checks now and start earning any "royalties" available through search, and leave the disputed rights and claimants for another day.

Submission + - Android is forbidden in iPhone App Store (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by donberryman on Friday February 05, 2010 @10:50AM

donberryman writes: Apple has told a software developer that its application cannot be included in the iPhone App Store if it mentions Google Android. They just wanted to mention that the app was a finalist in Google’s Android Developer’s Challenge. See http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/02/05/apple_slaps_iphone_app_for_mentioning_google_android/

Comment Re:Insecure personality (Score 2, Insightful) 736

by ooutland on Wednesday December 30, 2009 @12:11PM (#30594748) Attached to: Why Do So Many Terrorists Have Engineering Degrees

In the West, you can substitute "Islam" with "Ayn Rand" and see the same fanatical attraction to an all-encompassing, all-answering philosophy at work, especially in the mindsets of those (engineers or not) who crave a perfect order which just happens to put them at the top of it.

Apple Pushes Unwanted Software To PCs, Again 267

Posted by kdawson on Monday September 28, 2009 @08:10PM from the just-updates-please dept.

itwbennett writes "Blogger Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols wags his finger at Apple for indiscriminately pushing the iPhone Configuration Utility 2.1 update out to Windows users, since it is a tool for business system administrators to set up and administer corporate iPhones — the blogger himself (and practically every other iPhone user) not being of the corporate iPhone user persuasion. But more than just unnecessary, the update actually puts him and millions of other iPhone owners/Windows PC users at increased risk by installing 'not just a configuration program, but the Apache Web server as well,' says Vaughan-Nichols. 'A Web server like the one Apple [is] adding to your PC... [is] a gateway just asking to be hammered on by an attacker. Managed properly Apache is as safe a Web server as you'll ever find, but ordinary PC users shouldn't try to manage it, and even an expert can't do anything with it if they don't know it's there.'" Reader CWMike notes that Apple pulled the iPhone Configuration Utility from the update list after a few hours.

Replacements For Adobe Creative Suite 3 Apps? 270

Posted by timothy on Wednesday August 26, 2009 @06:05PM from the best-of-luck-to-ye dept.

Gilmoure writes "With rumors of Adobe not supporting Creative Suite 3 applications on Mac OS X 10.6, I was wondering what Open Source apps folks would recommend to replace Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Dreamweaver? If the apps can work with the native file formats, all the better but if they provide the same functionality, that's still good. I have several designer friends that are looking forward to the speed boost of OS X 10.6 but don't want to go through the Adobe upgrades so soon after the CS2 to CS3 upgrades. Especially when Adobe's already working on CS5."

A Standardized OS For Robots 184

Posted by timothy on Tuesday August 11, 2009 @08:56AM from the kill-all-humans-until-done dept.

Hugh Pickens writes "The New Scientist reports that at present, all robot software is designed uniquely, even for parts common to all robots but that could be about to change as roboticists have begun to think about what robots have in common and what aspects of their construction can be standardized, resulting in a basic operating system everyone can use. 'It's easier to build everything from the ground up right now because each team's requirements are so different,' says Anne-Marie Bourcier of Aldebaran Robotics but Bourcier sees this changing if robotics advances in a manner similar to personal computing where a common operating system allowed programmers without detailed knowledge of the underlying hardware and file systems to build new applications and build on the work of others. 'Robotics is at the stage where personal computing was about 30 years ago,' says Chad Jenkins of Brown University. 'But at some point we have to come together to use the same resources.' This desire has its roots in frustration, says Brian Gerkey of the robotics research firm Willow Garage. If someone is studying object recognition, they want to design better object-recognition algorithms, not write code to control the robot's wheels. "You know that those things have been done before, probably better," says Gerkey, who hopes to one day see a robot "app store" where a person could download a program for their robot and have it work as easily as an iPhone app."

McAfee Leaks Conference Attendees' Personal Info 72

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday July 30, 2009 @07:57AM from the black-fly-in-your-chardonnay dept.

Timmy writes "In the cruelest of ironies, e-mail security vendor McAfee has accidentally coughed up the personal details of some 1400 attendees of its recent security conference in Sydney, Australia. Those who were sent the list — attached as a spreadsheet to a thank you e-mail — are far from pleased that such an extraordinary thing could happen. McAfee, which sells products to 'stop sensitive and protected data from leaving the enterprise through email and web traffic' has blamed 'human error' for the blunder and is 'taking steps to ensure it doesn't happen again.' Doh!"

Submission + - World's oldest computer is even older than thought (newscientist.com)

Submitted by

Calopteryx

on Wednesday July 29, 2009 @11:52AM

Calopteryx writes: "A word in ancient Greek deciphered on a dial of the Antikythera mechanism — the world's first computer — suggests the device, the iPhone of the ancient world, may date to the early second century BC."

Submission + - Medieval UK Battle Records Released Online (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by eldavojohn on Tuesday July 21, 2009 @09:25AM

eldavojohn writes: Do you have ancestors that served in the British military under Henry V or fought in the Hundred Years War? Look them up online now that 250,000 medieval battle records are online and available for searching. According to the project details (PDF Warning) 'The main campaigns of the period were to France but there were others to Flanders, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Wales and Scotland, a much wider geographical spectrum than before 1369. In addition, garrisons were maintained within England (such as that held at the Tower of London), the Channel Islands, Wales and the marches, as well as at Calais and in Gascony. In the fourteenth-century phase of the Hundred Years War, the English also held some garrisons in areas of northern France, and in the fifteenth century phase, there was a systematic garrison-based occupation of Normandy and surrounding regions ...'

How They Built the Software of Apollo 11 220

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday July 21, 2009 @08:08AM from the we-had-to-use-the-letter-o dept.

LinuxScribe tips a piece up at Linux.com with inside details on the design and construction of the Apollo 11 code. There are some analogies to open source development but they are slim. MIT drafted the code — to run on the Apollo Guidance Computer, a device with less grunt than an IBM XT — it had 2K of memory and a 1-MHz clock speed. It was an amazing machine for its time. NASA engineers tested, polished, simulated, and refined the code. "The software was programmed on IBM punch cards. They had 80-columns and were 'assembled' to instruction binary on mainframes... and it took hours. ... During the mission, most of the software code couldn't be changed because it was hard-coded into the hardware, like ROM today... But during pre-launch design simulations, problems that came up in the code could sometimes be finessed by... computer engineers using a small amount of erasable memory that was available for the programs. The software used a low-level assembly language and was controlled using pairs or segments of numbers entered into a square-shaped, numeric-only keyboard called a Display and Keyboard Unit... The two-digit codes stood for 'nouns' or 'verbs,' and were used to enter commands or data, such as spacecraft docking angles or time spans for operations." Reader Smark adds, "The Google Code Blog announced today that the Virtual AGC and AGS project has transcribed the Command Module and Lunar Excursion Module code used during the Apollo 11 moon landing. The code is viewable at the VirtualAGC Google Code Page."

Submission + - What if the Apollo program had continued? (newscientist.com)

Submitted by proslack on Thursday July 16, 2009 @10:38AM

proslack writes: The die had been cast years before Apollo 11 had even reached the moon. In the late 1960s, the Vietnam war was straining US finances. A fatal fire on the Apollo launch pad in January 1967 had blotted NASA's copybook. The Soviet moon effort seemed to be going nowhere. In the budget debates during the summer of 1967, Congress refused NASA's request to fund an extended moon programme. What if things had been different that summer? Suppose Congress had granted NASA's wish, then fast-forward 40-odd years..."

Bill Gates Puts Classic Feynman Lectures Online 338

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday July 15, 2009 @01:16PM from the surely-you're-joking dept.

theodp writes "Okay Tux fans, let's see how badly you want to see Feynman's Messenger Lectures on Physics. Bill Gates has the goods over at Microsoft Research's Project Tuva site. Also, CNET's Ina Fried has an interesting interview with Gates. He goes into why he spent his own money to make a series of classic physics lectures available free on the Web, talks about the possibility of Project Natal bringing gesture recognition to Windows, gives his thoughts on Google's Chrome OS, and discusses plans to patent 'cows that don't fart.' The last is a joke. I think."

BOINC Exceeds 2 Petaflop/s Barrier 114

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday July 14, 2009 @03:06PM from the faster-faster-for-science dept.

Myrrh writes "Though an official announcement has not yet been made, it would appear that the BOINC project as a whole has exceeded two petaflop/s performance. The top page features this legend: '24-hour average: 2,793.53 TeraFLOPS.' According to last month's Top500 list of supercomputers, BOINC's performance is now beating that of the fastest supercomputer, RoadRunner, by more than a factor of two (with the caveat that BOINC has not been benchmarked on Linpack)."

Submission + - Americans do not agree with science (yahoo.com) 2

Submitted by

ZeroSerenity

on Friday July 10, 2009 @12:31PM

ZeroSerenity writes: "In a not so stunning article, it is thought by many that science is not something you have to agree with. A survey conducted by Pew Research Center states that "...nearly 9 in 10 scientists accept the idea of evolution by natural selection, but just a third of the public does. And while 84 percent of scientists say the Earth is getting warmer because of human activity, less than half of the public agrees with that." In addition just 27% of the respondents said that the advances of the US in science are its greatest achievement, down from 44% ten years ago. I fear for my own country's progress if people aren't this interested in science."

Submission + - ESA and NASA establish a joint Mars exploration in (spacefellowship.com)

Submitted by

Matt_dk

on Wednesday July 08, 2009 @10:26AM

Matt_dk writes: "At the bilateral meeting in Plymouth, the executive board recommended NASA and ESA establish MEJI spanning launch opportunities in 2016, 2018 and 2020, with landers and orbiters conducting astrobiological, geological, geophysical and other high-priority investigations, and leading to the return of samples from Mars in the 2020s. The Director and Associate Administrator agreed, in principle, to establish the Initiative and continue studies to determine the most viable joint mission architectures."

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