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Comment Re:Giving up so quickly? (Score 1) 380

by panthrkub (#42679125) Attached to: Alan Cox: Fedora 18 "The Worst Red Hat Distro," Switches To Ubuntu
Touché. :) However, in this case the key word is contributed. I think all of us geeks (I'm going out on a limb and assuming you're a geek as well) can agree that it's pretty silly to give up on something because the installer... the open source installer... is buggy.

I also really, really wanted to use that meme.
Censorship

DHS Seized Domains Based On Bad Evidence 235

Posted by Soulskill from the legal-systems-and-intertubes-don't-mesh dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Back over Thanksgiving, the Department of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement unit (ICE) made a lot of news by seizing over 80 domain names. While many of these involved sites that sold counterfeit products, five of the domains involved copyright issues. Four of them involved hiphop-related blogs — including ones that hiphop stars like Kanye West and others used to promote their own works, and the last one was a meta search engine that simply aggregated other search engines. Weeks went by without the owners of those sites even being told why their domains were seized, but the affidavit for the seizure of those five sites has recently come out, and it's full of all sorts of problems. Not only was it put together by a recent college graduate, who claimed that merely linking to news and blog posts about file sharing constituted evidence of copyright infringement, it listed as evidence of infringement songs that labels specifically sent these blogs to promote. Also, what becomes clear is that the MPAA was instrumental in 'guiding' ICE's rookie agent in going after these sites, as that appeared to be the only outside expertise relied on in determining if these sites should be seized."
Education

Best Education Path To Learn Video Game Programming? 240

Posted by Soulskill from the try-the-duke-nukem-technical-institute dept.
Proudrooster writes "Fellow Slashdotters, I have transitioned to teaching and my students have asked me what is the best path to take to work in the video game programming industry. Which would be of more benefit: pursing a Computer Science degree or taking an accelerated program like those at FullSail? I have a CS degree, and suspect that the CS degree would be of more benefit in the long run, but I would like anyone in the industry to share their wisdom and experience with my students trying to follow in your footsteps. If you could recommend some programs in your replies it would be appreciated." A couple other questions that might help those students: what non-academic methods would you recommend to students looking for a career in the games industry? What projects and tools are good starting points for learning the ropes?
Image

Developer Demands Pirate Bay Not Remove Torrent 203

Posted by samzenpus from the please-steal-this-software dept.
An anonymous reader writes "This week TPB got a very unusual e-mail. It was a 'Notice of Ridiculous Activity' from a company that had found one of its apps cracked and listed as a torrent on TPB. The app in question is called Memoires, developed by Coding Robots. Memoires is marketed as the easiest way to keep a journal on your Mac. It costs $29.99 to buy after you've enjoyed a 30-day free trial. That, of course, didn't stop someone from cracking the software and making it available for free as a torrent. Dmitry Chestnykh, founder of Coding Robots, noticed the cracked torrent and decided to download it to see what had been done. After using it, he was upset — not because the cracked version was available, but because the cracker (named Minamoto) had done such a bad job of cracking it. The best section of the e-mail has to be this: 'I demand that you don't remove this torrent, so that people can laugh at Minamoto and CORE skills. However, I also demand the[sic] better crack to be made, so that it doesn't cripple the user experience of my beautiful program.'"
Idle

Submission + - Town Gets Patent On Being The Center Of Europe (techdirt.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: And you thought software patents were going to far? How about geography patents? Apparently, as a part of the weird fight over what place in Europe represents the "geophysical center of Europe," the Austrian town of Frauenkirchen has received a patent (Austrian patent AM 7738/2003) declaring it the center of Europe. Not clear how one "infringes" on such a patent, but then again, it's not clear why anyone's patenting this either.
Government

Submission + - Nothing to Fear but Fearlessness Itself?

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: In last August's Is Technology Evil?, Robert X. Cringely voiced fears that Goldman Sachs and others were not so much evil as 'clueless about the implications of their work,' leaving it up to the government to fix any mess they leave behind. 'But what if government runs out of options?,' worried Cringely. 'Our economic policy doesn't imagine it, nor does our foreign policy, because superpowers don't acknowledge weakness.' And now Cringely's fears are echoed in We're Governed by Callous Children, currently the most-read WSJ story, in which Peggy Noonan frets: 'We are governed at all levels by America's luckiest children, sons and daughters of the abundance, and they call themselves optimists but they're not optimists — they're unimaginative. They don't have faith, they've just never been foreclosed on. They are stupid and they are callous, and they don't mind it when people become disheartened. They don't even notice.' With apologies to FDR, do we have nothing to fear but fearlessness itself?
NASA

Hunt For Earth-Like Planets Delayed 56

Posted by Soulskill from the death-star-needs-new-brake-pads dept.
An anonymous reader sends along this excerpt from Nature News: "Kepler, NASA's mission to search for planets around other stars, will not be able to spot an Earth-sized planet until 2011, according to the mission's team. The delays are caused by noisy amplifiers in the telescope's electronics. ... The problem is caused by amplifiers that boost the signals from the charge-coupled devices that form the heart of the 0.95-metre telescope's 95-million-pixel photometer, which detects the light emitted from the distant stars. Three of the amplifiers are creating noise that compromises Kepler's view. The noise affects only a small portion of the data, Borucki says, but the team has to fix the software — it would be 'too cumbersome' to remove the bad data manually — so that it accounts for the noise automatically. He says that the fix should be in place by 2011." Mindful of Halloween's approach, NASA has put up a piece looking at some of the already-known exoplanets that wouldn't be very friendly to human life.
Windows

Submission + - Wait for Windows 7 SP1, support firm warns users (computerworld.com)

Submitted by CWmike
CWmike writes: Users should wait for Microsoft to work out the bugs in Windows 7 before jumping on the new OS, computer support company Rescuecom said on Friday. "From the calls we're getting, as well as our own experience in the past with all Microsoft's operating systems, we're recommending that people stick with their time-tested OS and wait for the dust to settle," said Josh Kaplan, president of Rescuecom. Citing a litany of reasons, ranging from the risk of losing data during an upgrade to tough economic times, Kaplan urged Windows users to put off upgrading to Windows 7 or buying a new PC with the operating system pre-installed. "There are some compelling reasons for both businesses and home users to move to Windows 7," Kaplan said, "so we're saying 'just wait for a bit.'" Upgrading an existing machine — whether it's running the eight-year-old Windows XP or the much newer Vista — is particularly risky, he added, especially if users haven't taken time to make a full backup before they migrate their machines. Some users have found that out first hand. Among the top subjects on Microsoft's support forum is one that has put some PCs into an endless reboot loop when their owners tried to upgrade from Vista to Windows 7. Microsoft has not yet come up with a solution that works for all the users who have reported the problem, sparking frustration.

Submission + - The most influential people in open source (mindtouch.com)

Submitted by mmaney
mmaney writes: As part of its 2009 open source best practices research, MindTouch asked C and VP level open source executives who they thought are the most influential people in the industry today. The list is ranked by the effect these individuals have had on the open source industry. Over 50 votes from executives in Europe and North America were cast. There were a few surprises from outside of the open source industry. Steve Ballmer was voted in because of his negative remarks on the open source industry and its subsequent positive impact. Vivek Kundra was voted in because of his contributions to the industry inside the US Federal Government. Notably absent however are any influential women.

Submission + - Clever desalinization (economist.com)

Submitted by jbeaupre
jbeaupre writes: The Economist reports on progress by a company called Saltworks on using saline gradients to do the heavy lifting of desalinization. In essence, Saltworks uses solar energy or waste heat to concentrate sea water. They then use the ionic gradient between the concentrated brine and 2 sea water streams to pull ions from from a 3rd sea water stream. It appears to work with entropy by trading the reduced entropy of the desalinated water against the increased entropy of "mixing" the brine and the other sea water streams. The article only discusses Na and Cl, but even just removing these ions is a step in the right direction.

Note to editor: I've linked to the Economist for 3 reasons: it has a better description of the process, a better diagram of the process, and is less likely to suffer from slashdotting.
The Internet

Submission + - ICANN Could Pre-Register gTLDs To Placate Critics (eweekeurope.co.uk)

Submitted by judgecorp
judgecorp writes: Internet regulator ICANN is to be congratulated for succeeding in expanding the Internet beyond the Latin alphabet. However, those new characters can only be used to the left of the dot. While ICANN is preening about the new characters, it's facing a harder task in extending the Internet's global top-level domains (gTLDs), to the right of the dot. Here, it faces struggles with trademark owners and competing businesses — but ICANN is being criticised for acting slowly (as seen in transcripts of the Seoul ICANN meeting. It now seems likely the body will have a pre-registration scheme to gauge demand and placate critics by getting something moving on new gTLDs.

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