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GNU is Not Unix

Submission + - Linus Torvalds Looks To End Linux 2.6 Kernel (phoronix.com)

An anonymous reader writes: With the Linux 2.6 kernel set to begin its 40th development cycle and the Linux kernel nearing its 20th anniversary, Linus Torvalds has expressed interest today in moving away from the Linux 2.6.x kernel version. Instead he's looking to change things up by releasing the next kernel as Linux version 2.8 or 3.0. "The voices in my head also tell me that the numbers are getting too big. I may just call the thing 2.8.0...So I'm toying with 3.0 (and in that case, it really would be "3.0", not "3.0.0" — the stable team would get the third digit rather than the fourth one."

Comment Re:Best explanation: SN 287 (Score 5, Informative) 490

impossible to "game" the system

The system has already been "gamed" by its very creator and a handful of early adopters. They mined most of the bitcoins currently in existence and then they made people believe in their value and became millionaires. (Satoshi is said to own between 1 and 2 million bitcoins, that's between $7M and $14M at current market prices.) Regardless of the usefulness of the idea itself, bitcoin was also designed to be a get rich quick scheme. You could conceive a similar digital currency, where wealth distribution was not so heavily biased towards early adopters.

Comment Re:Good news? (Score 1) 286

If developers writing competing software having prior knowledge of [parts of] the code of the original was not a problem, the concept of clean room reverse engineering wouldn't exist.
But since the Mono project used not to accept contributions from people that have seen Microsoft's shared source code, they are definitely aware of the danger and must be confident that a lawsuit from Attachmate isn't coming.

Education

Submission + - University Copyright Case About To Go To Trial (duke.edu)

Nidi62 writes: A Duke University blog covers the possible ramifications of the latest motion in the copyright case against Georgia State University. Cambrigde, Oxford, and Sage have proposed an injunction that would first enjoin GSU to include all faculty, employees, students. All copying would have to be monitored and limited to 10% of a work or 1000 words, whichever is less. No two classes would be allowed to use the same copied work unless they paid for it, essentially taking fair use out of the classroom. Along with this, courses would be allowed to be made up of only 10% copied material, the other 90% must be either purchased works or copies that have been paid for by permission fees. And, if this isn't enough, the publishers also want access to all computer systems on the campus network, to monitor compliance and copying.

This proposed order, in short, represents a nightmare, a true dystopia, for higher education....Yet you can be sure that if [these] things happen, all of our campuses would be pressured to adopt the “Georgia State model” in order to avoid litigation.

Disclosure: I am currently a graduate student at Georgia State University.

Japan

Submission + - Fukushima Meltdown: Earthquake not Tsunami (reuters.com) 1

formfeed writes: As the data from the Fukushima reactor is being reviewed it looks like the meltdown happened much earlier: "the fuel rods in the No. 1 reactor were completely exposed to the air and rapidly heating five hours after the quake."

Apparently, the earthquake had caused a crack in the containment vessel. Which means, that even without the generators failing, the meltdown might still have happened.

With this new data, it seems a similar incident could happen in an earthquake zone even without a tsunami.

Government

Submission + - Can computers be used to optimise the US tax code? (dailykos.com) 1

FatLittleMonkey writes: Science Fiction author, David Brin, wonders whether the US tax code, described by President Obama as a "10,000-page monstrosity", could be dramatically simplified. No, he's not trying to get support a libertarian wet-dream "Flat Tax", this is about using computers to... shuffle the existing system.

"I know a simple way the sheer bulk of the tax code could be trimmed by perhaps 70% or more, without much political pain or obstructionism! ... it should be easy to create a program that will take the tax code and experiment with zeroing-out dozens, hundreds of provisions while sliding others upward and then showing how these simplifications would affect, say, one-hundred representative types of taxpayers ... Let the program find the simplest version of a refined tax code that leaves all 100 taxpayer clades unhurt. If one group loses a favorite tax dodge, the system would seek a rebalancing of others to compensate. No mere human being could accomplish this, but I have been assured that a computer could do this in a snap."

With all the talk about Open Government, perhaps the computer code currently used in tax modelling could be released to the wider community, leading eventually to a Folding@Home type project.

Facebook

Submission + - Bing Search Results Now Using 'Like' Feature (pcmag.com)

Tiek00n writes: "Microsoft on Monday expanded its use of Facebook within its Bing search engine, adding "likes" and recommendations from friends and strangers into search results. Going forward, if you search for something one of your Facebook friends has "liked," Bing will note that in its search results. Did your sister and roommate "like" a nearby Italian restaurant? A small photo, the Facebook "thumbs up" icon, and a note that said they approve will show up in search results, Microsoft said.

Once again, Bing is following in Google's footsteps"

Comment Re:for Srware Iron users (Score 1) 310

Who knows what's included in their build, they only provide outdated code as archive fragments on rapidshare... whether it's because of malice or ineptitude, I wouldn't run any software those guys produce. Publishing a project on github or similar service is not rocket science.
I once tried asking what the deal was on their forums, but my post didn't make it through moderation.

Comment Re:Gnome/KDE division discourages developers (Score 1) 344

That's like saying the "proprietary software community" shot itself in the foot by continuing the division between Windows and MacOS.
Gnome and KDE are large software stacks built on completely separate foundations, by separate teams skilled in different programming environments, and there's no unifying the codebases without throwing one of them away. Developers involved in freedesktop.org have been working on interoperability for the last 11 years, I'm not sure what more you could expect.

Comment Re:Need a better client-side scripting language (Score 4, Insightful) 141

Wait, what?

Python as a choice of multithreading-enabled language? You are aware that CPython has a global lock and only one thread can execute Python code at once?
Javascript will be more multicore friendly than Python when web workers get widely implemented.

And what's the point of developing a brand new sub-set of python with a brand new interpreter and set of libraries? You might as well just compile python to javascript, there's not a lot of impedance mismatch between them. Python is mostly useful because of its wealth of libraries, other than that it's just a generic dynamically-typed language with a certain syntax.

Comment The scale is the problem (Score 3, Interesting) 484

I suspect it's simply impossible to create a non-corrupt government that manages a country that big and is so far removed from its citizens. Going back to the roots and organizing ourselves into something akin to city-states might allow us to keep closer control over the people we designate.
Diversity of laws can be a problem, but at least nowadays with online communications it'd be easier for such city-states to cooperate on treaties.
A question that arises is whether it wouldn't actually empower corporations more, with smaller states having smaller budgets than industry leaders.

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