rk295 - Slashdot User

Second Life Tries To Backpedal On the GPL 207

Posted by kdawson on Wednesday February 24, 2010 @03:17AM from the one-hand-giveth dept.

GigsVT writes "The Second Life viewer has been available under the GPL for three years. Linden Lab, the maker of Second Life, recently released a 'third party viewer' policy that all but erases the freedoms granted under the GPL. It includes such draconian measures as 'You agree to update or delete at our request any data that you have received from Second Life or our servers and systems using a Third-Party Viewer,' 'You must not mask IP or MAC addresses' (reported to the server), 'you must have a published privacy policy explaining your practices regarding user data,' and 'You acknowledge and agree that we may require you to stop using or distributing a Third-Party Viewer for accessing Second Life if we determine that there is a violation.'"

AU Internet Censorship Spells Bad News For Gamers 152

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday February 24, 2010 @02:11AM from the no-hope-for-call-of-duty-kangaroo-wars dept.

eldavojohn writes "Kotaku is running an investigative piece examining what internet censorship means for games in Australia. Australia has some of the most draconian video game attitudes in the world, and the phrase 'refused classification' should strike fear in game developers and publishers looking to market games there. Internet censorship may expand this phrase to mean that anybody hosting anything about the game may suffer censorship in AU. Kotaku notes, 'This means that if a game is refused classification (RC) in Australia — like, say, NFL Blitz, or Getting Up — content related to these games would be added to the ISP filter. [This would bring up] a range of questions, foremost of those being: what happens when an otherwise harmless website ... hosts material from those games (screenshots, trailers, etc) that is totally fine in the US or Japan or Europe, but that has been refused classification in Australia?' Kotaku received a comment from the Australian Department of Broadband Communication promising that the whole website won't be blocked, just the material related to the game (videos, images, etc). Imagine maintaining that blacklist!"

Scaling Algorithm Bug In Gimp, Photoshop, Others 368

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday February 23, 2010 @10:16PM from the black-is-black-sometimes dept.

Wescotte writes "There is an important error in most photography scaling algorithms. All software tested has the problem: The Gimp, Adobe Photoshop, CinePaint, Nip2, ImageMagick, GQview, Eye of Gnome, Paint, and Krita. The problem exists across three different operating systems: Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. (These exceptions have subsequently been reported — this software does not suffer from the problem: the Netpbm toolkit for graphic manipulations, the developing GEGL toolkit, 32-bit encoded images in Photoshop CS3, the latest version of Image Analyzer, the image exporters in Aperture 1.5.6, the latest version of Rendera, Adobe Lightroom 1.4.1, Pixelmator for Mac OS X, Paint Shop Pro X2, and the Preview app in Mac OS X starting from version 10.6.) Photographs scaled with the affected software are degraded, because of incorrect algorithmic accounting for monitor gamma. The degradation is often faint, but probably most pictures contain at least an array where the degradation is clearly visible. I believe this has happened since the first versions of these programs, maybe 20 years ago."

Gates and MS Don't See Eye-To-Eye On CO2 288

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday February 23, 2010 @05:52PM from the forest-and-trees dept.

Sam Machkovech writes "Bill Gates's speech at last week's TED Conference centered on 'moving to zero-carbon energy, and our need to reduce CO2 emissions 80% by 2050.' His choice of subject was an abrupt turn from The Gates Foundation's typical humanitarian topics, but he insisted that energy innovation is crucial to his Foundation's goals. A move by Microsoft today proves that Gates's old company has less interest in that carbon-neutral goal — Microsoft has begun campaigning against a bridge redesign that would result in more bus and transit options for commuters between Seattle and the company's homebase of Redmond, WA."

Comment how I became a unix sa (Score 1) 903

by rk295 on Friday November 09, 2001 @12:18PM (#2543653) Attached to: How Did You Become a UNIX Administrator?

I'm not quite sure how I started, I studied cs at uni. Although the course was very good, it didnt actually teach you how to admin unix on any scale bigger than maybe keeping your own mail/home account in order. When I left there I thought I wasnt good enough to try for a job as a full time programmer, so I blagged my way thru and interview for a sysadmin with a small london based internet company. My first day there I was given root on 4 suns, so it was time to learn solaris. Since those early days things got easier, and I've realised that a lot of what I learnt in my CS course is damn usefull.

Now I'm one of two SA's running a 2million user free email site, still just taking things one day at a time ;)

I guess what I'm suggesting is, as long as you understand the basics, and you can learn new stuff relativley quickly you should just go out and try to get a unix sa job. In a small company where the buck stops with you will help you learn stuff quickly ;)

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