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Submission + - SF Says AdWare Bundled with Gimp Is Intentional (google.com) 5

Submitted by tresf
tresf writes: In response to a Google+ post from the Gimp project claiming that "[Sourceforge] is now distributing an ads-enabled installer of GIMP", Sourceforge had this response:

In cases where a project is no longer actively being maintained, SourceForge has in some cases established a mirror of releases that are hosted elsewhere. This was done for GIMP-Win.

Editor's note: Gimp is actively being maintained and the definition of "mirror" is quite misleading here as a modified binary is no longer a verbatim copy. Download statistics for Gimp on Windows show SourceForge as offering over 1,000 downloads per day of the Gimp software. In an official response to this incident, the official Gimp project team reminds users to use official download methods. Slashdotters may remember the last time news like this surfaced (2013) when the Gimp team decided to move downloads from SourceForge to their own FTP service.

Therefore, we remind you again that GIMP only provides builds for Windows via its official Downloads page.

Note: SourceForge and Slashdot share a corporate parent.

Submission + - GNU Hurd 0.6 Released (lwn.net)

Submitted by jrepin
jrepin writes: It has been roughly a year and a half since the last release of the GNU Hurd operating system, so it may be of interest to some readers that GNU Hurd 0.6 has been released along with GNU Mach 1.5 (the microkernel that Hurd runs on) and GNU MIG 1.5 (the Mach Interface Generator, which generates code to handle remote procedure calls). New features include procfs and random translators; cleanups and stylistic fixes, some of which came from static analysis; message dispatching improvements; integer hashing performance improvements; a split of the init server into a startup server and an init program based on System V init; and more.

Submission + - SimCity's Empire Has Fallen and Skylines Is Picking Up the Pieces (vice.com)

Submitted by sarahnaomi
sarahnaomi writes: Mariina Hallikainen, CEO of small Finnish game developer Colossal Order, is having a good day. When I call her, it's only been a few hours since she learned that Colossal Order's SimCity-like game, Cities: Skylines, has sold more than half a million copies in its first week. The first 250,000 of those were sold in the first 24 hours, making it the fastest-selling game its publisher Paradox Interactive has ever released.

The irony here doesn't escape Hallikainen. Only a week before Skylines was released, game publisher Electronic Arts announced that it was shutting down SimCity developer Maxis' studio in Emeryville, which it acquired in 1997.

"I feel so bad about Maxis closing down," Hallikainen said. "The older SimCitys were really the inspiration for us to even consider making a city builder."

At the same time, Hallikainen admits SimCity's mistakes were Colossal Order's opportunity. "If SimCity was a huge success, which is what we expected, I don't know if Skylines would have ever happened," she said, explaining that it would have been a harder pitch to sell to Paradox if the new SimCity dominated the market.

Submission + - Microsoft is building a new browser as part of its Windows 10 push (zdnet.com)

Submitted by mpicpp
mpicpp writes: There's been talk for a while that Microsoft was going to make some big changes to Internet Explorer in the Windows 10 time frame, making IE "Spartan" look and feel more like Chrome and Firefox.

It turns out that what's actually happening is Microsoft is building a new browser, codenamed Spartan, which is not IE 12 — at least according to a couple of sources of mine.
Thomas Nigro, a Microsoft Student Partner lead and developer of the modern version of VLC, mentioned on Twitter earlier this month that he heard Microsoft was building a brand-new browser. Nigro said he heard talk of this during a December episode of the LiveTile podcast.

Spartan is still going to use Microsoft's Chakra JavaScript engine and Microsoft's Trident rendering engine (not WebKit), sources say. As Neowin's Brad Sams reported back in September, the coming browser will look and feel more like Chrome and Firefox and will support extensions. Sams also reported on December 29 that Microsoft has two different versions of Trident in the works, which also seemingly supports the claim that the company has two different Trident-based browsers.

However, if my sources are right, Spartan is not IE 12. Instead, Spartan is a new, light-weight browser Microsoft is building.

Windows 10 (at least the desktop version) will ship with both Spartan and IE 11, my sources say. IE 11 will be there for backward-compatibility's sake. Spartan will be available for both desktop and mobile (phone/tablet) versions of Windows 10, sources say.

Submission + - The Death of Voice Mail 1

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Duane D. Stanford writes at Bloomberg that Coca-Cola's Atlanta Headquarters is the latest big campany to ditch its old-style voice mail, which requires users to push buttons to scroll through messages and listen to them one at a time. The change went into effect this month, and a standard outgoing message now throws up an electronic stiff arm, telling callers to try later or use “an alternative method” to contact the person. Techies have predicted the death of voice mail for years as smartphones co-opt much of the office work once performed by telephones and desktop computers. Younger employees who came of age texting while largely ignoring voice mail are bringing that habit into the workforce. “People north of 40 are schizophrenic about voice mail,” says Michael Schrage. “People under 35 scarcely ever use it.” Companies are increasingly combining telephone, e-mail, text and video systems into unified Internet-based systems that eliminate overlap. “Many people in many corporations simply don’t have the time or desire to spend 25 minutes plowing through a stack of 15 to 25 voice mails at the end or beginning of the day,” says Schrage, In 2012, Vonage reported its year-over-year voicemail volumes dropped 8%. More revealing, the number of people bothering to retrieve those messages plummeted 14%. More and more personal and corporate voicemail boxes now warn callers that their messages are rarely retrieved and that they’re better off sending emails or texts. "The truly productive have effectively abandoned voicemail, preferring to visually track who’s called them on their mobiles," concludes Schrage. "A communications medium that was once essential has become as clunky and irrelevant as Microsoft DOS and carbon paper."

Submission + - ORACLE CEO LARRY ELLISON STEPS DOWN

Submitted by mrspoonsi
mrspoonsi writes: Oracle founder Larry Ellison is stepping down as CEO. He will be replaced by two executives. Former Oracle presidents Safra Catz and Mark Hurd will be co-CEOs. Ellison will be the Executive Chairman of Oracle's Board, and the company's CTO. Oracle's shares are off by 3% on the news. "Larry has made it very clear that he wants to keep working full time and focus his energy on product engineering, technology development and strategy," said the Oracle Board's Presiding Director, Dr. Michael Boskin.

Submission + - Court: Car Dealers Can't Stop Tesla from Selling in Mass. 1

Submitted by curtwoodward
curtwoodward writes: Many states have laws that prevent car manufacturers from operating their own dealerships, a throwback to the days when Detroit tried to undercut its franchise dealers by opening company-owned shops. But dealers have taken those laws to the extreme as they battle new competition from Tesla, which is selling its cars direct to the public. In some states, dealers have succeeded in limiting Tesla's direct-sales model. But not in Massachusetts: the state's Supreme Court says the dealers don't have any right to sue Tesla for unfair competition, since they're not Tesla dealers. No harm, no foul.

Submission + - Net neutrality comments surge past 1.7M, an all-time record for the FCC

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Following Wednesday's Internet Slowdown campaign, the Federal Communications Commission says it has now received a total of 1,750,435 comments on net neutrality, surpassing the approximately 1.4 million complaints it saw after the exposure of Janet Jackson's breast during Super Bowl XXXVIII in 2004.

Wednesday saw citizens submit more than 700,000 new comments to the FCC, and place more than 300,000 calls to the agency.

Submission + - Ozone hole growth finally negative (www.empa.ch)

Submitted by i kan reed
i kan reed writes: While the production and release of CFCs have been reduced for a couple decades now, the ozone hole had continued to grow through the 80s and 90s, and in the 2000s and 2010s it has been stable in size, with trends towards shrinking just beginning to show.

Some concerns do remain, as not all CFCs have shown reductions in atmospheric concentrations.

Submission + - Why Learning to Code Outweighs a Degree in Computer Science (theepochtimes.com) 1

Submitted by jjp9999
jjp9999 writes: A college degree may not the best route when it comes to jobs in coding. Jobs for computer science majors flow aplenty, yet employers (and job-seekers) often learn quickly that the college grads don't have the skills. "This is because the courses taught in virtually all computer science curriculums focus on theory, and they only dabble in teaching practical programming skills," says Cody Scholberg on Epoch Times. This ties into a unique factoid in the world of programmers. Nearly half of the software developers in the United States do not have a college degree. Many never even graduated from high school. Instead, many aspiring programmers are turning to open source learning materials, or to the new programming bootcamps popping up around the United States. While theory does have its place, the situation begs the question of whether colleges are teaching the right skills people need to join the workforce, and what its place is amid the rise of open source learning.

Submission + - Taking the Ice Bucket Challenge With Liquid Nitrogen (dice.com)

Submitted by Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: As a trend, the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge seems a bit played out—who hasn’t yet dumped a bucket of icy water over his or her head for charity? But that didn’t stop Canadian chemist Muhammad Qureshi from executing his own sublimely scientific, potentially dangerous variation on the theme: After donating to the ALS Association, he proceeded to douse himself with a bucket of liquid nitrogen. Anyone who’s taken a chemistry class, or at least watched the end of Terminator 2, knows that liquid nitrogen can rapidly freeze objects, leaving them brittle and prone to shattering. Pouring it on your skin can cause serious frostbite. So what prevented that bucketful of liquid nitrogen from transforming Qureshi into a popsicle? In two words: Leidenfrost effect. Named after 18th century scientist Johann Gottlob Leidenfrost, the effect is when a liquid comes near a mass that’s much warmer than the liquid’s boiling point, which (in the words of Princeton’s helpful physics explainer) results in an insulating vapor layer that “keeps that liquid from boiling rapidly.” In other words, the vapor makes the liquid “float” just above the surface of the object, rather than coming into direct contact with it.

Submission + - 'MythBusters' drop Kari Byron, Grant Imahara, Tory Belleci 1

Submitted by rbrandis
rbrandis writes: In a video announcement Thursday on Discovery Channel, "MythBusters" hosts Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman revealed that longtime co-hosts and fan favorites Kari Byron, Grant Imahara, and Tory Belleci are no longer on the show.

"This next season we're going back to our origins with just Adam and me," Hyneman said in the video, which explained that the change took hold as of the season's last episode on August 21.

Submission + - U.S. University Restricts Network Access to Social Media, Political Content 1

Submitted by onproton
onproton writes: Northern Illinois University recently began restricting student access to webpages that contain "illegal or unethical" content which, according to University policy, includes resources used for "political activities...and the organization or participation in meetings, rallies and demonstrations." A student raised concerns after attempting to access the Wikipedia page for Westboro Baptist Church, and receiving a filter message informing him that his access of this page would likely violate the University's Acceptable Use Policy, along with a warning that "all violations would be reviewed." This has lead to questions about whether some policies that restrict student access to information are in the best interest of the primary goal of education.

Submission + - Gmail Now Rejects Emails With Misleading Combinations Of Unicode Characters

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Google today announced it is implementing a new effort to thwart spammers and scammers: the open standard known as Unicode Consortium’s “Highly Restricted” specification. In short, Gmail now rejects emails from domains that use what the Unicode community has identified as potentially misleading combinations of letters. The news today follows Google’s announcement last week that Gmail has gained support for accented and non-Latin characters. The company is clearly okay with international domains, as long as they aren’t abused to trick its users.

Submission + - Patents that kill (economist.com)

Submitted by wabrandsma
wabrandsma writes: The Economist:
The patent system, which was developed independently in 15th century Venice and then in 17th century England, gave entrepreneurs a monopoly to sell their inventions for a number of years. Yet by the 1860s the patent system came under attack, including from The Economist. Patents, critics argued, stifled future creativity by allowing inventors to rest on their laurels. Recent economic research backs this up.

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