tjose - Slashdot User

China's Influence Widens Nobel Peace Prize Boycott 360

Posted by timothy on Tuesday December 07, 2010 @10:55PM from the friends-of-un-friends dept.

c0lo writes "Not only did China decline to attend the upcoming Nobel peace prize ceremony, but urged diplomats in Oslo to stay away from the event warning of 'consequences' if they go. Possibly as a result of this (or on their own decisions), 18 other countries turned down the invitation: Pakistan, Iran, Sudan, Russia, Kazakhstan, Colombia, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Iraq, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Venezuela, the Philippines, Egypt, Ukraine, Cuba and Morocco. Reuters seems to think the 'consequences' are of an economic nature, pointing out that half of the countries with economies that gained global influence during recent times are boycotting the ceremony (with Brazil and India still attending)."

Download Firefox, Feed a Red Panda 90

Posted by samzenpus on Tuesday December 07, 2010 @11:27AM from the have-a-sandwich dept.

KenW writes "Mozilla has launched a new marketing campaign to promote Firefox: adopting red pandas and putting them on live webcams. The company wants to underline the fact that the red panda is the mascot for its open source browser via a new section on its site called Firefox Live. It's clear that Mozilla is trying to think of new ways to promote its browser ahead of the launch of Firefox 4. The company has been struggling recently as Firefox steadily loses share to Google Chrome."

Comment Re:Honest (Score 1) 170

by tjose on Friday September 17, 2010 @02:50PM (#33613784) Attached to: Microsoft Releases Final Windows Phone 7 Dev Tools

Competition is good, but honestly, I don't want competition from Microsoft. I WANT them to fail (and thankfully the market so far has obliged). Their stranglehold on the desktop OS market is a tough egg to crack. It's a position that isn't even held via merit anymore - it's just kinda the default choice because that's what almost everyone runs so support and software are all made for it.

Microsoft failing in the mobile market hurts their bottom line, but more importantly it harms their company image even further. The more incompetent they look, the more likely people are to try out something else on their DESKTOP too. Not to mention that one extreme benefit of the mobile OS wars and the increase in people browsing from phones is that web developers have HAD to start thinking mutli-platform. The days when you could just develop for IE6 because that's what everyone used are long gone, and the myriad of non-MS OS's in use on mobile phones played a sizable role in that. I don't want MS to have a foothold in that area.

Let some new players fight in the mobile OS market.

You are absolutely right. The failure of MS in the mobile will definitely have a serious serious blow on the company as a whole. People will start thinking into alternatives which will eventually hit their desktop monopoly. If their market share come down to 75%, then it is just a matter of a short period (short may be 2-3 years) to get them finished !!. I am waiting for that to happen.

Child Abuse Verdict Held Back By MS Word Glitch 191

Posted by samzenpus on Sunday September 12, 2010 @05:17AM from the messy-verdict dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Last week several defendants including one high-profile TV presenter were sentenced in Portugal in what has been known as the Casa Pia scandal. The judges delivered on September 3 a summary of the 2000-page verdict, which would be disclosed in full only three days later. The disclosure of the full verdict has been postponed from September 8 to a yet-to-be-announced date, allegedly because the full document was written in several MS Word files which, when merged together, retained 'computer related annotations which should not be present in any legal document.' (Google translated article.) Microsoft specialists were called in to help the judges sort out the 'text formatting glitch,' while the defendants and their lawyers eagerly wait to access the full text of the verdict."

More Evidence For Steam Games On Linux 256

Posted by Soulskill on Thursday April 22, 2010 @06:17AM from the come-on-valve-spill-the-beans dept.

SheeEttin writes "Back in November 2008, Phoronix reported that Linux libraries appeared in the Left 4 Dead demo, and then in March, Valve announced that Steam and the Source engine were coming to Mac OS X. Now, Phoronix reports that launcher scripts included with the (closed beta) Mac version of Steam include explicit support for launching a Linux version."

Microsoft Shows Full 3D XNA Games On Windows Phone 70

Posted by Soulskill on Thursday March 11, 2010 @04:31AM from the xbox-live-mini dept.

suraj.sun writes "Microsoft has shown off XNA games running on Windows Phone; full 3D is a go. From Engadget: 'Microsoft just showed us a pair of 3D games running on its ASUS Windows Phone prototype and built with its brand new XNA Game Studio 4.0 9. The two titles are The Harvest, a good looking touch-controlled dungeon crawler with destructible environments, being developed by Luma Arcade; and Battle Punks. Microsoft spoke to the ease of its Direct3D development platform, which was built by the same folks responsible for the first-gen Xbox. What we saw of The Harvest was built in "two or three weeks," mostly from scratch, and folks who've already built games for XNA in VisualStudio shouldn't have much trouble with a port from the sound of things: "very, very easy," said Microsoft. Right now developers can do their testing in Windows, but there should be a Windows Phone 7 Series emulator out for devs eventually.'"

North Korea's Own OS, Red Star 316

Posted by timothy on Wednesday March 03, 2010 @06:00PM from the linux-is-sometimes-for-communists dept.

klaasb writes "North Korea's self-developed computer operating system, named 'Red Star,' was brought to light for the first time by a Russian satellite broadcaster yesterday. North Korea's top IT experts began developing the Red Star in 2006, but its composition and operation mechanisms were unknown until the internet version of the Russia Today TV program featured the system, citing the blog of a Russian student who goes to the Kim Il-sung University in Pyongyang."

Ubuntu Desktop In the Cloud 83

Posted by timothy on Wednesday March 03, 2010 @03:41PM from the free-floating dept.

jimjimovich writes "One new feature in Ubuntu 10.04 that caught my attention is the Desktop in the Cloud project. Ubuntu already has great EC2 support, and it's getting even better. Now you can launch Ubuntu Desktop instances on EC2 and connect to them with an NX client."

7 of the Best Free Linux Calculators 289

Posted by timothy on Saturday January 30, 2010 @08:36PM from the open-in-tabs dept.

An anonymous reader writes "One of the basic utilities supplied with any operating system is a desktop calculator. These are often simple utilities that are perfectly adequate for basic use. They typically include trigonometric functions, logarithms, factorials, parentheses and a memory function. However, the calculators featured in this article are significantly more sophisticated with the ability to process difficult mathematical functions, to plot graphs in 2D and 3D, and much more. Occasionally, the calculator tool provided with an operating system did not engender any confidence. The classic example being the calculator shipped with Windows 3.1 which could not even reliably subtract two numbers. Rest assured, the calculators listed below are of precision quality."

FreeNAS Switching From FreeBSD To Debian Linux 206

Posted by Soulskill on Sunday December 06, 2009 @12:29PM from the changing-horses dept.

dnaumov writes "FreeNAS, a popular, free NAS solution, is moving away from using FreeBSD as its underlying core OS and switching to Debian Linux. Version 0.8 of FreeNAS as well as all further releases are going to be based on Linux, while the FreeBSD-based 0.7 branch of FreeNAS is going into maintenance-only mode, according to main developer Volker Theile. A discussion about the switch, including comments from the developers, can be found on the FreeNAS SourceForge discussion forum. Some users applaud the change, which promises improved hardware compatibility, while others voice concerns regarding the future of their existing setups and lack of ZFS support in Linux."

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