DevanJedi - Slashdot User

Comment Google Books (Score 2, Informative) 152

by DevanJedi on Thursday November 13, 2008 @04:41PM (#25752207) Attached to: Non-Profit Org Claims Rights In Library Catalog Data

The simple reason this is happening is Google Books. From the OCLC FAQ:

# My library has been contacted by a commercial search engine company about contributing our catalog for use in the search engine's system. Does the Policy permit the transfer of WorldCat-derived records from our catalog to the search engine company?
Since the search engine company is a commercial organization, there must be an agreement in place between OCLC and the search engine company prior to the transfer of WorldCat-derived records. OCLC can let you know if it has an agreement with the search engine company in question. Please submit a WorldCat Record Use Form to OCLC or ask the search engine company to submit a WorldCat Record Use Form to OCLC and we will reply within five business days.

Skype Blames Microsoft Patch Tuesday for Outage 286

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday August 20, 2007 @12:52PM from the ddos-ing-yourself dept.

brajesh writes to tell us that Skype has blamed its outage over the last week on Microsoft's Patch Tuesday. Apparently the huge numbers of computers rebooting (and the resulting flood of login requests) revealed a problem with the network allocation algorithm resulting in a couple days of downtime. Skype further stressed that there was no malicious activity and user security was never in any danger.

Submission + - FBI Employees Face Criminal Probe Over Patriot Act (wired.com)

Submitted by

DevanJedi

on Thursday July 12, 2007 @12:49PM

DevanJedi writes: "According to an article at Wired.com, "FBI personnel who used misleading emergency letters to acquire thousands of Americans' phone records are the subject of a criminal investigation [...] The privately disclosed investigation would mark the first time government officials have faced possible prosecution for misuse of Patriot Act investigative tools.""

Are 80 Columns Enough? 763

Posted by Zonk on Saturday July 07, 2007 @05:34PM from the good-enough-for-government-work dept.

ThinkGeek writes "Dating back to the venerable DEC VT100, the 80 column terminal has served us well for over 25 years. Even now, many open source projects and common conventions require lines of code and documentation to fit on that terminal. I am not alone, judging by code I've seen in and out of the open source world, in finding that number insufficient for coding, much less more verbose writing. Given that modern graphical displays (and all popular editors) are capable of far more, is it time we came up with a new standard-sized terminal? If so, what should the new standard be?"

Best Advanced Linux Kernel Training? 153

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday July 03, 2007 @10:02PM from the those-who-teach dept.

hdxia writes "Can anybody recommend a good Linux kernel training course? I have had some Linux kernel hacking experience, but would like to further harden and improve my understanding of the kernel. I expect the course would be advanced. You may say that the best method would be to dig into the kernel myself, but I really want to have a chance to discuss and learn all aspects of the kernel with an experienced instructor."

Sun Joins Mac Open Office Development 171

Posted by kdawson on Thursday May 03, 2007 @09:18AM from the bye-bye-X11 dept.

widhalmt writes "In a blog post, a developer at Sun Microsystems announces that Sun will help with porting Open Office to Mac OS X. The open source office suite is well known on Linux and Windows, but does not have a native version on Mac OS. For a long time Sun did not want to join the development of that port but now they will actively push it."

A Master's In CS or a Master's In Game Programming? 278

Posted by Cliff on Friday November 17, 2006 @07:08PM from the career-choices dept.

Rustcycle asks: "I'm attending the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, which has just announced that they are offering a Master's Degree in their Games and Media Integration (GMI) program. There is a fair amount of overlap between the GMI curriculum and the CS courses, so I'm considering a switch in degrees. If you were hiring MS grads outside the game industry for visualization work, am I worth more to you with the more specialized program or would you be more interested in me if I had more exposure? Within the gaming industry, how much does a specialized degree compel a company to hire a recent grad?"

China Reinstates Wikipedia Ban 172

Posted by Zonk on Friday November 17, 2006 @03:36PM from the that-was-depressingly-quick dept.

Rob T Firefly writes "The International Herald Tribute reports that the lifting of China's Wikipedia ban earlier this week was short-lived. Wikipedia is once again inaccessible from behind the Great Firewall, along with all other Wikimedia projects. Additionally, the URL of Chinese Wikipedia is once again a banned search term. No reason has yet been given for any of it." From the article: "It wasn't immediately clear if Wikipedia was inaccessible due to technical glitches or because government censors had blocked the site again. The Foreign Ministry and Ministry of Information Industry did not immediately respond when contacted for comment Friday. Beijing blocked access to the English and Chinese versions of Wikipedia in October last year, apparently out of concern about entries touching on the country's sensitive spots -- Tibet, Taiwan and other topics."

Scientific American's Top 50 75

Posted by Hemos on Monday November 13, 2006 @12:41PM from the advancements-in-science dept.

dptalia writes "It's that time of year again, where everyone is putting out their best of 2006 lists. Last week, Popular Science did it, and today, Scientific American has released their top 50 list. Of note are improvements in RFID technology, discoveries in nantechnology, and net neutrality."

Microsoft Releases Patent on SenderID 128

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday October 23, 2006 @11:26PM from the sharing-your-toys-in-the-sandbox dept.

wayne writes "Microsoft has now put the SenderID patents under the OSP. The Open Specification Promise was discussed on slashdot before in conjunction with web services and it is good to see that they are opening up even more. There are still technical problems with SenderID compared with SPF and, of course, SPF isn't problem free. Still, over the last year, the number of SPF records has more than doubled from around 1.7 million to 4.1 million, with rate of growth increased in the last 6 months."

MPAA Ignores Usenet, Goes After Bittorrent 232

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday October 19, 2006 @09:41AM from the well-wouldn't-you-too dept.

mjeppsen writes "The Motion Picture Association of America is turning a blind eye towards movie piracy on Usenet, going after torrent link sites instead. PC Magazine says it is because the studios are in bed with GUBA, who is also shilling downloadable movies for the MPAA at a premium price."

Mining Neologisms from Wikipedia 93

Posted by Zonk on Tuesday September 05, 2006 @10:12AM from the everchanging-face-of-net-slang dept.

holy_calamity writes "Natual Language Programming researchers have developed a tool called Zeitgeist that can discover the meaning of new words for itself using Wikipedia. It looks for entries for words not in the WordNet database and works out their meaning by looking for known words linked to them. Development of the tool is focusing on using it to understand what bloggers (using slang and neologisms) are saying about companies' products."

Novell Story Site Launched 75

Posted by CowboyNeal on Saturday August 26, 2006 @12:51PM from the personal-testimonials dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Novell launched a Linux/Open Source story page where everyone can briefly describe how he/she helps pushing Linux or Open Source forward. For every submission a marker is set on a world map. You can also win prices, among them, although yet not mentioned on the page, 50 SLED 10 licenses."

Microsoft Flubs Patch, Putting Users At Risk 209

Posted by Zonk on Tuesday August 22, 2006 @03:41PM from the i'm-working-here dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft is rushing to fix a flaw introduced by the company's latest security update to Internet Explorer. From the article: 'The flaw, initially thought to only crash Internet Explorer, actually allows an attacker to run code on computers running Windows 2000 and Windows XP Service Pack 1 that have applied the August cumulative update to Internet Explorer 6 Service Pack 1, security firm eEye Digital Security asserted. The update, released on August 8, fixed eight security holes but also introduced a bug of its own, according to Marc Maiffret, chief hacking officer for the security firm, which notified Microsoft last week that the issue is exploitable.'"

U.S. Senate Ratifies Cybercrime Treaty 192

Posted by Zonk on Friday August 04, 2006 @07:01PM from the worst-law-evar dept.

espo812 writes "A story from Washingtonpost.com says, 'The Senate has ratified a treaty under which the United States will join more than 40 other countries, mainly from Europe, in fighting crimes committed via the Internet.' Ars Technica says it's the 'World's Worst Internet Law.'" From the Ars story: "According to the EFF, 'The treaty requires that the U.S. government help enforce other countries' 'cybercrime' laws--even if the act being prosecuted is not illegal in the United States. That means that countries that have laws limiting free speech on the Net could oblige the F.B.I. to uncover the identities of anonymous U.S. critics, or monitor their communications on behalf of foreign governments. American ISPs would be obliged to obey other jurisdictions' requests to log their users' behavior without due process, or compensation.;"

Slashdot Top Deals