arun_s - Slashdot User

Interviews: James Randi Answers Your Questions 217

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday March 28, 2013 @01:12PM from the you-can't-handle-the-truth dept.

A while ago you had the chance to ask James Randi, the founder of The James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF), about exposing hucksters, frauds, and fakers. Below you'll find his answers to your questions. In addition to his writings below, Randi was nice enough to sit down and talk to us about his life and his foundation. Keep an eye out for those videos coming soon.

Comment Re:And that will also mark (Score 3, Interesting) 378

by arun_s on Saturday November 10, 2012 @01:35PM (#41943387) Attached to: GNOME 3.8 To Scrap Fallback Mode

I'm a heavy KDE user but I keep switching DEs and WMs every now and then. Currently I'm playing with Enlightenment which is as pretty as it always has been. More importantly, it starts up on my aging laptop in less than 2 seconds, which is years ahead of both Gnome and KDE. As another lightweight but full-fledged alternative to the big two, I recommend it highly.

Comment Re:on the non-fiction side (Score 1) 278

by arun_s on Wednesday October 24, 2012 @11:10PM (#41760745) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Mathematical Fiction?

Great list. Some other good mathematical non-ficiton books I've liked are:
Anything by Marcus du Sautoy (Music of the Primes, Finding Moonshine)
Dr.Riemann's Zeros by Karl Sabbagh
Unknown Quantity by John Derbyshire
Alex's Adventures in Numberland by Alex Bellos

Comment Interesting, but... (Score 1) 205

by jandersen on Wednesday December 16, 2009 @05:56AM (#30455252) Attached to: Aussie Scientists Find Coconut-Carrying Octopus

While this is a very interesting finding, I think the hermit crab's use of empty snails' shells is an already known example of similar tool use in an invertebrate.

LucasArts To Re-Release Old Games Through Steam 147

Posted by Soulskill on Monday July 06, 2009 @04:41PM from the i-fired-up-x-wing-on-dosbox-just-two-days-ago dept.

LucasArts today announced that they will soon be releasing games from their back catalog through Steam. The releases begin this Wednesday with a group of eight games, including Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, The Dig, LOOM, and Star Wars: Battlefront II. This is apparently just "the first round of releases," so we can doubtless expect to see more of their old games before long. Joystiq spoke with LucasArts CEO Darrell Rodriguez, who said the company is considering updated versions of the old games, depending on how well next week's launch of Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition goes. He also hinted at the possibility that some games could be ported to mobile gaming devices, such as the PSP Go and the iPhone.

Examining the HTML 5 Video Codec Debate 459

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday July 06, 2009 @03:39PM from the we'll-cooperate-and-do-it-my-way dept.

Ars Technica has a great breakdown of the codec debate for the HTML 5 video element. Support for the new video element seems to be split into two main camps, Ogg Theora and H.264, and the inability to find a solution has HTML 5 spec editor Ian Hickson throwing in the towel. "Hickson outlined the positions of each major browser vendor and explained how the present impasse will influence the HTML 5 standard. Apple and Google favor H.264 while Mozilla and Opera favor Ogg Theora. Google intends to ship its browser with support for both codecs, which means that Apple is the only vendor that will not be supporting Ogg. 'After an inordinate amount of discussions, both in public and privately, on the situation regarding codecs for and in HTML5, I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that there is no suitable codec that all vendors are willing to implement and ship,' Hickson wrote. 'I have therefore removed the two subsections in the HTML5 spec in which codecs would have been required, and have instead left the matter undefined.'"

At Atlantic Records, Digital Sales Surpass CDs 273

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday November 25, 2008 @11:20PM from the trading-analog-dollars-for-digital-pennies dept.

The NYTimes reports that Atlantic is the first major label to report getting a majority of its revenue from digital sales, not CDs. Analysts say that Atlantic is out in front — the industry as a whole isn't expected to hit the 50% mark until 2011. By 2013, music industry revenues will be 37% down from their 1999 levels (when Napster arrived on the scene), according to Forrester. "'It's not at all clear that digital economics can make up for the drop in physical,' said John Rose, a former executive at EMI ... Instead, the music industry is now hoping to find growth from a variety of other revenue streams it has not always had access to, like concert ticket sales and merchandise from artist tours. ... In virtually all... corners of the media world, executives are fighting to hold onto as much of their old business as possible while transitioning to digital — a difficult process that NBC Universal's chief executive ... has described as 'trading analog dollars for digital pennies.'"

Comment Re:It is a disease, and that's why it works! (Score 3, Interesting) 167

by arun_s on Thursday September 20, 2007 @02:51PM (#20685591) Attached to: Gartner Says Open Source "Impossible To Avoid"

There's nothing wrong a viral idea, and there's nothing wrong with admitting that an idea is viral.

Your comment made me think of what first attracted me to the Free Software world. To any one who's discovered the elegant beauty of Darwin's evolutionary theory, there is an equal attractiveness in the way the GPL license is framed.
The very fact that the GPL attaches itself to the code its released under, and survives into the downstream modifications that are made to the code.. there are beautiful resemblances to the way successful life itself evolves.
I'm inclined to believe that licenses that are not viral (e.g. BSD) and depend on altruistic reasons to survive, are somehow doomed to extinction (i.e. will be swallowed by proprietary licenses that couldn't care less about perpetuating the BSD cause). In the long run, the GPL will emerge as the fitter license that made its way into the larger user base while retaining pefect copies of itself.
(Of course I'm neither a biologist nor a programmer, so apologies if I sound like I'm talking outta my ass.)

Submission + - Microsoft Drops GPLv3 Like a Hot Rock 1

Submitted by

pilsner.urquell

on Friday July 06, 2007 @05:01AM

pilsner.urquell writes: "Microsoft yesterday issued a statement proclaiming that is isn't bound by GPLv3. Grolaw has a very humorous article about Microsoft's statement."

Submission + - Mandriva says no to Microsoft Linux deal

Submitted by

Kurtz'sKompund

on Thursday June 21, 2007 @05:15AM

Kurtz'sKompund writes: "French Linux vendor Mandriva said no to dealing with Microsoft on open source patents — the third Linux vendor in a week to do so. http://www.techworld.com/news/index.cfm?RSS"

Submission + - ZFS on Linux: It's alive! (linuxworld.com)

Submitted by lymeca on Tuesday June 19, 2007 @02:30AM

lymeca writes: LinuxWorld reports that Sun Microsystem's ZFS filesystem has been converted from its incanartion in OpenSolaris to a module capable of running in the Linux user-space filsystem project, FUSE. Because of the license incompatibilities with the Linux kernel, it has not yet been integrated for distribution within the kernel itself. This project, called ZFS on FUSE, aims to enable GNU/Linux users to use ZFS as a process in userspace, bypassing the legal barrier inherent in having the filesystem coded into the Linux kernel itself. Booting from a ZFS partition has been confirmed to work. The performance currently clocks in at about half as fast as XFS, but with all the success the NTFS-3g project has had creating a high performance FUSE implementation of the NTFS filesystem, there's hope that performance tweaking could yield a practical elimination of barriers for GNU/Linux users to make use of all that ZFS has to offer.

Submission + - Tim Berners-Lee awarded the British Order of Merit (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by

MarsBar

on Thursday June 14, 2007 @04:48AM

MarsBar writes: "The BBC is reporting that Sir Tim Berners-Lee has been awarded The Order of Merit, a royal award granted directly by the Queen. Previous recipients have included Florence Nightingale, Sir Winston Churchill, Bertrand Russell, Graham Greene, Sir Edward Elgar, Mother Teresa and Margaret Thatcher"

Submission + - Microsoft bullies UK developer (zdnet.co.uk)

Submitted by

ZDOne

on Friday June 01, 2007 @06:18AM

ZDOne writes: "Microsoft has shown that once again despite having a near bottomless marketing budget — it is supremely talented at coming across as ruthless and uncaring. The boys at Redmond have demanded — with very unsubtle lawyers' letters — that a London-based Windows developer withdraws a version of his free debugging tool from distribution, and is claiming that the tool breaches its licensing conditions. What's this about Microsoft finally seeing the light around the benefits of an open source community approach to software development — we are not convinced.

Microsoft angered by UK developer

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,3928 7310,00.htm"

Submission + - New AACS "fix" hacked in a day

Submitted by

VincenzoRomano

on Friday June 01, 2007 @03:56AM

VincenzoRomano writes: "ArsTechnica has just published an update to the neverending story about copy protection used in HD DVD and Blu-ray discs and hacker hefforts against it. Quoting the original article:

The ongoing war between content producers and hackers over the AACS copy protection used in HD DVD and Blu-ray discs produced yet another skirmish last week, and as has been the case as of late, the hackers came out on top.
The hacker "BtCB" posted the new decryption key for AACS on the Freedom to Tinker web site, just one day after the AACS Licensing Authority (AACS LA) issued the key.

The article proposes a simple description of the protection schema and a brief look back at how the cracks have slowly chipped away at its effectiveness.
It seems it'll be a long way to an effective solution ... if any.
One could also argue whether all those money spent by the industry in this reace will be worth the results and how long it would take for a return on investment."

Submission + - Gates and Jobs to share the stage

Submitted by Rob on Friday May 25, 2007 @06:25AM

Rob writes: Microsoft chairman Bill Gates and Apple chief Steve Jobs will make a rare joint appearance to wax lyrical about their visions of future technologies at the D: All Things Digital conference, which is to be held in Carlsbad, California. Expect no miraculous joint announcement from the event, which will be a 75-minute joint interview. "We expect to use the occasion to get them to reflect on both the past — how we got here — and the future," said Mossberg, who is personal tech columnist at the Wall Street Journal, in an email. He declined to give any color about the questions he and Swisher are preparing, or any additional information. Most likely, Gates and Jobs will use the occasion to do some friendly sparring on their polar-opposite philosophies on personal computing. Jobs may bang on about the benefits of a software-hardware approach, while Gates may rattle off the joys of partnering with hardware partners.

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