Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror

Submission + - Roguelike Celebration (roguelike.club)

Submitted by paulproteus
paulproteus writes: The Roguelike Celebration is a community-generated weekend of talks, games, and conversations about roguelikes and related topics, including procedural generation and game design. It's happening right now, with a live stream. It's for fans, players, developers, scholars, and everyone else, including people new to this type of game.

Submission + - OpenHatch, an open source outreach organization, winding down its activities (openhatch.org)

Submitted by paulproteus
paulproteus writes: OpenHatch was a non-profit that organized free tutorials with college computer science groups to learn how to teach how to get involved in open source, covered previously on Slashdot. It has run more than 50 events so far. On Friday, it announced it is closing its doors due to board members moving on to other projects, leaving open the door for other people to organize future Open Source Comes to Campus events.

Comment Sandstorm (Score 1) 132

by paulproteus (#51140251) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Keeping My Data Mine? (2015 Edition)

I run an instance of Sandstorm, which is software you can install on a Linux server that lets you run other apps. Some features:

* One-click installs of any of 47 apps, like WeKan (similar to Trello) and Davros (similar to Dropbox) and Etherpad (which you probably already know about) and Piwik (similar to Google Analytics).

* Total self-hostability, with auto-configured free HTTPS certificates and dynamic DNS if you want.

* Security sandboxing of the apps against each other and away from the Internet, so malicious apps can't leak your data back to the app's author.

* A way to "share" an instance of any app, like on Google Docs.

* Total open source-ness.

Admittedly, I'm one of its authors too. So feel free to take this with a grain of salt. But I do use it every single day.

Also if your friends don't want to self-host, but want to use the same apps as you, the Sandstorm.io company runs a hosting service.

Submission + - Software Freedom Conservancy asks for supporters

Submitted by paroneayea
paroneayea writes: Software Freedom Conservancy has is asking people to join as supporters to save both their basic work and GPL enforcement. Conservancy is the steward of projects like it, Samba, Wine, BusyBox, QEMU, Inkscape, Selenium, and many more. Conservancy also does much work around GPL enforcement and needs 2,500 members to join in order to save copyleft compliance work. You can join as a member here.

Comment Share the source, and make it easy to install (Score 2) 47

by paulproteus (#50849255) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: How Can My Code Help?

Hi anonymous person,

Getting more eyeballs on your code is a marketing problem. So:

* Give us here a link to your code, and

* Make it easy to run your code.

* Then, you can try to reach people who care about that problem domain and tell them to use your code.

To make it easy to run the app, I suggest you create a package for Sandstorm, which is an open source project that makes web apps easy & secure to run. I work on the project, so feel free to decide I'm biased! But do take a look at https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fapps.sandstorm.io%2F and see how easy it is.

You can reach me (for packaging help) at community@sandstorm.io and find our packaging tutorial here: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdocs.sandstorm.io%2Fen%2Fl...

Best of luck!

Comment Re:Back doors & binaries (Score 1) 359

by paulproteus (#50209333) Attached to: Interviews: Ask Richard Stallman a Question

Only problem having the source code does not mean you can actually understand it. A lot of open source code is obfuscated, sometimes I'm wondering if its deliberate

The GPL handles this by requesting the "preferred form for modification." Consider reading the GPL sometime; it's a really well-written document that considers a lot of these issues.

Comment File a take-down notice (Score 3, Insightful) 180

by paulproteus (#48685437) Attached to: Sony Accused of Pirating Music In "The Interview"

YouTube has a standard DMCA complaints procedure. I recommend that Yoon Mi-rae and the label follow that process, partly because it actually works which is great in this case, and partly to give Sony a taste of their own medicine.

Here is the link: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fsupport.google.com%2Fyou...

(Note that I have a bunch of experience with the take-down process, including participating in an EFF lawsuit ~10 years ago; see https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.eff.org%2Fdocument%2Fd... .)
Security

The Windows Flaw That Cracks Amazon Web Services 114

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the you're-doing-it-wrong dept.
Nerval's Lobster writes "Developer and editor Jeff Cogswell decided to poke around the security of Amazon Web Services, and found a potential loophole that could theoretically allow anyone — a developer, an unscrupulous Amazon employee, the NSA — to access and copy data volumes stored on the system, using a slightly modified version of the popular 'chntwp' password tool. In this article, he breaks down how he did it, and suggests some ways for those who use cloud-hosting services to keep their data a little more secure in the future. 'The key here, of course, is that an unscrupulous employee might be able to make a copy of any existing Windows volume, and go to work on it without the customer ever knowing that it happened,' he writes. 'Now let's be clear: I'm not accusing anyone of having done this; in fact, I doubt anybody has, considering I was unable to find a working copy of chntpw until I modified it.' It's a security concern, and one that's particularly insidious to patch."

Comment This is w/r/t CPython, not random code in Python (Score 5, Informative) 187

by paulproteus (#44751085) Attached to: Open-Source Python Code Shows Lowest Defect Density

The Slashdot summary is confusing, as is the eweek.com headline. Reading the article, it is clear that it is about the code that powers the official Python interpreter, AKA CPython, AKA /usr/bin/python. When I clicked the link, I thought Coverity had surveyed the entire world of open source Python code and discovered that Python programmers as a whole publish higher quality code than people who e.g. program in Ruby. That's not what the article's about.

It'd be great if the headline in Slashdot were to be fixed to say, "Python interpreter has fewer code defects compared to other open source C programs, says Coverity."
Software

Ask Slashdot: Tags and Tagging, What Is the Best Way Forward? 142

Posted by timothy from the spray-and-pray dept.
siliconbits writes "The debate about tagging has been going for nearly a decade. Slashdot has covered it a number of times. But it seems that nobody has yet to come up with a foolproof solution to tagging. Even luminaries like Engadget, The Verge, Gizmodo and Slashdot all have different tagging schemes. Commontag, a venture launched in 2009 to tackle tagging, has proved to be all but a failure despite the backing of heavyweights like Freebase, Yahoo and Zemanta. Even Google gave up and purchased Freebase in July 2010. Somehow I remain convinced that a unified, semantically-based solution, using a mix of folksonomy and taxonomy, is the Graal of tagging. I'd like to hear from fellow Slashdotters as to how they tackle the issue of creating and maintaining a tagging solution, regardless of the platform and the technologies being used in the backend." A good time to note: there may be no pretty way to get at them, but finding stories with a particular tag on Slashdot is simple, at least one at a time: Just fill in a tag you'd like to explore after "slashdot.org/tag/", as in "slashdot.org/tag/bizarro."
Microsoft

Microsoft Patents "Cartoon Face Generation" 117

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the return-of-jerkcity dept.
theodp writes "The latest round of patents granted by the USPTO included one for Cartoon Face Generation, an invention which Microsoft explains 'generates an attractive cartoon face or graphic of a user's facial image'. Microsoft adds, 'The style of cartoon face achieved resembles the likeness of the user more than cartoons generated by conventional vector-based cartooning techniques. The cartoon faces thus achieved provide an attractive facial appearance and thus have wide applicability in art, gaming, and messaging applications in which a pleasing degree of realism is desirable without exaggerated comedy or caricature.' A Microsoft Research Face SDK Beta is available. Hey, too bad Microsoft didn't have this technology when they generated Bob from Ralphie!"
Games

Mining Companies Borrow From Gamers' Physics Engines 39

Posted by Soulskill from the experts-in-blowing-things-up dept.
littlekorea writes "Mining companies are developing new systems for automating blasting of iron ore using the same open source physics engines adapted for games such as Grand Theft Auto IV and Red Dead Redemption. The same engine that determines 3D collision detection and soft body/rigid body dynamics in gaming will be applied to building 3D blast movement models — which will predict where blasted materials will land and distinguish between ore and waste. Predictive blast fragmentation models used in the past have typically been either numerical or empirical, [mining engineer Alan Cocker] said. Numerical models such as discrete element method, he noted, are onerous to configure and demanding of resources — both computing and human — and are generally not appropriate for operational use at mines. 'The problem with empirical models, by contrast, is that they tend to operate at a scale too coarse to give results useful for optimizations,' he added, noting typical Kuz-Ram-based fragmentation models (PDF) (widely used to estimate fragmentation from blasting) assume homogeneous geology (the same type of materials) throughout a blast."
Programming

What Early Software Was Influential Enough To Deserve Acclaim? 704

Posted by timothy from the cultural-literacy dept.
theodp writes "That his 28-year-old whip-smart, well-educated CS grad friend could be unaware of MacWrite and MacPaint took Dave Winer by surprise. 'They don't, for some reason,' notes Winer, 'study these [types of seminal] products in computer science. They fall between the cracks of "serious" study of algorithms and data structures, and user interface and user experience (which still is not much-studied, but at least is starting). This is more the history of software. Much like the history of film, or the history of rock and roll.' So, Dave asks, what early software was influential and worthy of a Software Hall of Fame?"

Slashdot Top Deals

The moving cursor writes, and having written, blinks on.

Close