Comment Novell, not Nortel (Score 4, Informative) 294
Reading comprehension fail or professional troll? MS said they invited Google to a joint bid for the Novell deal. That's not the $4.5 billion Nortel deal.
Comment Re:Yeah, my heroes (Score 3, Informative) 131
Google China stopped serving censored results. Source: The very same Wikipedia article you reference.
Comment Background (Score 1) 225
Eben Moglen on taking back control over your data, privacy and freedom in the age of cloud services.
Summary:
- Don't accept any cloud services that come with free spying, free built-in man in the middle attack (Facebook as the worst offender, GMail and many other services mentioned as other examples)
- Thus avoid lock-in, avoid anyone limiting your mobility and freedom, stop being exploited and spied upon.
- Instead of centralized services use P2P (or federated services), protected by strong encryption
- A $29.90 plug-in, power-supply-sized appliance (the "freedom box") providing these services, and much more (VoIP telephony, TOR, etc.) at home.
1. Freedom in the cloud: http://www.isoc-ny.org/?p=1338
(talk from February 2010)
2. How We Can Be the Silver Lining of the Cloud: http://penta.debconf.org/dc10_schedule/events/641.en.html
(talk from August 2010)
(I wrote this summary back in August 2010, so it's somewhat outdated.)
Can a Video Game Solve Hunger, Disease and Poverty? 72
destinyland writes "Dr. Jane McGonigal of the RAND Corporation's Institute for the Future has created a game described as 'a crash course in changing the world.' Developed for the World Bank's 'capacity development' branch, EVOKE has already gathered more than 10,000 potential solutions from participants, including executives from Procter & Gamble and Kraft. '[Dr. McGonigal] takes threats to human existence — global food shortage, fuel wars, pandemic, refugee crisis, and upended democracy — and asks the gaming public to collaborate on how to avoid these all too possible futures.' And by completing its 10 missions, you too can become a World Bank Institute certified EVOKE social innovator. (The game designer's web site lays out her ambitious philosophy. 'Reality is broken,' but 'game designers can fix it.')"
Comment Re:If only we could harness this in RL (Score 1) 252
I think this is an indicator that a lot of people would like to own/operate a business, and have an entrepreneurial spirit, but are too bogged by the realities of risk and especially legal burden to carry out their entrepreneurial instinct in real life. Imagine how many jobs we could create if people felt safe enough to be able to play these games in the real world.
People are working on just that. For some inspiration, watch this irresistible TED talk: Jane McGonigal: Gaming can make a better world (20min).
Comment Re:Opinion of Google is Changing... (Score 2, Informative) 628
My opinion changed when they stopped releasing text-only copies of public domain works through Google Books.
Care to substantiate that claim?
As far as I see, Public Domain books can be downloaded in the PDF and EPUB format, for free. And there's a plain text version.
Example: "The origin of species" By Charles Darwin
PS: Reposting this since I don't have mod points and the anonymous user's post is currently at 0.
Submission + - A new fun way of looking at server logfiles (fudgie.org) 1
Fudgie writes: "My boss claimed it was pretty much impossible to create an entertaining way to visualize server traffic and events in a short time frame, so of course I had to prove him wrong.
A weekend of neglecting my family produced a small ruby program which connects to your servers via SSH, grabs and parses data from Apaches access log and Ruby on Rails production log, and displays your traffic and statistics in real-time using a simple OpenGL interface (tested under Linux and Mac OS/X).
It's a bit hard to explain over text, so please have a look at http://www.fudgie.org/ for an example movie, and more information."
A weekend of neglecting my family produced a small ruby program which connects to your servers via SSH, grabs and parses data from Apaches access log and Ruby on Rails production log, and displays your traffic and statistics in real-time using a simple OpenGL interface (tested under Linux and Mac OS/X).
It's a bit hard to explain over text, so please have a look at http://www.fudgie.org/ for an example movie, and more information."
Submission + - ISO says "No" to Microsoft's OOXML standar (noooxml.org)
qcomp writes: The votes are in and Microsoft has lost for now, reports the FFII's campaign website OOXML. The 2/3 majority needed to proceed with the fast-track standarization has not been achieved. Now the standard will head to the ballot resolution meeting to address the hundreds of technical commentsa submitted along with the "no" (as well as some "yes" votes.
Submission + - Ubuntu Servers HACKED! (ubuntu.com)
Anonymous Coward writes: "Ubuntu had to shutdown 5 of 8 production servers that are sponsored by Canonical, when they started attacking other systems. Canonical blames the community, saying they were community hosted, and were poorly maintained. However, kernel upgrades couldn't be done because of poor backwards compatibility with the very hardware that Canonical had sponsored! While people point fingers at each other it is pretty clear that both sides are equally to blame, the community administrators for practicing bad security practices, such as using unencrypted FTP transfers with accounts, not properly maintaining the system. However Canonical should have been well aware of what they are hosting. The question remains, if any of the files distributed to users have been compromised. A major blow for Canonical though who are attempting to enter the business market with Ubuntu Server."
Submission + - Red Hat Developer Studio first contact (blogspot.com)
juanignaciosl writes: "First beta of Red Hat Developer Studio has just been published. This IDE is a bunch of Eclipse plugins which comes out from JBoss IDE and Exadel Studio fusion. The main advantages it offers are: JSF development improved, specially integrating RichFaces and Ajax4JSF libraries; Seam (next J2EE middleware standard?) integration; it also includes plugins for JBoss, Hibernate...
RHDS seems promising. Is finally the time Java development meets Visual Whatever integration?
If anybody wants to read on first impressions you can check my software engineering blog post on Red Hat Developer Studio installation."
RHDS seems promising. Is finally the time Java development meets Visual Whatever integration?
If anybody wants to read on first impressions you can check my software engineering blog post on Red Hat Developer Studio installation."
Karl Auerbach — ICANN the USSR of the Internet 35
gnaremooz writes to tell us that The Register recently sat down with Karl Auerbach, the last publicly elected member of the ICANN board, and discussed some of the more recent developments. "Perhaps my main point of view regarding what I want to do for the net is expressed in my presentation [PPT] "From Barnstorming to Boeing - Transforming the Internet Into a Lifeline Utility" (speakers notes avilable [PDF]). I've long been interested in making the net a solid utility, and I have a great deal of sympathy for the folks who have to go out and fix things at 3am. I'm very interested in building tools for those folks."
Journal Journal: QWERTY and unicode characters
I am French, and using a QWERTY keyboard. How to write characters like é, à, etc. and how to write specific unicode characters ?
I am not the only one to have this problems. All European people using a US keyboard have the same.
So I decided to solve it and I designed a keyboard with the following properties:
Feed World Business Briefing: China: Intel Considers Building Chip Plant (nytimes.com)
Intel is considering building its first semiconductor factory in Asia in the northeastern Chinese city of Dalian. China’s central government has approved the project, said Gao Fujun, assistant counsel at the Dalian Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation Bureau. An Intel spokesman, Mark Miller, said the company was in talks with several governments about its next chip factory. The company won approval to build a factory in the Dalian Economic and Technological Development Zone, Mr. Gao said. Intel has assembly and testing plants in Shanghai and Chengdu.
Submission + - Seamonkey 1.1 Released
stuuf writes: "Version 1.1 of the Seamonkey Internet Application Suite is now available, with quite a few improvements over the 1.0 series. Some of the new features include spell checking in form text areas, a new tagging system to classify email, a better indicator for secure web sites and preview images for browser tabs. This release also includes many of the updates that have gone into the Firefox 2 and Thunderbird 2 branches. Check out the release notes and download page for more."
Vendor AMD irons out the bumps in Dresden
AMD has begun outfitting its new Bump and Test facility
in Dresden, all 20,000 square meters of it. Dr. Hans Deppe general manager of AMD in Dresden confessed he was, "amazed at the speed at which construction of the new clean room premises and supporting infrastructure has progressed." AMD's chip powerhouse in Dresden will have has some $8 billion spent on it by 2008. And the quicker it gets its two fabs on the site up an
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