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Yesterday's News

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Technology: A Mozilla Plugin to Help Overcome IE Rendering Flaw

Posted by timothy on Wednesday August 20, @05:11PM
from the like-a-screaming-monkey dept.
Mozilla
least_weasel writes "An article on Ars Technica reveals Mozilla's intention to create and release a plugin for Internet Explorer that would allow the often-criticized IE to utilize some of the cooler rendering code developed for Firefox. The current WIP focuses on rendering using HTML5 standards, but the plans seem to be more ambitious than just fixing this one small piece of IE. The article covers some of the plans, hurdles, and potential benefits. It also spills the beans on the code name for the project: Screaming Monkey."

Ask Slashdot: How Do I Prevent Lan Party Theft?

Posted by timothy on Wednesday August 20, @04:24PM
from the have-it-at-the-neighbors'-place dept.
PC Games (Games)
DragonTHC writes "I'm thinking about hosting a lan party open to the public. I'm aiming for approximately 60 people to attend. I can handle all the logistics of operation. The only thing I can't wrap my head around is: how do I prevent theft at the lan party? Do I hire security guards? Do I need security cameras? I don't know the people who will attend, and I don't know if they're trustworthy enough to not steal other people's equipment. What do I do?"

Hardware: Nvidia Rumored To Be Readying X86 Chip Release

Posted by timothy on Wednesday August 20, @03:31PM
from the probably-not-for-wristwatch-computers dept.
Businesses
jdb2 writes with the (honestly labeled) rumor from the Inquirer "that Nvidia is preparing to release an x86 microprocessor with its guns targeted directly at its two major rivals — Intel and AMD/ATI," and excerpts from the just-linked Inquirer article: "THE HOT RUMOR going around IDF ... [is] that the company will do an x86 part. The background whispers say that the part will be announced next week at Nvision ... Nvidia's men in white coats certainly have the brainpower to do it, but they also most certainly don't have a license to sell such a part. NV is basically locked out unless Intel and AMD both decide to be magnanimous, and we would not recommend holding your breath waiting for this to happen ... That leaves the lawsuit option open ... Any attempt to enter the market without a license would bring down Intel legal on them like flying monkeys blackening the sky. It would get ugly. Really ugly. Expensive too.""

Your Rights Online: James Powderly of Graffiti Research Labs Detained In China

Posted by timothy on Wednesday August 20, @02:43PM
from the many-eyes-might-help dept.
Censorship
An anonymous reader writes "News from Free Tibet 2008 that internationally known artist, technologist and co-founder of the Graffiti Research Lab, James Powderly, was detained in Beijing early on August 19th while preparing to debut a new work and technology of protest, the L.A.S.E.R. Stencil. According to a Twitter message received yesterday by Students for a Free Tibet at approximately 5 pm Beijing Standard Time, Powderly had been detained by Chinese authorities at 3 am. His current whereabouts remain unknown. Powderly was the inventor of throwies." (Powderly's detention was also mentioned at Make Magazine's blog.)

Science: Research Suggests Polygamous Men Live Longer

Posted by timothy on Wednesday August 20, @02:23PM
from the depends-which-part-of-utah dept.
Medicine
Calopteryx writes "Want to live a little longer? Get a second wife. A study reported in New Scientist suggests that men from polygamous cultures outlive those from monogamous ones. After accounting for socioeconomic differences, men aged over 60 from 140 countries that practice polygamy to varying degrees lived on average 12% longer than men from 49 mostly monogamous nations."

Linux: Microsoft To Buy $100M More SUSE Support Vouchers

Posted by timothy on Wednesday August 20, @01:50PM
from the whole-lot-of-sweetness dept.
Linux Business
CWmike writes "Microsoft will buy and resell up to another $100 million worth of enterprise support subscriptions for Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server operating system. Two years ago, Microsoft agreed to buy and resell $240 million worth of the vouchers. Susan Hauser, general manager of strategic partnerships and licensing at Microsoft, confirmed that some of the subscription vouchers were sold to customers for less than face value, though none were given away for free."

Idle: Slashdot's Disagree Mail

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday August 20, @01:02PM
from the keep-your-cool dept.
thumbnail
In this week's Disagree Mail, I try to show the range of messages I get. It's not all angry or insane, sometimes it's sent to us for no apparent reason. We start off a little mad, slip into a whole bunch of crazy and finish with someone who has a complaint about racism at his favorite restaurant. Read below to get started.

Book Reviews: My Job Went To India

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday August 20, @12:11PM
from the read-all-about-it dept.
thumbnail
Josh Skillings writes "The author, Chad Fowler, draws upon his experiences as a software engineer, a team leader over a group of Indian developers, and as a jazz musician, to describe 52 ways or tips that will help you to become a more valuable employee. These tips are described in two or three pages each, and are usually illustrated by a practical example or story. The tips are well thought-out, well-explained and make sense. Chad draws upon the open source movement as well, highlighting ways that contributing to and learning from open source can improve your career. These tips gave me greater respect and appreciation for the open source movement in general." Read on for the rest of Josh's review.

Science: NASA Installing Shocks On Ares

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday August 20, @11:22AM
from the hydaulics-will-be-in-the-next-rev dept.
NASA
caffiend666 writes "In order to abate the massive vibration issues of their new Ares I spacecraft, NASA is installing shock absorbers. 'The plan is to install 16 canisters in the bottom of the rocket with 100-pound weights attached to springs. Battery-powered motors will move the weights up and down to stop vibrations. Those are essentially remote-controlled shock absorbers, said Garry Lyles, who headed the team of NASA engineers tackling the shaking problem.' So, when the spaceship is a rocking, don't come a knocking?"

Mobile: Apple's IPhone 3G Firmware Update Bombs

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday August 20, @10:37AM
from the oops-they-did-it-again dept.
Apple
JagsLive writes "After lots of complaints about iPhone 3G connection issues, Apple released a firmware update Monday with hopes it would fix the issues. But early reports suggest it didn't work as planned. Complaints have included dropped calls, abrupt network switches, poor reception, and service interruptions. Apple declined to offer details about its iPhone 2.0.1 update, other than saying it included 'bug fixes.' However, comments in Apple's support forum say plenty about the latest attempt to rectify poor user experiences. In fact, the update seems to be causing new issues, apparently interfering with the GPS function, among others."

Your Rights Online: Hacker Uncovers Chinese Olympic Fraud

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday August 20, @09:48AM
from the that's-a-helluva-home-court-advantage dept.
Censorship
SkeptOlympics writes "A new chapter in the ongoing controversy surrounding China's women's gymnastics team opened today, as search engine hacker stryde.hax found surviving copies of official registration documents issued by China's General Administration of Sport of China. The incriminating documents, expunged by censors from the official site and from Google's document cache, still appear in the document translation cache of Chinese search giant Baidu, here (1) and here (2), showing the age of one of China's gold medal winning gymnasts to be 14 instead of 16, the minimum age for competition presented on her government-issued passport. Now that official government documentation is available, how long will the IOC be able to keep a lid on this scandal?" I imagine the answer is "Forever."

Entertainment: Watchmen Delayed, Or Worse

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday August 20, @09:00AM
from the this-isn't-gonna-be-good dept.
Movies
whisper_jeff writes "Due to some potential copyright issues, The Watchmen might be delayed, or worse. It seems that Fox claims it still owns copyrights which would prevent Warner Bros from releasing the movie. US District Court Judge Gary Feess decided that Fox had enough of a case that he's willing to hear things out. The geek in me hopes that it will be resolved quickly and the movie will hit theaters on time."

Politics: States Throw Out Electronic Voting Machines

Posted by kdawson on Wednesday August 20, @08:16AM
from the returning-to-paper dept.
Government
Davide Marney passes along an AP story about the thousands of voting machines gathering dust in warehouses across the country after states such as California, Ohio, and Florida have banned their use. Many of these machines cost $3.5K to $5K each. Local election boards are struggling to find ways to recover any of the cost of the machines, or even to recycle them. The picture in Ohio is the most confusing, as multiple court cases limit the state's options and result in a situation in which the discredited machines will nevertheless be used in the presidential election coming up in November. The state's new (Democratic) attorney general has just issued a rule banning the practice of election workers taking the machines home with them the night before elections.

Science: Magpies Are Self-Aware

Posted by kdawson on Wednesday August 20, @06:08AM
from the who-you-callin'-birdbrain dept.
Science
FireStormZ writes "Magpies can recognize themselves in a mirror, confounding the notion that self-awareness is the exclusive preserve of humans and a few higher mammals. It had been thought only four species of apes, bottlenose dolphins, and Asian elephants shared the human ability to recognize their own bodies in a mirror. But German scientists reported on Tuesday that magpies, a species with a brain structure very different from mammals, could also identify themselves. It had been thought that the neocortex brain area found in mammals was crucial to self-recognition. Yet birds, which last shared a common ancestor with mammals 300 million years ago, don't have a neocortex, suggesting that higher cognitive skills can develop in other ways."

Developers: Why Corporates Hate Perl

Posted by kdawson on Wednesday August 20, @04:02AM
from the not-such-a-shiny-new-thing dept.
Perl
Anti-Globalism recommends a posting up at O'Reilly's ONLamp on reasons that some companies are turning away from Perl. "[In one company] [m]anagement have started to refer to Perl-based systems as 'legacy' and to generally disparage it. This attitude has seeped through to non-technical business users who have started to worry if developers mention a system that is written in Perl. Business users, of course, don't want nasty old, broken Perl code. They want the shiny new technologies. I don't deny at all that this company (like many others) has a large amount of badly written and hard-to-maintain Perl code. But I maintain that this isn't directly due to the code being written in Perl. Its because the Perl code has developed piecemeal over the last ten or so years in an environment where there was no design authority.. Many of these systems date back to this company's first steps onto the Internet and were made by separate departments who had no interaction with each other. Its not really a surprise that the systems don't interact well and a lot of the code is hard to maintain."

Technology: FTC Bans Prerecorded Telemarketing Drivel

Posted by kdawson on Wednesday August 20, @01:51AM
from the but-will-it-stop-321-504-7429 dept.
Communications
coondoggie writes "In the ongoing battle to let us eat dinner in peace without being interrupted by amazingly annoying telemarketer blather, and in this case the even more infuriating recorded telemarketing drivel, the Federal Trade Commission today basically outlawed recorded telemarketing calls. Specifically, the FTC changed its venerable Telemarketing Sales Rule (TSR) to prohibit, as of Sept. 2009, telemarketing calls that deliver prerecorded messages, unless a consumer has agreed to accept such calls from a given caller/seller. Between now and 2009, telemarketers must provide an obvious, easy and quick way for consumers to opt-out of any call, the FTC said. Such an opt-out mechanism needs to be in place by December 1, 2008."

Apple: Japan Demands Probe of iPod Nano Flameouts

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday August 19, @11:41PM
from the hot-pockets dept.
Media (Apple)
iminplaya sends in an item from TechNewsWorld that begins, "Several incidents of iPod Nanos bursting into flames have created consumer jitters in gadget-happy Japan. Apple is downplaying the problem, pointing out that no major injuries or damage have been reported. The problem is due to defective batteries, the company said, and only a tiny percentage of the devices have caught on fire." Japan has seen 14 such incidents so far, two in recent days. iminplaya adds, "I like that. Only a 'tiny percentage'... Is anybody beginning to understand why I would prefer that these devices not be allowed on airplanes?"
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