A collection of stories tagged 'distribution' from Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/ Copyright 2006 RoomforMilk.com. RoomforMilk is not affiliated with Slashdot.org. Fri, 21 Nov 2008 23:41:51 EST In Atlantic Recording v. Raleigh, an RIAA case pending in St. Louis, Missouri, the defendant has asserted detailed counterclaims against the RIAA for federal RICO violations, fraud, violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, prima facie tort, trespass, and conspiracy. The claims focus on the RIAA's 'driftnet' tactic of suing innocent people, and of demanding extortionate settlements. The RICO 'predicate acts' alleged in the 42-page pleading (PDF) are extortion, mail fraud, and wire fraud. The proposed class includes all people residing in the US 'who were falsely accused... of downloading copyrighted sound recordings owned by the counterclaim Defendants and making them available for distribution or mass distribution over a P2P network and who incurred costs and damages including legal fees in defense of such false claims' or 'whose computers used in interstate commerce and/or communication were accessed... without permission or authority'. This is the second class action of which we are aware against the RIAA and the Big 4 recording companies, the first being the Oregon class action brought by Tanya Andersen, which is presently in the discovery phase."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26308 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/EQdpHz7dX1M/article.pl Fri, 21 Nov 2008 13:05:02 EST Finally, the day has come. Adobe has released a pre-release version of the 64-bit Flash player. It is available at the Adobe Labs Flash Player 10 download site immediately. Where are the Windows and Mac versions? "Release of this alpha version of 64-bit Flash Player on Linux is the first step in delivering upon Adobes commitment to make Flash Player native 64-bit across platforms. We chose Linux as our initial platform in response to numerous requests in our public Flash Player bug and issue management system and the fact that Linux distributions do not ship with a 32-bit browser or a comprehensive 32-bit emulation layer by default. Until this pre-release, use of 32-bit Flash Player on Linux has required the use of a plugin wrapper, which prevents full compatibility with 64-bit browsers. With this pre-release, Flash Player 10 is now a full native participant on 64-bit Linux distributions." Windows and Mac OS X 64-bit versions will follow, and the final versions all will be released simultaneously. Tamarin, the JIT compiler in Flash, is now capable of producing 64-bit code and nspluginwrapper is no longer required. There are, however, no plans to release a debugger version of the 64-bit plugin."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26212 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/FHeZifkK9B8/article.pl Mon, 17 Nov 2008 13:05:05 EST A Calgary man was fined $1,495 and banned from theaters for a year in the first conviction under a new Canadian law making recording a movie in a theater a crime. Until the new law took effect in 2007, prosecutors had to show evidence of distribution to get a conviction; now, recording without permission is sufficient. The Canadian Motion Picture Distributors Association was disappointed that jail time was not given." The man was also banned for a year from possessing any video recording equipment, even a video-capable cellphone, outside of his home.Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26188 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/CdGMrbUGwEo/article.pl Sat, 15 Nov 2008 23:05:02 EST Microsoft is working on a software distribution scheme along the lines of Apple's iPhone App Store, CEO Steve Ballmer said yesterday at a developer's conference in Sydney, Australia. 'There's not much money being made, but the general concept of giving developers a way not only to get their code distributed, but to really get visibility for the code, is a good idea,' Ballmer said. Ballmer hinted that something similar would be coming soon from Microsoft. While he said Micrsoft was not ready to detail the works in progress, he said '... fear not, we're hard at work, and you'll see some of the benefits [of that] with some of the concepts, particularly Facebook's.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26052 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/Af06B-y01dc/article.pl Sat, 08 Nov 2008 19:05:01 EST p1234 writes with this excerpt from the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics: "Simulations by the Virgo team show how the Milky Way's halo grew through a series of violent collisions and mergers from millions of much smaller clumps that emerged from the Big Bang. ... If Fermi does detect the predicted emission from the Milky Way's smooth inner halo, then it may, if we are lucky, also see gamma-rays from small (and otherwise invisible) clumps of dark matter which happen to lie particularly close to the Sun. ... The largest simulation took 3.5 million processor hours to complete. Volker Springel was responsible for shepherding the calculation through the machine and said: 'At times I thought it would never finish.' Max Planck Director, Professor Simon White, remarked that 'These calculations finally allow us to see what the dark matter distribution should look like near the Sun where we might stand a chance of detecting it.'" We discussed a related simulation a few months ago.Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26041 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/ebk-VzKkOp8/article.pl Sat, 08 Nov 2008 03:05:01 EST With modern console technology making it easy to develop and distribute small games, more and more companies are taking advantage of gamers' nostalgia to re-release decades-old hits, and to create entirely new titles in older styles. Gamasutra takes a look at what the retro game fad has become, and where it can go from here. What old games or series do you think would translate well onto today's consoles? "Many gamers who bought Mega Man 9 did so because of the game's inherent nostalgia, or because they never had a chance to enjoy the older games on the Nintendo Entertainment System when they were younger. Mega Man 9 is very much a product of its context. Its gameplay is fantastic, but it too is a product of the time period in which it reigned supreme. It suggests the question: can neo-retro games stand the test of time? Will games that mimic or lampoon the 8-bit era remain relevant and interesting to the masses long after its original audience has disappeared?"Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26040 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/lDrQ8Jun0ww/article.pl Sat, 08 Nov 2008 01:05:02 EST IBM and Sun joined at the 2008 OpenOffice.org conference in Beijing to announce the ODF Toolkit Union. The ODF Toolkit project will be independent of the development at OpenOffice.org, and will operate under the liberal Apache license. It goes from small tools that simplify using ODF in the software development process to large ODF Java and .NET libraries that can be used within other projects. 'The future of accessing and distributing software is here today,' said Michael Bemmer, senior director of Collaboration Engineering at Sun. 'It is no longer an acceptable business practice to have silos of office document data stored in proprietary formats. The industry has moved forward and is replacing the silos with business content, such as on-premise business applications, software solutions offered over the Internet and applications supported by mobile devices that are critical in Service Oriented Architectures.' Will this help ODF to make inroads in the business world after the successes on the desktops of users at home?"Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26037 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/LJFJ3L9_t_E/article.pl Fri, 07 Nov 2008 20:05:05 EST Diebold Inc. and its subsidiary, Premier Election Solutions, is using Ghostscript in its electronic election systems even though Diebold and PES 'have not been granted a license to modify, copy, or distribute any of Artifex's copyrighted works,' Artifex claims in court papers filed late last month in US District Court for Northern California. The gs-devel list first brought up the possible GPL violation a year ago."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25969 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/7PvCPCA6_UE/article.pl Tue, 04 Nov 2008 17:05:20 EST An EU document on the Anti-Counterfeiting Treaty was leaked. The main purpose of the trade agreement is to impose the European enforcement measures for IPR infringements on the US and emerging economies, widen the enforcement measures to include criminal sanctions for patent infringements, and introduce internet content filtering measures. Civil society groups such as the FFII criticize the ACTA process because negotiation documents are not made publicly available by the governments. The EU document ('fact sheet') from the EU Trade Commissioner explicitly mentions: 'Internet distribution and information technology — e.g. mechanisms available in EU E-commerce Directive of 2000, such as a definition of the responsibility of internet service providers regarding IP infringing content.'" And an anonymous reader adds Michael Geist's push for more transparency around ACTA negotiations in Canada.Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25964 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/JLnFayOLJxY/article.pl Tue, 04 Nov 2008 15:05:02 EST HP recently released their TouchSmart Application Development Guidelines to third party developers, allowing anyone to port and create touch-friendly applications that integrate and run within the TouchSmart Software suite on their popular TouchSmart PC. As part of the release, HP has gotten behind Capable Networks' Touchsmart Community website and forum to distribute the guidelines to developers while providing an environment for TouchSmart developers to interact. Also on the site is a download hub that allows TouchSmart developers to upload and share their creations with TouchSmart owners in a central location. To kick off the new development initiative, the TouchSmart Community is running a promotion that will send one developer (travel expenses paid) to demo their software in the HP booth at the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, along with a free TouchSmart PC, HP MediaSmart Server, and a month of promotion in the community."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25909 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/j6FgyWpp01w/article.pl Sat, 01 Nov 2008 04:05:09 EDT Mark Shuttleworth, the millionaire bankroller that keeps Ubuntu going strong, has revealed "Canonical is not cash-flow positive" just as version 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) of the popular Linux distribution is set to be released today. In a call, he said he "had no objection" in funding Canonical for another three to five years. He did say, however, that if they concentrated on the server edition of Ubuntu that they could be profitable in two years."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25877 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/L_zF_lw2sI4/article.pl Thu, 30 Oct 2008 13:05:10 EDT The Linux Foundation's recently released report claims, ""it would take approximately $10.8 billion to build the Linux community distribution Fedora 9 in today's dollars with today's software development costs". The article states why this might actually understate the value of the distros, though, since it doesn't include the power of the brand and the goodwill value. "There were several approaches that the Linux Foundation employed to reach the $10.8 billion dollar figure, including calculating the number of lines of code in Fedora 9 (204,500,946), and using an average programmer's salary of $75,662.08--as determined by the U.S. Department of Labor--to measure development costs...On the balance sheets of Coca Cola and many other huge corporations, you find goodwill listed as a major asset.""Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25725 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/XCtA1dGiu2U/article.pl Thu, 23 Oct 2008 12:05:06 EDT SOS Children's Villages has released the 2008/9 Wikipedia Selection for Schools — 5500 checked and reviewed articles matching the English National Curriculum, produced by SOS for use in their own schools in developing countries. The 2007 edition was a huge success, with distributions to schools in four countries, use by the Hole in the Wall education project, thousands of downloads and disks and around 6000 unique IPs a day visiting the online version — the most successful end-user distribution version of Wikipedia to date."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25713 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/HyhIIB1uM-A/article.pl Wed, 22 Oct 2008 18:05:03 EDT Want to run Enlightenment on your cell phone? The Rasterman's recent efforts bring E17 to Open Moko FreeRunner and Treo 650: 'According to the Rasterman, when used with his updated illume stack and new Elementary widget set, E17 can now run in just 32MB of RAM, on an ARM9 processor clocked at 317MHz. To prove it, he is distributing a Linux kernel and E17/Illume/Elementary stack for Palm's Treo650. The stack can be launched from PalmOS without touching the device's flash storage, he says.' While Microsoft fumbles with limited 'instant on,' GNU/Linux rules the embedded world and that's the only thing going in the IT market right now."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25587 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/a7NtQ0DJMyo/article.pl Thu, 16 Oct 2008 20:05:16 EDT The search giant is retaining the right to delete applications from Android handsets on a whim. Unlike Apple, the company has made no attempt to hide its intentions, and includes the details in the Android Market terms and conditions, as spotted by Computer World: 'Google may discover a product that violates the developer distribution agreement... in such an instance, Google retains the right to remotely remove those applications from your device at its sole discretion.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25577 http://rss.slashdot.org:80/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/ryVh8r8l7AY/article.pl Thu, 16 Oct 2008 18:05:13 EDT Want to run Enlightenment on your cell phone? The Rasterman's recent efforts bring E17 to Open Moko FreeRunner and Treo 650: 'According to the Rasterman, when used with his updated illume stack and new Elementary widget set, E17 can now run in just 32MB of RAM, on an ARM9 processor clocked at 317MHz. To prove it, he is distributing a Linux kernel and E17/Illume/Elementary stack for Palm's Treo650. The stack can be launched from PalmOS without touching the device's flash storage, he says.' While Microsoft fumbles with limited 'instant on,' GNU/Linux rules the embedded world and that's the only thing going in the IT market right now."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25570 http://rss.slashdot.org:80/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/a7NtQ0DJMyo/article.pl Thu, 16 Oct 2008 18:05:01 EDT The search giant is retaining the right to delete applications from Android handsets on a whim. Unlike Apple, the company has made no attempt to hide its intentions, and includes the details in the Android Market terms and conditions, as spotted by Computer World: 'Google may discover a product that violates the developer distribution agreement ... in such an instance, Google retains the right to remotely remove those applications from your device at its sole discretion.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25561 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/ryVh8r8l7AY/article.pl Thu, 16 Oct 2008 12:05:02 EDT The Register reports that 'OpenOffice.org is throwing a launch party in Paris on 13 October' to celebrate eight years, and hopefully announce the release of version 3.0. Some notes: [OpenOffice.org 3.0] will support the OpenDocument Format 1.2 standard, and be able to open files created by MS Office 2007 and Office 2008 for Mac OS X." As maj_id10t notes, though the OO.o site does not yet carry an announcement, "Lifehacker has posted an entry stating the final release of OpenOffice 3.0 is available for download via their distribution mirrors."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25454 http://rss.slashdot.org:80/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/pKaRo-u6Brg/article.pl Sun, 12 Oct 2008 05:05:22 EDT The Register reports that 'OpenOffice.org is throwing a launch party in Paris on 13 October' to celebrate eight years, and hopefully announce the release of version 3.0. Some notes: [OpenOffice.org 3.0] will support the OpenDocument Format 1.2 standard, and be able to open files created by MS Office 2007 and Office 2008 for Mac OS X." As maj_id10t notes, though the OO.o site does not yet carry an announcement, "Lifehacker has posted an entry stating the final release of OpenOffice 3.0 is available for download via their distribution mirrors."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25449 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/pKaRo-u6Brg/article.pl Sat, 11 Oct 2008 22:05:02 EDT John Lam was one of many readers to send in news that on Thursday, "at a conference in Vienna, Austria, as reported by the BBC, a European Community science working group built a quantum backbone using 200-km of standard commercial optical fiber running among seven sites and successfully demonstrated the first secure quantum cryptographic key distribution network. In addition, each of the seven links used a different kind of quantum encryption, demonstrating interoperability between the technologies. To paraphrase, the project focused on the trusted repeater paradigm and developed an architecture allowing seamless integration of heterogeneous quantum-key distribution-link devices in a unified framework. Network node-modules managing all classical communication tasks provide the underlying quantum devices with authentic classical channels. The node-module architecture uses a layered model to provision network-wide, end-to-end, provably secure key distribution."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25404 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/zC1vKd21fog/article.pl Fri, 10 Oct 2008 09:05:04 EDT After years of wrangling, TiVo has won its day in court against Dish Network, formerly known as the EchoStar, when the Supreme Court declined to take up Dish Network's appeal, forcing the satellite television company to pay $104 million in damages. According to the article, 'TiVo originally won a patent infringement case in 2004 against Dish, which was then named EchoStar Communications. It charged that Dish illegally copied its technology, which allows people to pause, rewind, and record live television on digital video recorders.' Despite an injunction, Dish continued distributing its set-top boxes in the belief that the work-around they had implemented avoided infringing TiVo's patents. Now the case goes back to the lower court for review to determine if they did indeed steer clear of those patents."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25361 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/3OVSiFCz8E0/article.pl Wed, 08 Oct 2008 09:05:03 EDT The funny thing about the RIAA & BPI is that the artists are just as tired as the fans with how online music is being handled. So they're trying something new called the Featured Artists' Coalition. FAC's site states in their charter: 'We believe that all music artistes should control their destiny because ultimately it is their art and endeavors that create the pleasure and emotion enjoyed by so many.' As digital releases are increasing, the artists aren't seeing any more money. With the advent of online distribution, are the traditional music industry functions of promotion, samples, radio, and marketing now nothing but costly overhead for the artists? From Iron Maiden to Kate Nash to Radiohead, some big names are backing this new organization."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25318 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/jkyZfDbEHxU/article.pl Mon, 06 Oct 2008 19:05:04 EDT unlametheweak recommends an Ars Technica report that the US Senate has unanimously passed a bill requiring the FCC to explore what "advanced blocking technologies" are available to parents to help filter out "indecent or objectionable programming." "...the law does focus on empowering parents to take control of new media technologies to deal with undesired content, rather than handing the job over to the government. It asks the FCC to focus the inquiry on blocking systems for a 'wide variety of distribution platforms,' including wireless and Internet, and an array of devices, including DVD players, set top boxes, and wireless applications."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25307 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/A1ZvUwIBbfw/article.pl Mon, 06 Oct 2008 10:05:11 EDT An anonymous reader writes with news that ArtistDirect, the company who acquired MediaDefender, has launched another company called PiCast for the purpose of P2P video distribution. The reader says: "This is a strange twist for a company which last year set up a video-sharing site called Miivi in an attempt to entrap users uploading copyrighted content, and was caught launching a DoS attack against Revision3, which we discussed earlier this year."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25287 http://rss.slashdot.org:80/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/pB-ZW1Lm7Ck/article.pl Sun, 05 Oct 2008 02:05:43 EDT There are still places on the world where having anonymity might mean the difference between life and death. Covering one's tracks is considered to be of such paramount importance that we are now witnessing the rise of a Linux distro catering to the most paranoid. The 'alpha-alpha' version of ParanoidLinux is now out. But is this the best way to protect oneself? Couldn't it be easily circumvented? The article asks, 'Why is it necessary to put the applications and services designed to protect anonymity, to encrypt files, to make the user nameless and faceless, all together, in one distribution? Let's think in a truly paranoid manner. Wouldn't it be far easier for a nefarious government organization to target that distribution's repositories, mirror that singular distribution's disk images with files of its own design, and leave every last one of that distribution's users in the great wide open?' What should truly paranoid user do?"Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25279 http://rss.slashdot.org:80/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/tpFet35eMkw/article.pl Sun, 05 Oct 2008 02:05:14 EDT