User Conversations
posted by Almafeta on Tue 4th Mar 2008 18:54
Since OSnews is also a general-geek-news site when the geekiness rises to a certain level of geekiness and universal impact, would the news about Gary Gygax be appropriate to submit?
posted by Almafeta on Fri 25th Jan 2008 15:37
When I went to check for new stories this morning, my average comment rating had jumped about 1.5 points. What could have caused so crazy a jump to happen? I haven't had anything modded up to +128 lately, so has there been a change in the way those values are calculated?
posted by Almafeta on Thu 17th Jan 2008 13:46
When the comics section is done... 1) Will it be its own section?
2) Will we be able to submit comics, like we are able to submit stories?
3) Will we be able to link comics to news items?
posted by Almafeta on Fri 9th Nov 2007 23:53
Apparently, there's a project to do for BSD what DSL did for Linux: http://www.damnsmallbsd.org/
However, it hasn't had a release yet, which makes me a sad panda.
(I do like the palindromic nature of the name, though... 'Da*n Small BSD' could be abbreviated as 'DSB', inverse of BSD, or as 'DSBSD'...)
posted by Almafeta on Thu 25th Oct 2007 16:19
I heard this rumor from a very good friend, who is otherwise a reliable source of information, but this piece of news I have to question... I heard from him that Vista SP1 is actually going to take out some of Vista's kernel-level security features, in order to facilitate hooking in third-party antivirus software into the kernel. He said said that it was because various antivirus manufacturers threatened an antitrust lawsuit if Microsoft did not introduce those vulnerabilities back into Vista.
(It'll also facilitate viruses compromising Windows, but that's also in the manufacturer's best interests, I'm sure.)
Can anyone confirm this from a reliable source?
posted by Almafeta on Sun 14th Oct 2007 02:53
Earlier this morning, OSnews was down. I'm aware the details are probably boring, but what happened?
posted by Almafeta on Sat 11th Aug 2007 15:05
In my regular news today, a link to this article declaring a decision on the SCO/Unix case was posted: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070810165237718
In short: the UNIX copyrights are now legally considered to be owned by Novell, the company behind the Windows/Linux hybrid.
I haven't submitted it to OSnews since... well, this is Groklaw we're talking about, not a reputable source. Can anyone get confirmation on this from somewhere else?
posted by Almafeta on Tue 7th Aug 2007 20:02
Browsing around the recent OSNews threads, I saw one comment had been modded down to -500, and could be modded down no further (it could be modded up, though). Was that a bug, or was that by design? Or did that poor guy really just offend 501 people?
posted by Almafeta on Mon 30th Jul 2007 18:54
A few days ago, there was a discussion on OSNews about minimizing to icons in Windows, and how it was copied from some OSS GUI into Windows. I would have put this comment there, but it was more than five days old... Interestingly, while doing (unrelated) research, I discovered that Windows was 'minimizing to icons' quite a whiel back -- since Windows 1.0, in fact, way back in 85 (maybe in 84, too, but not in 83 -- it was barely more than a pretty command line then). This Windows 1.0 feature would be changed for Windows 2.0 (when Microsoft licensed all those GUI features from Apple; it became minimize-to-'desktop'), but the idea of minimizing to an 'icon bar' would later be most notably resurrected for Windows 95 (along with labelling the icons with human-readable text).
Just an interesting bit of computing history. Everything old is new again!
posted by Almafeta on Fri 20th Jul 2007 15:24
(I know this hasn't been a popular section of OSnews, but it's worth a shot...) Recently, management has announced their intention to switch the project I am working on to open source, "probably that new GNU license, because it's supposed to be the best."
Now, I like this job, a lot. Good people, easy atmosphere, and it's not profit-driven. However, if they finish this changeover, professional ethics will force me to leave... and I can't really afford to lose this job, knowing how long it took for me to find this one.
My question is this: What method can I use to prevent management from open-sourcing this project? Should I try to appeal to their ethics? Should I point out the flaws and unenforcability of the license? Or since this project will (by necessity) involve working with people's private data (including medical information, at times), can I somehow legally prevent them from copylefting the project?
Any help you could give me would be appreciated.
posted by Almafeta on Mon 25th Jun 2007 19:38
For my last 3 comments, I have seen a bug where I start at '2' instead of '1' for my votes. Could someone please fix this? Or is everyone seeing this?
posted by Almafeta on Mon 4th Jun 2007 18:40
Although I'll be writing a full report after the event, I will say this: the day of Microsoft as a Linux/OSS business seems rather sooner after hearing the keynote. (I see their Xandros announcement has already hit OSNews, but none of the other distros announced here at TechEd have been mentioned here on OSNews yet -- I wonder if one of them is included on one of the DVDs I got in the ever-growing free DVD stack I have?)
posted by Almafeta on Tue 8th May 2007 02:15
I think that this should qualify as a bug... two of the posts in the SkyOS thread which were locked down as -5 by the system were actually being voted up by OSNews readers at the time they were locked, which indicates its accuracy isn't all that hot. Besides, if posts can be automatically declared 'trollish', shouldn't this be checked before the post is added to the conversation?
posted by Almafeta on Sat 5th May 2007 21:55
I don't know if anyone else is getting this (I'm on an old computer with an old browser), but the new OSnews front page has a notable bug that makes about half the articles illegible. The bug only happens in darkened cells. If less than half the cell is visible, the text is visile and then links are clickable, but if the full cell is visible on the screen, the text is invisible (not even through selecting) and the links cannot be clicked.
Not all dark cells suffer this bug, but it does make about 1 in 2 stories unreadable from the front page...
posted by Almafeta on Fri 4th May 2007 18:36
As part of my summer internship, I am going to be attending Microsoft TechEd 2007. (It's actually almost perfectly coinciding with my birthday, actually -- for my birthday this year, I get to be surrounded by developers, IT pros, and other such geekery.) It'll be about this time next month. Would any OSNews readers be interested in my writing up a convention report about everything that I saw down there? Of course, there'd be the tasks my job required of me, but beyond that, I can (and will) poke my nose into a little of everything.
posted by Almafeta on Wed 11th Apr 2007 17:47
Could you add an "OS4 Beta" link to the sidebar in the old OS3 page. so it's easier to link to? Preferrably just above "News Archive," so it's easy to tab to?
posted by Almafeta on Thu 5th Apr 2007 03:29
Here's one straight from my hobbyist OS development woes: I need an emulator that allows for an easy way to drag and drop files from my workspace to a virtual hard-drive, including designating a particular file as the 'first sector'?
Can anyone think of anything like this? No open-source, please, legit stuff only.
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