Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Tableturkey, Stromlo, Mandrake
The silver lining.dragonsister writes "Regarding the recent slashdot story on Mount Stromlo Observatory being hit by fire, it seems the damage is not nearly as extensive as it might have been. The Australian National University has posted details here. In particular, the office buildings were spared, meaning that the work of staff and students is safe, and the many years worth of data collected should still be usable. The main question remaining in my mind is whether or not there were backups of the data on the computers that were actually located in the telescope buildings themselves, as these contained information crucial to the interpretation of some of the data. The importance of off-site backups has just been demonstrated. Everybody backup now!"
And blakduk writes "We were able to enter the site and retrieve computing equipment that survived the fire. This enabled us to set up our servers and have all staff back on-line within 24 hours."
Other than that, how was the parade? Back in November, I posted an article about the DocuNote, an inexpensive tablet PC available with Linux. According to richardbondi , maybe "cheap" would be a better word. He writes:
"I bought one, it arrived today. It was clearly used, not new, and didn't work. If you tilted it, it hung. I gave up after a dozen reboots. Only purchasable from www.microsono.com, where all sales are final.The handwriting recognition software turned out to be trialware.
And although the stepupcomputing.com site says it works with Windows 2000, it came with a note that said now it has to be OEM installed.
One user's bad experience -- bad hardware, deceptive advertising re software."
Looks nice over two monitors, too. Znonymous Coward writes "Mandrake is trying to prove it's not dead yet. Yesterday[Note: the 19th, that is], they released Beta 2 of Mandrake 9.1. You can get the 2 ISO images from the usual mirrors." There's a (critical but mostly positive) review of this 2nd beta running at DistroWatch, too.
Once this starts it always gets messy. Per Hansson writes
"Yesterday we at Techspot posted a Interview with Nvidia plus high-resolution pictures of the Geforce FX.A few sites rightfully claimed that this material had been stolen from Nordichardware however this was not the case, we interviewed Nvidia at the same time and therefore our Interviews looks so similar."
Anton Nilsson, assistant editor in chief of Nordic Hardware writes, in contrast,
"... [I]t seems as if they have used my material as found here.I've spoken to the TechSpot staff and the person who reported the news item to you and it seems as if they overheard me doing my interview with nVidia at Comdex. Since they didn't want to bug nVidia with the same questions again they later on read the interview at my page and then posted it on theirs. Still that doesn't make up a fair excuse in my opinion."
You'll have to make up your own mind on this.
Wow...after such a superlative exposition of alternative schlong slang, the only question remaining to be asked is:
Did that qualify as a troll, or flamebait?
And it looks like you guys can't even get it to work right, and still push it out the door on us.
Will any slashdot editor make any comment or update about these changes to its readers??
BTW: This is not offtopic, this is slashback, as appropriate a place to mention this as it gets since slashdot hates meta stories.
No insult to the original poster, (who didn't apply the moderation points), but this moderation thing is beyond me. +5 Funny I can understand.
Anyhoo, as another poster pointed out (making me -1, Redundant), misrepresentation is fraudulent. Quite often, your local laws may trump whatever boilerplate they throw at you.
If it were my Mom, I know she'd get her money back, no matter what the fine print said. People like her make me glad I don't work in retail.
From EETimes (http://www.eet.com/sys/news/OEG20030123S0034) : "Japanese consumer electronics manufacturers are backing away from efforts to push proprietary operating systems into wider use and are turning instead to open-source OSes, specifically Linux. The retreat underlines the failure of proprietary OS strategies for consumer electronics."
/. but it got censored as usual, so here we go.
I tried to submit it to
Don't ever bother trying to find out the logic behind moderation, and for god's sake never post about it. It's a guaranteed -1 offtopic every time.