Kilrah_il writes "Oxford University Press has confirmed that they are considering offering their next version of the Oxford English Dictionary as an online version only, with no option for a hardcopy. The 20-volume set, whose last edition (2nd) was published in 1989, weighs 145 pounds (65kg) and costs about $1,165. It is considered the 'accepted authority on the meaning and history of words.' In 2000, the dictionary was offered online for $295 a year and has been getting 2 million hits a month from subscribers. The printed version, on the other hand, has sales of only 30,000. Work is now progressing on the 3rd edition, but it's still a decade or more away from completion. Oxford University Press is considering going online-only with the next edition of their flagship product, but not for other products such as their best-selling Advanced Learner's Dictionary. At least for now."

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adeelarshad82 writes "The bidding war between HP and Dell has reached a swift and dramatic conclusion. One could even say HP sniped the auction at the last minute — to the tune of $2 billion for the acquisition of data storage provider 3PAR. HP's not-so-subtle efforts to pull the company away from a preliminary merger agreement with Dell — a $1.15-billion arrangement announced August 16 — took three successive bids to reach an ultimate conclusion. The final acquisition cost of $2 billion, confirmed by 3PAR late Friday, represents a price of $30 per share of 3PAR stock. That's triple the closing price of the company's stock before Dell's initial offer was made public, and more than double after."

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sciencehabit writes "Responding to a court order issued a week ago, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) on Friday ordered intramural researchers studying human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) to shut down their experiments. NIH's action — probably unprecedented in its history — is a response to a preliminary injunction on 23 August from US District Judge Royce Lamberth. The judge ruled that the Obama policy allowing NIH funding to be used to study hESC lines violates a law prohibiting the use of federal funds to destroy embryos."

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Canadian_Daemon writes with news that India has granted a 60-day reprieve for their threat to ban BlackBerry devices while the government evaluates RIM's proposal for "lawful access" to users' encrypted data. "The Ministry of Home Affairs said in a statement it would review the situation in 60 days after the Department of Telecommunications studies the feasibility of routing BlackBerry services through a server in India. India wants greater access to encrypted corporate e-mails and instant messaging, though it remains unclear precisely what concessions Research In Motion agreed to in order to avert the ban. About one million BlackBerry users would have been affected in India. 'RIM have made certain proposals for lawful access by law enforcement agencies and these would be operationalized immediately. The feasibility of the solutions offered would be assessed thereafter,' the ministry said."

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osliving writes "This article takes a tour of the hardware and software behind the innovative Apertus, a real world open source project. Led by Oscar Spierenburg and a team of international developers, the project aims to produce 'an affordable community driven free software and open hardware cinematic HD camera for a professional production environment'."

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Datamation looks at Novell's third quarter financial results, which have fallen short of the company's projections. "The decline in revenues in the third quarter extended across Novell's multiple product lines, including its security-management and operating platforms, as well as its Linux business. Novell's reported revenue of $108 million for its security-management and operating platforms, down 2 percent year-over-year. Earlier this week, Novell announced a new cloud security service to manage access, identity and compliance. Novell's SUSE Linux platform products revenue in the third quarter netted $36 million, a decline of 7 percent from the third quarter of 2009. " (Thanks to Don Marti)

eldavojohn writes "Some light is being shone on comic book history today as the Library of Congress opens up the 222 boxes of a German psychiatrist's evidence and papers against comic books. Dr. Fredric Wertham is well known by comic book fans as the author of Seduction of the Innocent, a bestselling book linking comic books and juvenile delinquency — leading to a full blown congressional investigation (some say witch hunt) of the comic book industry. Wertham was long involved with criminal trials before campaigning against comic books and promoting industry and government censorship for children. Ars adds a little more context for the younger crowd and notes that he later tried to move against television violence but couldn't find the publisher backing he had against comic books."

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IQpierce writes "My good friend Bradley W. Lewis has set up a site for his hobby: building replica lightsabers at home. These aren't your average cheap pieces of plastic, in fact they're more authentic than the Master Replica sabers: Brad tracks down the pieces of equipment actually used to build the original props — or, when they're unavailable, very close replicas, that he further customizes with a metal lathe in his garage — and puts them together with loving attention. My favorite part is the embellishments he does add, on the inside of the saber — his replica of Luke's saber from ANH can be opened to see authentic-looking internals such as a glowing crystal (as well as another surprise — an autograph from Luke himself, Mark Hamill). Each project is documented step-by-step with hundreds of photos — whether you're a hobbyist, or just a big Star Wars geek like me, you'll find it interesting."

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Debian has updated phpmyadmin (multiple vulnerabilities), typo3-src (multiple vulnerabilities), and openoffice.org (denial of service).

Mandriva has updated phpmyadmin (Corporate 4.0, Enterprise Server 5.0: multiple vulnerabilities).

MeeGo has updated emacs (symlink race), firefox (multiple vulnerabilities), ghostscript (arbitrary code execution), polkit (information disclosure), kernel (denial of service), python (multiple vulnerabilities), glibc (privilege escalation), mutter-moblin (denial of service), ruby (cross-site scripting), and libtiff (multiple vulnerabilities).

openSUSE has updated xorg-x11-server (privilege escalation).

Red Hat has updated httpd (multiple vulnerabilities) and kernel (RHEL 5.3, RHEL 5: privilege escalation).

Slackware has updated gnupg2 (code execution), httpd (denial of service), kdegraphics (memory corruption), php (multiple vulnerabilities), pidgin (denial of service), and xorg-server (privilege escalation).

eldavojohn writes "Some light is being shone on comic book history today as Congress opens up the 222 boxes of a German psychiatrist's evidence and papers against comic books. Dr. Fredric Wertham is well known by comic book fans as the author of Seduction of the Innocent, a bestselling book linking comic books and juvenile delinquency — leading to a full blown congressional investigation (some say witch hunt) of the comic book industry. Wertham was long involved with criminal trials before campaigning against comic books and promoting industry and government censorship for children. Ars adds a little more context for the younger crowd and notes that he later tried to move against television violence but couldn't find the publisher backing he had against comic books."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

phy_si_kal writes "Now Microsoft must love free software. Indeed, Office 2011 for Mac (beta 5 at least) uses Freetype! Somehow they figured out the free software 'clean room implementation' of their own (patented) TrueType technology must better suit their needs."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hugh Pickens writes "The Philippine Daily Inquirer reports on a recent case where the Office of the Solicitor General (OSG) lost an appeal after seeking to impeach the testimony of a defendant's expert witness by citing an article from Wikipedia. In her brief, the defendant said 'the authority, alluded to by oppositor-appellant, the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Health Disorders DSM-IV-TR," was taken from an Internet website commonly known as Wikipedia,' and argued that Wikipedia itself contains a disclaimer saying it 'makes no guarantee of validity.' The court in finding for the defendant said in its decision that it found 'incredible ... if not a haphazard attempt, on the part of the (OSG) to impeach an expert witness, with, as pointed out by (the defendant) unreliable information. This is certainly unacceptable evidence, nothing short of a mere allegation totally unsupported by authority.'"

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stevegee58 writes "As if the Klingon opera described recently here at Slashdot weren't enough, here's an interesting offering for Shakespeare buffs. The Washington Shakespeare Company (based in Arlington VA) will soon be performing selections from Hamlet and Much Ado About Nothing in Klingon."

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eldavojohn writes "The New York Times is reporting on a new kind of web ad that takes products you were looking at purchasing on one site and continually advertising them in front of you at subsequent sites. After looking at shoes at Zappos, a mother in Montreal noticed the shoes followed her: 'For days or weeks, every site I went to seemed to be showing me ads for those shoes. It is a pretty clever marketing tool. But it's a little creepy, especially if you don't know what's going on.' The spreading ploy is called 'retargeting ads' and really are just a good demonstration of how an old technology (all they use are leftover browser cookies) are truly invasive and privacy violating. Opponents are clamoring for government regulation to protect the consumer and one writer mentioned a consumer 'do not track' list — adding that retailers really show little fear of turning off customers with their invasion."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

theodp writes "Universities really should tell engineering students what to expect in the long term and how to manage their technical careers. Citing ex-Microsoft CTO David Vaskevitch's belief that younger workers have more energy and are sometimes more creative, Wadwha warns that reports of ageism's death have been greatly exaggerated. While encouraging managers to consider the value of the experience older techies bring, Wadwha also offers some get-real advice to those whose hair is beginning to grey: 1) Move up the ladder into management, architecture, or design; switch to sales or product management; jump ship and become an entrepreneur. 2) If you're going to stay in programming, realize that the deck is stacked against you, so be prepared to earn less as you gain experience. 3) Keep your skills current — to be coding for a living when you're 50, you'll need to be able to out-code the new kids on the block. Wadwha's piece strikes a chord with 50-something Dave Winer, who calls the rampant ageism 'really f***ed up,' adding that, 'It's probably the reason why we keep going around in the same loops over and over, because we chuck our experience, wholesale, every ten years or so.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Remember that other tablet, which came out right around the same time the iPad was released? Yeah, the joojoo, by Fusion Garage. During its development, it was known as the CrunchPad, and emerged out of some form of collaboration between Michael Arrington's TechCrunch and Chandrasekhar Rathakrisnan's Fusion Garage. Things went sour between the two, and eventually, Fusion Garage released the joojoo on its own. Consequently, Arrington sued, and we've got the first major court decision.

phy_si_kal writes "Now Microsoft must love free software. Indeed, Office 2011 for Mac (beta 5 at least) uses Freetype! Somehow they figured out the free software "clean room implementation" of their own (patented) TrueType technology must better suit their needs."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

academic/octave: Build bump, various changes.
audio/ardour: Updated for version 2.8.11.
audio/rosegarden: Updated for version 10.04.2.
desktop/cwp: Updated for version 1.2.1.
desktop/kcometen4: Updated for version 1.0.7.
development/ipython: Fixed permissions of docdir contents
development/kompozer: Added (Easy Web Authoring)
development/netbeans: Updated for version 6.9.1.
development/parrot: Fixed pkgconfig path and typo.
libraries/gtkmm: Clarified dep info in README
libraries/libkdcraw: Added (C++ interface to dcraw)
libraries/libkexiv2: Added (wrapper around Exiv2 library)
libraries/lxml: Updated for version 2.2.7.
libraries/pangomm: Clarified dep info in README
multimedia/dvdrip: Clarified dep info in README
multimedia/google-talkplugin: Added (Plugin for Google Talk)
multimedia/imagination: Added (simple DVD slide show maker)
network/arping: Added (ARP level ping utility)
network/ntop: Updated for version 4.0.1.
network/phpmyadmin: Updated for version 3.3.6.
network/pidgin-toobars: Updated for version 1.10.
system/foremost: Updated for version 1.5.7.
system/hwinfo: Updated for version 17.3.
system/nilfs-utils: Updated for version 2.0.19.
system/wine: Updated to include DIB engine patches.

An anonymous reader writes "After two years of gestation, 4 betas, 2 release candidates and thousands of commits by 1600+ contributors, the result of the succesful merge of the Merb and Rails frameworks (and teams) is now out and ready to transport your web applications on all new shiny tracks."

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J. Dzhugashvili writes "A little over four years have passed since AMD purchased ATI. In May of last year, AMD took the remains of the Canadian graphics company and melded them into a monolithic products group, which combined processors, graphics, and platforms. Now, AMD is about to take the next step: kill the ATI brand altogether. The company has officially announced the move, saying it plans to label its next generation of graphics cards 'AMD Radeon' and 'AMD FirePro,' with new logos to match. The move has a lot to do with the incoming arrival of products like Ontario and Llano, which will combine AMD processing and graphics in single slabs of silicon."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.