Cody Taylor

deltaromeo points out a BBC report calling the UK’s law requiring ISPs to retain users’ emails for at least a year an “attack on rights.” The article also points out financial and technical flaws with the plan (which we first discussed in October). TechCrunch goes a step further, detailing how it conflicts with other governmental goals. Quoting: “…with one hand the government seeks to lock down the British Internet with an iron fist, while at the same time telling us it is boosting innovation and business online. It is quite clearly blind to the fact that one affects the other. Are we also expected to think that the consumers using online services are not going to be put off from engaging in the boom of ‘sharing’ that Web 2.0 created? How would you feel if every Twitter you sent, every video uploaded, was to be stored and held against you in perpetuity? That may not happen, but the mere suggestion that your email is no longer private would serve to kill the UK population’s relish for new media stone dead, and with it large swathes of the developing online economy.”

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paleshadows writes “The first issue of Dr. Dobb’s Journal (DDJ) was published in January 1976. A few days ago, Herb Sutter (the chair of the ISO C++ committee and a long-time DDJ columnist) announced through his latest blog post that, ‘as of January 2009, Dr. Dobb’s Journal is permanently suspending print publication and going web-only.’ This follows an earlier announcement that PC Magazine is to become digital-only, too, as of February 2009. To those of us who enjoy reading such stuff away from the computer these are bad news, as there seems to be no other major technical programmers’ magazines left standing.”

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snikulin writes “My 6-year-old embedded software happily runs on kernel v2.4 on an XScale CPU. The software gets a bunch (tens of megabytes) of data from an FPGA over a PCI-X bus and pushes it out over GigE to data-processing equipment. The tool chain is based on the somewhat outdated gcc v2.95. Now, for certain technical reasons we want to jump from the ARM-based custom board to an Atom-based COM Express module. This implies that I’ll need to re-create a Linux RAM disk from scratch along with the tool chain. The functionality of the software will be essentially the same. My question: is it worth it to jump to kernel 2.6, or better to stick with the old and proven 2.4? What will I gain and what will I lose if I stay at 2.4 (besides the modern gcc compiler and the other related dev tools)?”

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UnknowingFool writes “As a followup to the Zune New Year’s Eve meltdown, Microsoft has issued a workaround for what some users have correctly guessed was a bug caused by a leap year. To recover from the problem, let the Zune drain the batteries and restart it after noon on January 1, 2009. Many sites are reporting that Microsoft has ‘fixed’ the issue, but technically all Microsoft has done is to ask users to wait out the conditions that triggered the bug. Unless a software patch comes out, Zunes will suffer the same problem again in four years.” Reader ndtechnologies adds, “According to posts in the Toshiba forum at anythingbutipod.com, the same bug that shut down millions of Zune 30’s also affects the Toshiba Gigabeat S. The Zune 30 is based off of the Gigabeat S series and was co-developed by Microsoft with Toshiba.”

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