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In an attempt to tackle gun crime in the UK, researchers from Loughborough University are developing an innovative identification system that will use CCTV cameras to spot individuals carrying concealed firearms. Starting in June, the three-year multi-environment deployable universal software application (Medusa) project aims to develop intelligent software that can detect a person carrying a concealed weapon in real time. While it is difficult to predict if someone is carrying a gun before crime occurs, Professor Alastair Gale, head of Loughborough University's Applied Vision Research Centre and leader of Medusa, said there are a number of cues the CCTV operator...

Seeking FReeper opinions on best Computers,and Antivirus software...Please Help!

Former CA Chief To Plead Guilty Sanjay Kumar, former chief executive officer of Computer Associates International Inc., is expected to plead guilty to financial fraud charges later today. People familiar with the situation said Mr. Kumar and his co-defendant Stephen Richards, a former top sales executive, will appear in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn today at 2 p.m. Details of the expected guilty pleas weren't immediately available. ... The executives were indicted in September 2004 on financial fraud charges in connection with allegedly back-dated contracts that allowed the business software giant to appear to meet financial goals by continuing to...

Former CA Chief To Plead Guilty By William M. Bulkeley & Paul Davies April 24, 2006 12:59 p.m. Sanjay Kumar, former chief executive officer of Computer Associates International Inc., is expected to plead guilty to financial fraud charges later today. People familiar with the situation said Mr. Kumar and his co-defendant Stephen Richards, a former top sales executive, will appear in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn today at 2 p.m. Details of the expected guilty pleas weren't immediately available. Lawyers for Messrs. Kumar and Richards couldn't be reached for comment. Once the protégé of CA founder Charles Wang, Mr. Kumar...

Engineers at NASA's Independent Verification and Validation (IV&V) facility are examining the feasibility of reusing portions of old NASA spacecraft systems software for new missions. One of the goals of the effort is to determine whether using that old software would actually save the agency time and money. "There's a lot of confusion about this issue," said Lydia Sorenson, director of federal projects for Global Science & Technology, Inc. (GST) of Greenbelt, Md., the contractor on the project. "Some people say that it saves money, saves times and decreases risk. And some people say the exact opposite. So that's what...

It’s a sad state of affairs when you buy a new computer these days and it comes pre-loaded with a ton of garbage software that brings your new machine to a crawl. If anyone’s bought a Dell PC in the last few years, you probably know what I’m talking about. Just recently, I was helping a friend set up his brand new Inspiron 1300 and it took FOREVER for it to boot up. It’s a very dissatifiying experience to pull a brand new computer out of the box and be spammed with a bunch of trial software. After removing all...

Software Freedom Conservancy Offers Nonprofit Umbrella to Free and Open Source Projects NEW YORK, April 3 /PRNewswire/ -- The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), provider of pro-bono legal services to protect and advance Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), today announced it has established the Software Freedom Conservancy to provide free financial and administrative services for a collection of FOSS projects through a single entity."The mission of the Conservancy is to provide free and open source software developers with all of the benefits of being a tax-exempt corporate entity without having to do any of the work of setting up...

Americans seeking jobs in booming Bangalore More U.S. workers heading East to beef up their resumes, launch companies The Associated Press Updated: 2:37 p.m. ET April 2, 2006 BANGALORE, India - After graduating from Northwestern University last year, Nate Linkon contemplated job offers in Chicago and New York. But he chose a less conventional path and started his career here, in India’s booming tech capital. The 22-year-old Milwaukee native works in marketing at Infosys Technologies Ltd., India’s second-largest software exporter. He’s part of a small but growing number of young Americans moving to Bangalore and other Indian cities to beef...

CHICAGO, March 22 (UPI) -- Major software players like Microsoft Corp., Oracle and SAP have started responding soberly to a trend that has been slowly escalating for years: selling "on demand" software. Such software is sold over the Internet, exactly when the company actually needs to use it, experts tell United Press International's The Web column. Soon, shrink-wrapped software, purchased from the store, or a reseller, may disappear, or at least gather lint, like dot matrix printers and other relics of the early days of the information age. By Gene Koprowski

• The Earth revolves around the Sun. • The speed of light is a constant. • Apples fall to earth because of gravity. • Elevated blood sugar is linked to diabetes. • Elevated uric acid is linked to gout. • Elevated homocysteine is linked to heart disease. • Elevated homocysteine is linked to B-12 deficiency, so doctors should test homocysteine levels to see whether the patient needs vitamins. ACTUALLY, I can't make that last statement. A corporation has patented that fact, and demands a royalty for its use. Anyone who makes the fact public and encourages doctors to test for...

London - Collateral damage? Virus slayer McAfee admitted on Friday that an error in its definition file meant its security tools had flagged a few harmless good eggs along with its usual horde of saboteurs as it policed the cyber-streets. Antivirus software detected Microsoft Office components--Excel.exe and Graph.exe--and Adobe Systems' (nasdaq: ADBE - news - people ) AdobeUpdateManager.exe--an application installed alongside Adobe products that deals with software updates, as a virus called W95/CTX. According to a media report, W95/CTX is an obscure Windows 95 virus that McAfee first identified in 2004. A malicious flag was even applied to updaterui.exe, McAfee's...

The most popular open-source software is also the most free of bugs, according to the first results of a U.S. government-sponsored effort to help make such software as secure as possible. The so-called LAMP stack of open-source software has a lower bug density--the number of bugs per thousand lines of code--than a baseline of 32 open-source projects analyzed, Coverity, a maker of code analysis tools, announced Monday. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security awarded $1.24 million in funding to Stanford University, Coverity and Symantec to hunt for security bugs in open-source software and to improve Coverity's commercial tool for source...

The authors of a US government-sponsored report claim to have delivered the first reliable guide into judging the safety and reliability of open source software. The report, backed by the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), has evaluated 31 popular open source packages searching for defects that will cause "hard crashes" - problems that leave users open to hackers or cause downtime. And fortunately for many a young Silicon Valley start-up and entrepreneur, the report, conducted by fault tracking specialist Coverity, has effectively given the Linux, Apache, MySQL and Perl/PHP/Python (LAMP) stack a healthy rating. LAMP "showed significantly better software...

Software Insecurity Outsourcing and defense fear of "foreign influence" By Daniel G. Dupont In February 2005 a group of Pentagon industry advisers warned that the "migration of critical microelectronics manufacturing" from the U.S. to other countries compromised national security. To ensure a steady supply of safe microchips, the Defense Science Board--which advises senior defense officials--recommended establishing "trusted foundries" to make critical hardware. But that is only part of the picture. According to the science board, any effort to improve the safety and supply of microchips would be of "limited utility" without a comparable focus on software--especially on what the Pentagon...

We Support Our Troops!  For the freedom you enjoyed yesterday... Thank the Veterans who served in The United States Armed Forces. FR CANTEEN MISSION STATEMENT:  Showing support and boosting the morale of our military and our allies military and the family members of the above. Honoring those who have served before. Five Top Desktop Search ApplicationsMake it easier on yourself! Google Desktop 2 has a clean interface; quick access to online and local apps and files; more than 100 plug-ins, with more sure to come from third-party developers.   The Google Desktop does a mixed job anticipating the content you...

FEB. 22 8:20 A.M. ET A group of Microsoft Corp.'s rivals filed a complaint with the European Commission on Wednesday, alleging its business practices threatened to deny real choice among competing software products. The European Committee for Interoperable Systems -- which includes International Business Machines Corp., Oracle Corp., RealNetworks Inc., Nokia Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc. -- said it was asking EU regulators to end practices that reinforced Microsoft's existing monopolies and extended its market dominance into current and future product markets. "We are at a crossroads," the group said in a statement. "Will one dominant player be permitted to...

Say goodbye to diaries — those small books with breakable locks that little brothers could easily get their hands on. Today’s women have computer programs that help them track their most cherished secrets. Women practicing Natural Family Planning (NFP) can throw away their paper charts and store that information in their palm pilot. And there is no worry about this sensitive information falling into the wrong hands — with the click of a button, the intimate details of a woman’s life can be protected by a password. Woman Calendar, a program by BEIKS LLC, is a simple program that any...

California lawmakers on Wednesday debated the use of open-source software in the state’s electronic voting systems in hopes it might build public confidence in the nascent technology. Sen. Debra Bowen (D-California) called the hearing, citing successful use of open-source software—programs based on widely published code—by large companies including Amazon, AOL, and IBM. No action was expected to be taken. The hearing was scheduled more in the interest of expanding discussion of open-source alternatives, said a spokesperson for Sen. Bowen. California has already taken steps toward using such software throughout the state. In 2004, the California Performance Review strongly recommended the...

<p>IBM today announced free software and educational resources to help developers in Russia build and deploy innovative applications based on open standards and open source.</p> <p>IBM provided ebizQ with the following details.</p> <p>Tapping into the booming software development market in Russia, IBM is giving software developers, architects and students free access to software and hundreds of new tools and technical and educational resources that will enable them to more easily build open standards-based applications.</p>

"This is your one-stop utility for managing contacts, appointments, mail, notes, tasks, RSS feeds, weather, horoscopes, movie showtimes, and all other iPod extras. Some of iPodAgent's features include the ability to transfer songs from your iPod to your PC; and transfer Outlook mail, appointments, contacts, tasks, and notes to your iPod. The application also can fetch weather forecasts, RSS newsfeeds, and local movie showtimes from the Internet. Version 1.1.2.0 may include unspecified updates, enhancements, or bug fixes."