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Security

Cyberwarrior Shortage Threatens US Security 394

An anonymous reader writes "US security officials say the country's cyberdefenses are not up to the challenge. In part, it's due to a severe shortage of computer security specialists and engineers with the skills and knowledge necessary to do battle against would-be adversaries. The protection of US computer systems essentially requires an army of cyberwarriors, but the recruitment of that force is suffering. 'We don't have sufficiently bright people moving into this field to support those national security objectives as we move forward in time,' says James Gosler, a veteran cybersecurity specialist who has worked at the CIA, the National Security Agency, and the Energy Department."

Comment Re:wow (Score 1) 325

Yeah seriously, why doesnt this idea come up more often?
Why cant browsers just function like any other media player and use already installed system codecs?
Or if you really want it to be noob friendly why not include libavcodec or something and use that instead of having to pick one codec?

Comment Re:Kindle v. iPad (Score 1) 297

I wouldn't be surprised if iPad e-books cost even more than on Kindle, since they're higher resolution and in color.

eBooks are not images, they are text. They dont have resolution in that sense.
iBooks is supposedly going to be selling ebooks in the ePub format which is just html/css in a zip container.
I suppose cover images might be higher resolution but i doubt it, the iPad is only 1024x768 to the Kindle's 800x600 or the Kindle DX's 1200x824.

Having said that I too would not be surprised if iBooks was more expensive than Amazon ;)

Intel

Fertilizer Dump Spoils Intel's Pure Water 211

An anonymous reader writes "Intel had to shut down part of its Irish plant for a while because of the extreme cold and the fact the local council polluted the water supply with fertilizer. Apparently it got down to -12 degrees C at the Intel plant in Leixlip, County Kildare. But to make matters worse, the local council ran out of rock salt to grit the roads and opted for fertilizer instead. There were fears that ammonia and nitrates in the fertilizer might have contaminated the local water supply. The problem for the chipmaker is that it needs extremely pure water for its manufacturing processes."

Comment Re:Not very well (Score 1) 111

Have your MySQL servers instead of PHP do some calculations in queries (hashes, query-related math, etc) usually doesn't hurt since you're generally offloading CPU-intensive operations to a disk-bound machine.

Interestingly in the presentation he said they actually do the opposite of that, things like md5 hashes are done in the application rather than on the DB because its much easier to scale up the number of web servers

Comment Re:Were nerds here... use the f'ing metric system (Score 1) 472

Fahrenheit just makes more sense to most of us. 30s = cold, 40s = chilly, 50s = cool, 60s = decent/might need a windbreaker, 70s = nice, 80s = warm, 90s = hot, etc, etc. Celsius is no where near that intuitive and was as arbitrarily defined as Fahrenheit was.

No it makes more sense to Americans (being one of the very few countries left still using Fahrenheit) because they were brought up with it.

How is 30s = cold, 40s = chilly etc any more intuitive than 0-10 = cold, 10-20 = chilly etc? Thats a ridiculous argument.

People used to using Fahrenheit find Celsius unintuitive.
People used to using Celsius find using Fahrenheit unintuitive.
Shocking!

My parents were brought up using Fahrenheit but the UK switched to celsius in the 70's, they occasionally still give temperatures in Fahrenheit but for the most part use celsius, its not that hard to adapt really.

Considering the rest of the world uses Celsius don't you think it might be sensible for the US to switch too? :P

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