Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Government

Submission + - British Gov't Apologises For Treatment of Turing (number10.gov.uk)

Submitted by BertieBaggio
BertieBaggio writes: The British Government has apologised for the treatment of Alan Turing, convicted of 'gross indecency' and sentenced to chemical castration under anti-homosexuality laws in 1952. In a statement responding to a petition (discussed previously) on the Prime Minister's website, Gordon Brown has recognised that the action taken against Turing was "inhumane" and "appalling", and that he [Turing] should be remembered for his contributions to the Allied war effort and to humanity:

It is no exaggeration to say that, without his outstanding contribution, the history of World War Two could well have been very different. He truly was one of those individuals we can point to whose unique contribution helped to turn the tide of war. [...] But even more than that, Alan deserves recognition for his contribution to humankind. For those of us born after 1945, into a Europe which is united, democratic and at peace, it is hard to imagine that our continent was once the theatre of mankind's darkest hour. [...] It is thanks to men and women who were totally committed to fighting fascism, people like Alan Turing, that the horrors of the Holocaust and of total war are part of Europe's history and not Europe's present.
AMD

Submission + - AMD's DX11 Radeons can drive six 30" displays (techreport.com)

Submitted by J. Dzhugashvili
J. Dzhugashvili writes: Eat your heart out, Matrox. Whereas most current graphics cards can only drive a pair of displays, AMD has put some special sauce in its next-generation DirectX 11 GPUs to enable support for a whopping six monitors. There's no catch about supported resolutions, either. At an event yesterday, AMD demonstrated a single next-gen Radeon driving six 30" Dell monitors, each with a resolution of 2560x1600, hooked up via DisplayPort. Total resolution: 7680x3200 (or 24.6 megapixels). AMD's drivers present this setup as a single monitor to Windows, so in theory, games don't need to be updated to support it. AMD showed off Dead Space, Left 4 Dead, World of Warcraft, and DiRT 2 running at playable frame rates on the six displays.
Social Networks

Submission + - Pedophile Social Networking Site Goes Online

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Billing itself as the "first-ever child-love social network" ToyBOX purports to allow pedophiles to seek each other out to share "that wonderful affection for the littler ones" by way of blogs, forums and chat groups. With all the recent discussion over the Illinois prohibition of Sex Offenders from participating in social networking sites, is this the beginnings of a constitutional challenge in the making? Or is it a sign of something more sinister?

How will it be possible to know whether these pedophiles are simply talking about the latest child actor or plotting to commit the next Jaycee Lee Dugard attack? Are there some groups who simply should not be allowed access to social networking? Not even the pedophiles themselves think the site will last--a sign of danger on the horizon?
Hardware Hacking

Submission + - Cool-sounding things to do with Beowulf clusters. 1

Submitted by brentonboy
brentonboy writes: I have been scavenging computers out of trash and recycling bins for a few years, and my roommate and I finally decided to put all our boxes to use in a Beowulf cluster, more to impress visitors than anything else. So we have this stack of computers, and a good answer to the question "what is that?" But now we need a really impressive answer to the next question: "what is it doing?" So what are some neat things to have a small ragtag "conversation starter" Beowulf cluster work on?
Oracle

Submission + - MySQL's Future in Oracle's Hands 1

Submitted by DSquared66
DSquared66 writes: "Even if Oracle keeps MySQL, it's unlikely to invest much in improving the product, says the CEO of a Silicon Valley software company who recently worked at Oracle. "Any innovation there will just be choked off," he says. As an independent company and under Sun, MySQL was winning deals Oracle otherwise would have, and Oracle doesn't want the software to become a full-blown threat to its flagship 11g database, the executive says. "

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/sep2009/tc2009093_421812.htm?campaign_id=yhoo
Google

Submission + - Google UFO Doodle Explained (spacefellowship.com)

Submitted by
Dagondanum
Dagondanum writes: "The intertoobs have been abuzz with Google's seemingly unexplained latest doodle: A UFO beaming up one of Google's "O"s. The plot thickened when Google's Twitter account Tweeted the following: "1.12.12 25.15.21.18 15 1.18.5 2.5.12.15.14.7 20.15 21.19." Was Google giving credence to UFO believers? Or referring to the wife of Japan's new Prime Minister for her belief that she traveled to Venus on a UFO? Or perhaps honoring Voyager 1's launch (Sept. 5, 1977) or space shuttle Discovery's first landing on Sept. 5 1984. None of the above, it turns out."
Education

Submission + - Should Touch-Typing be Mandatory in High School? 4

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "With the perspective of forty plus years since my graduation, I would say the single most useful course I took in high school was a business class in touch-typing that gave me a head start for writing and with computers that I have benefited from my entire life, so it was with particular interest that I read Gordon Rayner's essay in the Telegraph proposing that schools add a mandatory course in touch typing to the four cornerstones of education: reading, writing and arithmetic. "Regardless of the career a child takes up when they leave school, a high percentage of them will use a keyboard in their daily work, and all of them are likely to use a keyboard in their leisure time," writes Rayner. "Touch-typing would help every child throughout their lives — so why are our schools so blind to this?""
Software

Submission + - Ubuntu tweaking for everyone (itwire.com)

Submitted by
davidmwilliams
davidmwilliams writes: "One great tool power users in the Windows world have long enjoyed is Microsoft's unsupported TweakUI. A range of similar Tweak utilities have followed for successive versions of Windows. Ubuntu Linux users have their own little-known tool called Ubuntu Tweak to help achieve the same degree of modification."
Windows

Submission + - Beyond Trust Warns that UAC is Still Broken. (reuters.com) 2

Submitted by
twitter
twitter writes: "Enterprise users looking for a reason to upgrade from XP will be disappointed with Windows 7 security issues. BeyondTrust, a Least Privilege Management provider for Windows, warns that UAC changes are ineffective and not up to Federal regulations.

Despite growing CSO and CISO recognition of the need to deploy end-users as standard users, and requirements by the Federal Government for the removal of administrator rights under the Federal Desktop Core Configuration (FDCC) mandate, Windows 7 includes no significant changes to UAC for standard users.

"For enterprises, there is little benefit to the changes to User Account Control in Windows," said John Moyer, CEO of BeyondTrust. "Windows 7 introduces cosmetic changes to reduce the prompts that plagued Vista, but it does nothing to fix the underlying productivity and usability problems for standard users... Windows 7`s UAC slider puts end-users in charge of the security decision of what to run with administrative privileges, which is essentially an invitation for malicious users, hackers and malware."

It is amazing that Microsoft can not do what Unix and every gnu/linux distribution has done for decades, provide real user privilege separation. Where these are provided, it is easy to add GUI front ends like kdesu, so that authentication is simple and painless for the few times it is needed."
Idle

Submission + - Police Swarm Bungie Office over HALO replica rifle (kotaku.com) 1

Submitted by sv_libertarian
sv_libertarian writes: A panicked person in Kirkland, WA called local police claiming they saw someone walking down the street with an AK-47, when it was actually an Bungie employee carrying an overgrown model of a HALO sniper rifle. Which resembles an AK-47 as much as a Volkswagen resembles a Formula 1 racer...
Mozilla

Submission + - Official Mozilla site distributes malicious addon (mozilla.org) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A Facebook ad for an amusement program that produces a caricature of your real face is actually a disruptive browser hijacker. Facebook malware is nothing surprising, but what makes this one unusual is that the malware is actually available in the form of a Firefox addon. Furthermore, it's even listed on Mozilla's official addons site at addons.mozilla.org.

In addition to disrupting normal browser function, this addon is designed to be difficult to remove, and leaves behind a configuration mess that must be manually cleaned up. It's effectively a malware addon.

I find it very disturbing that this hostile and disruptive addon is listed through Mozilla's official addon site, as this gives it an appearance of legitimacy that could easily lead many users to think it is safe to install.

Slashdot Top Deals

When it is incorrect, it is, at least *authoritatively* incorrect. -- Hitchiker's Guide To The Galaxy

Close