Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Security Trying To Hold Back Progress, Again (Score 1) 60

So here we have security vendors trying YET AGAIN to hold back progress in Internet protocols. They did it with window scaling, ECN and IPv6. Each new invention doesn't work with their snake oil so they either disable it or tell people not to use it.

They like to lock down HTTP too, preventing anything that doesn't "look right." As if a server would respond to PUT or OPTION if it didn't intend to support that.

Comment Re: Fire(wall) and forget (Score 1) 348

Software that monitors the traffic for unusual patterns or attack patterns is not a firewall. It is an IDS (or IPS depending on configuration) such as Snort.

Consumer desktop PCs have "antivirus" software which is a combination of firewall, IDS, antivirus and other malware detection systems. Enterprise network admins have firewall, IDS, NAT, and many other systems with each one configured separately.

Network admins have many words for things like Eskimos do for snow because precision is important.

Submission + - Conservatives Release New Video Proving Global Warming is a Hoax (youtube.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Conservative Louisiana House of Representative Lenar Whitney has released a new four minute video on Youtube proving once and for all that global warming is a hoax. In the heavily referenced and peer reviewed video, Whitney puts to rest global warming — something "any ten year-old can invalidate." She points out the important fact that our planet "has done nothing but get colder each year." The highly polished video with special effects clearly exhausted all of Whitney's cognitive powers in researching and backing up each point in her proof that global warming is the "greatest deception in the history of mankind." Fat cat scientists and their propaganda machines don't stand a chance with this hardworking former oilfield equipment company sales employee to set the record straight.

Comment Over at Dice? (Score 4, Insightful) 315

Over at Dice

But we are at Dice, sir:

[Querying whois.publicinterestregistry.net]
[whois.publicinterestregistry.net]
Domain Name:SLASHDOT.ORG
Domain ID: D2289308-LROR
Creation Date: 1997-10-05T04:00:00Z
Updated Date: 2014-03-14T22:12:11Z
Registry Expiry Date: 2015-10-04T04:00:00Z
Sponsoring Registrar:Tucows Inc. (R11-LROR)
Sponsoring Registrar IANA ID: 69
WHOIS Server:

Referral URL:
Domain Status: clientTransferProhibited
Domain Status: clientUpdateProhibited
Registrant ID:tuE8gFbzWFO9qSj2
Registrant Name:Host Master
Registrant Organization:Dice Holdings, Inc.
Registrant Street: 1040 Avenue of the Americas
Registrant City:New York
Registrant State/Province:NY
Registrant Postal Code:10018
Registrant Country:US
Registrant Phone:+1.8557527436
Registrant Phone Ext:
Registrant Fax:
Registrant Fax Ext:
Registrant Email:hostmaster@slashdotmedia.com

Pros: Today's article has more content than the usual Dice front page linkage. Great article if you're not a programmer but feel stymied by the wide assortment of languages out there. Although instead of hemming and hawing before making your first project you're better off listening to Winston Churchill and sticking your feet in the mud: "The maxim 'Nothing avails but perfection' may be spelt shorter -- 'Paralysis."

Cons: It barely scratches the surface of an incredibly deep topic with unlimited facets. And when one is considering investing potential technical debt into a technology, this probably wouldn't even suffice as an introduction let alone table of contents. Words spent on anecdotes ("In 2004, a coworker of mine referred to it as a 'toy language.'" like, lol no way bro!) could have been better spent on things like Lambdas in Java 8. Most interesting on the list is Erlang? Seems to be more of a random addition that could just as easily been Scala, Ruby, Groovy, Clojure, Dart -- whatever the cool hip thing it is we're playing with today but doesn't seem to quite pan out on a massive scale ...

Technology

MIT Combines Carbon Foam and Graphite Flakes For Efficient Solar Steam Generati 110

rtoz (2530056) writes Researchers at MIT have developed a new spongelike material structure which can use 85% of incoming solar energy for converting water into steam. This spongelike structure has a layer of graphite flakes and an underlying carbon foam. This structure has many small pores. It can float on the water, and it will act as an insulator for preventing heat from escaping to the underlying liquid. As sunlight hits the structure, it creates a hotspot in the graphite layer, generating a pressure gradient that draws water up through the carbon foam. As water seeps into the graphite layer, the heat concentrated in the graphite turns the water into steam. This structure works much like a sponge. It is a significant improvement over recent approaches to solar-powered steam generation. And, this setup loses very little heat in the process, and can produce steam at relatively low solar intensity. If scaled up, this setup will not require complex, costly systems to highly concentrate sunlight.

Comment Some Public Records ... You Know ... Just in Case (Score 5, Informative) 448

So a whois.net domain name lookup on their site yielded nothing. And there are suspiciously no patents mentioning "wetag" or "ifind" and the names they listed (Dr. Paul McArthur) are in patents but for cold fusion BS in California.

Surely, though, they must have registered the "iFind" trademark? And if you search on TESS we find:

Owner (APPLICANT) WeTag, Inc. CORPORATION TEXAS 3309 San Mateo Drive Plano TEXAS 75023

With an attorney listed as "Richard G. Eldredge" which corresponds to a local attorney. Before you deploy the door kickers to lynch somebody, that address is just somebody's $200,000 house and could possibly be a random address used by a jerk. Remember that it's entirely possible that this is all a front by some other actor and someone was paid western union/bitcoin to register this trademark through this attorney without realizing they were just being used by literally anyone in the world ... of course, kickstarter should have even better transaction details (hopefully).

Submission + - Star Wars: Episode VII Cast Officially Announced (starwars.com)

eldavojohn writes: Word was leaking this week of some familiar faces in London hanging out together. Finally today an official cast listing was handed down from on high to us mere mortals (Google Cache and Onion AV recap available). From the short release, "Actors John Boyega, Daisy Ridley, Adam Driver, Oscar Isaac, Andy Serkis, Domhnall Gleeson, and Max von Sydow will join the original stars of the saga, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill, Anthony Daniels, Peter Mayhew, and Kenny Baker in the new film." Let's not bicker and argue about who shot first but instead come to an agreement on expected levels of almost certain disappointment. No, this will not feature the Expanded Universe (EU) — you can now refer to those tales as "Legends" which are not part of Star Wars canon. Instead prepare yourself for what will likely be the mother of all retcon films.

Comment Re:If only (Score 2) 216

But how do you know which parts are relevant to you?

I mean, you might think a little thing like the Constitution is perfectly clear when it lays out the rules for regulating interstate commerce. I bet you didn't know that growing wheat on your own small farm and eating it yourself is interstate commerce.

Comment Re:the one flaw in that (Score 1) 860

I was wrong about XP needing to map all 3 GB of video RAM.

It is more accurate to say that Windows XP limits the GPU to a 256 MB window. The GPU would perform a lot better if all of its memory was mapped for direct access.

The newer pieces of GPU hardware and drivers are using zero-copy direct memory access with addressing that is the same on the GPU and the CPU which allows sharing of data structures without copies or modifications. That can't be done in a 256 MB window, or if it can, not well.

Comment Re:Necessary sometimes (Score 1) 572

How do you expect the keyboard is attached? USB. I've actually seen this, in person. A machine with sealed USB ports ... and a USB keyboard and mouse. Really. What was IT thinking?

I bet the IT guy who did the job was a contractor. 'Uh yeah, here's a work order to seal up all the open USB ports.' "What about the keyboard?" "Doesn't say. Don't ask questions: its 20 hours of easy work at $60/hr."

Slashdot Top Deals

He who steps on others to reach the top has good balance.

Working...