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Advertising

Power To the Pop-Ups 204

Slashdot frequent contributor Bennett Haselton writes a piece advocating for Pop-Ups and even more obtrusive advertising. But not for the reasons you might think. He says "Annoying pop-up ads have been a great friend to Internet freedom, by enabling the operation of proxy sites that would be too expensive to operate otherwise. With the rising costs of making new proxy sites to stay ahead of the 'censorware' companies, even more intrusive ads could be an even bigger friend to Internet freedom. Got any ideas for how those more intrusive ads could work?" Clicky clicky below to read his point.
Businesses

Failed Games That Damaged Or Killed Their Companies 397

An anonymous reader writes "Develop has an excellent piece up profiling a bunch of average to awful titles that flopped so hard they harmed or sunk their studio or publisher. The list includes Haze, Enter The Matrix, Hellgate: London, Daikatana, Tabula Rasa, and — of course — Duke Nukem Forever. 'Daikatana was finally released in June 2000, over two and a half years late. Gamers weren't convinced the wait was worth it. A buggy game with sidekicks (touted as an innovation) who more often caused you hindrance than helped ... achieved an average rating of 53. By this time, Eidos is believed to have invested over $25 million in the studio. And they called it a day. Eidos closed the Dallas Ion Storm office in 2001.'"
The Almighty Buck

NY Times To Charge For Online Content 488

Hugh Pickens writes "New York Magazine reports that the NY Times appears close to announcing that the paper will begin charging for access to its website, according to people familiar with internal deliberations. After a year of debate inside the paper, the choice has been between a Wall Street Journal-type pay wall and the metered system in which readers can sample a certain number of free articles before being asked to subscribe. The Times seems to have settled on the metered system. The decision to go paid is monumental for the Times, and culminates a yearlong debate that grew contentious, people close to the talks say. Hanging over the deliberations is the fact that the Times' last experience with pay walls, TimesSelect, was deeply unsatisfying and exposed a rift between Sulzberger and his roster of A-list columnists, particularly Tom Friedman and Maureen Dowd, who grew frustrated at their dramatic fall-off in online readership. The argument for remaining free was based on the belief that nytimes.com is growing into an English-language global newspaper of record, with a vast audience — 20 million unique readers — that would prove lucrative as web advertising matured. But with the painful declines in advertising brought on by last year's financial crisis, the argument that online advertising might never grow big enough to sustain the paper's high-cost, ambitious journalism — gained more weight."
Programming

Dumbing Down Programming? 578

RunRevKev writes "The unveiling of Revolution 4.0 has sparked a debate on ZDNet about whether programming is being dumbed down. The new version of the software uses an English-syntax that requires 90 per cent less code than traditional languages. A descendant of Apple's Hypercard, Rev 4 is set to '...empower people who would never have attempted programming to create successful applications.' ZDNet reports that 'One might reasonably hope that this product inspires students in the appropriate way and gets them more interested in programming.'"

Comment Why are you giving them the ability to screw up? (Score 1) 932

Seriously dude, after the second time you should have removed their admin or power user rights and given them a standard user account. Then install a decent antivirus that you can prevent them from changing the settings on and force daily virus/malware scans. Also, once the account is setup the way they like it, login as an admin and create a backup of their profile... or use any number of free backup solutions to create nightly backups and/or create nightly/daily restore points.

I hate to tell you this, but knowing what you know about how they use their computer, it's YOUR fault that they keep having this problem. 99% of the time you can prevent bad users from creating these problems or at least make the recovery a heck of a lot easier on yourself.

Buy a sysadmin for dummies book or something, learn a little about backups and malware/virus prevention. Learn to tell your users that it's for their own good(as well as yours). And if they don't like it, tell them to ask somebody else for help(a little harder with family, but still VERY effective to get your point accross).

Security

Easing the Job of Family Tech Support? 932

DarkDevil writes "Ever since I was introduced to computers at a very young age, I've been the resident tech support for a household of 7 users. I've been in a cycle for the last ~8 years where something happens to my parents' computer, I spend a week or two trying to non-destructively fix the problem (and try to explain to the users what caused it and how to avoid it), and then if it's not easily fixed I'll reformat and start from scratch. Most often, the level of infection warrants a reformat, which usually ends up taking even more time to get the computer back to how my parents know how to use it. 4-8 months later, it happens again. Recently, I found ~380 instances of malware and 6 viruses. I only realized something was wrong with their computer after it slowed down the entire network whenever anyone used it. My question for Slashdot is: are there any resources out there that explain computer viruses, malware, adware, and general safe computer practices to non-technical people in an easy-to-digest format? The security flaws in my house are 9, 26, and ~50 years old, with no technical background aside from surfing the internet. Something in video format would be ideal as they are perfectly happy with our current arrangement and so it'll be hard to get them reading pages and pages of technical papers."
Earth

GPS Receiver Noise Can Be Used To Detect Snow Depth 51

cremeglace writes "Scientists at the University of Colorado at Boulder have found a use for GPS besides finding restaurants or the occasional road-that-doesn't-exist: it can be used to measure snow depth. The new technique, which takes advantage of distortions of the GPS signal after it reflects off the snowpack, may potentially improve weather forecasts by allowing meteorologists to track snowfall patterns. ScienceNOW has the story, which one geophysicist describes as 'a classical case of one person's noise becoming another person's signal.'"
Businesses

AU Goverment To Break Up Telstra; Filtering News 144

benz001 writes "The Minister who has pushed the ridiculous broadband filter plan has at least won a few brownie points with yesterday's press conference, in which he promised to force Telstra to split its network and wholesale businesses. Australia's largest ISP, and the country's main infrastructure owner, will be given a chance to implement the structural separation voluntarily; if it does not, the Government will step in with legislation. Here is the Minister's official press release." And speaking of the filtering program, reader smash writes "After several years of debate and electioneering, some statistics on the Australian national web filtering effort have been disclosed. Apparently, the typical Aussie web surfer is 70 times more likely to win the national lotto than stumble across a blocked page. Additionally, despite the claim that the main aim of the filter is to block child pornography, only 313 of the 977 total sites blocked is on the basis of child porn. At $40M AU so far in taxpayers funds, the cost so far is around $40,900 per blocked URL. Government efficiency at work..."
Government

SSN Overlap With Micronesia Causes Trouble For Woman 494

stevel writes "Holly Ramer, who lives in Concord, NH, has never been to the Federated States of Micronesia, but debt collectors dun her mercilessly for unpaid loans taken out by a small business owner in that Pacific island nation. Why? Micronesia and other countries in the region have their own Social Security Administrations which gave out numbers to residents applying for US disaster relief loans. The catch is that the Micronesian SSNs have fewer digits than the nine-digit US version, and when credit bureaus entered these into their database, they padded them out with zeros on the front. These numbers then matched innocent US citizens with SSNs beginning with zeroes, as many in northern New England do. The credit bureaus say to call the Social Security Administration, the SSA says call the credit bureaus, the FTC says they can't help, and nobody is taking responsibility for the confusion."
Operating Systems

Behind Menuet, an OS Written Entirely In Assembly 419

angry tapir writes "MenuetOS is an operating system written entirely in assembly language. As a result it's extremely quick and compact (it can even fit on a floppy disk, despite having a GUI). It can run Quake. Two of the developers behind MenuetOS took time out to talk about what inspired them to undertake the daunting task of writing the operating system, the current state of Menuet and future plans for it."
The Courts

Arizona Judge Tells Sheriff "Reveal Password Or Face Contempt" 624

An anonymous reader writes "Four days ago, deputies from the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office in Arizona conducted a raid against the county government building hosting computers for a law enforcement database. After threatening to arrest county employees who would stop them, the officers proceeded to secure the room and promptly changed passwords on many of the servers. In a hearing on Friday, a Superior Court judge threatened to hold members of the Sheriff's Office in contempt if they did not reveal the passwords by next Wednesday. Following this, the Sheriff's Office claimed to be conducting an investigation against other Superior Court judges. Courts have asked for passwords before, but never under conditions like this."
Sci-Fi

Battlestar Galactica Feature Film Confirmed 342

Dave Knott writes "Entertainment Weekly reports that Universal Pictures has confirmed rumours of a Battlestar Galactica feature film. Directed by Bryan Singer, and co-produced by original series creator Glen Larson, the new movie will not be related to the recently concluded SyFy Network series. Rather, it will be a 'complete re-imagining of the sci-fi lore that was invented by Larson back in the '70s.'"

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