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Security

Submission + - Vista more secure than Mac OS X

Submitted by myfootsmells
myfootsmells writes: Vista more secure than Mac OS X. In a recent interview Dino Dai Zovi, the New York-based security researcher who took home $10,000 in a highly-publicized MacBook Pro hijack has declared the code quality, at least in terms of security, to be much better overall in Vista than Mac OS X 10.4. and praises Microsoft's Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) at making this possible suggesting more vendors follow their lead.
Biotech

Submission + - Are heart attack victems really dead?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Consider someone who has just died of a heart attack. His organs are intact, he hasn't lost blood. All that's happened is his heart has stopped beating — the definition of "clinical death" — and his brain has shut down to conserve oxygen. But what has actually died? As recently as 1993, when Dr. Sherwin Nuland wrote the best seller "How We Die," the conventional answer was that it was his cells that had died. The patient couldn't be revived because the tissues of his brain and heart had suffered irreversible damage from lack of oxygen. This process was understood to begin after just four or five minutes. If the patient doesn't receive cardiopulmonary resuscitation within that time, and if his heart can't be restarted soon thereafter, he is unlikely to recover. That dogma went unquestioned until researchers actually looked at oxygen-starved heart cells under a microscope. What they saw amazed them, according to Dr. Lance Becker, an authority on emergency medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. "After one hour," he says, "we couldn't see evidence the cells had died. We thought we'd done something wrong." In fact, cells cut off from their blood supply died only hours later. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18368186/site/newsweek ?GT1=9951
Education

Submission + - Software Architect skills

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I would like to ask the fellow Slasdot readers what, based on their experience, are the skills needed to become a Software Architect. I come from a programming background, have a CS degree, and would like to progress into an architectural role. What are the "required" skills, technologies to know or knowledge in general needed for a Software Architect type of role? Any courses or formal training? What kind of tasks can help prepare for the job?
Patents

Submission + - Microsoft infringing on AT&T patent, only in U

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) sided with Microsoft in a patent fight with AT&T. Acknowledging that Microsoft infringed on a patent, SCOTUS says AT&T is only entitled to damages based on Windows sold in the US. Story link:

Feed A tribute to Jim Gray (theregister.com)

From feed by registerfeed
Lost, but not forgotten

As we post this, Jim Gray has been missing for three months. It now seems very unlikely that he is still alive, although his family has not given up hope.
Software

Submission + - OpenOffice vs MS Office 2007, a sad day for OO

Submitted by
NexTechNews
NexTechNews writes: "With advocates of OpenSource bashing on Microsoft Office 2007 for its high price tag and supposed bloatedness, one blogger decided to take the plunge and put the latest from Microsoft and the Latest from OpenOffice and put the 2 systems to the test. The most astonishing test was probably the simplest possible, just opening up some OOXML and ODF format files.

The result though might put some opensource viewers to shame as Microsoft Office not only opened the files 5 times faster than the opensource counterpart, it also managed to use 4 times LESS memory than open office 2.2 did. The reviews show that OpenOffice has definitly made leaps and bounds since its previous versions, but its in no way ready to outperform MS Office 2007.

This comes at a critical time as many offices are deciding whether the upgrade to MS office is worthwhile when free alternatives exist. But the review shows what many don't see, while office integrates a new ribbon and may look like its bloated microsoft managed to keep performance leaps ahead of its opensource competitor, while still including a rich UI with new things like the Citation Manager that OpenOffice 2.2 just flat out doesn't have a counterpart for."
Linux Business

Submission + - Qantas ditches Linux for AIX

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Australia's No. 1 airline Qantas will shift their underlying platform running its internal finance systems from Linux to IBM's AIX next month as part of a wide-ranging technology transformation project. "We're moving from a Linux platform to an IBM AIX environment — we did that to address some stability issues we were having", said Suzanne Young, Qantas group general manager for finance improvement and segmentation. The decision was made last year, as part of the planning for the rollout.
Biotech

Submission + - Vitamin D deficiency behind many Western cancers?

Submitted by twilight30
twilight30 writes: Today's Globe and Mail is reporting that 'research into vitamin D is suggesting a heretical notion: that cancers and other disorders in rich countries aren't caused mainly by pollutants but by a vitamin deficiency known to be less acute or even non-existent in poor nations.

In June, U.S. researchers will announce the first direct link between cancer prevention and the sunshine vitamin. Their results are nothing short of astounding. A four-year clinical trial involving 1,200 women found those taking the vitamin had about a 60-per-cent reduction in cancer incidence, compared with those who didn't take it, a drop so large — twice the impact on cancer attributed to smoking — it almost looks like a typographical error. And in an era of pricey medical advances, the reduction seems even more remarkable because it was achieved with an over-the-counter supplement costing pennies a day.

One of the researchers who made the discovery, professor of medicine Robert Heaney of Creighton University in Nebraska, says vitamin D deficiency is showing up in so many illnesses besides cancer that nearly all disease figures in Canada and the U.S. will need to be re-evaluated. "We don't really know what the status of chronic disease is in the North American population," he said, "until we normalize vitamin D status." '
Security

Submission + - Weak GMail Security

Submitted by
Martins
Martins writes: "About a year ago, I was sent an invite to GMail to my email account at the time at Telus. I set the account up but didn't use it immediately. A month later, I changed my ISP and email to Shaw. I then tried to get into GMail but had forgotten my password. I clicked on the appropriate link, and instead of asking me the security question as I'd expected, GMail emailed my password to my old Telus account, which had since been registered by someone else. I've tried contacting Google support to get my account back, even providing them with the original invite email that my friend had sent to me. However, I get back one or two form replies stating that they cannot help me because I don't have the received invite email — the one that has been appropriated by the user @ telus.net. After the form reply, Google tech support ignores my emails. This seems to me to be a huge security risk, what with the transiency of email accounts, to have a forgotten password automatically emailed without a verifying security question first. I was also hoping for better technical support from Google. I don't think my expectations are that unrealistic."
Programming

Submission + - Open Source alternative to Java/Flash/Silverlight

Submitted by dgym
dgym writes: Having applications that can be deployed on the net and run either in a browser or from a standalone player is an old idea, but still not one that has been done really well.
Java is one solution, but for various reasons hasn't attained ubiquity. Now that it is being open sourced it might find itself on more platforms, but it still may be too big for some devices, and too slow to start up to not be annoying.
Flash is geared towards video and animation, but can also lend itself to RIAs and it is certainly a very popular plugin. However, like any closed standard, it is only available on the platforms Adobe decide to support.
Silverlight might be a better platform for RIAs from a technical perspective, but is otherwise in the same position as Flash (only with even fewer platforms).

So why are there so many poor choices for such a simple problem? After all the requirements for developing applications are rather low:
  • A sand boxed virtual machine for running client side code.
  • A means to display information, i.e. graphics drawing primitives.
  • Event handling for user input.
  • Networking back to the originating server.
Can we not have an open standard for these, and open source plugins implementing it? The "virtual machine" could either be defined in terms of a language (e.g. ECMAScript), or be a true byte code engine such as Parrot or Mono. The graphics are straight forward, and using a cross platform library such as Cairo would help make these plugins extremely portable. Networking is almost trivial, although being able to make HTTP requests using the browser's proxy settings would be an important consideration.

The need is there, where is the open standard?

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