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Comment misleading (Score 4, Insightful) 271

by bytor4232 (#26502089) Attached to: Ubuntu's Laptop Killing Bug Fixed

The title and article summary is misleading. It shortens the life of the hard drive, not the laptop itself. Hard drives are cheap, and on most laptops as easy to swap out as the battery with screwdriver in hand.

Its not like Ubuntu is killing the motherboard or screen, its the Hard Drive.

Comment Re:I seem to prefer GNOME (Score 1) 193

by bytor4232 (#26120735) Attached to: Samba's Jeremy Allison On Linux's Future

I prefer GNOME as well, I've found GNOME with Compiz, Emerald, and AWN to be the most productive and most beautiful environment I've ever worked with. Right now I'm using the Aurora Leopard theme off off gnome-look.org.

However, it is very resource intensive, and can't run it on everything I have in service in my home. I used to run XFCE on my old Athlon/256 meg Compaq Presario 700 Laptop, but the most recent releases of Xubuntu have been using almost as much resources as GNOME/Metacity.

I've recently turned to Fluxbox. Its takes a little kung fu to get it configured just right, but it uses next to no resources, has a system tray, and has a very nice set of themes, at least the Debian/Ubuntu packages do. I don't run it on my Acer Gemstone with 2 gigs of ram, or my desktops which all have 1 gig or more, but its a good alternative for those resource limited machines.

Comment Work Experience and Certs (Score 1) 1123

by bytor4232 (#25942807) Attached to: IT Job Without a Degree?

Unless you want a job with Google or Microsoft, get out there and get working. Do anything, cut deals, get to building pcs and servers. Then, once you get some knowledge, get some MCSE tests at http://www.vue.com/ . For Linux certs, hit the http://www.brainbench.com/ site, unless you want to pay for some of the higher end certs like RHCE or LPI. Brainbench is fairly cheap, and got me my current job five years ago, where I now make 40k/yr, which is decent for where I live. I have a friend who works an hour south of me, and makes 70k/yr and doesn't have a degree.

You have to get out there. A BS in CS is nice, but your really not going to make that much more having a degree. Its all in what you know, not what classes you took.

Comment Re:Oh, get over yourself (Score 1) 556

by bytor4232 (#25909621) Attached to: Computer For a Child?

Give the guy a break, his child might very well be a prodigy. My oldest daughter has had her own computer since she was two. Sure in the beginning it was a lot of banging the keyboard and watching the pretty pretty lights, but now she is a straight A student, model citizen, top athlete, critical thinker, and top conversationalist whom I spend many hours discussing life with. She is only 8. The only thing she wants under the tree is an Eee PC. I'm so proud of her.

That being said, you could try a umpc. I have my daughter's Eee right now, and they are fairly sturdy. That being said I would consider getting a USB keyboard and mouse/trackball until your sure he doesn't destroy the thing.
Science

Nobel Prize For Medicine Awarded, Physics Soon To Follow 135

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the tis-the-season dept.
Nobel Prize season is here again, and the first award for Physiology or Medicine was split between two virologists who discovered HIV and one who demonstrated that a virus causes cervical cancer. Coming soon is the announcement for Physics. Look to the right for a chance to pit your selection wit against the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences with a poll for which scientific achievement deserves the prize. Front runners, according to Reuters, are; Andre Geim and Kostya Novoselov, discovers of graphene, Vera Rubin, provider of the best evidence yet of dark matter, and Roger Penrose and Dan Shechtman, discoverers of Penrose tilings and quasicrystals.
Security

CSRF Flaws Found On Major Websites, Including a Bank 143

Posted by kdawson from the wherever-you-look dept.
An anonymous reader sends a link to DarkReading on the recent announcement by Princeton researchers of four major Web sites on which they found exploitable cross-site request forgery vulnerabilities. The sites are the NYTimes, YouTube, Metafilter, and INGDirect. All but the NYTimes site have patched the hole. "... four major Websites susceptible to the silent-but-deadly cross-site request forgery attack — including one on INGDirect.com's site that would let an attacker transfer money out of a victim's bank account ... Bill Zeller, a PhD candidate at Princeton, says the CSRF bug that he and fellow researcher Edward Felton found on INGDirect.com represents ... 'the first example of a CSRF attack that allows money to be transferred out of a bank account that [we're] aware of.' ... CSRF is little understood in the Web development community, and it is therefore a very common vulnerability on Websites. 'It's basically wherever you look,' says [a security researcher]." Here are Zeller's Freedom to Tinker post and the research paper (PDF).
Upgrades

Steam To Begin Hosting Game Mods 81

Posted by Soulskill from the upgrades dept.
Valve made a brief announcement on Friday that they will be allowing the download of user-created game mods directly from Steam. "Once installed, these MODs will appear in your 'My Games' list and will receive automatic updates just like other games on Steam. Also, these MODs now take advantage of Steamworks, which provides stat tracking and tighter integration with the Steam community." Mods will be available for five different games to start, and more in the future.
Science

Another Way the LHC Could Self-Destruct 367

Posted by kdawson from the no-physics-whatsoever dept.
KentuckyFC writes "Just when you thought it was safe to switch on the LHC (though it won't be for a while yet), another nightmare scenario has emerged that some critics worry could cause the particle accelerator to explode. The culprit this time is not an Earth-swallowing black hole but a 'Bose supernova' in the accelerator's superfluid helium bath. Physicists have been playing with Bose Einstein Condensate (BECs) for over 10 years now. But in 2001, one group discovered that placing them in a powerful magnetic field could cause the attractive forces between atoms to become repulsive. That caused their BEC to explode in a Bose supernova — which they called a 'Bosenova,' a name that fortunately did not catch on. This was little more than a curiosity when only a microscopic blob of cold matter was involved. But superfluid liquid helium is also BEC. And physicists have suddenly remembered that the LHC is swimming in 700,000 liters of the stuff while being zapped by some of the most powerful magnetic fields on the planet. So is the LHC a Bose supernova waiting to go off? Not according to the CERN theory division, which has published its calculations that show the LHC is safe (abstract). They also point out that no other superfluid helium handling facility has mysteriously blown itself to pieces."
Music

Guitar Hero World Tour Won't Allow Copyright Infringement 92

Posted by Soulskill from the to-be-expected dept.
1Up did an interview with two of the developers for Guitar Hero: World Tour about the process of creating the game. One of the interesting things they mention is that they won't be putting up with people who use the song creation tools to make covers of existing songs. "We'll be actively monitoring the site. And, obviously, if the copyright holder complains, Activision will pull it down immediately. We can't condone people putting up covers of music. It's really there for original content." We discussed the creation tools themselves recently. Since then, Activision has announced that they'll be including a MIDI sequencer to assist with making your own tunes.
AMD

AMD Graphics Chips Could Last 10X To 100X Longer 150

Posted by kdawson from the bumping-the-solder dept.
An anonymous reader writes "According to a research report out of UCLA, released this morning, NVidia's high-lead bump packaging could last anywhere from 1/10th to 1/100th as long as AMD's advanced eutectic bump approach. (TG Daily has picked up the claim.) NVidia is currently in the midst of a $200M recall of bad GPUs, and the report suggests that the issue could be much deeper than NVidia's PR department would have us believe." The report lends credence to the strident claims of the Inquirer's Charlie Demerjian, which we discussed a month back.
Privacy

Canadian Privacy Czar Wants To Anonymize Court Records On the Web 340

Posted by samzenpus from the do-you-know-who-I-am dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The web is evil and must be stopped — because it makes public information too public. So says Canada's Privacy Commissioner. She wants to 'anonymize' court records by substituting initials for names. The Toronto Star quotes Jennifer Stodddart as saying 'The open court rule, which is extremely historically important, has now become distorted by the effect of massive search engines... Court decisions and other related documents, which contain all sorts of personal information, are now searchable worldwide, which was never intended when openness rules were devised.' All Stoddart's proposal would do is erect a minor barrier for the techno unsaavy. Researchers, reporters, geeks, and most teenagers would still be able to figure out who's who. Stoddart seems to believe only in an abstract notion of freedom and access — but only as long as not too many people use it and no one suffers. She cites the case of someone who is upset at reading the divorce case of her parents. Is Stoddart a danger or a menace? Or just clueless?"
The Internet

42% of Web Users Sneak Onto Others' Online Accounts 313

Posted by samzenpus from the what-are-you-doing-there dept.
An anonymous reader writes "In an online survey, 42 percent of Internet users admitted to logging into other people's email and social networking accounts without their knowledge. The poll doesn't ask if passwords were found, granted, or stolen — which would make for further interesting results. The write-up summarizing the results defines the respondents as part of an "educated tech-readership" and questions the ethics of logging onto someone else's account, and whether those differ depending on the person and relationship."
Science

New Insect Species Purchased On EBay 50

Posted by samzenpus from the what-a-bargain dept.
SpuriousLogic writes "A scientist who bought a fossilized insect on the web auction site eBay for £20 has discovered that it belongs to a previously unknown species of aphid. The bug has been named Mindarus harringtoni after the scientist."
Transportation

Six Questions To Ask Before Telecommuting 320

Posted by samzenpus from the will-you-be-checking-on-my-work dept.
Lucas123 writes "With gas prices 30% higher this summer over last, telecommuting is back on everyone's radar. According to a Computerworld story, however, IT and telecommuting don't have a great record of success. For example, citing negative impacts on productivity, HP ended its telecommuting policy for hundreds of workers two years ago, and this year, Intel began requiring more than half the teleworkers in its IT group to report to the office at least four days a week. So before leaping, some questions you should ask as a manager if you're considering telework include: How will you define and measure performance? Will creativity suffer? What about employees stuck in the office?"

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