Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Fight...for your right.... (Score 1) 420

Not that I agree with the idea that it's a mental illness, but gender dysphoria is an illness according to the DSM-IV: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_identity_disorder#Diagnostic_Criteria

So, in the US, you're 'ill' too. In fact, it was only recently that the people who do the DSM realized that homosexuality was not an illness.

Comment Re:So, basically the parents are screwed? (Score 1) 420

The problem with this approach is that the students are then spoon-fed their sources. Giving them an assignment with a pre-approved list of sites takes away the part where they have to actually dig for information.

I don't think this is really a problem. For example, when I was in grade/middle school the internet didn't exist as it does today. We were supposed to do research papers on various topics (specifically, I wanted to be a vet at the time, so I was doing one on the health of cats).

I had access to the complete resources of our school library. This was a pre-approved list, and I (still) had to dig for information. When you're 12, you really don't have the critical thinking faculties to determine what is a good and bad resource. Librarians have had lots of training, supposedly they're good at it.

In my mind, having a whitelist is the best possible solution for institutions like grade/middle schools. It's exactly like the librarian model, and would prevent most abuses.

Comment Re:Am I missing something? (Score 4, Insightful) 266

No, this is not what SSL is for at all. SSL you have a party you wish to communicate with, but an insecure channel.

Here, you don't want to communicate anything useful to anyone. This is more a privacy preserving data mining problem. It goes something like this:

I have a long list of secret numbers 1...n. I do something to these numbers, so that Google doesn't know what they are, and then I send them to Google. Next, I want to know how many numbers are larger than, say k. So, I ask Google, but in a clever way, so that Google doesn't know what I'm asking.

Google then tells me how many of my original numbers were larger than k. However, Google doesn't know my original numbers, and they don't know what question I asked. There needs to be some theoretical mapping that preserves this privacy, but still allows the data mining to occur.

Graphics

Larrabee ISA Revealed 196

David Greene writes "Intel has released information on Larrabee's ISA. Far more than an instruction set for graphics, Larrabee's ISA provides x86 users with a vector architecture reminiscent of the top supercomputers of the late 1990s and early 2000s. '... Intel has also been applying additional transistors in a different way — by adding more cores. This approach has the great advantage that, given software that can parallelize across many such cores, performance can scale nearly linearly as more and more cores get packed onto chips in the future. Larrabee takes this approach to its logical conclusion, with lots of power-efficient in-order cores clocked at the power/performance sweet spot. Furthermore, these cores are optimized for running not single-threaded scalar code, but rather multiple threads of streaming vector code, with both the threads and the vector units further extending the benefits of parallelization.' Things are going to get interesting."

Comment Re:47% (Score 1) 1038

Who cares how much of earth is covered with water? I didn't know how much (other than that it was >60% or so), and I'm going to graduate with an engineering degree in May. I know about science, but I don't know random facts about Earth. Does that make me illiterate?

No, I'm more concerned with concepts. For example, I recently shared with my girlfriend why metal is so much 'colder' than plastic (i.e. they're both the same temperature, but metal conducts the heat away from your hand much faster). She doesn't need to know ANY of the thermal conduction constants for metals or plastics to know the concepts. Giving people the idea that earth is 'mostly covered' with water is more important than giving them the exact number.

Government

White House Ditches YouTube 204

An anonymous reader writes to tell us that in an apparent response to privacy complaints, the White House has quietly moved off of YouTube as a method for serving the President's weekly video address. Choosing instead to use a Flash-based solution and Akamai's content delivery network, this comes just days after YouTube began to roll out their own new policies regarding privacy of visitors.

Comment Re:Alternatives (Score 2, Insightful) 208

Check to see if the URL to the site begins with http:/// [http] before you login. If it does, and it's displaying a padlock icon (suggesting that it is 'secure'), then you're being attacked. Really, you should already be wary when a site asks you for login information over HTTP rather than HTTPS.

Even this doesn't work. Legitimate banks do this (http://www.usbank.com is one, who I've banked with in some fashion since I had a net worth of over $50). Note that after you type your username in, you're taken to a secure page.

Comment Re:NSF REU (Score 1) 87

I have been employed by the REU program doing research since August 2007, and I've had a blast. I've learned a lot about how to do research, written a paper, and had a lot to talk about on my graduate school applications.

I highly recommend the program to anyone interested. If you can find a professor who is willing to take you on and really teach you, it can be a life changing experience. It was for me.

Comment Re:1 question (Score 4, Interesting) 488

Amarok 2 does not have support for an equalizer, because Phonon (KDE4's media backend) does not have equalizer support. I have seen no timeline which indicates that there are even plans to add equalizer support to Phonon (although, presumably I'm not the only one missing this feature).

A google search of "phonon equalizer" yields nothing of any value.

Does anyone know if there will be an equalizer for phonon?

Comment 32MB On Disk Cache (Score 3, Interesting) 454

I was thinking about this the other day, but, does the 32MB on disk cache really matter?

Think of it this way: the Linux kernel does disk caching with my free RAM (which I generally have more than 32MB of) according to some reasonable locality scheme (LRU or something).

If the HDD does the same caching according to nearly the same principles, won't the data on the disk cache nearly always be a subset of the disk cached in RAM? Meaning: doesn't the disk cache have no effect whatsoever?

I'm genuinely interested in an answer to this question, even if it is a little OT. Please burn a little karma for me :)

Networking

Best FOSS Active Directory Alternative? 409

danboid writes "I'm an IT technician at a large school near Manchester, England. We currently have two separate networks (one for pupils, one for staff) each with its own Windows Server 2003 Active Directory box handling authentication and storing users' files. We're planning on restructuring the network soon and we'd like to be able to replace the two aging AD servers with a single, more powerful Linux server running an open source OpenLDAP implementation. The main contenders for this purpose seem to be Fedora Directory Server, OpenDS, and Apache Directory Server; but I've been unable to find meaningful comparisons among the three. I'd like to hear which solution Slashdot readers recommend. What is your experience with ease of implementation / maintenance? Any stories of similar (un)successful migrations? Any other tips for an organization wanting to drop AD for a FOSS equivalent?"

Slashdot Top Deals

egrep -n '^[a-z].*\(' $ | sort -t':' +2.0

Working...