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Programming

Submission + - Want to be a computer scientist? Forget maths (itwire.com.au)

Submitted by
Coryoth
Coryoth writes: "A new book is trying to claim that computer science is better off without maths. The author claims that early computing pioneers such as Von Neumann and Alan Turing imposed their pure mathematics background on the field, and that this has hobbled computer science ever since. He rejects the idea of algorithms as a good way to think about software. Can you really do computer science well without mathematics? And would you want to?"
Editorial

Submission + - MIT Professor: Who Cares About Global Warming?

Submitted by Jomama
Jomama writes: Noted climate expert Richard S. Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology, writes in a recent Newsweek article that the global warming debate is irrelevant because global warming is actually a good thing that has naturally occured throughout the Earth's history. From the article:

Looking back on the earth's climate history, it's apparent that there's no such thing as an optimal temperature — a climate at which everything is just right. The current alarm rests on the false assumption not only that we live in a perfect world, temperaturewise, but also that our warming forecasts for the year 2040 are somehow more reliable than the weatherman's forecast for next week.
Novell

Submission + - openSUSE Hobbled by Microsoft Patents

Submitted by
kripkenstein
kripkenstein writes: "openSUSE 10.2 no longer enables ClearType (which improves the appearance of fonts). The reason given on the openSUSE mailing list for not enabling it is:

Note that this feature is covered by several Microsoft patents and should not be activated in any default build of the library.
As reported on and discussed here and here, this matter may be connected to the Microsoft-Novell deal. If so, Novell should have received a license for the Microsoft patents, assuming the deal covered all relevant patents. Does the license therefore extend only to SUSE, but not openSUSE?"

Feed Verizon rolling out G-PON technology to boost FiOS speeds (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed

Filed under: HDTV, Home Entertainment, Networking

In Verizon's never-ending quest to continue bumping the bandwidth to the four or five lucky customers that actually have access to its FTTH network, the firm is planning to implement a new technology which will hopefully increase the speed of FiOS fiber-to-the-premises links "by four to eight times." Of course we jest about the amount of you oh-so-fortunate ones that can actually get ahold of such speedy luxuries, but Verizon is looking to Alcatel-Lucent to help with the forthcoming gigabit passive optical network (G-PON), which is slated to "increase the aggregate broadband speeds on Verizon's FTTP systems by four times downstream to the customer, and by eight times upstream back to the Internet." The outfit also stated that it would "continue deploying the broadband passive optical network (B-PON)" that it has been using since 2004, and took a moment to boast about "how simple" upgrading FiOS actually was. Still, the vast majority of you won't even be in the general vicinity necessary to acquire the newfangled G-PON niceties, but the soon-to-be-celebrating town of Lewisville, Texas can keep an eye on Q2 of this year, while folks in Kirklyn, Pennsylvania should have it sometime "over the summer."

[Thanks, Jim V.]

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BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD A new documentary series. Be part of the transformation as it happens in real-time

Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!
Toys

Submission + - Mileage Maniacs

Submitted by WY
WY writes: Bloomberg reports in this article about the Japanese hybrid car hackers: "Toyota Motor Corp. says its Prius gasoline-electric hybrid car gets about 55 miles to the gallon, making it one of the most fuel-efficient cars on the road. That's not good enough for Takashi Toya." He managed to reach as high as 115 MPG. He "is one of about 100 nenpimania, Japanese for 'ileage maniacs,'."
Education

Is The Term Paper Dead? 444

Posted by kdawson from the drop-and-give-me-5,000-words dept.
Reader gyges writes in to tell us that the Washington Post has picked up a piece he wrote about cut-and-paste plagiarism: "Plagiarism today is heavily invested with morality surrounding intellectual honesty. That is laudable. But truly distinguishing plagiarism is a matter of intent. Did I mean to copy, was it accidental (a trick of memory), was it polygenesis[?] ... Young people today are simply too far ahead of anything schools might do to curb their recycling efforts. Beyond simply selling used term papers online, Web sites such as StudentofFortune.com allow students to post specific questions and pay for answers." The author argues that in the era we're entering, schools need to rely far less on term papers in assessing students.
Portables (Apple)

Submission + - Intel Mac Performance Comparison

Submitted by jfpoole
jfpoole writes: Primate Labs has a processor performance comparison of almost all the Intel Macs Apple's shipped over the past sixteen months (the only omission being the new Xeon-based Xserve). It's interesting to see just how little processor performance varies across the entire Intel Mac lineup (except for the quad-core Mac Pro, of course).
Software

Submission + - Gaim is being renamed to "Pidgin IM"

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: After some legal threats from AOL, the GAIM project is undergoing a name change in preperation for the 2.0 release. The project will now be known as Pidgin IM, and libgaim will now be known as libpurple, according to discussions on the GAIM project mailing lists

The new site will be located at http://www.pidgin.im/ , and the developers site is at http://developer.pidgin.im/
Security

Submission + - Firefox also vulnerable to Windows cursor exploit

Submitted by Stony Stevenson
Stony Stevenson writes: Computerworld is reporting that the unpatched Windows vulnerability involving cursor animation files that caused Microsoft to release an out-of-sequence patch on Tuesday also affects Mozilla's Firefox 2.0 browser.

From the article: "Contrary to other reports, Mozilla's Firefox 2.0 is vulnerable to attackers armed with the Windows animated (ANI) cursor exploit, a researcher said Tuesday.

Alexander Sotirov, the vulnerability researcher at Determina who discovered the ANI flaw last December and notified Microsoft of it later that month, yesterday posted a demonstration of an ANI exploit that hijacks a PC when Firefox users are conned into visiting a malicious site.

An identical attack against Firefox 2.0, however, gave Sotirov complete and total access to the PC's drive. "Since Firefox does not have a low-privilege mode, similar to the protected mode in IE, we'll be able to overwrite files as well," he said."

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