285383
submission
140Mandak262Jamuna writes:
Cnet is reporting a new drug delivery mechanism adapted from ink jet printers by HP.
The article says, "The company is licensing a medical patch it has developed to Ireland's Crospon that potentially can replace hypodermic needles or pills for delivering vaccines or other types of medication to patients. The patch contains up to 90,000 microneedles per square inch, microprocessors and a thermal unit."
I remember inkjet printer works by heating the ink, so much so that it is ejected in an micro explosion from the nozzle. I wonder how many drugs can still be potent after being subjected to that kind of heat and pressure. Still it could turn out to be useful mechanism for some drugs. But wait till the refurbished medicine cartridge makers to enter the market if you want it at a cheaper price. ;-)
273957
submission
140Mandak262Jamuna writes:
Once upon a time, Google was the new kid on the block in the search engine arena. Then it became the big kahuna of that area. There was a time when using google as a verb would have brought a smile. But now every body and his brother and even the prim and proper, stiff upper lip and what not types like the Deputy Attorney General Ronald Smetana are using it as a verb. The quotes have been dropped, the capitalization still persists as some vestigial token acknowledging it as a neologism.
Already a number of dictionaries define google as a plain English word. If OED or some such big name dictionary includes it, would Google lose its trademark? Does Google have lawyers who assiduously take steps to protect its trademark and not allow it to become a generic word to mean "search the internet"? Didn't Xerox lose its trademark or came close to losing it? Imagine a world where Microsoft Live could be branded as "Microsoft Live Google"!
241521
submission
140Mandak262Jamuna writes:
Microsoft is planning a version of
Works (its stripped down office package) that is ad supported . Works is usually part of the crapware preinstalled by many OEM vendors. Though it is supposed to sell for 40$ or so, I don't know anyone who bought MS-Works.
There is this ambiguous statement in the article, "Melissa Stern, Sr Product Manager for Microsoft, said the program will display advertisements when Works is being used online or off. The ads will be based on what the users are doing with the software, not the content they might be typing into a word processor."
Looks like MSFT believes that users will be using the word processor to do other things than typing stuff in it.
235917
submission
140Mandak262Jamuna writes:
In the latest book, The Deathly Hallows by JKR I came across a very interesting passage. Don't worry, this is not a spoiler. It does not reveal any plot details.
"You don't understand, Harry, nobody could understand unless they have lived with the goblins. To a goblin, the rightful and true master of any object is its maker, not the purchaser. All goblin-made objects are, in goblin eyes, rightfully theirs."
"But if it was bought — "
" — then they would consider it rented by one who had paid the money. They have, however, great difficulty with the idea of goblin-made objects passing from wizard to wizard. [snip] I believe
he thinks, as do the fiercest of his kind, that it ought to have been returned to the goblins once the original purchaser died. They consider our habit of keeping goblin-made objects, passing them from wizard to wizard without further payment, little more than theft."
I thought it is remarkably similar to the way a slashdotter would describe the mind set of *IAA people about CDs and DVDs! Has JKR expressed any opinion about *IAA and its tactics?
213603
submission
140Mandak262Jamuna writes:
Electric motors built into the hubs of car wheels can improve the efficiency of electric/hybrid vehicles, according to IEEE Spectrum.
The CEO of the company making such wheel-hub motors plugs thus:
A motor housed inside a wheel hub can shunt up to 96 percent of the torque it generates directly to the patch of tire that touches the road, With a conventional drive train, roughly 20 percent of the power generated by the motor is lost to friction.
Hype and plugging aside, the company has actually built two buses that can run for 1 hour without using the diesels. It has two electric motors built into the hubs and has some pretty heavy duty batteries. In the stop-and-go city traffic the regenerative braking gives big boost to the efficiency. Still, these buses cost 250 K$ more each, and they save some 20 K liters of diesel a year or some 60 K$ a year.
IANAFinExprt but it looks like it is cost effective if the useful life of the vehicle is more than
5 years and we can assume faster than inflation rise of gas/diesel prices.
194659
submission
140Mandak262Jamuna writes:
Apple says you need a iTunes account to use iPhone according to PC world . The article says:
The move will allow Apple to create its own billing relationship with iPhone customers, rather than collecting payments for any iTunes purchases they make via the mobile operator.
"It would be naive to imagine that Apple wouldn't leverage iTunes with iPhone," said Emma Mohr-McClune, senior analyst for wireless services in Europe at Current Analysis Inc.
Dont know what I hate more. Leveraging a near monopoly position in one area to muscle into other areas and reduce competition? Or the cell phone companies who charge an arm and length for trivial services like text messaging? Hope MSFT, AAPL and all the cellphone companies, *IAA and cable/sattelite providers will all fight an internecine battle to death. No it is not hope, it is a dream.
122557
submission
140Mandak262Jamuna writes:
Before you break out the champaigne bottles, please note the story is about Indian telcos. According to
The Economist , the government put up a pool of money to subsidize expansion of mobile phones to rural India and invited bids from the mobile phone companies. Most companies are bidding zero, and one negative!.
"But something rather odd happened in India: in 38 of the 81 regions on offer, many mobile operators bid zero. In other words, they asked for no subsidies at all. In 15 regions, India's biggest operator, Bharti Airtel, even offered to pay. As a result, barely one-quarter of the 40 billion rupees ($920m) available in subsidies is likely to be allocated." says the article. The article says the companies will still benefit by the subsidy because atleast some of the infrastructure will be paid for by the pool funded by Universal Service Funds, a kind of tax on mobile phone service elsewhere.
The article goes further to say that now the Governments of these devloping nations like Chile, India, Brazil etc are looking to subsidize/build district level (regions the size of counties in USA) wi-fi broadband. Contrast this with what the telcos are doing to rural America. They are arm-twisting the State governments to prohibit (slashdot) municipalities and rural counties from building WiFi networks to serve their communities.
113305
submission
140Mandak262Jamuna writes:
IIT Bombay, one of the top Indian engineering schools, is restricting the internet access to its students, according to the BBC reports. It also reports that access restrictions has been in place in IIT Madras for more than a year now.
The restriction is simply cut off ALL internet access at night from the dorms. The school claims the 24/7/365 internet access is hampering academic performance, personality development and extra curricular activities. Though these are the "official" reasons, it appears there are other reasons too. Mr Prakash Gopalan, the Dean of Student Affairs, says, "one only had to look at the hard drive of any of the students' computers to see that bad content dominated over good." The definition of good and bad are left as an exercise to the reader.
IIT-Delhi is watching Bombay. Kanpur and Karaghpur say that they will leave it to the students to practice prudent self restraint.
110607
submission
140Mandak262Jamuna writes:
R2D2 is going to collect mail to commomerate the 30th anniversary of the release of star wars. USPS is also releasing a stamp to commomerate the event. USPS spokeswoman Anita T Bizzotto (yeah, that is the name, not Bizzare) said "It's a little teaser for the upcoming announcement and we decided to have a little fun with it,". As long as postal employees dont bring their light sabres to work ...
109085
submission
140Mandak262Jamuna writes:
Lenovo has agreed to install MSN search toolbar as default search engine. The article also says more "Microsoft plans to announce more such partnerships in the coming months and has several in the works, Osmer said, declining to specify. Microsoft also may start packaging its search tool bar with some of its software downloads, he said."
Interestingly, compared to the last time when rammed Internet Explorer down the throat of all customers and vendors, this time the vendors seem to understand the real benefit of being "default browser" or "default search engine." The article says that Dell demanded its pound of flesh to install MSN as the default search engine.
I think the landscape (should have made a creative pun with netscape here) has changed a lot since the last browser war. Vendors know the deal. Customers seem to be more informed. Atleast in some circles people are noticing the deletrious effects of vendor lock. It is real or it is just an illusion created by the herd moving from one vendor lock to a different vendor lock? In this case from MSFT to GOOG?
103688
submission
140Mandak262Jamuna writes:
US Dept of Transportation has banned or atleast throttling back the upgrades to Vista, Office2007 and IE7.
DOT chief technology officer Tim Schmidt says the Transportation Department hasn't ruled out upgrading its computers to Windows Vista if all of its concerns about the new operating system — the business version of which was launched late last year — can be resolved. "We have more confidence in Microsoft than we would have 10 years ago," says Schmidt. "But it always makes sense to look at the security implications, the value back to the customer, and those kind of issues."
To me it looks more like a ploy to wangle a better price from MSFT than a serious attempt to break the vendor lock and move to a truly interoperable Info System. Even then, here is a Govt bureaucrat who is trying to save money instead of finding ways to waste it. So let me propose three cheers to Mr Schmidt on that account alone.
32267
submission
140Mandak262Jamuna writes:
Vanguard mutual fund is using a two step login process, where the user gives the username, and a password page previously customized by the user appears. Defeating this would require the phishing site to present a fake login screen, accept the user name, present it to Vanguard and fetch the customized password screen and present it to the potential victim. I dont know if they have any more secret technology to thwart this.
Yahoo is trying to promote an idea called sign in seal to help its users spot phish more easily. It is a cookie based system with a cached image in Yahoo servers that appears on the log in screen. To defeat it the phishing site has to retrieve the cookie from the user and present it to a genuine yahoo login server and fetch the sign-in seal, and then present it to the victim. Dont know how easy/tough it would be.
I think there is a mathematical proof somewhere that a true man in the middle phish attack could not be thwarted at all. But one simple thing that comes to my simple mind is to use tracert to make sure that the packets do not go to/through strange territories.
Please dont get me wrong. Atleast Yahoo and Vanguard are thinking about phish attacks. Most other companies, sadly, still present a simple username password screen. Schwab, two of my banks, Gmail, Citicards, Vonage... all of them are using easily spoofable login screens. What would happen when the phishers graduate to phoned phishes with spoofed caller id using VOIP?
My question to /.tters is, "what can these financial companies do to help the general public spot phishes more easily?"
13551
submission
140Mandak262Jamuna writes:
Security Focus and another site Heise Security UK are reporting that the much publicized Firefox flaw is really not a flaw at all and that the whole thing is a joke.
It is quoting Mozilla developer blogs
The presentation was intended mainly as a joke, Spiegelmock said in the statement, in which he apologized.
"The main purpose of our talk was to be humorous," the 19-year-old researcher said in the statement. "As part of our talk we mentioned that there was a previously known Firefox vulnerability that could result in a stack overflow ending up in remote code execution. However, the code we presented did not in fact do this, and I personally have not gotten it to result in code execution, nor do I know of anyone who has."
Could we get a slashdotter who reads Mozilla developer blogs to confirm it? Security hole claimed without proof, reported without verification ...
10807
submission
140Mandak262Jamuna writes:
Microsoft not only released a patch for the FairUse4WM hack extremely fast and out of cycle,
but it is going after the developer of FairUse4WM. The claim, as far as I can tell, is "No one can be this clever. So you must have stolen our source code." Can such a logic be sustained in a court? Is it any different from Intelligent Design supporters arguing, "We can't figure out how this. So there must be an intelligent designer".
Further, the article says that "Microsoft realised from the start that its DRM code would be a prime target for hackers so it designed the code to make security updates far easier to develop than is the case with Internet Explorer, for example." But everyone and his brother knows that IE has been attracting hackers like honey attracts ants, and it has always been claiming that IE gets attacked more than other software. Then what possible excuse it can come up with for not patching IE as fast as it did WMP?
8717
submission
140Mandak262Jamuna writes:
Why people managing some hot software like Firefox would select such a dumb logo?
Will join Chevy Nova and other such inaptly named/logoed ideas?
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=34 574
