Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Submission + - HSBC tech executive fears jail time for cloud data breaches (v3.co.uk) 1

Submitted by TinTops
TinTops writes: The head of HSBC's technology services arm fears that the financial services industry is being stifled by out-dated laws in the handling of data. He believes that IT execs — who outsource their data to cloud providers which are subsequently compromised — could face jail time despite not being directly responsible for the loss.

Barry Childe said at Cloud Expo Europe: “Right now a financial services IT professional is at risk if he outsources a service elsewhere and a leak happens. There is a risk that he would potentially go to prison. There’s no get out of jail free card because he used a third party."

Submission + - Why Improbable Things Really Aren't (scientificamerican.com)

Submitted by sixoh1
sixoh1 writes: Scientific American has an excellent summary of a new book "The Improbabilty Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day" by David J. Hand. The summary offers a quick way to relate statistical math (something that's really hard to intuit) to our daily experiences with unlikely events. The simple equations here make it easier to understand that improbable things really are not so improbable, which Hand call the "Improbability Principle":

How can a huge number of opportunities occur without people realizing they are there? The law of combinations, a related strand of the Improbability Principle, points the way. It says: the number of combinations of interacting elements increases exponentially with the number of elements. The “birthday problem” is a well-known example.

Now if only we could harness this to make an infinite improbability drive!

Submission + - The JavaScript juggernaut rolls on (techworld.com.au)

Submitted by JThaddeus
JThaddeus writes: An article in TechWorld Australia summarizes the latest opinions on JavaScript from ThoughtWorks: "There is no end in sight to the rise of JavaScript... 'I think JavaScript has been seen as a serious language for the last two or three years; I think now increasingly we’re seeing JavaScript as a platform,' said Sam Newman, ThoughtWorks’ Global Innovation Lead." The article touches on new additions to JavaScript tools, techniques, and languages built on Javascript. As the fuller report (PDF) says, "The ecosystem around JavaScript as a serious application platform continues to evolve. Many interesting new tools for testing, building, and managing dependencies in both server- and client-side JavaScript applications have emerged recently."

Comment Re:Thinkpad line (Score 5, Insightful) 160

by dintech (#46045595) Attached to: Lenovo To Buy IBM's Server Business For $2.3 Billion
A public consumer buying a laptop is one thing, but I can imagine certain blue chip institutions (banks for example) will be slightly less interested in buying servers from Lenovo as opposed to HP. I have some IBM servers on order right now and there isn't usually a lot in it when deciding whether HP or IBM is better for my use case. If it was Lenovo or HP, that decision would probably only go HPs way.

Submission + - Suggestions for a Simple Media Server 1

Submitted by rueger
rueger writes: We live and breathe Netflix, but sometimes want to watch programs downloaded from the 'net. I've been carrying them downstairs on a USB stick, but would prefer to run a small media server on my Mint Linux box.

As usual, I thought this would be simple. Install a package on my PC, and use our Netgear NeoTV Max box to play stuff off of the server.

Plex was highly recommended, and installed easily, but will see some mkv files, but not others, for no obvious reason. The one file that does show up plays fine, except that subtitles don't work. And it completely refuses to see the partition full of music. A quick tour of the Plex forums suggests that making this work would take more hours than I'm prepared to spend.

Serviio looked good too, and "sees" my music, and sees the movie folders that Plex couldn't, but won't show the actual mkv files. And again, it looks like configuring the thing could consume half of my life.

So I'm asking — is there a fairly simple, works right out of the box, fairly resource friendly, media server that will just allow me to play movies that I download without a lot of headaches?

(Notes: one obvious issue is that movies and TV shows downloaded can be in a any of a dozen formats. I'd love it if the server dealt with that. Second note: Used to own Apple hardware, and don't care for it, especially iTunes. Third note: I'm also open to suggestions for a Roku style box that does Netflix well, but which will also play nicely with a media server. And if any or all of these things can also let me play streaming video off the web (like BBC Iplayer content) I'll be in heaven.)

Comment Re:Enough already (Score 1) 489

by dintech (#45935853) Attached to: Tech's Gender and Race Gap Starts In High School
You are arguing against a valid point and I'd like to know why. We are forever brainwashed with what makes any minority group of your choice special, protected and in need of expanding. If anyone tries to defend the rights of white males in such a way it's automatically treated as patriarchy or racism. Why the bigotry? What are you going to do when white men are the most oppressed group? It's already starting.
Censorship

The UK's Internet Porn Filter and Fighting Censorship Creep 234

Posted by Soulskill from the won't-somebody-think-of-the-children dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The Guardian takes the UK government's internet porn filter to task by pointing out how absurd the opt-out process is: 'Picture the scene. You're pottering about on the internet, perhaps idly looking up cake recipes, or videos of puppies learning to howl. Then the phone rings. It's your internet service provider. Actually, it's a nice lady in a telesales warehouse somewhere, employed on behalf of your service provider; let's call her Linda. Linda is calling because, thanks to David Cameron's "porn filter", you now have an "unavoidable choice", as one of 20 million British households with a broadband connection, over whether to opt in to view certain content. Linda wants to know – do you want to be able to see hardcore pornography? How about information on illegal drugs? Or gay sex, or abortion? Your call may be recorded for training and monitoring purposes. How about obscene and tasteless material? Would you like to see that? Speak up, Linda can't hear you.' The article also points out how the filter is being used as a tool for private industry to protect their profits. 'The category of "obscene content", for instance, which is blocked even on the lowest setting of BT's opt-in filtering system, covers "sites with information about illegal manipulation of electronic devices [and] distribution of software" – in other words, filesharing and music downloads, debate over which has been going on in parliament for years.'"

Submission + - UK banks hit by cyber attacks, Bank of England warns (v3.co.uk)

Submitted by DW100
DW100 writes: The much discussed threat to banks from cyber attacks was shown yet again when the Bank of England revealed that several UK banks were hit by cyber attacks over the last six months. No specifics of the incidents were revealed by it underlines the looming threats to financial firms, and be default everyone else, from the breed of cyber bad guys intent on stealing cash and causing disruption around the world.

Submission + - What kind of laptops are pre-Retina MacBook Pro users buying? (wired.com) 1

Submitted by stigmato
stigmato writes: Once upon a time the MacBook Pro line was well-regarded amongst IT professionals for their quality, performance, serviceability & upgradeability. As appealing as the new Retina displays are, I don't want a device I cannot upgrade or repair. Glued in batteries and soldered in RAM with high prices have made me look to other manufacturers again. What are you buying, /. community? System76? Dell? Old article but still rings true with the latest models. I post this from my 2010 MBP 13" with a 256GB SSD, 1TB HDD in the optical bay, 8GB (possibly 16GB soon) and a user replaced battery.

Comment Alternatives? (Score 1) 1

by dintech (#45489341) Attached to: After 15 years, community favourite Winamp is no more.
I would love to know what other options there are out there. I still use winamp and will keep it installed in its current form but would love to try some alternatives. The winamp highlights for me were:

1) Simple and quick interface on the legacy skin. I like the playlist in particular.
2) Can play old music files from the demo scene is pretty cool, even if it's support wasn't prefect (.mod, .xm, .s3m, .it).
3) Handy disk writer for quick batch converstions to .wav
4) Fast, it used to be one of the best free options for browsing audio samples on windows.
5) A huge array of plugins, most useful to me was the VST adapter that allow me to add professional audio scope visualisation for professional audio.

There have been several detractions:

1) Awful, awful bloatware and bundled crap. (No I don't want 50Mb of crap mp3s, I have my own crap...)
2) The modern skins were historically slower.
3) One of the worst EQs I have ever heard.
4) You had to mess turn off the fade in/out settings and fix the audio buffers to prevent missing bits at the beginning or end of short audio samples
5) Not so good for video, but now I'm just splitting hairs.

Slashdot Top Deals

Good day to avoid cops. Crawl to work.

Close