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Comment No Kudos to facebook (Score 2) 227

by Tmack (#34987194) Attached to: How Facebook Responded To Tunisian Hacks
Like others have said, this is easily preventable. HTTPS. Make the http login page redirect to https, and make pages default to https and no more login stealing-by-snooping (firesheep) will work. As is, you can login via https, but all the links on the page are http. VERY annoying.

Yes, https increases CPU and bandwidth, but if you also include the benefits: reduction in staff, support, bandwidth, cpu, etc currently wasted trying to fix the resulting stolen/hijacked accounts, it would come out ahead, probably way ahead.

Tm

Comment Re:Small sample is right (Score 1) 356

by Tmack (#34869812) Attached to: Google vs. Bing — a Quasi-Empirical Study
I gave up on Bing for most searches when it repeatedly failed to find a Microsoft Knowledge base article about a fairly common problem, that was quickly returned as the top hit on google.

The one somewhat useful feature is its travel section, comparing and attempting to predict airfare. It gives a much cleaner and featureful interface than Orbitz/travelocity/expedia/etc (even though it also launches them for comparison). The price predictor thing is only somewhat accurate though, if you know what tickets to your destination generally go for, its easy to buy them when they hit the right price without bothering with it.

-Tm

Comment Re:First? What about Chattanooga TN? (Score 1) 168

by Tmack (#34713194) Attached to: South Korea Launches First Electric Bus Fleet
Not only 'lectricity, they did a bunch of the work towards Nuke power and bombs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennessee_Valley_Authority

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_Ridge,_Tennessee

With the second reactor ever built (first for continuous operation) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-10_Graphite_Reactor

-Tm

Comment Still have them on a floppy somewhere... (Score 1) 152

by Tmack (#34562850) Attached to: 20 Years of Commander Keen
Think I have them zipped up on a floppy somewhere, probably 2 floppies actually (5 and 6 were WAY larger than the others). Will have to go dig out a drive and see if they rotted too much to recover.

Ahhh keen.. wasted so much time in the drafting lab in HS playing keen (and then wolfenstein 3d, and Doom) instead of autocad...

-Tm

Submission + - Link between Magnetism, Superconductivity

Submitted by GisG
GisG writes: European and U.S. physicists this week are offering up the strongest evidence yet that magnetism is the driving force behind unconventional superconductivity. The findings by researchers from Rice University, the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids (MPI-CPfS) in Dresden, Germany, and other institutions were published online today in Nature Physics. The findings follow more than three decades of research by the team that discovered unconventional superconductivity in 1979. That breakthrough, which was led by MPI-CPfS Director Frank Steglich, preceded by seven years the more widely publicized discovery of unconventional superconductivity at high temperatures. In the latest study, the team revisited the same heavy-fermion material — a mix of cerium, copper and silicon — that was used in 1979, applying new experimental techniques and theoretical knowledge unavailable 30 years ago.
Java

Apache Resigns From the JCP Executive Committee 136

Posted by timothy from the I'll-resign-my-commission dept.
iammichael writes "The Apache Software Foundation has resigned its seat on the Java SE/EE Executive Committee due to a long dispute over the licensing restrictions placed on the TCK (test kit validating third-party Java implementations are compatible with the specification)."

Comment TFA makes no sense? (Score 1) 72

by Tmack (#34505130) Attached to: General Motors' NASA Robot On Tour

Possible automotive applications include adaptive lane-changing and adaptive cruise

How does being the "strongest/fastest/most dextrous" humanoid robot assist with such things vs a computer + servo on the automotive controls?

And wtf does this even mean:

“It allows us to do work and do it safely.side by side with astronauts or with workers here on Earth,”

TFA is confusing and very poorly written. It touts one thing, but then hints at completely different things.

-tm

Comment Samsung, 2006, demo video (Score 1) 298

by Tmack (#34490060) Attached to: A Peek At South Korea's Autonomous Robot Gun Turrets
Looks similar to the one in TFA:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkAmpMy8liQ

With kids making autonomous turrets out of paintball guns, legos and Nerf Guns, I no longer see these as new or special. I would be extremely surprised if they were not in wide use in some form already (ie: auto-hunt, but wait for human confirmation of target before firing), with many more functions than just machine gun (missiles, grenades, laser targeter, etc)

-Tm

Comment Re:Students will complain (Score 1) 419

by Tmack (#34018806) Attached to: Colleges May Start Forcing Switch To eTextbooks

Something ye forgot:

YOU CAN'T RESELL E-TEXTS. When I was in college I used to buy books for about $50 used, get my work out of it, and then sell it for $40 at the end of semester. NET COST: $10.

Now this e-text idea will prevent us from doing that. It will end-up costing MORE not less.

...until profs realized they could bump the version numbers of the text, change a few $variables in the problem sets so the answers would be a little different, and force more books to be bought ( which meant more $$ into the prof's pocket, since they typically wrote the book). Then your $90 calclueless book became a $90 monitor stand, since its out of date and no bookstore would buy it back.

-Tm
Social Networks

Of 1.2 Billion Twitter Posts, 71% Are Ignored 192

Posted by timothy from the stunning-underestimate dept.
destinyland writes "1.2 billion Twitter 'tweets' were analyzed over two months by analytics company Sysomos, who concluded that a whopping 71% of them got no reaction whatsoever — no online responses, and no Twitter 'retweets.' 'Only a small number of users actually have the ability to engage on Twitter in a significant way,' the researchers conclude, noting that just 6% of Twitter's status updates ever get retweeted (while 23% get a reply). And among those status updates, 85% have exactly one response, while only 1.53% of Twitter conversations are more than three levels deep — where a reply receives a response which then generates a second reply." I am astounded by the claim that nearly three out of ten tweets actually do get any response.

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