Oshawapilot - Slashdot User

Submission + - SOA could change the way you buy electricity (computerworld.com.au)

Submitted by

StonyandCher

on Monday October 22, 2007 @10:36PM

StonyandCher writes: "Researchers at the US Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), with IBM as a partner, have built a demonstration network called GridWise that showed how an event-driven service-oriented architecture (SOA) can be used to build a power marketplace that lets residential and commercial customers change their electricity consumption nearly in real time, based on price and other factors. During the yearlong, Energy Department-sponsored marketplace demonstration, customers spent less money on power, and utilities easily accommodated spikes in demand without affecting service levels. The marketplace ran on an IBM WebSphere Application Server at PNNL and received data in real time from various Web services about electricity's current wholesale price and most recent closing price, as well as whether those prices were trending up or down. It communicated with specialized, "smart" appliances at participants' sites via IBM-developed middleware built within what IBM calls its event-driven architecture (EDA) framework and running on the WebSphere server. The EDA middleware provided the link between the transaction-oriented marketplace and the more physical world of the controls-based appliances."

Submission + - Boot Camp Pulled for OS X 10.4 Users (macuser.com)

Submitted by RulerOf on Monday October 22, 2007 @08:17PM

RulerOf writes: In a not-so-surprising move amidst the anticipation surrounding the impending release of OS X 10.5 Leopard, Apple has pulled the Boot Camp 1.4 Beta from their web site. It will from now on presumably only be usable as a fully released product, bundled with Leopard. Of course, this doesn't leave current Boot Camp users in the dust; from the article:

"Not to worry, though: if you've used Boot Camp [...] your Windows partition should continue to work just like it [used] to. Remember, however, that Apple will ignore any problems you might encounter, and the Boot Camp utility itself will stop working."

This comes on the heels of a previous announcement at the beginning of the month, where v1.2 of Boot Camp expired on October 1st.

Submission + - Bill Gates Denied Visa to Nigeria (gizmodo.com) 1

Submitted by

Xight

on Saturday October 13, 2007 @02:43PM

Xight writes: "Gizmodo recently wrote an article about Nigeria recently denying Bill Gates a visa to travel there on his recent trip to Africa proving that money can't get you everything. Whats even more amusing is that he was at "initially denied the Microsoft kingpin's application on the premise that they required proof he would not reside in Nigeria indefinitely, causing a strain on social services and a general nuisance for immigration.". I guess those Nigerian 419 scams really do pay off for them."

Submission + - Non Windows for Dummies?

Submitted by

Oshawapilot

on Saturday October 13, 2007 @02:35PM

Oshawapilot writes: "Despite my best efforts to avoid it (Firefox, adequate spyware, virus and registry protection, etc) a relatives Windows XP machine has once again come to the point where it's unusable. This time around it decided to eat the TCP/IP stack, a problem that despite a great deal of effort to fix, has persisted to the point of being a lost cause.

Frankly I'm tired of reinstalling (or bandaging) Windows only to eventually reach this seemingly inevitable conclusion once again in the future.

That said, I'm looking for Linux alternatives. The catch is that the end user in question is by no means an OS savvy individual, so it needs to simply work — all the time, every time.

My (albeit limited) experiences with some of the Linux distro's in the past is that they work OK out of the box, but you still need to be somewhat Linux savvy in order to accomplish such seemingly simple tasks like installing new peripherals, for example.

I need a system that she could plug a new digital camera or printer she might buy into, and not have it turn into command-line hell in order to configure it and actually get it to work.

My first thought was to tell her to simply go and buy a Mac, but that's not financially in the options list at this time.

Tell me, Slashdot readers — is there a realistic option?"

Submission + - Porn Spammers Get Five Years

Submitted by

Frosty Piss

on Saturday October 13, 2007 @02:26PM

Frosty Piss writes: "Two men who sent millions of unsolicited pornographic e-mails have been sentenced to more than five years in federal prison as part of the first prosecution under the CAN-SPAM Act, U.S. Department of Justice officials said Friday. They sent millions of unsolicited e-mails, prosecutors said. During nine months in 2004, Kilbride, Schaffer and an associate transmitted more than 600,000 spam messages advertising pornographic Web sites, according to court documents."

Submission + - What bugs us on Earth gets worse in space... (go.com)

Submitted by

Ant

on Saturday October 13, 2007 @02:09PM

Ant writes: "ABC News (one print page) says space invaders have colonized the International Space Station (ISS). When astronaut Peggy Whitson moves into the orbiting laboratory today for a six-month stay, she'll have two human roommates — as well as countless ones invisible to the naked eye, from microbes that can corrode metal to germs that can cause serious infections in people. Outer space is a cold and sterile place, but spaceships are not. As the 9-year-old space station ages, it's likely to grow more micro-organisms that could pose a risk to its human residents and the station itself. Adding an extra worry, scientists have seen signs that the human immune system weakens during space trips. "Wherever man goes, microbes go," says Cheryl Nickerson of Arizona State University, who studies disease-causing micro-organisms. Most of the bugs in orbit aren't dangerous, she says, but "there's absolutely a risk ... to the crew." In a study published Tuesday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nickerson found that salmonella bacteria turned deadlier after a few weeks in space. The bacteria rode into orbit as an experiment aboard National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)'s space shuttle Discovery in 2006... Seen on Blue's News."

Submission + - Google forgets DST change.

Submitted by

Ghost-in-the-shell

on Sunday March 11, 2007 @09:50PM

Ghost-in-the-shell writes: "Looks like Google forgot to change the time on their calendar servers last night. I guess I'll be showing up to classes an hour later than normal for the next few weeks. The problems documented here is only in effect for the next three weeks until the traditional date of the DST change of early April. Partial (for privacy reasons) screen shots included."

Submission + - Vista Download Disaster

Submitted by

SkinnyGuy

on Monday March 05, 2007 @10:12AM

SkinnyGuy writes: "Downloading Windows Vista sounds like a great idea — until you actually do it. Looks like Microsoft hasn't thought out all the fine details. PC Magazine's own publisher gave it a shot and recounts his sorry tale to columnist Lance Ulanoff. Some other tales of woe appear in the associated forum."

Security Software Costs More to Renew Than Buy New 164

Posted by Zonk on Friday March 02, 2007 @02:21PM from the helping-the-consumer-choose dept.

Matt Whipp writes "In a story I wrote for PCPro, I explore a tip submitted by one of our readers. They pointed out how much more it costs to renew security software, rather than buying it new. In fact it cost less than half the price to buy it new than it does to renew the license because of heavy discounting. He feels a bit cross that, as a loyal customer, he is the one penalized. From the article: 'ZoneAlarm may have tripped up on this discount issue, but it's not alone. It highlights just how cynical companies can be in relying on customers' assumptions that a renewal should be cheaper than buying new. McAfee's Internet Security Suite costs just £24.99 with the current 50 per cent discount. However, should you be fool enough to already be a customer of McAfee, you'll have to pay £39.99 to renew your licence.'"

Submission + - Microsoft Vista, IE7 Banned By U.S. DOT

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 02, 2007 @02:07PM

An anonymous reader writes: Citing concerns over cost and compatibility, the top technology official at the federal Department of Transportation has placed a "moratorium" on all in-house computer upgrades to Microsoft's new Windows Vista operating system, as well as Internet Explorer 7 and Office 2007, according to a memo obtained Friday by InformationWeek. In a memo to his staff, DOT chief information officer Daniel Mintz says he has placed "an indefinite moratorium" on the upgrades as "there appears to be no compelling technical or business case for upgrading to these new Microsoft software products. Furthermore, there appears to be specific reasons not to upgrade."

Is Vista a Trap? 559

Posted by Zonk on Friday March 02, 2007 @01:43PM from the please-keep-ackbar-quotes-to-a-minimum dept.

logube writes "BBC has up an article about the trap of installing Vista in your existing desktop. Written by Tim Weber, a self-confessed 'sucker for technology,' this article is a good introduction to the pain and extra money required to get going with the newest version of Windows. See how you can spend an extra 130 british pounds, and still have no working webcam! Says Weber, 'It took me one day to get online. The detail is tedious and highly technical: reinstalling drivers and router firmware didn't work, but after many trial and error tweaks to Vista's TCP/IP settings, I had internet access. Once online, Creative's website told me that my sound card was a write-off. No Vista support would be forthcoming.'"

Submission + - Legal Home Media?

Submitted by

SuperCharlie

on Friday March 02, 2007 @12:14PM

SuperCharlie writes: "I am in the process of setting up a home media center where all my movies, music, etc.. can be streamed throughout my house. I think there could be a real market for this where I live and would like to take the final solution on the road in my backwoods part of the world and try to sell it to house builders for doctors, lawyers and the likes. The sticking point I am running into is the media, specifically, movies. Sure, you can stick a DVD in, share it and be on your way, but most people have libraries of movies that even a decent sized jukebox can't hold. How can I provide a *legal* digital version of a users movie collection?"

Submission + - Firefox releases update to fix critical exploit

Submitted by

MGOB

on Friday February 23, 2007 @12:06PM

MGOB writes: "Mozilla published releases 1.5.0.10/2.0.0.2 this morning to fix a critical security flaw in the Firefox web browser. The problem lies in how Firefox handles writes to the 'location.hostname' DOM property. The vulnerability allows malicious websites to manipulate authentication cookies for third-party sites. A demo/check of the issue can be found here."

Submission + - Study shows file sharing has no effect on CD sales

Submitted by

jibjibjib

on Friday February 23, 2007 @06:10AM

jibjibjib writes: "Ars Technica reports that a study by Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf, recently published in the Journal of Political Economy, shows that file sharing is not responsible for declining CD sales figures.

The study, entitled "The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales: An Empirical Analysis," claims that "a one-standard-deviation increase in file sharing reduces an album's weekly sales by a mere 368 copies, an effect that is too small to be statistically distinguishable from zero.""

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