Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Feed Techdirt: TV Exec Upset When Daughter Doesn't Want To Bring TV To College (techdirt.com)

From feed by techdirtfeed
Just about a year ago, ABC TV exec Anne Sweeney was telling people at CES that they were in the providing good content business, and she wanted to see it delivered however people wanted to watch it, on whatever device they wanted. But, it's a little more difficult to apply that message to her own family, apparently. In the opening to an article about the whole "web vs. TV" debate (as if there really is one) in light of the Comcast/NBC deal, the piece opens with a story about Sweeney forcing her daughter to bring a television to college, despite the younger Sweeney's protests that she had no need for a TV:

"Mom, you don't understand. I don't need it," her 19-year-old responded, saying she could watch whatever she wanted on her computer, at no charge....

"You're going to have a television if I have to nail it to your wall," she told her daughter, according to comments she made at a Reuters event this week. "You have to have one."
Perhaps it's time to recognize that more and more people don't need a TV?

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story



Feed Engadget: Confused school district fires sysadmin for running SETI: 'As an educational ins (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed
We've dealt with a number of confused and outright foolish school administrators in our time, but it seems like Arizona's Higley Unified School District might be run by the most bonkers of the bunch: they've fired IT director Brad Niesluchowski for running SETI@Home on some 5,000 of the district's machines. Why? According to confidently-underinformed superintendent Denise Birdwell, Higley Unified "certainly would have supported cancer research," but does "not support the search for E.T." Well, that's just peachy -- except that her flippant dismissal of SETI belies a complete ignorance of one of the oldest and most respected distributed-computing projects in the world, and what it's actually looking for. Oh, but it gets worse: Birdwell thinks SETI@home -- which primarily runs as a screensaver -- was somehow slowing down "educational programs in every classroom," and magically estimates that it's cost her district "$1 million in added utility fees and replacement parts," with a further huge cost required to remove the software. Completing her transformation into the worst-possible stereotype of a school district superintendent, Birdwell's even got the local cops on the case. Yeah, it's idiotic, but it could be worse -- we can only imagine the hell that would have broken loose had Higley's machines been a part of the renegade Engadget Folding@home team.

Confused school district fires sysadmin for running SETI: 'As an educational institution we do not support the search for E.T.' originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 02 Dec 2009 15:24:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | |Email this|Comments



Comment It is cheaper (Score 1) 1

by Killeryugi (#30103066) Attached to: Thousands shun colour television
According to Wikipedia the annual tax for a color TV is £142.50, but a black and white TV is only £48.00. Since you usually need only one license per household, my guess is people hide the color TV in the back room, and the black and white TV (if it exists) gets put in the living room.
Programming

Submission + - FBI arrests Madoff's programmers

Submitted by Tuffnutz
Tuffnutz writes: Looks like the FBI is scooping up Madoff's coders. It's not surprising that the FBI would go after computer programmers involved in fraud, but the potential sentences and fines are incredible. The article hints that the programmers themselves were somewhat unwilling but not strong enough to take a stand against their boss. This should make any coder think twice before assuming they'll be ok because they were just "following orders".

Feed Techdirt: Star Wreck Filmmakers Experiment With Iron Sky (techdirt.com)

From feed by techdirtfeed
BullJustin points out to us that the guys behind Star Wreck (which we wrote about back in 2006) are trying a few interesting things to promote their follow-up movie project Iron Sky -- a story about Nazis who fled to the moon in 1945 with plans to return to Earth in 2018. To connect with fans, the Iron Sky project released some Creative Commons material for a movie teaser remix and is selling "War Bonds" to crowdfund part of the movie production. To be clear, the "War Bonds" aren't actually bonds -- just a limited-edition package (only 2,000) of keepsakes that includes:
  • a 16-page book with very pretty pictures
  • a DVD with the teaser trailer and two documentaries
  • a signed certificate of support
  • official dogtags
  • undying gratitude
There are about 1,760 war bonds still available at 50€ a piece. Though, you can get some of the items separately from the Iron Sky online store (undying gratitude is presumably included in all purchases).

With only 240 war bonds sold since August 2008, the Iron Sky movie isn't going to be completely funded by fans. But it looks like the British Stealth Media Group has chipped in up to 1 million euros for worldwide distribution rights -- and the movie's total budget has grown to be at least 5 million euros. On top of that, the Star Wreck folks seem to have even bigger plans -- with a separate Iron Sky game project called Iron Sky: Operation Highjump that is looking for contributions/suggestions from fans to create a single-player video game based on the movie's background story. All of which is based on the WreckAMovie community that encourages more films to be bootstrapped and crowdsourced from a collection of both amateur and professional filmmakers.

So for much less than $200 million, the Star Wreck crew is developing creative ways to interact with their fans (and other filmmakers) to get their projects accomplished more cost effectively. They've given away free promotional materials for fan remixing. They've set up a process for fans to donate ideas and money to the project. They're creating movie accessories that get an audience excited about a movie that hasn't even been made yet. Shouldn't this be the way more movies are produced?

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story



Submission + - Software Piracy at the Workplace 3

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: What does one do when a good portion of the application software at your workplace is pirated? Bringing this up did not endear me at all to the president of the company. I was given a flat, "We don't pirate software software," and, "We must have paid for it at some point." Given that I was only able to find one burnt copy of Office Pro with a Google-able CD-Key and that version of Office was on at least 20 computers, I'm not convinced. Some of the legit software in the company has been installed on more than one computer, such as Adobe Acrobat. Nevertheless I have been called on to install dubious software on multiple occasions.

As for shareware, what strategies do you use to convince management to allow the purchase of commonly used utilities? If an installation of WinZip reports thousands of uses, I think the software developer deserves a bit o' coin for it. When I told management that WinZip has a one-second per file previously opened timeout counter, they tried to implement a policy of wait for it, do something else, and come back later, rather than spend the money.

Also, some software is free for home and educational use only, like AVG Free. What do you when management ignores this?
Communications

Submission + - Comcast encrypting basic digital cable

Submitted by Obfuscant
Obfuscant writes: Comcast of Oregon, the friendly cable company that once allowed people with ClearQAM-equipped TVs to eavesdrop on other people's On-Demand programs, has decided to encrypt even the Digital Starter channels it was carrying in the clear. These are the channels that anyone paying for digital service gets. The reason: to prevent signal theft.

They're claiming that they cannot simply trap out the digital channels from those getting the analog Basic service, even though the digital goodies start way up at channel 64 and the analog tops out at 30. "Traps don't work", according to customer service. (Someone please explain why RF traps care what modulation is on the frequencies they filter out, or how a trap that makes analog signals undetectable will provide a viewable digital signal when even an unfiltered digital signal drops out on a regular basis.) This is the same cable company that used to be able to trap out channels 31 and above if you didn't have Expanded Basic.

They point the finger at the program providers — like ESPN and SyFy. "It's a contractual requirement" for people who are paying for the programs to be prevented from using their own DVRs to record them for later use. "Of course we'll rent you a Comcast DVR..."

Perhaps it's time to dust of those old copies of the Cable Consumer Protection Act of 1992, which deals specifically with this issue.
NASA

Submission + - SPAM: NASA to power Mars rover out of sand trap

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes: NASA's long running Mars rover Spirit is stuck in a sand trap — a situation the space agency would like to fix. Today NASA said it will begin what it called the long process of extricating Spirit by sending commands that could free the rover.

Spirit has been stuck in a place NASA calls "Troy" since April 23 when the rover's wheels broke through a crust on the surface that was covering a bright-toned, slippery sand underneath. After a few drive attempts to get Spirit out in the subsequent days, it began sinking deeper in the sand trap. Driving was suspended to allow time for tests and reviews of possible escape strategies, NASA stated.

[spam URL stripped]
Link to Original Source
Google

Submission + - Slashdot (and the rest of the web) 2X faster?! 1

Submitted by grmoc
grmoc writes: As part of the "Let's make the web faster" initiative, we (a few engineers (including me!) at Google, and hopefully people all across the community soon!) are experimenting with alternative protocols to help reduce the latency of web pages. One of these experiments is SPDY (pronounced "SPeeDY"), an application-layer protocol (essentially a shim between HTTP and the bits on the wire) for transporting content over the web, designed specifically for minimal latency. In addition to a rough specification for the protocol, we have hacked SPDY into the Google Chrome browser (because its what we're familiar with) and a simple server testbed. Using these hacked up bits, we compared the performance of many of the top 25 and top 300 websites over both HTTP and SPDY, and have observed those pages load, on average, about twice as fast using SPDY.. Thats not bad!

We hope to engage the open source community to contribute ideas, feedback, code (we've open sourced the protocol, etc!), and test results!

Submission + - California Decision Could Limit HDTV Choices (livescience.com)

Submitted by Caviller
Caviller writes: California is at it again in determining what consumers are allowed to have instead of what the want to have. They are scheduled to vote on a proposal that would require retailers by 2011 to limit sales of TV sets to those that consume about a third less power than they do today. According to the article, this decision could have the possibility of limiting choices and raising prices for TVs nationwide.

Comment The best system is (Score 1) 15

by Killeryugi (#30050098) Attached to: What's the best tool for remembering passwords?
Your brain and a piece of paper for backup. It is true that a moderately strong password can be hard to remember, but with a creative system it can be done. For instance, in my system a password for Google would be something like "n0EVIL$flaNNel!". I would then be written on piece of paper like "n_o _(evil) _4 S_am_antha fla_n_nel _1". The password is reasonably secure, and the lost paper doesn't reveal too much about the password or the account associated with it. You can sort of see the password in there, but it gets easier if you know the system. The first part of the password is tangentially associated with Google (don't be evil), and would be hard for someone to guess. You can write something extra on the paper you know to remove (like the name of an ex), just don't repeat it between passwords. The rest of the written password is control characters like _ which signify that the next word is capitalized, or a number instead of a letter. The strongest control character is just a common letter or letters not occurring in the password, so it could be written with p and t as control characters instead as "nto p(evil) t4 Spamtantha flapntnel t1". True, it is security through obscurity, but if the system is neither to ambiguous nor too easy to guess, it should work well.

Submission + - Epic Fail?

Submitted by sirgoran
sirgoran writes: About a month ago the company I work for had a hard disk fail. It was sent to a Disaster Recovery company to try to get back whatever they could from the failed hardware. Total cost to our company was $5,000 for the service. Well yesterday we got the results back from the Recovery Company. One small problem, the data they sent, wasn't ours. So far we have not gotten our data and have not yet heard if our data left their offices and was sent to someone else.

I wanted to ask the slashdot crowd what they think our next step should be, and has anything like this ever happened to someone else and how did they handle it.
Earth

Submission + - A slice of life on earth (cnn.com)

Submitted by babboo65
babboo65 writes: Seems the humble golf ball is creating quite an ecological problem and has a hefty impact. A golf ball naturally bio-degrades in 100 to 1000 years and hundreds of millions are lost or discarded annually (I can personally account for a good number of them). The article goes on to explain that in many cases removing the ball can cause even more damage.
Security

Submission + - $9 million ATM hacking ring busted (threatpost.com) 1

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: U.S. and international prosecutors have taken down a criminal ring that they allege was responsible for an ATM scam last year that stole about $9 million from RBS WorldPay. The criminals were able to evade the company's encryption system used on payroll debit cards and withdraw money from ATMs in 280 cities around the world. A federal grand jury in Atlanta has indicted eight men in connection with the scheme, including five Estonians, one Russian, one Moldovan and one unidentified man. Prosecutors allege that the men "used sophisticated hacking techniques" to defeat the company's encryption system. The scam, which hit RBS WorldPay last November, involved an elaborate plan in which the attackers first bypassed the encryption on the debit cards, which RBS WorldPay issues to customers for employee payroll purposes. They then raised the limits on the accounts attached to the cards.
Security

Submission + - What's the best tool for remembering passwords? 15

Submitted by StonyCreekBare
StonyCreekBare writes: Lately I've been re-thinking my personal security practices. Somehow having my Firefox "fill in" passwords automatically for me when I go to my bank's site seems sub-optimal should my laptop be stolen. Keeping passwords for all the varied sites on the computer in a plain-text file seems unwise as well. Keeping them in my brain is a prescription for disaster, as my brain is increasingly leaky. A paper notepad likewise has it's disadvantages.

I have looked at a number of password managers, password "vaults" and so on. The number of tools out there is a bit overwhelming. Magic Password Generator add-in for Firefox seems competent but is tied to Firefox, and I have other places and applications I want passwords. Plus I might be accessing my sites from other computers which do not have it installed.

The ideal tool in my mind should be something that is independent of any application, browser or computer, something that is easily carried, but which if lost poses no risk of compromise.

What does the Slashdot crowd like in Password tools?

Slashdot Top Deals

The key elements in human thinking are not numbers but labels of fuzzy sets. -- L. Zadeh

Close