whencanistop - Slashdot User

Submission + - www.timesonline.co.uk de-indexed from Google (brentdpayne.com)

Submitted by whencanistop on Wednesday April 21, 2010 @08:31AM

whencanistop writes: I'm sure I'm not the first to point this out — but The Times recently announced that it was going to put itself behind a pay wall (for when The Times does go behind a pay wall and you can't see that article, here is a link to The Guardian's article on it). Now Google has apparently decided that it is going to remove The Times from its search index (just in case they get put back) so that users will not be able to find it by natural search (it still seems to appear in Google News). Interestingly this doesn't appear to have been done by The Times as there is nothing in its robots.txt that states that this should be disallowed. To prove how annoying this actually is, I had to go back to my blog to find a link to that article stating what The Times is doing because I couldn't find it in Google. It's also worth pointing out that in Google.co.uk, if you search for "The Times" you now get pointed to the new domain and not the old one.

Submission + - EU cookie law is ridiculous (webanalyticsdemystified.com)

Submitted by whencanistop on Friday November 13, 2009 @07:23AM

whencanistop writes: A couple of weeks ago there was some talk about the EU cookie law which has now been passed into law. Whilst the original story broke on the Out-law blog from a law perspective there has been a follow up from a couple of industry insiders. Aurelie Pols of the Web Analytics Association has blogged on how this will affect websites who want to monitor what people are looking at on their sites, whilst eConsultancy has blogged on how this will affect the affiliate industry. All of this is probably ignoring the general public who, if this is actually implemented, will have to proceed through ridiculous screens of text every time they access a website telling them that they are going to put cookies on their computers. I know most of you guys hate them, but it is vital for websites to work out how people are accessing the sites so they can work out how to improve the experience for the user.

Submission + - How do we get more women and young people in IT? (computerweekly.com)

Submitted by

whencanistop

on Thursday January 08, 2009 @06:51PM

whencanistop writes: "The new chair of the British Computer Society Women's Forum, Rebecca George, is looking for some new ideas on how to get more women and young people into IT. Here she states that the number of women in IT has dropped to 16% from 23% of the total workforce and that there are a lot of bright, young males leaving the industry too. So she's asking for some new, innovative ideas to try and persuade more women into IT to "diversify the workforce". I'm sure we can come up with some for her here."

Submission + - Is open source a viable option for Businesses? (computerweekly.com)

Submitted by

whencanistop

on Friday December 05, 2008 @08:38AM

whencanistop writes: "In an economic downturn, where budgets are being cut, is it sensible to use open source software as opposed to commercial software? Personally I think that the average CIO would take a lot of persuasion to tell their company that they are going to go with software that doesn't come with support, manuals, etc (before you ask it — yes I know people will write them — but that isn't necessarily the same). Has anyone out there done this? Is anyone using the open source software? More to the point, is it cheaper — surely the maintenance costs that you pay will be cancelled out in open source by the additional people resources?"

Submission + - Spam actually works (computerweekly.com)

Submitted by

whencanistop

on Tuesday November 11, 2008 @07:14PM

whencanistop writes: "I didn't quite know what to write about this, apart from "Freaking hell". Of course I swore instead of that first word. Apparently some scientists have run some spam through the Storm network and discovered that even though they only got 28 sales out of several million messages, they would still make a £4.5k profit a day. Surely scientists should be finding ways of preventing it rather than proving it works so that more people do it. And who the hell are these 28 idiots?"

Submission + - James Bond Gadgets (computerweekly.com)

Submitted by

whencanistop

on Wednesday October 29, 2008 @07:41AM

whencanistop writes: "Given that the new James Bond film is just about to be released today, this is quite a nice summary of James Bond gadgets from past films. Tomorrow Never Dies was on telly last night and I was commenting on how the mobile phone that controlled the BMW was awesome, why they haven't done it in real life is beyond me (although there'd probably be a few accidents if they ever did). Ridiculous to think that in 1963 the gadget of choice for Bond was a pager though."

Submission + - A Planetary Survival Guide (newscientist.com)

Submitted by

whencanistop

on Tuesday October 21, 2008 @07:22AM

whencanistop writes: "New Scientist have looked into what is going to happen to the sun in the next few (ok, several billion) years and how that will impact the earth. I know none of us will still be here , but thinking about climate change now could help us come up with a plan for the future, even if that means moving the earth out to a radius nearer that of Mars to avoid the seas evaporating. It beats putting billions of people into a spaceship and terraforming Mars into something new, although this is starting to sound a little bit like the hitch hikers guide the galaxy now."

Submission + - Are Intelligent people are more attractive? (newscientist.com)

Submitted by

whencanistop

on Monday October 06, 2008 @10:34AM

whencanistop writes: "New Scientist is reporting on a study that shows that women like men who look and act intelligently. Whilst the headline is a bit sensationalist and I'm not a lonely man, it did remind me of a time when I was on the tube recently with some female friends. I was sitting next to an attractive, young lady and we got a bit of banter going about when the Victoria line was closing for the evening. She then pulled out a copy of New Scientist and started reading it. I should have got talking to her, but instead I smiled and giggled to my friends like a schoolboy (they didn't realise what was going on) before we got off at the next stop. Clearly intelligence is nothing without a cracking first line."

Submission + - CERN, the big bang and impact on the IT industry (computerweekly.com)

Submitted by

whencanistop

on Thursday September 11, 2008 @07:39AM

whencanistop writes: "ComputerWeekly have put together a nice short guide (with lots of links) of what is going on at CERN. They've got a nice slant though on what this big bang experiment is going to mean for the IT Industry. Interesting slant on the worlds largest grid and the database clustering technology that they are using. They have also picked up on the amusing rap video by CERN's scientists that hase been wandering around Youtube."

Submission + - IT Superheroes (computerweekly.com)

Submitted by

whencanistop

on Wednesday September 10, 2008 @08:35AM

whencanistop writes: "Are you an IT Superhero? ComputerWeekly are trying to debunk the myth that IT professionals are geeks, so they are trying to get people to nominate their friends (or themselves) to be the new superhero of IT. I suppose this will come back to the last time we talked about this on Slashdot when there was a new Microsoft heroes cartoons. This time though, lets have some superhero names. Personally I am known as Hitbox guru in the office, but I feel that this is a level down from a real superhero."

Submission + - UK Government to snoop on internet traffic (computerweekly.com)

Submitted by

whencanistop

on Thursday August 28, 2008 @11:08AM

whencanistop writes: "It looks like the Home Office (part of the UK government) is going to pass through a law stating that it can monitor all ISP traffic. This will mean that it will know everything that anyone does in the country that involves passing information through the internet. Whilst the benefits of this will be that it will be able to spot terrorists (presumably by searching for overuse of key phrases in emails/instant messaging as well as the websites they are looking at) and paedophiles, the downside has got to be what else they are going to use it for: eg picking up illegal file sharers (music, video, games, etc). Surely this is a bit of an infringement of your human rights."

Submission + - WWW takes too long to say (newscientist.com)

Submitted by

whencanistop

on Thursday July 24, 2008 @09:09AM

whencanistop writes: "The guys at New Scientist have noticed that 'www' takes too long to say. The double u, double u, double u bit at the start is three of the longest letters in the alphabet (in English). I've taken to not saying them at all and just starting at the domain name, but I find I have to repeat myself often because people miss it the first time because they aren't expecting it straight away. Any suggestions for alternatives? We used to have a right hand up rule for sarcasm, should something similar be out there for when you are saying website addresses."

Submission + - Microsoft wants to buy AOL (and hence Bebo) (computerweekly.com)

Submitted by

whencanistop

on Friday July 18, 2008 @05:12AM

whencanistop writes: "Interesting news of Microsoft thinking about switching its acquisition strategy from Yahoo! to AOL. More interestingly this will give it Bebo as a social networking group and give it direct competition from MySpace owners News Corp. It would probably sit quite well with their online population of teenie boppers as well. Would that force Google's hand into buying Facebook?"

Submission + - Virtual offices finally here (computerweekly.com)

Submitted by

whencanistop

on Wednesday July 09, 2008 @07:51AM

whencanistop writes: "IBM and Second life have come together to make it so that avatars can move easily between Second Life and OpenSim (an open source toolkit for developing virtual platforms). This should finally mean that we are coming to a point where if we need meetings with people in the office, we can just trundle into a virtual world. What with rising transport costs from oil prices, this could mean the start of home working. Before you know it, every company will have its own virtual world for meetings and everyone will work at home on their laptop through wireless connections. Well I can dream, can't I?"

Submission + - Virgin Media warns file sharers (computerweekly.com)

Submitted by

whencanistop

on Thursday July 03, 2008 @11:03AM

whencanistop writes: "The BPI (British Phonographic Industry) have been signing up to file sharing systems so that they can download files (usually music) in the same way that a normal peer to peer person would. They then grab the IP address and can use this information to prosecute you. So far the only action is that they've passed a list to broadband service provide Virgin Media who are writing to all those people and telling them off. Seems to me that this is a bit like entrapment, but in an online world. I prosecute you for file sharing because I downloaded a file from you must be fairly similar to I prosecute you for trespassing by pushing you into my garden. You might have been intending to go in anyway, but they can't be sure."

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