Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Image

Scientists Say a Dirty Child Is a Healthy Child Screenshot-sm 331

Posted by samzenpus from the snack-is-going-to-be-on-the-floor-today dept.
Researchers from the School of Medicine at the University of California have shown that the more germs a child is exposed to, the better their immune system in later life. Their study found that keeping a child's skin too clean impaired the skin's ability to heal itself. From the article: "'These germs are actually good for us,' said Professor Richard Gallo, who led the research. Common bacterial species, known as staphylococci, which can cause inflammation when under the skin, are 'good bacteria' when on the surface, where they can reduce inflammation."

Comment Re:Use your head and quit your bitching. (Score 1) 1007

by Zaffle (#30056362) Attached to: Best Tool For Remembering Passwords?

Bottom line is if you never tell anyone that your base password starts with p455W0rd, then I don't think having a personalize system of 2+ characters to distinguish which system the password is for, and another 2+ characters to allow to reoccurring password changes would make your password any less secure, with the benefit of making them easier to remember. For extra security, add some ! _ - @ % etc characters to break up the 3 parts to your password. i.e. p455W0rd#02!01

Hi, please sign up for a system that I run, where I log every users IP, PTR record, username, full name, DOB, etc, etc, and PASSWORD to a nice database. Now I can begin work on cracking your other passwords.

I wish people would stop thinking that the systems you log in to are secure. This especially bad with the users who have one standard password, or the mysecret-slashdot. The ones who use apples01, apples02 are rarely better. Your system just adds a little bit more complexity.

I'm sorry, the only way to deal with the multitude of passwords today, given there is no wide-spread smartcard deployment, is a secure encrypted password DB stored on a portable eletronic device (eg phone, ipod touch, palm, etc, etc), and use the autogen password tool to generate new passwords.
Space

Australian Student Balloon Rises 100,000 Feet, With a Digital Camera 174

Posted by timothy from the shame-about-the-iso-setting dept.
hype7 writes "An Australian student at Deakin University had a fascinating idea for a final project — to send a balloon up 100,000ft (~30,000 metres) into the stratosphere with a digital camera attached. The university was supportive, and the project took shape. Although there were some serious hitches along the way, the project was successful, and he managed to retrieve the balloon — with the pictures. What's really amazing is that the total cost was so low; the most expensive part was buying the helium gas for approximately AUD$250 (~USD$200)."

Comment Wrong, in many ways (Score 5, Insightful) 338

by Zaffle (#28567721) Attached to: HTML Tags For Academic Printing?

What you want (being able to define pages) is wrong in many many ways.

You should, as an authoring tool, never define a page, or its dimensions, especially academic works, which will be printed in different formats, on different paper (A4/Letter/Tradeback/etc/etc)

At most, whatever markup you have, many define things like page breaks, but even then, they are more a typesetting issue.

What you want is either LaTeX or DocBook.

Comment Re:What languages? (Score 1) 1359

by Zaffle (#28492153) Attached to: Emigrating To a Freer Country?

"somewhere in the South Pacific, just watch out for the coups that happen every few years."

He's not wanting to holiday there, he wants to move there. A country with a history of unstable government, and one that is in the middle of a military coup d'état is not a good place to live.

Comment Re:When Will the Average Consumer Learn? (Score 1) 311

by Zaffle (#28414769) Attached to: Kindle, Zune DRM Restrictions Coming Into Focus

I just read that the Earth is spherical. Can you point me to a precedent? If you don't do my homework for me I'll just DIE!

Actually, its not, well, not exactly spherical, and yes, I'll do your homework (though if you are older than 12, your teacher should shoot you for using Wikipedia as a reference) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth#Shape

(Hint - All wiki facts should be referenced, check the reference and quote it instead!)

Comment Re:How much is your time worth (Score 1) 837

by Zaffle (#27736151) Attached to: Handmade vs. Commercially Produced Ethernet Cables

Oy vei! Does anybody use T568A these days? I thought that was pretty much phased out?

Wikipedia answers:

TIA/EIA-568-B specifies that horizontal cables should be terminated using the T568A pin/pair assignments, "or, optionally, per [T568B] if necessary to accommodate certain 8-pin cabling systems." Despite this instruction, many organizations continue to implement T568B for various reasons, chiefly associated with tradition (T568B is equivalent to AT&T 258A). The United States National Communication Systems Federal Telecommunications Recommendations do not recognize T568B.

Eg - you are old and out of date - T568A is the correct, current standard.

Comment Mailman (Score 1) 489

by Zaffle (#25173885) Attached to: Good Email For Kids?

We used mailman, but in theory any mailing list software will do.
We created a non-archived moderator approved single subscriber mailing list called our_childs_name@our_domain. Then created a real mailbox called secret_mailbox@our_domain, then setup ACLs in the mailserver to deny anyone but localhost from delivering to secret_mailbox. Then subscribed the secret_mailbox to the mailing list. My wife and I are moderators of the list. When a new email comes in, we get an emailing notifying us theres a message, one click opens the approval page, and one click forwards the mail on, or drops it.

Done and done, all free software and it took only a few minutes with an already working mail server.

If you don't have your own mailserver, then I guess it gets more tricky :)
Social Networks

MySpace Joins OpenID Coalition 272

Posted by timothy from the inflection-point-perhaps dept.
the4thdimension writes "MySpace has joined a coalition of other big-name e-services in support of OpenID. If you aren't familiar with the OpenID coalition, they are a group that seeks to allow users to create a single account/password set to be used on a number of services. Such services already signed up include: Google's Blogger, Wordpress, AOL, Yahoo, Vox, LiveJournal, and others." Reader gbjbaanb adds a link to the BBC's coverage and points out that MySpace's 100 million users would mean nearly a doubling of the approximately 120 million OpenID accounts now in use, writing: "Initially support is to use MySpace OpenIDs as providers only — i.e. you cannot logon to MySpace with an OpenID created elsewhere, but that policy will change in the future. This should help to make OpenID the de-facto login mechanism for the Internet, now if only Microsoft would support it, there are plenty OSS OpenID libraries available."
Cellphones

iPhone's Development Limitations Could Hurt It In the Long Run 452

Posted by Soulskill from the my-way-or-the-iway dept.
ZDOne writes "Apple might have finally come around to allowing third party developers to create applications for the iPhone, but only up to a point. ZDNet UK claims Apple is leaving itself vulnerable to the competition and to a loss of lustre by blocking background tasks on the device. The author notes, 'Perhaps it doesn't trust application designers or users very much. Perhaps it wants the best software for itself, where it can limit what it can do in order not to upset its telco friends. Whatever the reason, it reflects badly on Apple. The iPhone is not an iPod; it's a smartphone connecting to a universe of fast-changing data on behalf of innovation-hungry users. The sooner it stops pretending to be a 1981 IBM PC, the better it will be for everyone.'"
Patents

Multi-Channel Communication Patent Up For Sale 97

Posted by kdawson from the can-you-say-prior-art dept.
OTDR alerts us to the latest software patent stupidity in the news as patent number 6,418,462, "methods allowing clients to perform tasks through a sideband communication channel, in addition to the main communication channel between a client and server," snubs its nose at AJAX, ftp, and decades of prior art and goes on sale next month in San Fransisco. "Singled out are AJAX mashups including Google Maps and Gmail, and Microsoft 'Live'... Also in the frame are Amazon's S3 and EC2 and clusters from Microsoft, VMware, and Oracle. eBay's Skype, Napster, and Microsoft's Groove are also listed as potentially infringing on the patent in P2P."
Businesses

Submission + - Skype Stole My Credit

Submitted by
Syphtor
Syphtor writes: "Recently found out that after 180 days if I don't use some of my Skype Credit (which I paid for), I lose it. They don't refund it, they keep the money. I've logged my complaints with Skype, and am hopeful of getting it back, but it does raise the question for these kind of 'buy credit' businesses. How long is reasonable for them to keep your credit open? 180 days? I think that's bad, obviously Skype disagrees."
Google

Google Admits to Using Sohu Database 209

Posted by CowboyNeal from the cut-and-paste dept.
prostoalex writes "A few days ago a Chinese company, Sohu.com, alleged Google improperly tapped its database for its Pinyin IME product, stirring controversy on whether two databases were similar just due to normal research process. Today Google admitted that its new product for Chinese market 'was built leveraging some non-Google database resources.' 'The dictionaries used with both software from Google and Sohu shared several common mistakes, where Chinese characters were matched with the wrong Pinyin equivalents. In addition, both dictionaries listed the names of engineers who had developed Sohu's Sogou Pinyin IME.'"

Slashdot Top Deals

"The four building blocks of the universe are fire, water, gravel and vinyl." -- Dave Barry

Close