Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Enlightenment

Submission + - Michael Pritchard turns filthy water drinkable (ted.com)

Submitted by peater
peater writes: Too much of the world lacks access to clean drinking water. Engineer Michael Pritchard did something about it — inventing the portable Lifesaver filter, which can make the most revolting water drinkable in seconds. An amazing demo from TEDGlobal 2009.
Portables

11.6" Netbooks Face Off 238

Posted by kdawson from the category-benders dept.
Dr. Damage writes "Netbooks have grown from tiny curiosities with 7" screens into surprisingly well-rounded little computers. The latest step is 11.6" displays with 1366x768 resolution and near-full-sized keyboards. Two such systems are available now for under $400 at US retailers: the Aspire One at Walmart and the Gateway LT3103 at Best Buy. The Gateway packs an Athlon 64 processor and Radeon graphics. The Tech Report bought them both and has compared them head to head in some depth, choosing a clear winner between the two." Like most such in-depth reviews, this one is spread across 10 pages.
Privacy

Submission + - Can we abandon Confidentiality for Google Apps? 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I provide IT services for medium sized medical and law practices and have been getting a lot of feedback from doctors and lawyers who use gmail at home and believe that they can run a significant portion of their practice IT on Google Apps. From a support standpoint, I'd be happy to chuck mail/calendar service management into the bin and let them run with gmail, but for these businesses, there is significant legal liability associated with the confidentiality of their communications and records (eg HIPPA).

For those with high profile celebrity clients, stating that "Google employees can read your stuff" will usually end the conversation right there, but for smaller practices I often get a lot of pushback in the form of "What's wrong with trusting Google?" and "Google's not interested in our email/calendar". Weighing what they see as a tiny legal risk against the promise of Free IT Stuff(TM) becomes increasingly difficult in the face of the clear functionality/usability/ubiquity that they experience when using Google at home. So my question to the Slashdot community is this:

Are they right? Is it time for me to remove the Tin Foil Hat from their confidentiality obligations and stop resisting the juggernaut that is Google?
If not, what's the best way to clarify the confidentiality issues?

Comment Re:poor latin (Score 1) 337

by peater (#27238583) Attached to: Dell's Adamo Goes After MacBook Air

""Adamo, pronounced 'A-dahm-o,' means 'to fall in love with' in Latin."

phhh, as any fule knos, it really means 'I fall in love with' if they had wanted it to mean 'to fall in love with' it should be called 'adamare'

come on, this is a basic 1st conjugation verb with a preposition, basic stuff.

Yeah what he said...

Comment Re:Chrome still misses the point (Score 1) 258

by peater (#27238489) Attached to: 2.0 Beta Chrome On Windows, Chromium On Linux
I agree. I'm a Chrome fan for fast and light weight browsing, but I think I just get a lot more done with GreaseMonkey and Ubiquity combined on FF. But I guess while Chrome needs to support add-ons in the future, FireFox needs to realize that it needs to spruce up its memory and process management. Hopefully the competition will do what it usually does, force the developers on both fronts to get off their asses, improve two WONDERFUL products and make them even better. End result, the end-user wins. I like the fact that FF finally has competition on the loyalty front. On the PR front, FireFox had eaten IE alive but with Chrome catching up on the PR and technology front, I guess FF is in for some real heat. Should be a fun game to watch (and hopefully contribute to! )

Slashdot Top Deals

"More software projects have gone awry for lack of calendar time than for all other causes combined." -- Fred Brooks, Jr., _The Mythical Man Month_

Close