rbollinger - Slashdot User

Submission + - Apple Releases iOS 4.3.3 With Location Fixes (winbeta.org)

Submitted by

BogenDorpher

on Wednesday May 04, 2011 @04:10PM

BogenDorpher writes: "Recently, reports were circulating that Apple was tracking its iPhone users. The tv show South Park even made a parody of the situation. Today, Apple released an updated iOS software, 4.3.3, which fixes what Apple calls a "bug" with its location based services."

Submission + - 82% of IT Workers Report Data Breaches (i4u.com)

Submitted by i4u on Wednesday May 04, 2011 @03:58PM

i4u writes: In the wake of Sony's data debacle, corporations around the world are taking another look at information security. Storing your data behind a firewall isn't enough, and trusting on client-side protections to keep the bad people out is what screwed the PlayStation Network. The industry is grappling for a solution, especially with the news that 82% of IT practitioners questioned report at least one breach of their systems.

The cost of a stolen file varies pretty wildly. The average figure is $214...but entities lose an average of 16,000 records per data breach.

Submission + - Facebook "archiving" all groups (facebook.com)

Submitted by Sprotch on Wednesday May 04, 2011 @03:52PM

Sprotch writes: The following message has appeared over the first page of all groups:
"Over the next few months, Facebook will be archiving all groups created using the old groups format. Moving forward, you can create groups using the new groups format, which makes it easy to share with the important groups in your life."
As part of the archiving process, members of the old group get deleted. In other words, "archived" groups are destroyed.
While facebook claims that it is possible to upgrade to the new groups, this option is not available for larger groups, which are most at need of it.

Submission + - Harrison Schmitt's Plan to Solve the Energy Proble (yahoo.com)

Submitted by

MarkWhittington

on Wednesday May 04, 2011 @03:41PM

MarkWhittington writes: "Harrison Schmitt, Apollo Moonwalker, geologist, and former United States Senator, recently presented a plan to solve the world’s long term energy problems by developing fusion power fueled with helium-3 mined from the Moon. He presented this plan at a speech at Williston Basin Petroleum Conference,"

Submission + - Asus Eee Pad Transformer in action. A comprehensiv (tabletnewsreport.com)

Submitted by tabletnr on Wednesday May 04, 2011 @03:38PM

tabletnr writes: More and more video clips presenting the possibility of Asus tablet appears every day. Below are three video recorded by one of the owners of the Eee Pad Transformer, which I think are the best videos with the review of this device, which appeared by today. A must see for people who are thinking of buying the Transformer.

Submission + - The Complex Information Security Landscape (net-security.org)

Submitted by Orome1 on Wednesday May 04, 2011 @03:34PM

Orome1 writes: We live in complex times. The black hats have seemingly endless resources while the good guys have to get management approval for all their tools. What can a large organization do to stay on top of the fast-paced threat landscape while fighting on a limited budget? In this interview, Latha Maripuri, Director, IBM Security Services and Marc van Zadelhoff, Director of Strategy, IBM Security Solutions, discuss the increasingly complex information security landscape by addressing budget strategies, cloud computing security, mobile devices and more.

Submission + - Signs of Dark Matter from Minnesota Mine (sciencenews.org)

Submitted by

thomst

on Wednesday May 04, 2011 @03:20PM

thomst writes: "Ron Cowen of Science News reports that on May 2nd, at the American Physical Society meeting in Anaheim, CA, Juan Collar, team leader of COGENT, an experimental effort to detect WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles), presented a paper detailing 15 months of data collected via a pure germanium detector located deep in a Minnesota mine which seems to confirm similar results reported by a European effort called DAMA/LIBRA. The results are particularly intriguing, because they appear to show a seasonal variation in the density of WIMPs that accords with models that predict that Earth should encounter more WIMPs in Summer (when its path around the Sun moves in the same direction as the Milky Way revolves) than in Winter (when it goes the opposite direction). The most interesting thing about the COGENT experiment is that the mass of the WIMP candidates it records is significantly less than most particle physicists had predicted, according to popular models. If the interactions recorded by COGENT are eventually confirmed as WIMP encounters, wholesale revisions to the so-called "Standard Model" may be required. (Cowen wrote an earlier article about COGENT last year that goes into a lot more detail about how COGENT works, what its team expects it to find, and why."

Submission + - Sensor Glove Helps Stroke Patients Through Gaming (ecouterre.com)

Submitted by Elliot Chang on Wednesday May 04, 2011 @02:04PM

Elliot Chang writes: It’s well-known that video games improve hand-eye coordination, so it shouldn’t come as a huge surprise that stroke patients could recover their range of motion by playing them. Four mechanical-engineering students at McGill University in Canada have developed an inexpensive sensor glove that allows patients to exercise in a game-like fashion at home with minimal supervision. Self-therapy? Well, yes and no. Using the accompanying software, doctors will be able to monitor their charges’ progress off-site, cutting down on hospital visits and costs.

Submission + - Carriers Back Off On Mobile Payment Network (computerworld.com)

Submitted by

CWmike

on Wednesday May 04, 2011 @01:42PM

CWmike writes: "Isis, a consortium comprised of AT&T, Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile USA, is said to have decided to back off plans for a new, separate mobile payment network and will instead work within traditional systems that include major credit card processors such as Visa and MasterCard for mobile transactions, according to unnamed sources in a WSJ story. The carriers will still move ahead with a pilot test planned for 2012 in Salt Lake City of a system using near field communication (NFC) technology inside smartphones. Isis' change in direction is an acknowledgement that setting up a mobile payment system is much more challenging than putting NFC chips in smartphones and installing NFC reader terminals, at least in the U.S., analysts have said."

Submission + - Intel Designs Faster, 3D Transistor (nytimes.com)

Submitted by

lee1

on Wednesday May 04, 2011 @01:13PM

lee1 writes: "Intel has found a way to keep on the Moore's Law track by making smaller, faster and lower-power computer chips by building 3D transistors. They are already manufacturing microprocessors using this new design, called a FINFET (for fin field-effect transistor), which incorporates a small pillar, or fin, of silicon that sticks up above the surface of the chip. Intel said that it expected to be able to make chips that run as much as 37 percent faster in low-voltage applications and use as much as 50 percent less power. Products based on the new technology may appear some time later this year."

Submission + - 1st International Flight for Solar-powered Plane (gizmag.com)

Submitted by Zothecula on Monday May 02, 2011 @12:29PM

Zothecula writes: Solar Impulse is on standby for its first international flight this week. Brussels has been chosen as the destination for the first venture outside Swiss borders, which follows the solar powered aircraft's maiden flight and first overnight flight last year and will mark another important step towards the goal of flying around the world in 2012.

Submission + - iOS fix for tracking issue just two weeks away (edibleapple.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 02, 2011 @12:25PM

An anonymous reader writes: Apple last week officially addressed the controversy surrounding the consolidated.db file found in iOS 4. Now BGR relays that they've obtained an early build of iOS 4.3.3 — an iOS update set to fix many of the bugs Apple acknowledged with its current implementation of the consolidated.db file.

Submission + - How to monitor your Internet data transfer amounts 1

Submitted by Vrtigo1 on Monday May 02, 2011 @12:18PM

Vrtigo1 writes: With many ISPs either already using bandwidth caps or talking about them, I was wondering how other Slashdot readers are keeping tabs on how much data is being transferred through their home Internet connections. None of the consumer routers I've used seem to make this information easily accessible. I'd like some way to see exactly how much data has been sent and received by the WAN port facing my ISP's modem so I can compare the numbers I get with the numbers they give me. I don't want to pay for their modem firmware updates and other network management traffic, so I'd like to see how the two numbers line up.

Submission + - 25% Of Users Now On Windows 7 (techspot.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 02, 2011 @11:40AM

An anonymous reader writes: By the end of 2010, Windows 7 had grabbed 20 percent of the market. At the end of April 2011, Microsoft can already say that Windows 7 has passed the 25 percent mark, according to Net Applications. In other words, the latest and greatest operating system from Redmond is now installed on one in four computers.

Submission + - Book Review: Apache JMeter

Submitted by

MassDosage

on Monday May 02, 2011 @11:37AM

MassDosage writes: "Apache JMeter written by Emily H. Halili is very much an introductory guide to using Apache’s open source JMeter testing tool. Unfortunately a book that should have been good fodder to wet the appetites of testers is spoiled by shoddy editing, poor writing and very little content that isn’t already included in JMeter’s own user manual.

I am one of those (fairly) rare software developers with a genuine interest in testing and first tried using JMeter many years ago after its initial release as a tool primarily focused on testing the Apache Tomcat web/application server. It was a bit rough around the edges and poorly documented in those days so I was looking forward to a book that would re-familiarise me with JMeter in its current form. This book clearly targets itself at the testing community and doesn’t require any programming (or even much testing) knowledge.

Apache JMeter starts off with a not particularly convincing overview of why one would want to automate testing and goes off on a tangent trying to prove the monetary savings this leads too. Any testing will depend very much on the type of software being tested, the skills of the tester, technology stack in use etc. so trying to come up with a general formula proving that testing will save money is probably impossible and pointless. It would have been far more useful to include some practical examples where testing saved time, effort, caught bugs early etc. A very brief history of JMeter is provided as well as an overview of its GUI and the the various elements available. For those who haven’t used it before — JMeter acts as a client which sends requests to the application being tested and can then act on the responses returned. Overall this isn’t the smoothest of introductions with lots of grammatical errors, fragmented text and repeated concepts, which doesn’t bode well for the rest of the book.

Installing and setting up JMeter is covered next and this is straightforward and simple. A good overview of what a JMeter test plan consists of is provided and this covers controlling how many simultaneous users a test will use, what logic and timing will be used to issue requests, the type of requests (e.g. HTTP for web sites, FTP for file retrieval etc.), various configuration options, how to assert the contents of responses and so on. The book is a bit dated and the version of JMeter I was using didn’t always match up with the text and diagrams but most of the differences were self explanatory so this wasn’t really an issue.

The chapter on load and performance testing is the best on offer and provides sensible guidelines on this type of testing. These include tips such as ensuring network bandwidth between the machines under test, running the tests on physically separate machines from the software being tested, running tests for long periods of time and what to monitor. This is mainly common sense but it’s good to see them summarised and the book would have benefited from more sections that appear to be informed by the author’s practical experiences as a tester. The example given in the book is the load testing of a web site over HTTP and it’s left up to the reader to translate the various types of request being made to an example website of their own. The screen shots of setting the various GUI values are clear and useful. Remote testing (i.e. not using a single JMeter GUI but multiple command-line instances of JMeter) is mentioned but sadly not covered which is a shame as any serious load or stress testing usually requires this. Using JMeter as a proxy to quickly generate a test plan by recording HTTP requests from a browser is both neat and useful and explained well.

JMeter is not just limited to load testing but can also be used to do simple functional tests as it can inspect the values returned by requests and perform assertions on these responses (e.g. checking that the returned HTML contains some text). Unfortunately functional testing is covered very poorly with far too little detail and no explanation of how to run the examples yourself. The author should have stuck to one simple use case (ideally that the reader could follow along with) which would show how to add one’s own custom values to requests and to assert the results returned. In the end I could figure it out for myself, but I’d expect a book to guide me through this.

Advanced features are up next and the reader is pointed towards the sample code included with the book (a .rar file inside a .zip file, why?) but absolutely no explanation is given as to what one should actually do with the bunch of PHP and SQL files included in it. Using regular expressions and configuring JMeter to run tests using loops is covered but this doesn’t make much sense as there is no context for the example used in setting this all up. Fortunately the sections on using JMeter to test a database and an FTP server are introduced with clear setup steps that are easy to follow. I wouldn’t classify most of this material as advanced, it just gives the reader the knowledge that JMeter can be used to test more than just HTTP sites and provides a few very simple examples which they can build on.

Finally the book wraps up by stressing once again that it’s just an introduction to JMeter and a concluding table clearly showing that more is not covered than actually covered. The appendices consist of definitions of nearly every JMeter element that can be accessed in the GUI (a good quick reference), some pointers to material for readers interested in learning more, and a glossary of testing terms, the vast majority of which are never used in the book itself. Unfortunately the latter is yet more evidence of the biggest weakness of this book — the appalling editing that doesn’t even remove sentences which are completely incorrect. “You can too contribute.” (the closing sentence of Chapter 1) is just one of many examples of poor writing that somehow survived into print.

On the whole the book does give one an overview of how to get started with JMeter and the section on load testing a website is a useful introduction to various JMeter concepts. This is the only printed book on the topic out there so if you learn best reading from print then you don’t have many options. This is a shame as a niche topic like this could do with an interesting, well-informed and authoritative guide. For everyone else I would suggest reading the User Manual on the JMeter website as it covers all the material here (and much more) and is far more readable.

Full disclosure: I was given a copy of this book free of charge by the publisher for review purposes. They placed no restrictions on what I could say and left me to be as critical as I wanted so the above review is my own honest opinion."

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