Hawkins - Slashdot User

Submission + - Enterprise-friendly Cell Phones Lose Market Share (techtarget.com)

Submitted by

rsmiller510

on Monday April 04, 2011 @07:49AM

rsmiller510 writes: "Android and iPhone continue to make significant market share gains, as RIM and Microsoft continue to bleed market share. IT seems to have stopped buying cell phones and is letting end users decide. From a support perspective, that means IT has to be prepared to deal with iOS and Android, and probably sooner than later."

Submission + - MESSENGER In Orbit Around Mercury (jhuapl.edu)

Submitted by krswan on Friday March 18, 2011 @08:22AM

krswan writes: From the NASA press release: "At 9:10 p.m. EDT, engineers in the MESSENGER Mission Operations Center at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Md., received the anticipated radiometric signals confirming nominal burn shutdown and successful insertion of the MESSENGER probe into orbit around the planet Mercury."

If you don't know much about this little spacecraft, check out its website. Designed with a completely passive cooling system, it will stay at 600C on the sun side, but room temperature behind the sunshade. During its 6 year journey it used its solar panels as sails, using the solar wind instead of thrusters to adjust its trajectory. Over then next year it will build a high-rez map of Mercury, and maybe determine if there is really ice hiding in polar craters on Mercury.

Submission + - Playstation Move Reverse Engineering (hackaday.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 14, 2011 @09:32AM

An anonymous reader writes: Kenn has been hard at work reverse-engineering his Playstation Move controller. He has documented all of the internals as well as pulled a full, working, unencrypted firmware image from the controller's main microcontroller. He has been able to get his own code running on the controller as well, opening the door for any number of cool hacks.

Submission + - Square Enix to shut down servers for a week (finalfantasyxiv.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 13, 2011 @06:37PM

An anonymous reader writes: "Due to the continuous earthquakes occurring in the eastern regions of Japan since Mar. 11, 2011, the power companies in Japan have encouraged everyone to cooperate by conserving as much energy as possible as it is feared there will not be enough power supply. Based on the current situation, we have decided to shut down the game servers temporarily, and therefore to suspend services of FINAL FANTASY XIV, FINAL FANTASY XI, and PlayOnline temporarily."

Submission + - How to be a Good Open Source Citizen (itworld.com)

Submitted by

itwbennett

on Thursday March 10, 2011 @10:20AM

itwbennett writes: "Brian Proffitt is blogging about the resurgence of of animosity between Canonical and the GNOME community, as each side accuses the other of generally screwing things up in the wake of the Banshee/Canonical kerfuffle. The question, says Proffitt, comes down to the balance between individuality and interoperability. 'GNOME, it can be argued, is doing their own thing. (You could say the same for KDE, too.) Where does their responsibility to be a good citizen in the broader open source and free software community stop and the sovereignty of their own goals begin?'"

Submission + - Brown Dwarf Hits Record Low (discovery.com)

Submitted by

astroengine

on Thursday March 10, 2011 @05:59AM

astroengine writes: "The Keck II infrared telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, has spotted what appears to be the coldest brown dwarf ever detected. Astronomers from the University of Hawaii have managed to constrain its temperature to just shy of 100 degrees Celsius. The object is part of a brown dwarf binary system and is estimated to be 6-15 times the mass of Jupiter. This is an exciting object as it could belong to a so-far theoretical "Y" class of brown dwarf, a classification that makes objects like this cool example more planet-like than star-like."

Submission + - Why Men Don't Have Spines on Their Penises (sciencemag.org) 4

Submitted by sciencehabit on Wednesday March 09, 2011 @02:39PM

sciencehabit writes: Most male mammals wield a penis covered with spines made of keratin, the same material that forms fingernails, to sweep out competitors' sperm and irritate a female into ovulating. Even chimpanzees, our closest relatives, have penile spines. So why don't men? A new study suggests that this feature disappeared due to a chunk of DNA that went missing after our evolutionary divergence from chimps. The researchers have identified another DNA deletion that may have contributed to humans' bigger brains.

Submission + - Leslie Valiant Wins 'Nobel Prize' of Computing (ispyce.com)

Submitted by

autospa

on Wednesday March 09, 2011 @12:57PM

autospa writes: "ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery today named Leslie G. Valiant of Harvard University the winner of the 2010 ACM A.M. Turing Award for his fundamental contributions to the development of computational learning theory and to the broader theory of computer science. Valiant brought together machine learning and computational complexity, leading to advances in artificial intelligence as well as computing practices such as natural language processing, handwriting recognition, and computer vision. He also launched several subfields of theoretical computer science, and developed models for parallel computing. The Turing Award, widely considered the "Nobel Prize in Computing", is named for the British mathematician Alan M. Turing. The award carries a $250,000 prize, with financial support provided by Intel Corporation and Google Inc."

Submission + - A letter on behalf of the world's PC fixers (pcpro.co.uk)

Submitted by

Barence

on Tuesday March 08, 2011 @07:16AM

Barence writes: "PC Pro's Steve Cassidy has written a letter on behalf of all the put-upon techies who've ever been called by a friend to fix their PC. His bile is directed at a friend who put a DVD bought on holiday into their laptop, and then wondered what went wrong.

"Once you stuck that DVD in there and started saying 'yes, OK' to every resulting dialog box, you sank the whole thing," Cassidy writes. "It doesn’t take 10 minutes to sort that out; it requires a complete machine reload to properly guarantee the infection is history."

"No, there is no neat and handy way I’ve been keeping secret that allows you to retain your extensive collection of stolen software licences loaded on that laptop. I do disaster recovery, not disaster participation.""

Submission + - Can For-Profit Tech Colleges Be Trusted? (infoworld.com)

Submitted by

snydeq

on Monday March 07, 2011 @10:59AM

snydeq writes: "InfoWorld's Robert Scheier takes a closer look at for-profit IT-oriented colleges, questioning whether IT pros and employers can trust the quality of education on offer at institutions such as University of Phoenix, DeVry, ITT Tech, and Kaplan in the wake of increasing scrutiny for alleged deceptive practices that leave in high debt for jobs that pay little. 'For-profit schools carry a stigma in some eyes because of their reputation for hard sales pitches, aggressive marketing tactics, and saddling students with big loans for dubious degrees or certificates,' Scheier writes. 'Should IT pros looking to increase their skills, or people seeking to enter the IT profession, consider such for-profit schools? And should employers trust their graduates' skills?'"

Submission + - Nintendo 3DS killswitch bricks pirate consoles (thinq.co.uk) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 07, 2011 @10:46AM

An anonymous reader writes: Nintendo 3DS owners who play pirated games could end up bricking the device, thanks to a firmware killswitch.
Japanese second-hand console reseller Enterking has issued a warning to 3DS sellers on its website, saying it will not buy 3DS devices with a history of using illegal or unauthorised software.
The shop claims that they are liable to stop functioning thanks to a device-bricking firmware update from Nintendo.
The rumoured killswitch looks set to counter the piracy problems that dogged Nintendo's earlier DS handheld.

Submission + - Microsoft Website Promotes Upgrading From IE6 (ie6countdown.com)

Submitted by

Tarmas

on Friday March 04, 2011 @02:47PM

Tarmas writes: "In a not very suprising move, Microsoft has launched a website intended to persuade people to upgrade their browsers from Internet Explorer 6. In Microsoft's words: "This website is dedicated to watching Internet Explorer 6 usage drop to less than 1% worldwide, so more websites can choose to drop support for Internet Explorer 6, saving hours of work for web developers". About time?"

Comment Sounds like someone with an axe to grind. (Score 4, Insightful) 432

by Hawkins on Thursday March 03, 2011 @11:21AM (#35369084) Attached to: Old Man Murray Entry Deleted From Wikipedia

Eric Wolpaw and Chet Faliszek have worked in the gaming industry, and the site itself is referenced in numerous interviews, articles, quotations, and even in games. All valid reasons for a Wikipedia entry, I'd think.

Submission + - How to (Accidentally) Sabotage a Developer Program (infoworld.com)

Submitted by

snydeq

on Thursday March 03, 2011 @10:49AM

snydeq writes: "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister examines the 'dicey and unique challenge' of maintaining a successful developer program in the wake of the recent beating RIM took over its PlayBook SDK. 'As RIM found out last week, managing a developer program often means striking a delicate balance between providing the resources developers want and maintaining the control over a product's ecosystem that its business demands.' Questions regarding licensing, SDK subscriptions, tools, documentation, and access abound, but it might just be the lines of communication that prove key to ensuring success, McAllister writes. Witness RIM, which required an angry, sarcastic blog post to finally address myriad complaints and pleas for help posted in its own developer forums."

Submission + - Cybercriminals targeting point-of-sale devices (networkworld.com)

Submitted by alphadogg on Thursday March 03, 2011 @10:48AM

alphadogg writes: Point-of-sale payment processing devices for credit and debit cards are proving to be rich targets for cybercriminals due to lax security controls, particularly among small businesses, according to a new report. Trustwave, which investigates payment card breaches for companies such as American Express, Visa and MasterCard, conducted 220 investigations worldwide involving data breaches in 2010. The vast majority of those cases came down to weaknesses in POS devices. Although there are rules for security controls that developers should use for the devices, such as the Payment Application Data Security standard, Trustwave said that "these controls are rarely implemented properly."

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