Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment It's About Intention and Competition (Score 1) 748

You have to look at the intention of the monopoly and the competition they face. When the bundling of IE happened, there was no desktop OS competition. All they had was the competition of moving the desktop into the browser, and MS wanted to be sure that they controlled that migration and limited it to their browser. Their competition was Netscape and their intention was to eliminate this competition by bundling and keeping their product "free."

When you look at the AV space, MS doesn't face competition from the AV vendors, they are helping their product work safer. Their competition is from Apple in the consumer space, Linux in the server space, and Google in the mobile and cloud space. Adding AV to their OS is an attempt to compete in the market, not to eliminate their competition of AV vendors.

That said, it will be interesting to see if and how 3rd party AV vendors will be allowed to replace the built-in AV.

Comment StackOverflow already solved this (Score 2) 213

Admit that you'll never know if anyone's name online is their real name, let them put whatever name they want, but then limit what they can do until they build up some reputation.

If they are a new user, don't let them run around spamming on everyone else's posts and throttle the number of activities they can take until it's been verified by other more trusted members. Allow people to flag posts or identities as spam, and follow up with moderators (or even algorithms analyzing the flags) to suspend or outright ban the offender.

There's no need to reinvent the wheel here.

Comment Re:usb security (Score 1) 238

Can you even access the pull down the activate USB mass-storage mode when the phone is locked?

Yes you can activate the USB without unlocking the phone, at least that's the case on my G2. But this only gives access to the SD card, which you have physical access to anyway (remove battery, pull SD card, mount with any adapter). The device's internal memory is another case, and may be protected when the screen is locked and development mode is disabled, but I personally wouldn't trust this lock. An obvious first step for anyone that is paranoid is having a remote-wipe capability.

Comment It's about time (Score 2) 102

Maybe now all the established security vendors will create a decent offering that works over IP, rather than plugging their old technology into a voip box. I wouldn't trust my home security to Comcast, but the established security vendors need to upgrade their products off of telephone modem technology badly.

If you were on IP, a simple "ping" could be run periodically to make sure you haven't had your connection cut. And you can get more advanced, like viewing the status on a web page (we already have banking online, so this can be done right) or getting a feed of the audio and video during a break-in to give police a heads up if it's a likely false alarm or send pictures of the criminal so police know who to look for. The alerts would also be sent faster, and can be encrypted over IP, rather than waiting for the modem to dial out.

Comment Taking it with a grain of salt (Score 1) 293

In a statement released on the Kremlin's website on Thursday, Medvedev instructed the country's communications ministry to draw up amendments "aimed at allowing authors to let an unlimited number of people use their content on the basis of free licensing."

So before they didn't allow authors to use free licenses?

And as much as I'd hope that Russia is relaxing copyright for the greater benefit, I'm pretty sure this is the same as it's always been for nations that are below the top. Mainly, those on top try to stay there with strict IP laws, and all the other nations have lax enforcement and laws to make it cheaper to compete and catch up. The US did it while we were a developing nation, China and India do it today, so it's no surprise if Russia goes this direction if they see themselves falling behind.

Comment The easy opt-out (Score 1) 581

Just sign the contract as Bugs Bunny. Odds are, if your signature is bad enough, no one will notice.

That said, any doctor that is this afraid of bad reviews is a doctor you should be afraid of. I prefer the ones that offer a survey on my way out and let me know some of the common sites that they need more reviews. If you've looked for a doctor on the internet long enough, you find that they all have bad reviews, but not a lot have good reviews, especially ones that look like they were written by an actual person.

Comment Re:You can never rule out risks completely (Score 1) 436

Given the prevailing options, I'll take nuclear for now. No power is safe, but we over emphasis the rare and unknown deaths while ignoring the common ones that happen every day:

http://www.geekosystem.com/coal-oil-nuclear-deaths-chart/

That said, we need to figure out a better solution for the used fuel. And long term, we really need to work on energy storage so that renewable becomes a better option.

Comment Make auto-pilot cars optional, just like HOV/Tolls (Score 1) 112

Instead of spending all the time, effort, and high risk should there be a failure, on an auto-pilot to handles real world situations perfectly, why not focus on the easy wins. Over long highways and busy cities, build HOV like lanes designed just for auto-pilot cars. If the car has the technology, it communicates with a gate that allows the car to enter the physically separate lane. When you get to the end of the special lane (or to your exit), you take control of the car before it lets you exit back on to the existing roads.

Include the technology for automatic valet parking that could be a seller for high end/big city areas, and you start the adoption process gradually. Even better is if the car can self-dock with a charging station while you're not using it. Companies like zipcar could purchase vehicles with the technology to get through rush-hour on the special lanes, and then the cars would reposition to high demand areas by themselves. Or the city could purchase vehicles and use them as an individual mass transit option that doesn't require building tracks, high voltage power lines, train stations, and the train cars.

For the paranoid, they don't have to give up control or even buy a car with the technology in it. But for the rest of us that would like to have our car drive at an optimal fuel efficient speed without any traffic jams while we read a book or talk on the phone, we can choose to trust the technology.

Comment Re:the interesting page is that one : (Score 1) 205

Where are they getting the prices for the smartphones in this table? For Sprint, I don't see anything resembling a $30 unlimited smartphone plan. The closest they have is a $70 plan with a 450 minute cap. Are they taking that plan and subtracting the 450 minute plan with no data for $40 to get the $30 for just the data? Something tells me you can't buy a plan like that. So while it's interesting for comparing data to data between carriers, it doesn't have a lot of practical use for anyone looking for the most affordable data plan.

Ref: http://shop.sprint.com/NASApp/onlinestore/en/Action/DisplayPlans?INTNAV=ATG:HE:Plans

Comment Wrong question (Score 1) 1115

Projects that can be pirated (software, movies, etc) have low maintenance costs and high creation costs. If the funds didn't exist to create the product, then it wouldn't be created and there's nothing to pirate. Once there is something to pirate, you can't kill the project, but you can make the venture unprofitable enough to discourage someone from doing it again. So the question isn't if a project has been killed due to piracy, but if someone has ever decided that a project isn't worth starting because the market isn't profitable enough. There can be a significant number of these but you'd never know, since the project was never started and therefore nothing exists to know about.

Unfortunately not all of us can put food on the table by giving everything away for free. There's a time and place for free/open software, but there's also an advantage to have people create something where the costs of that creation are spread across many customers rather than a single firm or with advertising.

Comment Re:since when is space shifting from CD not fair u (Score 3, Interesting) 145

As other's have mentioned, the first question is it fair use to download an mp3 of a cd/song that you have already purchased?

But, there's yet a further step, where time-shifting is allowed in the TV/video world for recording on a VCR. I presume that same shifting is permitted for recording off of the radio. Therefore, are you allowed to download/posses an mp3 of a song that you heard on the radio?

There's a slippery slope that I don't think we should say anyone can download content that's been played on some radio station at some point, but a lawyer would have a difficult time claiming that you hadn't already heard a collection of top-40 songs. And this also wouldn't excuse someone that turns around and shares the content with others.

Comment What needs transitioning first (Score 1) 250

Assuming that this is not VoIP to the home, but rather everything between the last miles, there's still some transitioning to be done. Mainly anything that is data over the phone, e.g. fax machines, alarm systems, and dial up networking. This requires some physical and procedural upgrades.

There are far too many legal and medical industries that won't accept a scan/pdf over email and insist on a fax for some simple forms. Heck, even Ameritrade asked me to fax in a form or to mail it in, you'd think they could setup a web page for updating personal data.

All of the major alarm companies that offer support over an IP line have a VoIP box to continue working with the older hardware. Switching to IP would allow 2 way communication, greater scalability, lower hardware costs, etc, but I've yet to see one do this.

Dial up networking is still used by not just the rural areas, but also things like credit card transactions that are performed over the stand alone readers.

All of these will need to be transitioned off of voice technology or updated to work reliably over a VoIP based connection. Personally I'll be happy to see the death of the fax machine and an upgrade of alarm systems, but I think we are stuck with some devices for rural locations.

Slashdot Top Deals

A failure will not appear until a unit has passed final inspection.

Working...