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Comment Re:The suckitude that was DARPA head Tony Tether (Score 1) 54

by philgross (#30563456) Attached to: What DARPA's Been Up To, At Length
Long term, heavy-academic-contribution stuff was exactly what he choked off. He was bad for America's research base and bad for big-picture American security, IMHO. Apologies for the gratuitous Dubya swipe (as you say, mod-bait on /.), but I do feel that Tether and GWB shared a disdain for academia, which was no problem for the president, but had terrible consequences for what is supposed to be the blue-sky research arm of the DoD.

Also, you're aware that this not some hindsight Bush-bashing here, right? I mean, they actually had Senate hearings on the Tether/DARPA mess back in 2005.

Comment The suckitude that was DARPA head Tony Tether (Score 4, Interesting) 54

by philgross (#30562866) Attached to: What DARPA's Been Up To, At Length
No mention of the disastrous Bush-era reign of Tony Tether at DARPA? With an incurious, aggressive president, we got an incurious, aggressive DARPA head, who cut long-term and academic research in favor of short-term corporate research. His dumping by Obama led to joy and celebrations (OK, cautious hope) across the land.

Comment Re:They're not big. (Score 1) 283

by philgross (#28518761) Attached to: Google Claims They "Just Aren't That Big"

Google did maps, it was okay but not #1, they bought Keyhole(now google earth) and advanced their tech to become #1

They hired the guys who made the Google Maps precursor, but it was a separate acquisition (and technology) from Keyhole / Google Earth. They only recently got the two systems to use the same imagery data, I think.

Comment Re:Easily identifiable source = easy blocked traff (Score 1) 195

by philgross (#28299029) Attached to: Is China Creating the World's Largest Botnet Army?
I was going to add the same comment. The point of a botnet is that the computers, being hijacked consumer/corporate pcs, are from all over the world and indistinguishable from random traffic IPs. If you're getting attacked by an all-China botnet, just cut off a well-defined set of addresses and the threat vanishes.
Education

MS Word 2010 Takes On TeX 674

Posted by timothy from the math-journals-won't-be-switching-anytime-soon dept.
alphabetsoup writes "Office 2010 Technology preview was leaked a few days back. With its leak, a feature which was rumored to be present can now be confirmed. Office 2010 finally adds support for Advanced Typographic features (ligatures, number forms, alternates, etc.) of OpenType, allowing one to create documents so far possible only in TeX or InDesign. Between this, the new equation editor and styles, what are the chances of Word replacing LaTeX as the editor of choice in academia?"

Comment Re:Why is it taking so long? (Score 4, Interesting) 308

by philgross (#26409843) Attached to: Chrome On the Way For Mac and Linux
Nope. Win32 is emphatically not Unix. If anything, it's closer to the old DEC VAX VMS OS (Dave Cutler's earlier OS). While there are POSIX compatibility adapters, the native OS provides services that look pretty different from the classic UNIX ones (process creation, IPC, security, etc.).

I recommend Windows System Programming by Hart if you want to get a feeling for it. It's arguably a better (and certainly more modern) API than the classic UNIX set. I mean, fork() is a pretty weird way to create a new process, if you think about it.

This is _not_ an endorsement of the entire Windows OS, which has miles-deep layers of cruft and crap on top -- just talking about the kernel and core system services.
Apple

Apple Intros 17" Unibody MBP, DRM-Free iTunes 1079

Posted by kdawson from the life-after-jobs dept.
Phil Schiller delivered the keynote at MacWorld, the first after the Steve Jobs era of keynotes. Here is Engadget's live blog. The big news, predicted by many rumor sites, was the introduction of the unibody 17" MacBook Pro. As rumored, the battery is not removable, but it's claimed to provide 8 hours of battery life (7 hours with the discrete graphics): "3x the charges and lifespan of the industry standard." $2,799, 2.66 GHz and 4 GB of RAM, 320GB hard drive, shipping at the end of January. There is a battery exchange program, and there is an option for a matte display. The other big news is that iTunes is going DRM-free: 8M songs today, all 10+M by the end of March. Song pricing will be flexible, as the studios have been demanding; the lowest song price is $0.69. Apple also introduced the beta of a Google Docs-like service, iWork.com.

Comment Drug use?! (Score 5, Informative) 1601

by philgross (#25703299) Attached to: Press Favored Obama Throughout Campaign
Are you referring to the drug use he had himself described in detail in his best-selling book? The drug use which, when the NYT investigated back in February, interviewing his peers of the time, he turned out to have probably exaggerated?

Oh, and when asked about his drug use back in October 2006 said "Of course I inhaled. That was the point". On video.

No, I have no idea why the media would not want to spend reporting resources and column inches covering this repeatedly.

And would you agree that Obama has been far more open about his illegal substance abuse than certain other presidents?
Privacy

Picasa Rolls Out 3.0 — Now With Facial Recognition 243

Posted by timothy from the face-in-the-crowd dept.
eldavojohn writes "If you use Picasa (Google's photo sharing site), they have upgraded to 3.0 and are purportedly offering facial recognition. That's right, why tag photos of your friends when the software will group similar faces together for you? There's a new list of features including repairing old photographs by touching them up and even writing on your images. As expected, not everyone is 'ok' with Google automatically recognizing you in pictures."
Education

Submission + - Computer Art for a CS Dept Office?

Submitted by
philgross
philgross writes: "My university's Computer Science Department has just renovated its main office, and is looking for artwork for the walls. Do Slashdotters have any recommendations about their favorite posters or images that address the algorithms, the history, and/or the aesthetics of Computer Science?"
Earth

Teen Discovers Plastic-Decomposing Bacteria 209

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the here-comes-the-study-claiming-it-causes-cancer dept.
ganelo writes to tell us that 16-year-old Waterloo Collegiate Institute student Danel Burd has made quite a stir with his plastic-eating bacteria discovery. For his efforts Burd won top prize at a Canada-wide science fair claiming a $10,000 prize and a $20,000 scholarship. "Tests to identify the strains found strain two was Sphingomonas bacteria and the helper was Pseudomonas. A researcher in Ireland has found Pseudomonas is capable of degrading polystyrene, but as far as Burd and his teacher Mark Menhennet know -- and they've looked -- Burd's research on polyethelene plastic bags is a first."
Security

Breakdowns of Website Defacement by Platform 203

Posted by CmdrTaco from the something-to-think-about dept.
SkiifGeek writes "Zone-H have recently posted the statistical breakdown of the collected website defacements from the last few years. Surprisingly, in 2007 more Linux servers suffered a successful attack than all versions of Windows, combined. Similarly, more Apache installations were successfully attacked than all IIS versions combined. A day after posting this data, Zone-H have questioned the appropriateness of continuing to operate the archive. Despite the valuable information that can be gleaned from the service, it may soon be lost to the world. The natural successor to the now-defunct Alldas archive of defaced websites, Zone-H's archive maintains records of over 2.6 million defaced sites but may be shut down due to the continuous accusations of impropriety leveled against them any time they disclose and mirror a reported defacement."

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