Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Television

Submission + - Stealth Advertising hits the Airwaves (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by
The0retical
The0retical writes: " Ars Technica has an article about advertisements such as product placments are being inserted into local newscasts in order to generate more revenue for the station as users become much more savvy at timeshifting.

A new study from the University of Oregon has found that local news broadcasts are being infiltrated by advertising at around the same rate that DVR users skip ads.The fact that DVRs allow viewers to skip adverts is seen as one of their biggest benefits by users, but advertisers — and the TV networks that depend on them — are not so happy. Ad buyers don't want to pay full price for slots that viewers will never see, and TV networks are going as far as asking fans not to watch timeshifted programs but instead watch them live, lest the show in question get canceled."
Google

Submission + - Google Responds to criticism - by deleting it

Submitted by Matt423
Matt423 writes: Information week reports about changes to Google Groups: Google Groups users, however, detest the changes, at least those who have gone to the effort of posting. While there's probably a silent majority that ranges from neutral to enthusiastic about the new interface and features, the users posting their opinions online have few nice things to say. A person posting as "Matty F" wrote, "This new version of Google Groups is almost completely unusable. Can we have the old one back please?" Such sentiment reflects a common theme among the disgruntled users. Another poster identifying himself as "Rich Jordan" wrote, "I'll have to add my dismay over this change. The new interface is ugly and slow compared to the previous one, and much, much less intuitive." "The new interface is really awful," a person with the user name Gabriele complained. Google apparently rushed into action today and apparently deleted or scattered hundred of posts that were critical including one thread that had almost 100 posts. http://www.informationweek.com/industries/showArti cle.jhtml?articleID=197000377 http://groups.google.com/group/Google%20Groups-Bas ics/browse_thread/thread/12b929f18ed762a7
United States

Submission + - U.S. Release Docs Form Barred E-Voting Test Lab

Submitted by
InternetVoting
InternetVoting writes: "Still trying to dig themselves out from recent allegations of secrecy, the US Election Assistance Commission has released documents relating to the recent decertification of the e-Voting test lab CIBER. In a letter to CIBER CEO, the EAC informed him that since they shared confidential documents with a third party, the EAC was not authorized to make them public."
OS X

Submission + - Court Documents Show Microsoft's Tiger Envy

Submitted by
phillymjs
phillymjs writes: "PC Pro is reporting on another juicy e-mail nugget from the Sent Items of Jim Allchin, (nyud link, PDF) courtesy of Iowa's Comes v. Microsoft trial. It's a lengthy e-mail conversation from late June, 2004 — in which several Microsofties ooh and ahh over features of the yet-unreleased Mac OS X 10.4. IMHO the award for best quote goes to Lenn Pryor, who said, 'It is like I just got a free pass to Longhorn land today.'"
Movies

Submission + - Movie piracy no big deal to most Americans

Submitted by ScottSCY
ScottSCY writes: MSNBC.com is reporting that Solutions Research Group recently conducted a phone survey in which only 40% of Americans believe illegally downloading movies to be a 'very serious offense', compared to 59% who think parking in a fire lane is a worse offense. Contrast this with 78% who said shoplifting a DVD from a store is a serious offense.
Slashdot.org

Submission + - Does every posting have to be a question?

Submitted by gregger
gregger writes: The growing trend for Slashdot posts appears to be that you must end your headline with a question mark. At least 63 posts in January 2007 have been posed as questions. Now, why is that? Are people afraid of making a statement?
Operating Systems

Submission + - Windows to Linux. Which distro to pick?

Submitted by Redjoy
Redjoy writes: I just finished school and I would now like to make the switch to linux (at home).

I have the following PC:
1. Custom (233MHz, 128MB RAM?, 80GB HD, OS:win98)
2. Compaq presario (400MHz?,256MB RAM, 20GB HD, OS:XPPro)
3. Dell GX1 (500MHz, 768MB RAM, 160GB HD, OS:XPPro)
4. DELL INSPIRON 9300 (1.6GHz, 512MB RAM, 40GB HD, OS:XPPro)

I would like to use:
1. for storage (shared files)
2. belongs to my wife (use for web browsing, email, and simple "office" applications.
3. for storage (Tivo, backup files)
4. main system (does everything)

My question to the community is what distro should I install for each system, and why I should intall that distro?

I am open to all (non MS) operating systems.
IBM

Submission + - Deep Fritz beats Kramnik

Submitted by Syats
Syats writes: As BBC points out Deep Fritz beats World Chess Champion Vladimir Kramnik; of a six game match, four were draws and two victories for the computer. Kramnik is talking of a rematch... in a couple of months, when Deep Fritz is even better.
Intel

Submission + - Intel to produce no hard drive cheap laptop

Submitted by sien
sien writes: In a similar vein to the One Laptop Per Child computer Intel have announced that they intend to produce a similar cheap laptop using flash storage. The story is on The Age and also at the Herald Tribune. The entry of Intel and the declaration that Microsoft intend to get Windows running on the One Laptop Per Child machine suggests that there may be a general market for a cheap, robust laptop without hard drive or optical storage.
User Journal

Submission + - Apple Developing iPhone and "Smart" Phone

Submitted by anaesthetica
anaesthetica writes: According to AppleInsider, Apple is not only working on a cellphone + mp3 player iPhone, but is working on a second model designed to be a smart phone, highly integrated with Mac OS and .Mac. The smart phone has gone through several iterations, as the notoriously demanding Mr. Jobs ordered the elite team working on the phone to redesign and re-engineer their prototypes. Capabilities are reported to include Front Row interface, syncing contacts and iCal with .Mac, "call ahead", iChat video conferencing integration, WiFi, and a slide-out keyboard. Too good to be true?
PHP

Submission + - CAPTCHA harder to break using animations

Submitted by
mlemos
mlemos writes: "CAPTCHA validation is often used to prevent robots from abusing Web site resources. Usually CAPTCHA methods employ text written on fuzzy graphical images that the users must recognize.

However, there are already anti-CAPTCHA capable robots that employ artificial intelligence to reckon the text automatically.

László Zsidi is a PHP Web developer that has written an harder to break CAPTCHA solution. It consists in generating animated GIF images that exhibit the validation text.

Since the text never appears all at once in each of the animated frames, this solution certainly raises the bar in terms of difficulty for the robots to guess the validation text, making it very hard to defeat, if possible at all. There is an example screenshot that shows that this PHP component can be used to render an animated CAPTCHA with a 3D light effect running over the validation text.

The solution can run on most PHP installations as it only requires the GD library to render the animated graphic frames. László also provides another pure PHP class that is necessary to assemble the generated animated CAPTCHA frames into a single animated GIF image.

László just won the latest edition of the PHP Programming Innovation award for this achievement."

Slashdot Top Deals

FORTRAN is not a flower but a weed -- it is hardy, occasionally blooms, and grows in every computer. -- A.J. Perlis

Close