Comment Big Blue Screen of Death (Score 0) 148
Probably.
Comment Typical comment (Score 4, Funny) 137
That's all we need here. Gamma nazis
GSM Association Slams Euro Call For Ban On Wireless In School 271
jhernik writes "The ongoing debate over the supposed dangers posed by mobile phone usage and wireless signals has exploded once again. An influential European committee has called for a ban on mobile phones and Wi-Fi networks in schools – the GSM Association has denounced the report as an 'unbalanced political assessment, not a scientific report.' The report made its recommendation to reduce mobile and wireless use in schools, despite admitting that there is a lack of clear scientific and clinical proof. However, it said the lack of proof was reason enough to restrict use, just in case, comparing mobile phone radiation to other things whose dangers were once unknown, such as asbestos, leaded petrol and tobacco."
Do Developers Really Need a Second Monitor? 1002
jammag writes "It was an agonizing moment: a developer arrived at work to realize his second monitor had been taken (given to the accounting dept., to add insult to injury). Soon, the wailing and the gnashing of teeth began. As this project manager recounts, developers feel strongly — very strongly — about needing a second monitor (maybe a third?) to work effectively. But is this just the posturing of pampered coders, or is this much screen real estate really a requirement for today's developers?"
Comment All time low? (Score 4, Insightful) 369
You mean lower than they were in, say, 1776?
Comment Obiligatory Car analogy (Score 1) 789
"My used car is better than your new motorbike!"
Yes, your bike may look impressive and be good for pulling the ladies, but can it pull a caravan? No! Can you put fourteen crates of beer in the back? No!
Comment Some reasons (Score 5, Interesting) 665
Ok... In reverse order of significance:
1. Expense (at least traditionally) of SSL Certificates. Although today that's not such a big issue, and an SSL certificate costs about the same as your domain registration. However, if you have multiple subdomains you still need a more expensive certificate.
2. Complication. It can be a highly confusing process for someone who's not an expert to do the certificate request process and the associated installation of the certificate. I know the first time I tried to do it, it went horribly wrong and I spent a day trying to sort it out.
3. Client Performance: SSL websites are slower than non-SSL websites. Not such a big deal again these days, but I remember when I had to wait it would seem forever for the images on my online banking site to load, cursing them every time for such a graphically-intensive SSL site.
4. IP addresses: This is a big one, if you host multiple websites on your server, and you only have a single IP address, you can't host more than one SSL certificate. So you need more IP addresses (which is not easy nowdays). Big deal for small company hosted websites, which are often on shared IPs.
5. Server Performance: A server that can cope with one million users per day using HTTP will not be able to cope with anywhere near that number of connections over HTTPS for obvious reasons. So you not only need a certificate, you potentially need a whole new server architecture to deal with it. Scale this up for a big business like Twitter or Facebook and you're talking implementation costs in high millions of dollars.
Comment Re:What's after 360? (Score 4, Funny) 134
Well, seeing as it's going to be a major INCREMENT of the X-Box family, I'd suggest the name Xcrement
Comment Lame HTML = Bogus Journal (Score 1) 103
Truism of the internet. The more crackpot your ideas are, the larger you have to set your HTML border widths on your table elements.
Submission + - O2 block Google Translate from under 18s 1
jolyonr writes: Are you one of the many people who are dismayed to see how easy it is for teenagers and children to get access to online translation services?
Well, fear not, because UK mobile internet operator O2 have now stepped in and made sure that Google Translate can no longer be accessed by anyone under 18.
"The site you tried to visit is restricted to over 18s", claims the statement when you visit the site.
To remove the block, you need them to charge £1 to your credit card. They offer £2.50 in mobile credit in return, but what about those who are under 18 and actually need something translated?
Almost certainly O2 are blocking this because their systems are not clever enough to block porn sites that are fed through Google Translate. But then what next? Blocking Google search because of the Cached pages?
Well, fear not, because UK mobile internet operator O2 have now stepped in and made sure that Google Translate can no longer be accessed by anyone under 18.
"The site you tried to visit is restricted to over 18s", claims the statement when you visit the site.
To remove the block, you need them to charge £1 to your credit card. They offer £2.50 in mobile credit in return, but what about those who are under 18 and actually need something translated?
Almost certainly O2 are blocking this because their systems are not clever enough to block porn sites that are fed through Google Translate. But then what next? Blocking Google search because of the Cached pages?
Comment Re:Acceptance (Score 5, Funny) 202
Who can accept an award on behalf of the Internet?
Al Gore, of course!
Milky Way Stuffed With an Estimated 50 Billion Alien Worlds 331
astroengine writes "Using data extrapolated from the early Kepler observations of 1,235 candidate exoplanets, mission scientists have placed an estimate on the number of alien worlds there are in our galaxy. There are thought to be 50 billion exoplanets, 500 million of which are probably orbiting within their stars' habitable zones."
Comment Re:SATA early adoptors (Score 1) 212
or ST-506 interface drives if you are just about to tell me that MFM is an encoding method rather than an interface. But they were called that back then. I remember!
Comment SATA early adoptors (Score 4, Funny) 212
Well, I guess this vindicates my decision to stick with MFM hard disks.
Researchers Track Mouse Movements and Hesitations 116
lpctstr writes "Researchers from the University of Washington and Microsoft Research have found that cursor movements and cursor hovers can detect the relevance of a search result and whether a user may abandon the search. They use an efficient algorithm written in Javascript to silently record movements and clicks on Bing and find that computing relevance using movements + clicks works better than just clicks (the current state-of-the-art). They explain some of this due to cursor and gaze being closely aligned on the web, and especially so on search result pages. Is this the future of innovation in search ranking — Google and Bing tracking your every twitch and pause?"
