Submission + - Terry Pratchett has Alzheimers (smh.com.au) 1
Hecatonchires writes: A blow to discworld fans everywhere. Terry Pratchett has announced he has a rare form of early onset alzheimers.
Best Way to Build a Searchable Document Index? 216
Blinocac writes "I am organizing the IT documentation for the agency I work for, and we would like to make a searchable document index that would render results based on meta tags placed in the documents, which include everything from Word files, HTML, Excel, Access, and PDF's." What methods or tools have others seen that work? Anything to avoid?
Submission + - Watching 'Star Wars' for the First Time
spungo writes: "Given that it's thirty years since the release of 'Star Wars', BBC journalist Kevin Young decides to find out what all the fuss is about, having never seen the movie before."
Submission + - 2006: The year of the stolen laptops. (timeline)
hypoboxer writes: "It looks like 2006 was another year of stolen laptops. This is a time line of what got taken when. It also proves that "hackers" aren't to blame for any of this. You can blame the theft on common criminals and companies ready to give out vital information to any employee with a laptop."
Water Cooling Computers With A Swimming Pool 241
guzugi writes "This is a project I have been working for several months and been hypothesizing for much longer. The basic idea is to shortcut the need for an air conditioner when cooling multiple computers. Swimming pool water is pumped into the house and through several waterblocks to effectively cool these hot machines. This greatly reduces noise cooling requirements."
Submission + - QuickTime users still at risk from MySpace bug
MySpaceDude writes: "The QuickTime vulnerability that led to a widespread worm outbreak on MySpace.com last month could be exploited again, according to security researcher Aviv Raff. Apple issued a temporary specific patch for the worm last month, but this bug can still be exploited to run unauthorized code on a patched computer.
From MacWorld.com"
Submission + - Mac OS X and Font Smoothing
Piroca writes: Font smoothing in OS X is one of the worst aspects of the system, yet few users dare to complain about it. The rationale behind Quartz font rendering is that anything in the screen should be rendered as they would while printing. Apple decided to turn off font hinting and perform anti-aliasing indiscriminately, thus adding artifacts to horizontal and vertical lines. It happens the end result is that fonts at small sizes are blurry and not very easy to read (which is exactly the opposite result expected from the anti-aliasing strategy, and renders the crispness of LCDs useless). Apple has been heavy-handed about this issue since OS X 10.1 by not acknowledging it and not providing configuration options to turn off anti-aliasing in small fonts while providing font hinting and choices for system fonts (the ubiquitous Lucida Grande is not hinted therefore it looks wrong when anti-aliased) as the old System 9 and Windows do. This situation is unlikely to change anytime soon (Leopard won't do anything about it, at least). For me, this is a problem because I have to develop on OS X and keep starring at blurry fonts the whole day gives me headaches. I'm pretty sure other developers out there have the same problem, therefore here goes my question: what do you do to cope with the troublesome font smoothing in OS X?
Submission + - Opera patched in secret
An anonymous reader writes: Opera 9.10 released in December seemed to be a rather cosmetic update. But as heise Security reports, behind the scenes Opera patched two remote code execution holes — neither of them mentioned in the changelog. In addition Opera rates an exploitable heap overflow as "moderate" because it is "not trivial to exploit it reliably". I wonder if this is really done to protect thier users or rather to minimize public exposure...
