ilctoh - Slashdot User

Submission + - How to erase your Facebook data?

Submitted by 0ffTheGr1d on Friday August 24, 2007 @07:10PM

0ffTheGr1d writes: My 'mate' found something and now needs to drop off the grid. I have searched far and wide, for a method to remove 'my friend' from Facebook. Is a time machine required?

I am not the only one to see that if you need to be found, your presence on facebook will make it very easy to be found/targeted by anyone with means. Any privacy statement counts for very little in this day and age. Never mind the fact that this opinion exists.

Or am I just paranoid?

Submission + - Implementing OOXML: One Developer's Nightmare (arstdesign.com)

Submitted by

Just Some Nobody

on Friday August 24, 2007 @05:55PM

Just Some Nobody writes: "While Microsoft likes to play up just how well-documented the 6,000+ page OOXML specification is, the independent developers implementing it don't have things so easy. Stéphane Rodriguez, one of the top non-Microsoft experts on the binary Excel file format, has been documenting the difficulties in working with the new OOXML format for Excel. It seems that one of the biggest difficulties is that Excel-produced documents don't even conform to Microsoft's own OOXML standard, ECMA 376."

Submission + - Another Battery Fire in AT&T's Network

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 24, 2007 @05:16PM

An anonymous reader writes: AT&T has disclosed another fire started by one of the 17,000 Avestor batteries in its broadband network. The first fire caused a violent explosion in suburban Houston. This second incident occurred just 20 miles away.

Submission + - Users Bash and Trash Wal-Mart on its Facebook Site (computerworld.com)

Submitted by

hhavensteincw

on Friday August 24, 2007 @04:55PM

hhavensteincw writes: "Only two weeks after Wal-Mart launched its latest forway into Web 2.0 land, Facebook users have hijacked a page aimed at selling back-to-school supplies to college kids to instead post a tirade of rants about the company's labor practices. Computerworld has the scoop http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?com mand=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9032718&intsrc=new s_ts_head about the latest battering the company is taking from Facebook users. Of the 100-plus comments, none relate to dorm decorating as Wal-Mart had originally envisioned."

Submission + - Wine 0.9.44 released (winehq.org)

Submitted by

jshriverWVU

on Friday August 24, 2007 @03:19PM

jshriverWVU writes: "This is release 0.9.44 of Wine, a free implementation of Windows on Unix. What's new in this release: — Better heuristics for making windows managed. — Automatic detection of timezone parameters. — Improvements to the builtin WordPad. — Better signatures support in crypt32. — Still more gdiplus functions. — Lots of bug fixes."

Submission + - Lunar Eclipse Next Tuesday Morning (space.com)

Submitted by

Raver32

on Friday August 24, 2007 @07:33AM

Raver32 writes: "Tuesday morning, Aug. 28 brings us the second total lunar eclipse of 2007. Those living in the Western Hemisphere and eastern Asia will be able to partake in at least some of this sky show. The very best viewing region for viewing this eclipse will fall across the Pacific Rim, including the West Coast of the United States and Canada, as well as Alaska, Hawaii, New Zealand and eastern Australia. All these places will be able to see the complete eclipse from start to finish. Europeans will miss out on the entire show, as the Moon will be below the horizon during their mid and late morning hours."

Submission + - How SBC (AT&T) pillaged South Africa's economy (busrep.co.za)

Submitted by Kifoth on Friday August 24, 2007 @05:19AM

Kifoth writes: For 8 years, SBC and Telekom Malaysia controlled South Africa's only telecommunications company, Telkom. Telkom had a government granted monopoly in order for it to connect the large parts of South Africa which had been neglected under apartheid. Instead of helping, SBC abused their position and raised Telkom's prices to amongst the highest in the world. The billions they made here ultimately went to fund their AT&T merger.

"SBC, described as "congenitally litigious", is said to have played a major role in the failure of South Africa's telecoms policy to develop a competitive telephone service. Under SBC's control Telkom not only failed to meet its roll-out obligations but behaved "as a tax on industry and a drag on economic growth"."

Submission + - Develop multitasking applications with PHP V5

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 13, 2007 @06:24PM

An anonymous reader writes: Many PHP developers believe that because standard PHP lacks threading capabilities, it's impossible for a practical PHP application to multitask. Not true... PHP doesn't support threading in the way other languages like the Java programming language or C++ do, but the examples in this article show that PHP can exploit in-process multitasking and has more potential for speed-ups than many realize.

Submission + - "How Experts Fail" book-in-progress (howexpertsfail.com)

Submitted by

Thomas David Kehoe

on Monday August 13, 2007 @06:09PM

Thomas David Kehoe writes: "I've set up a wiki website for the book I'm writing, "How Experts Fail: The Patterns and Situations in Which Experts Are Less Intelligent Than Non-Experts." I would appreciate contributions from your readers, especially stories in which a non-expert was right when an expert was wrong.

The website is at http://howexpertsfail.com/."

Submission + - FREE Open Source Enterprise Magazine re-launched (o3magazine.com)

Submitted by

buswellj

on Monday August 13, 2007 @06:07PM

buswellj writes: "The popular Enterprise Open Source Magazine — o3 magazine re-launched today with Issue 6. The latest issue of the magazine looks at globally distributed Rails applications and building global content data networks. The magazine itself is deployed on a pure Open Source Solution, that commercially would have cost over US$261,000. The magazine is built with Scribus, Open Office and The Gimp."

Submission + - Thieves in U.K. steal police data server (com.com)

Submitted by

mytrip

on Monday August 13, 2007 @05:22PM

mytrip writes: "One of the private companies that helps police use mobile-phone networks to track terror suspects confirmed on Saturday that a server had been stolen from its office in Sevenoaks, England.

According to police, the data stored on the stolen server was of little value. The company involved, Forensic Telecommunication Services (FTS), says that the data was encrypted.

But Shadow Home Secretary David Davis told The Mail on Sunday that the government considered the case to be "extremely serious.""

Submission + - College Orientation, Online (baltimoresun.com)

Submitted by

langelgjm

on Monday August 13, 2007 @04:37PM

langelgjm writes: "Not content to wait until arriving at college to start meeting friends, some recent high-school graduates are coordinating furniture, meeting significant others, and rejecting roommates based on sexual preference with the help of Facebook. "Last week, College Park had just sent out roommate assignments to about 3,800 entering freshman when university official Brian L. Watkins received his first phone call of the season from an upset mother. The woman said a Facebook profile of her son's freshman roommate "indicated that the roommate was into the same sex, so that threw up all kinds of red flags from their perspective," said Watkins, UM's director of parent and family affairs. "My response was that real or perceived sexual orientation is not a valid reason for a roommate change and that in our eyes that is like saying, 'I'm rooming with a Muslim, you need to move me,'" he said." Perhaps both the media covering Giuliani's daughter's Facebook profile and this mother could stand to learn a lesson: not everything you see online is necessarily true."

Submission + - Self Study Suggestions for Computer Science? 3

Submitted by

Merc248

on Sunday July 22, 2007 @06:37PM

Merc248 writes: "Right now, I'm a mathematics major in my fourth year. I've a great interest in at least the idea of computer science (but NOT programming). From what little I know, there's a lot of deep mathematics in computer science, and it is something that I would love to look into. However, I don't know of a good introduction to these sorts of deeper mathematical topics; the university I go to has an extremely competitive computer science program with all of the classes that would at least give me an idea of what the topics are like, which means that I probably won't be able to take those classes at all anytime soon. I figured that studying textbooks by myself would be the best option, though I have no idea what a good, classic computer science textbook would be. Maybe there's another resource that I do not know about? What do you guys suggest for someone who wants to know more about computer science in general and wants to perhaps delve into the topics a bit deeper?"

Submission + - Man with tiny brain lives normal life (reuters.com)

Submitted by Ecuador on Sunday July 22, 2007 @06:11PM

Ecuador writes: In a story that is sure to spur Civil Service jokes, Reuters reports:
"Scans of the 44-year-old man's brain showed that a huge fluid-filled chamber called a ventricle took up most of the room in his skull, leaving little more than a thin sheet of actual brain tissue.
"He was a married father of two children, and worked as a civil servant," Dr. Lionel Feuillet and colleagues at the Universite de la Mediterranee in Marseille wrote in a letter to the Lancet medical journal."

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