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Nielsen Recommends Not Masking Passwords 849

Posted by timothy from the *****-****-**-******** dept.
Mark writes "Usability expert and columnist Jakob Nielsen wants to abolish password masking: 'Usability suffers when users type in passwords and the only feedback they get is a row of bullets. Typically, masking passwords doesn't even increase security, but it does cost you business due to login failures.' I've never been impressed by the argument that 'I can't think why we need this (standard) security measure, so let's drop it.' It usually indicates a lack of imagination of the speaker. But in this case, does usability outweigh security?"

Comment Re:CSP makes parallel programming easy (Score 3, Informative) 48

by TwistedSquare (#28347449) Attached to: Erlang's Creator Speaks About Its History and Prospects
Erlang is based on the ACTOR model, not CSP. The main practical differences between Erlang and CSP is that Erlang uses asynchronous dynamically-typed messages sent to a particular address (process id), whereas CSP systems usually deal with synchronous messages sent down a particular, typed channel. But they are both message-passing systems with the idea of removing shared mutable data, as you say. For an implementation of CSP in the pure functional language Haskell, see my library CHP (http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/projects/ofa/chp/).
Media

CoS Bigwig Likens Wikipedia Ban to Nazis' Yellow Star Decree 567

Posted by timothy from the stable-sane-leadership-cuckoo-cuckoo dept.
We mentioned on Thursday that Wikipedia has banned edits originating from certain IP addresses belonging to the Church of Scientology; reader newtley writes now that Scientology leader (CEO and Chairman of the Board of the linked, but legally separate, Religious Technology Center) David Miscavige calls the ban "a 'despicable hate crime,' and asks, 'What's next, will Scientologists have to wear yellow, six-pointed stars on our clothing?' During World War II, Hitler forced Jewish men, women and children to wear a a yellow cloth star bearing the word Jude to brand them in the streets of Europe, and in the Nazi death camps."
Games

Bethesda Talks DLC Size and Limitations 93

Posted by Soulskill from the better-smaller-faster-easier dept.
Gamasutra has an interview with Pete Hines, product manager for Fallout 3, about Bethesda's philosophy for DLC, and how it's changed over the years. Quoting: "All these people are out there playing our game by the hundreds of thousands on a daily basis and we want to be able to bring those folks something they could do in a much shorter time frame, rather than just saying, 'See you next year.' That instantly ruled out doing a big expansion because those things just take so damn long to do. So we started looking at the biggest stuff we'd done that people really liked, but that we could do in smaller, digestible chunks. That's where we came to the Knights of the Nine model — it's substantive and it adds multiple hours of game play and new items, but we can do it in a time frame that allows us to get it out without waiting forever. That's what we've gone for with Fallout 3."

Comment Re:CSP Occam and Transputers (Score 1) 327

by TwistedSquare (#18449095) Attached to: Multi-Threaded Programming Without the Pain
I even implemented the original version of the Java Communicating Sequential Processes API which brought CSP style programming to the Java world, although it is based on Java's underlying Thread mechanism so context switching isn't as fast as it could be. Assuming that's true, that would make you Paul Austin. Hi. JCSP is still going strong -- we've recently been adding extended rendezvous and poison, new release to follow shortly. If you're interested in developing on JCSP again, let me know. While we're on the subject of C++ and CSP in this thread: C++CSP. Again, new version to follow shortly (so much to do...)

O'Reilly and CMP Exercise Trademark on 'Web 2.0' 229

Posted by Zonk from the can't-have-confusion-2.0 dept.
theodp writes "On May 16, the USPTO notified CMP Media, which co-presents the Web 2.0 Conference with O'Reilly, that its trademark for Web 2.0 was entitled to be registered. Eight days later, CMP sicced its lawyers on not-for-profit IT@Cork, taking the networking organization to task for not only using the term Web 2.0 for its free conference, but also for linking to a What is Web 2.0 article penned by Tim O'Reilly." It should be noted that their trademark only applies to the titles of industry events (CMP is a show organizer).

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