Comment Quick... (Score 1) 594
In before the we're sued.
Journal Journal: Entry.
I entered a post.
And it was quite delightful.
Back to work I go.
Submission + - Finally Opera Has Decided To Support Extensions (digitizor.com)
dkd903 writes: Opera is one of the most solid browsers around. It is very fast, extremely customizable and has a lot of functionalities which others do not have. Opera is also a very supporter of web standards. It is one of the first browsers to pass the ACID 3 test. However Opera has always been confined to a relatively small user-base because of one critical thing – lack of extensions. Well, that is about to change – at least the extensions part. Today, it has been announced that Opera 11 will support extensions.
Submission + - U.S. tops list of spam-relaying countries (networkworld.com)
alphadogg writes: The United States is the top spam-belching nation in the entire world — by far.
That's according to the Sophos "Dirty Dozen" report issued Thursday about the top spam-producing and relaying countries around the globe from July to September of this year. According to Sophos, the U.S. produces about one in five of all the junk mail polluting global networks. (Industry estimates are that over 90% of all e-mail is spam.)
So why does America lead in the spam race? Obvious reasons for this are that it has developed bandwidth, lots of computers that cyber-criminals (from all around the world) like to exploit to turn them into botnet-control relay points, and we have a lot of suckers, as circus kingpin P.T. Barnum used to put it, born every minute who can be fooled into doing almost anything. That would include opening attachments from anybody and anything, and ordering illegal (and potentially lethal) counterfeit pharmaceuticals right off a spam message, apparently pretty fine with a box of pills that arrives from China or elsewhere far away.
That's according to the Sophos "Dirty Dozen" report issued Thursday about the top spam-producing and relaying countries around the globe from July to September of this year. According to Sophos, the U.S. produces about one in five of all the junk mail polluting global networks. (Industry estimates are that over 90% of all e-mail is spam.)
So why does America lead in the spam race? Obvious reasons for this are that it has developed bandwidth, lots of computers that cyber-criminals (from all around the world) like to exploit to turn them into botnet-control relay points, and we have a lot of suckers, as circus kingpin P.T. Barnum used to put it, born every minute who can be fooled into doing almost anything. That would include opening attachments from anybody and anything, and ordering illegal (and potentially lethal) counterfeit pharmaceuticals right off a spam message, apparently pretty fine with a box of pills that arrives from China or elsewhere far away.
Submission + - How a Microsoft-Adobe Pact Could Impact Developers (infoworld.com)
snydeq writes: "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister provides a developer perspective on recent Microsoft-Adobe talks. While an acquisition may not be in the offing, a renewed partnership seems certain, and the focus of this pact could very well be developer mind share. 'Adobe desperately wants to make greater inroads into the enterprise market with its authoring tools, particularly by catering to developers,' McAllister writes. Meanwhile, Microsoft has never really cracked the UI design market. 'By teaming up, Microsoft and Adobe could not only consolidate their respective designer and developer customer bases, they could also form a united front against Oracle, which has promised to integrate its JavaFX RIA technology more tightly with the Java platform.'"
Submission + - IT's last hope: a job in the boonies? (infoworld.com)
GMGruman writes: Offshoring, cloud computing, automation, "do more with less" — all of these have been chipping away at U.S. IT workers' ability to have a job. But some companies now dangle a new possibility: Move to rural areas for lower-paying "onshoring" jobs that can compete with lower overseas salaries. InfoWorld's Bob Violino talked to IT workers who've made the move and discovered that although it's no "'Green Acres' meets 'Big Bang Theory'" experience, a move from the big city to the hinterlands appeals mainly to just some IT worker segments, even as it provides new opportunities for others.
Submission + - Verizon Will Sell iPad on Oct 28th (apple.com)
wiredmikey writes: Verizon Wireless and Apple® today announced that iPad will be available at over 2,000 Verizon Wireless Stores nationwide beginning Thursday, October 28. Verizon Wireless will offer three bundles, all featuring an iPad Wi-Fi model and a Verizon MiFi 2200 Intelligent Mobile Hotspot, for a suggested retail price of $629.99 for iPad Wi-Fi 16GB + MiFi, $729.99 for iPad Wi-Fi 32GB + MiFi and $829.99 for iPad Wi-Fi 64GB + MiFi. Verizon Wireless is offering a monthly access plan to iPad customers of up to 1GB of data for just $20 a month. In addition, Verizon Wireless will also offer all three iPad Wi-Fi models on a stand-alone basis.
Submission + - Data miners scraping away our privacy (correntewire.com)
Presto Vivace writes: "Twig, writing for Corrente reports on data scrapers. They are not looking for passwords and such; scrapers are looking at blogs and forums searching for material relevant to their corporate clients. We are assured that the information is “anonymized” to protect the identities of forum participants. However, a new tool, PeekYou permits users to connect online names with real world identities. No worries though, if you have a week to spare, you can opt-out of some of the larger data banks."
Submission + - Immigration Monitors Facebook for Applicant Fraud
Pickens writes: "According to documents obtained by the EFF, that since at least 2008 the US Immigation Service has been tracking social networks like Facebook to monitor and detect potential fraud from people who are applying for US citizenship. According to a May 2008 memo by the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, social networking sites give the government an opportunity to reveal fraud by friending people who are applying for citizenship, then monitoring their activity to see if they are being deceptive about their relationships. "Narcissistic tendencies in many people fuels a need to have a large group of “friends” link to their pages and many of these people accept cyber-friends that they don’t even know," says the memo. "This provides an excellent vantage point for FDNS to observe the daily life of beneficiaries and petitioners who are suspected of fraudulent activities." The memo doesn't say that officials need to be forthright about their own identities when "friending" immigrants, "leaving open the possibility that agents could actively deceive online users to infiltrate their social networks and monitor the activities of not only that user, but also the user's friends, family, and other associates.""
Submission + - Background noise affects taste of foods (bbc.co.uk)
gollum123 writes: The level of background noise affects both the intensity of flavour and the perceived crunchiness of foods, researchers have found. Blindfolded diners assessed the sweetness, saltiness, and crunchiness, as well as overall flavour, of foods as they were played white noise. While louder noise reduced the reported sweetness or saltiness, it increased the measure of crunch. It may go some way to explaining why airline food is notoriously bland — a phenomenon that drives airline catering companies to heavily season their foods. In a comparatively small study, 48 participants were fed sweet foods such as biscuits or salty ones such as crisps, while listening to silence or noise through headphones. Also in the group's findings there is the suggestion that the overall satisfaction with the food aligned with the degree to which diners liked what they were hearing — a finding the researchers are pursuing in further experiments.
Comment You have a Facebook message: (Score 4, Funny) 240
Robert S. Mueller, III just poked you. Poke him back?
Robert S. Mueller, III tagged you in a photo. (picture of you sitting at your computer right now)
Comment Re:Knuth didn't get anything wrong (Score 2, Interesting) 298
Other then varnish and squid what caching reverse proxy software is there? It looks like Nginx added caching to their core recently, although I'm not exactly sure if its intended to act in the same capacity as squid and varnish or to be more like mod_cache for lighttpd. I guess you could use apache and mod_proxy but that's not exactly high performance. I know my employer looked at the various offerings and we ended up writing our own on top of a webserver called OKWS.
Knuth Got It Wrong 298
davecb writes "Think you've mastered the art of server performance? Think again. Poul-Henning Kamp, in an article at ACM Queue, finds an off-by-ten error in btrees, because they fail to take virtual memory into account. And he solves the problem in the open source 'Varnish' HTTP accelerator, for all of us to see and use."
Submission + - Statistics find the best picture on dating sites (okcupid.com)
Cirvam writes: "OkCupid shows what pictures get the best responses on their dating site. Using statistical analysis they show that MySpace angle shots actually result in the best response rate from people and as women get older they post more shots of themselves outdoors. Many well held beliefs about pictures on dating sites are disproved by their data."
Submission + - Statistics find the best picture on dating sites (okcupid.com)
Cirvam writes: "OkCupid shows what pictures get the best responses on their dating site. Using statistical analysis they show that MySpace angle shots actually result in the best response rate from people and as women get older they post more shots of themselves outdoors. Many well held beliefs about pictures on dating sites are disproved by their data."
