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Comment Re:I do not use the same password for multiple sit (Score 2) 339

by cyclopropene (#38544732) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Changing Passwords For the New Year?

I can tell you that RCN cable does. I was with RCN for many years, even using their email. Two years ago I moved, and transferred my service. During the transfer process on the phone, they asked me my 'PIN' number for my voicemail. I didn't know it, because I never set one as I never used RCN voicemail. After answering some other questions, they told me over the phone what my 'PIN' was. Lo and behold it was my RCN email password, that I would never have given them as a voicemail PIN!!! It was complicated and hard for the person on the phone to read, and I was thinking to myself "where the f**k did you get that?"...

No. Don't ever reuse passwords, even if you add a suffix like 'rcn' at the end...

Comment Re:Learning Perl (Score 1) 624

by cyclopropene (#37305382) Attached to: What Is the Most Influential Programming Book?

I am not a programmer but I read this about 14 years ago because I needed to analyze some pretty big text files. I thought it was written spectacularly and got me up and going in no time at all. If nothing else, this book should be read by anyone looking to get into the business of writing good programming books.
Iphone

Real Reason Why the White iPhone 4 Is Delayed 182

Posted by samzenpus from the no-phone-for-you dept.
tekgoblin writes "There have been numerous reasons why the White iPhone 4 may be delayed with one reason being the color mismatch between the home button and the body. Well this time there is another reason. A source has told CultofMac that the reason for the delay is a light leakage issue caused by the case being clear. Light from the case leaks into pictures taken by the back and front camera on the white iPhone 4, causing distorted pictures. This problem is non-existent on the black iPhone 4, because of its already black case, so Apple has been looking for a solution to this problem, thus the delay of the White iPhone 4 till spring of next year."
United States

Building Prisons Without Walls Using GPS Devices 545

Posted by Soulskill from the prison-reform-step-by-step dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Graeme Wood writes in the Atlantic that increasingly GPS devices are looking like an appealing alternative to conventional incarceration, as it becomes ever clearer that traditional prison has become more or less synonymous with failed prison. 'By almost any metric, our practice of locking large numbers of people behind bars has proved at best ineffective and at worst a national disgrace,' writes Wood. But new devices such as ExacuTrack suggest a revolutionary possibility: that we might do away with the current, expensive array of guards and cells and fences, in favor of a regimen of close, constant surveillance on the outside and swift, certain punishment for any deviations from an established, legally unobjectionable routine. 'The potential upside is enormous. Not only might such a system save billions of dollars annually, it could theoretically produce far better outcomes, training convicts to become law-abiders rather than more-ruthless lawbreakers,' adds Wood. 'The ultimate result could be lower crime rates, at a reduced cost, and with considerably less inhumanity in the bargain.'"

Comment Re:PC! (Score 1) 133

by cyclopropene (#33406542) Attached to: What Pinball Looks Like When the Stakes Are High

Pinball really is a lost bit of nostalgia. I bet you a LOT of money could be made if classic machines such as Dr. Who, Attack from Mars, Revenge From Mars, Terminator, were adapted to the PC. I mean, Maxis' Full Tilt Pinball is the last decent pinball sim I can think of. And that was circa Windows 3.1

I agree. Although, while I haven't followed this in a while and I don't use Windows at home anymore, I was thrilled 7 or 8 years ago with vpinmame and Visual Pinball for machines like The Twighlight Zone, the Adams Family, and, well, Whirlwind, since I played that a lot in college. Actual ROMs, photographs of the tables as backgrounds, and real physics you could even edit, and it was all free (except for the ROMs technically, I guess...). Not sure what the status of these projects is these days, but I am inspired to check it out.
The Military

Warships May Get Lasers For Close-In Defense 482

Posted by kdawson from the hot-in-here-or-is-it-me dept.
King Louie writes "Raytheon and the US Navy have successfully tested a ship-borne laser capable of shooting down aircraft. Video at the link shows the 32-kilowatt solid-state laser shooting down an unmanned aerial vehicle. The technology is apparently mature enough to be deployed as part of ships' short-range missile defenses, a role currently filled by the Basic Point Defense Missile System (based on the Sea Sparrow missile) and the Close-In Weapons System (based on a 20mm Gatling gun)."
Businesses

Ninth Suicide At iPhone Factory 539

Posted by Soulskill from the need-a-union-app dept.
shar303 writes "A ninth employee has jumped to his death at Taiwanese iPhone and iPad manufacturer Foxconn, China's state media reports. The 21-year-old worker was the eighth fatality this year. This raises questions as to whether the shiny finish of the latest gadgets available from mega corporations are tarnished by such information, and whether the mistreatment of workers deserves to be highlighted when considering such firms."
Displays

HDTV Has Ruined the LCD Market 952

Posted by timothy from the but-it's-got-raisins-you-like-raisins dept.
alvin67 writes "Microsoft Evangelist Pete Brown rants about the lack of pixels available in today's LCD screens: 'OK, that's it. I've had it. I want my pixels, damn it! For a while, screen resolution has been going up on our desktop displays. The trend was good, as I've always wanted the largest monitor with the highest DPI that I could afford. I mean, I used to have one of the first hulking 17-inch CRTs on my desk. I later upgraded to a 21-inch job that was so huge, that if you didn't stick it in a corner, it took up the whole desk. It was flat-panel, though and full of pixels. It cost me around $1,100 at the time." After some years of improvements, we've regressed, in Brown's opinion: "At the rate we were going for a while, we should have had twice or three times the DPI on a 24- or 23-inch screen. But nooo."
Businesses

US Gamers Spend $3.8 Billion On MMOs Yearly 177

Posted by Soulskill from the tell-us-about-your-paladin dept.
eldavojohn writes "A new report from Games Industry indicates that MMO gamers in the United States paid $3.8 billion to play last year, with an analysis of five European countries bringing the total close to $4.5 billion USD. In America, the report estimated that payments for boxed content and client downloads amounted to a measly $400 million, while the subscriptions came to $2.38 billion. Hopefully that will fund some developer budgets for bigger and better MMOs yet to come. The study also found that roughly a quarter of the US population plays some form of MMO. Surely MMOs are shaping up to be a juicy industry, and a market that can satisfy people of all walks of life."
Government

Secret UK Plan To Appoint "Pirate Finder General" 332

Posted by Soulskill from the arrr-me-hearties dept.
mouthbeef writes "A source very close to the UK Labour government just called me to leak the fact that Secretary of State Lord Mandelson is trying to sneak a revision into the Digital Economy Bill that would give him and his successors the power to create future copyright law without debate. Mandelson goes on to explain that he wants this so he can create private copyright militias with investigatory and enforcement powers, and so he can create new copyright punishments as he sees fit (e.g., jail time, three strikes)."
Microsoft

Microsoft Launches Its Own Open Source Foundation 344

Posted by timothy from the said-the-spider-to-the-fly dept.
darthcamaro writes "Microsoft already had its own open source (OSI-approved) licenses, its own open source project hosting site and now it's adding its own non-profit open source foundation. That's right, the company that is still banging the patent drum against open source now has its own 501(c)(6) open source foundation. Officially called the CodePlex Foundation, it's a separate effort from the CodePlex site and is aimed at helping to get more commercial developers involved in open source. Considering how they continue to attack Linux and open source, will anyone take them seriously?"
Microsoft

Microsoft Acknowledges Linux Threat To Windows 348

Posted by kdawson from the credit-where-due dept.
angry tapir sends along coverage from Good Gear Guide of a recent Microsoft !0-K SEC filing: "Microsoft for the first time has named Linux distributors Red Hat and Canonical as competitors to its Windows client business in its annual filing to the US Securities and Exchange Commission. The move is an acknowledgment of the first viable competition from Linux to Microsoft's Windows client business, due mainly to the use of Linux on netbooks, which are rising in prominence as alternatives to full-sized notebooks. ... 'Client faces strong competition from well-established companies with differing approaches to the PC market,' Microsoft said in the filing. 'Competing commercial software products, including variants of Unix, are supplied by competitors such as Apple, Canonical, and Red Hat.'"
Cellphones

How Apple's App Review Is Sabotaging the iPhone 509

Posted by kdawson from the race-to-the-bottom dept.
snydeq writes to recommend Peter Wayner's inside look at the frustration iPhone developers face from Apple when attempting to distribute their apps through the iPhone App Store. Wayner's long piece is an extended analogy comparing Apple to the worst of Soviet-era bureaucracy. "Determined simply to dump an HTML version of his book into UIWebView and offer two versions through the App Store, Wayner endures four months of inexplicable silences, mixed messages, and almost whimsical rejections from Apple — the kind of frustration and uncertainty Wayner believes is fast transforming Apple's regulated marketplace into a hotbed of bottom-feeding mediocrity. 'Developers are afraid to risk serious development time on the platform as long as anonymous gatekeepers are able to delay projects by weeks and months with some seemingly random flick of a finger,' Wayner writes of his experience. 'It's one thing to delay a homebrew project like mine, but it's another thing to shut down a team of developers burning real cash. Apple should be worried when real programmers shrug off the rejections by saying, "It's just a hobby."'"

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