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Submission + - Bank of America losing on-line customers (networkworld.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Bank of America is restricting on-line banking to Microsoft and Apple operating systems

As a customer of BofA, I am now severing my relationship due to their recent and overly-restrictive "Electronic Communications Disclosure"

Bank of America
P O Box 15019
Wilmington, DE 19886-5019

ATTN: ONLINE BANKING SUPERVISOR

RE: Electronic Communications Disclosure and Policy

Online Banking Supervisor,

I am writing to make you aware that I will, shortly, close my accounts with Bank of America due to the recently introduced on-line banking policy entitled, “Electronic Communications Disclosure.” While this policy has, in my opinion, many objectionable elements, I find section 5, the “Hardware and Software Requirements” to be unreasonably restrictive. Therefore, I will shortly opt to discontinue my relationship with Bank of America and its on-line presence.

I have been successfully and safely using, for years, operating system and application software not dicated by your recent online banking hardware and software requirements (dictated, apparently, by your recent merger with Merrill Lynch). Because of my profession, as a software developer, I regard the recently dictated requirements to be overly restrictive and, likely, intentionally narrow. The exclusion of any operating system, except those produced by either Microsoft or Apple, is especially troubling. In my opinion, such restrictions have little to do with security. It is for these and other reasons that I am now likely to sever my relationship, however long and beneficial, with Bank of America and any of its affiliates that impose such requirements. Further, your inclusion of non-current and unsupported versions of Microsoft operating systems seems to contradict to your intention for improved security.

Should you decide to reverse the decision to impose such requirements on your customers, I may re-evaluate my decision to have or maintain a relationship with Bank of America. Frankly, I doubt that this communication will have any bearing on your corporate decisions. However, I implore you to reconsider the blanket imposition of these requirements on me and your other customers.

Hardware

Submission + - Electromechanical switch operates in extreme heat (sciencedaily.com) 2

Earthquake Retrofit writes: Science Daily is reporting that researchers at Case Western Reserve University have taken the first step to building a computer capable of operating in extreme heat.

Te-Hao Lee, Swarup Bhunia and Mehran Mehregany, have made electromechanical switches — building blocks of circuits — that can take twice the heat that would render electronic transistors useless. Their work was published in Science last month.

The group used electron beam lithography and sulfur hexafluoride gas to etch the switches, just a few hundred nanometers in size, out of silicon carbide. The result is a switch that has no discernable leakage and no loss of power in testing at 500 degrees Celsius.

A pair of switches were used to make an inverter, which was able to switch on and off 500,000 times per second, performing computation each cycle. The switches, however, began to break down after 2 billion cycles and in a manner the researchers do not yet fully understand.

Whether they can reach the point of competing with faster transistors for office and home and even supercomputing, remains to be seen. The researchers point out that with the ability to handle much higher heat, the need for costly and space-consuming cooling systems would be eliminated.

Submission + - Really Cisco, a Cius? Hey, I want a FlipPad! (trygstad.org)

trygstad writes: Cisco is coming out with a tablet, the Cius (what a crappy name). It looks to be much more complex than an iPad, it's another crappy 7 inch screen and not the 9.7 inch like the iPad, and it's targeted at business professionals and not consumers. It's also going to be about a thousand dollars. It fits Cisco's self image but frankly I think it's going to suck.

But many folks never notice that Cisco actually has one really great consumer product line: Flip video cameras . Here's where they should have positioned a killer consumer tablet: The FlipPad. It would have the whole Flip video camera ecology already installed as well as all the best in audio and video, which Cisco actually does pretty well. Think front AND back 720i video and a full 1024x768 10 inch screen. Built-in FlipshareTV connectivity. It would have all the hip cachet of the Flip, which is nearly ubiquitous among 20-somethings who want video a bit better than they can get from their phone. It could even have skins and the distinctive little pop-out USB connector like the Flip, since honestly, no one uses that without a USB extension cable anyway. Is it just me, or are they really missing the boat here? The FlipPad. I want one of these so bad.

Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft Uses Dorm Room Sex to Sell Windows 7

theodp writes: You'd think Microsoft would have learned its lesson with the IE8 projectile vomiting ad backlash. But no, Microsoft is giving 'edgy' advertising another try, this time using dorm room sex to sell Windows 7. OK, it's behind closed doors and the girl is presumably moaning 'awesome' about Windows 7, but Microsoft's repeated airing of the Windows-7-was-my-idea 'Hallway' ad — in which a college student sits locked outside of his dorm room all day and night with a DVR-equipped laptop while his roommate is inside having sex — during Sunday night's nationally broadcast Bears-Giants football game was as ill-timed as it was unfunny, running as it did on the same night as Rutgers' candlelight vigil for Tyler Clementi. 'Jason gets stranded in the hallway when his roommate is "tutoring" lady friends in their dorm room,' explains Microsoft. 'Luckily, with Windows 7, his laptop can now work like an HD DVR. So Jason can entertain himself while waiting. And waiting. Aaand waiting some more.'

Submission + - Mexican IP Agency Crowdsources to translate ACTA?

josech writes: In an epic twist of irony, the Mexican Institute of Industrial Property (IMPI), the mexican negotiator of ACTA for Mexico, may have enjoyed the benefits of crowdsourcing to translate and publish its spanish version of the ACTA (http://www.impi.gob.mx/work/sites/IMPI/resources/LocalContent/1891/22/Consolidated_Text_es_ok.pdf) from no other place than the PiratePad site (http://piratepad.net/UFMOMN6q15). Many redaction and style errors from both documents are suspiciously similar. As one of the collaborators from PiratePad noted on twitter: "Is it me or the IMPI just published as official translation the one that we did yesterday at Etherpad?" (http://twitter.com/tumbolian/status/26676099096). Fortunately, the IMPI may have not breached the intellectual property of the PiratePad collaborators, because they don't believe in plagiarism nor copyrights.
Idle

Submission + - 'Yodabat' discovered in New Guinea (mongabay.com) 2

rhettb writes: Researchers have discovered a trove of 200 previously unknown species during a 60-day expedition in a remote part of New Guinea. Half of the new species were spiders, but the team also found two new mammals, nine new plants, two dozen frogs, and multitude of insects. One of the most interesting finds was a still undescribed bat that looks somewhat like "Yoda".
Graphics

Submission + - ACM censors Phd student (realtimecollisiondetection.net)

sourcerror writes: Christer Ericson, Director of Tools and Technology at Sony Santa Monica (the God of War team) writes in his blog:

"The previous episode of the ACM saga had a powerful organization bully a young impressionable PhD student into deleting his fully legal web pages under an implied threat of legal action if he did not comply.

This weeks episode has ACM fighting against a US government initiative for open access to research papers supported by government funding! This is a highly important initiative. ACM is trying to kill it so they, and other greedy scientific publishers, can continue to make money on those papers that you paid for with your tax money."

Comment There's lots of precedent, actually... (Score 1) 226

Advertising in books used to be very common. Early Boy Scout Handbooks had several pages of advertising at the front and back, and many, many children's books from the early part of the 20th century had advertising in the front and back. There certainly is precedent for this and I for one would be happy to see a few ads if it meant people would stop charging ridiculous prices for eBooks-i.e. less than a buck an issue for a print copy of Wired personally delivered to my house versus $3.99 for the iPad version. Shoot, the e-version of Wired ought to be FREE for print subscribers just for propping up a failing business model!

Comment Novell has done better than the original owners (Score 1) 156

I believe Novell has been a better shepherd of this distribution than the original owners and have built a much better community. And their distro of OpenOffice.org, Go-OO, rocks--which is why it has become the default version in several other Linux distros. Honestly, I just wish they had some products that made them more money--like Netware used to--so they could go on contributing so much to the open source community. Let's face it, Samba, Mono, and Moonlight--while in many contexts being self-serving for Microsoft--really have made a serious contribution to Linux/Windows interoperability. I look forward to using the new release of openSUSE in the Linux+ class I am teaching this fall--along with Fedora and Ubuntu, of course.

Comment University Google Apps accounts already allow this (Score 1) 122

Those who have university Google Apps accounts already can do this. My daughter can log into her regular Gmail account and her university Gmail account simultaneously so obviously Google has had this figured out for a while. I know they have have different URLs but that's not what allows it; it's really just a matter of fixing the cookies to make this happen. I sure as heck could use this and would all the time.

Comment We revamped our grad IT program to require coding (Score 1) 257

In the graduate program in Information Technology that I work with, we recently revamped the degree to make coding mandatory. Incoming grad students must pass a programming placement exam or complete an intermediate level (not beginning!) software development class, currently in Java or C++. We found we had a lot of students moving to IT with undergraduate degrees in electrical engineering who had seriously deficient coding skills so they were not able to make an adequate contribution in system and network security and voice over IP course projects.

We've always had a fairly robust coding and scripting requirement for our undergrads, who have to do introductory and intermediate Java, introductory C++, UNIX/Linux shell scripting in BASH or Perl, and Javascript. In the undergraduate program we cover all of the core elements of the Information Technology profession as defined by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the IEEE Computer Society:
IT Fundamentals
Programming
Human Computer Interaction
Databases
Networking
Websystems
Information Assurance and Security
Professionalism

Comment SEC absolutely forbidden to use Open Source (Score 1) 296

Through an unimpeachable source I prefer not to reveal (to protect his job) I understand that the Securities and Exchange Commission is absolutely forbidden from using Open Source Software under any circumstances. Among other problems, this means that many simple everyday IT solutions normally performed by a quick Linux installation cannot be easily done. In some instances this has put them in the ridiculous situation of having to research, locate and purchase a commercial product to do something routinely done with a free Linux application. Despite an apparently sincere commitment to the use of Open Source on the part of U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra, the message does not seem to be percolating down to lower levels of the government very well. The kicker is that any software written by U.S. government employees is one step better that Open source: it's actually in the public domain by Title 17 U.S.C. 101.

Comment Re:Sweet! Another example of the human mind! (Score 1) 107

This device probably derives from an ongoing study at the University of Wisconsin. In this study the researchers discovered that after several weeks of using the device, the information it was providing would begin to be processed by the visual cortex, confirmed by actual measurement of brain activity. So as ircmaxell and Ungrounded Lightning noted, there is solid evidence that somehow the human brain is able to reroute connections to ensure that sensory input is processed properly. I wish I could cite a scholarly source for this but my source is my sister-in-law who is an occupational therapist that participated in the research.

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