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Comment Re:What the hell (Score 2) 168

by damacus (#48312195) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Single Sign-On To Link Google Apps and Active Directory?

The OP is using GAFE, Google Apps for Education. It's basically the same as the commercial offering. Students don't create their own accounts, the district likely has a process in place that automatically provisions the new accounts using something like Google Apps Directory Sync or a 3rd party app that uses the Google Accounts APIs. Kids / employees go to sign in and it Just Works. (TM).

(Source: I've implemented GAFE / GADS at a K-12.)

Submission + - Google Owes A Woman Money After Photos Of Her Cleavage Appeared In Street View

Submitted by mrspoonsi
mrspoonsi writes: A judge has ruled in favor of a Montreal woman who says Google invaded her privacy after a photo of her sitting outside of her house with part of her breast exposed appeared on Google Street View. Now Google must pay up to the tune of $2,250. According to a 17-page decision, Maria Pia Grillo suffered shock and embarrassment when she looked up her house using Google Maps' Street View feature in 2009 and discovered an image that shows her leaning forward and exposing cleavage. Even though the original image, which was snapped by one of Google’s camera-equipped cars, blurred out her face, the rest of the picture provided enough information to identify her.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Is large scale video for entertainment a wise use of the internet? 1

Submitted by LessThanObvious
LessThanObvious writes: In today's world services like Netflix, Youtube, Hulu and Amazon Instant Video are ubiquitous and generate a large amount of real time video traffic on the web. The question I put to you is whether or not this activity is a reasonable and healthy use of internet resources and is it a healthy social trend for the evolution of the internet? Is the internet to become a national or global replacement for broadcast television? Do massive video providers have any social obligation to cache content close to the users the serve to save WAN bandwidth? Do you believe the internet is prepared to absorb exponential growth in real time video along with traditional data traffic? Does there ever come a point when the internet has to split into functional zones whatever those may be (i.e. Business, Entertainment, Public, Government, Domestic, International, etc)? I do not mean for this to be a discussion of Net Neutrality, please set that aside in as much as it is possible in such a debate.

Submission + - We Gave Away 123 Million Books During World War Two (theatlantic.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Information wants to be free? During the Second World War, it actually was. Publishers took advantage of new printing technologies to sell crates of cheap, paperback books to the military for just six cents a copy, at a time when almost all the other books they printed cost more than two dollars. The army and the navy shipped them to soldiers and sailors around the world, giving away nearly 123 million books for free. Many publishers feared the program would destroy their industry, by flooding the market with free books and destroying the willingness of consumers to pay for content. Instead, it fueled a postwar publishing boom, as millions of GIs got hooked on good books, and proved willing to pay for more. It's a freemium model, more than 70 years ago.

Submission + - OpenBSD Works To Emulate systemd (phoronix.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Through a Google Summer of Code project this year was work to emulate systemd on OpenBSD. Upstream systemd remains uninterested in supporting non-Linux platforms so a student developer has taken to implementing the APIs of important systemd components so that they translate into native systemd calls. The work achieved this summer was developing replacements for the systemd-hostnamed, systemd-localed, systemd-timedated, and systemd-logind utilities. The hope is to allow for systemd-dependent components like more recent versions of GNOME to now run on OpenBSD.

Submission + - Did Sundance Vacations Forge A Court Order To Suppress Online Criticism? (medium.com)

Submitted by IonOtter
IonOtter writes: Matt Haughey, founder of MetaFilter, has challenged a Cease & Desist letter from Sundance Vacations, a seller of time-shares with a reputation for aggressive sales tactics and suppression of criticism. Only this time, it seems that the plaintiff may have forged court documents ordering Mr. Haughey, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines to remove any and all mentions of the links and posts in question. Legal blog, Popehat has picked this up as well, prompting Ken White to wryly note, "...Sundance Vacations is about to learn about the Streisand Effect." The story is gaining traction, and being picked up by Boing-Boing, as well as hitting the first page of search results on Google.

Submission + - Lara Croft explores her players through data mining

Submitted by jtogel
jtogel writes: Whenever you play a game of Tomb Raider: Underworld, a comprehensive record of your playing activities is collected on servers at Square Enix. Pretty much everything is tracked: from number of deaths, causes of death, requests for help, total and relative play time and rewards collected. Researchers at the University of Bonn, Fraunhofer IAIS and Northeastern University have mined this data to identify how playing behavior evolves throughout the entire game.
Using unsupervised behavioral clustering algorithms on gameplay data from 62,000 players, they identified six archetypes that both offered explanatory strength and representation value difference. Confirming earlier work that clustered players into Runners, Pacifists, Solvers and Veterans, this research found consistent spread of behavior at all levels of the game except when the design of a level enforced defined play attitudes. What’s more, playing styles vary and evolve as you play the game. This research helps game designers identify how players change from one type of behavior to the other, for example move from novice to expert, or from a non-paying user to become a paying user. (So that they can put all their effort into the ones that will eventually pay?)

Submission + - Firefox 32 Arrives With New HTTP Cache, Public Key Pinning Support

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla today officially launched Firefox 32 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Additions include a new HTTP cache for improved performance, public key pinning support, and easy language switching on Android. Firefox 32 has been released over on Firefox.com and all existing users should be able to upgrade to it automatically. As always, the Android version is trickling out slowly on Google Play. Changelogs are here: desktop and mobile.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: When is It Better to Modify the ERP vs. Interfacing It?

Submitted by yeshuawatso
yeshuawatso writes: I work for one of the largest HVAC manufacturers in the world. We've currently spent millions of dollars investing in an ERP system from Oracle (via a third-party implementor and distributor) that handles most of our global operations, but it's been a great ordeal getting the thing to work for us across SBUs and even departments without having to constantly go back to the third-party, whom have their hands out asking for more money. What we've also discovered is that the ERP system is being used for inputting and retrieving data but not for managing the data. Managing the data is being handled by systems of spreadsheets and access databases wrought with macros to turn them into functional applications. I'm asking you wise and experienced readers on your take if it's a better idea to continue to hire our third-party to convert these applications into the ERP system or hire internal developers to convert these applications to more scalable and practical applications that interface with the ERP (via API of choice)? We have a ton of spare capacity in data centers that formerly housed mainframes and local servers that now mostly run local Exchange and domain servers. We've consolidated these data centers into our co-location in Atlanta but the old data centers are still running, just empty. We definitely have the space to run commodity servers for an OpenStack, Eucalyptus, or some other private/hybrid cloud solution, but would this be counter productive to the goal of standardizing processes. Our CIO wants to dump everything into the ERP (creating a single point of failure to me) but our accountants are having a tough time chewing the additional costs of re-doing every departmental application. What are your experiences with such implementations?

Submission + - You're Paying Comcast's Electric Bill (speedify.com) 3

Submitted by agizis
agizis writes: We know Comcast is rolling out a new WiFi network that they're installing in customer’s homes, but most articles glossed over the routers' power usage. So using a Kill-A-Watt power meter, I actually measured and Comcast is saving tens of millions per year on the backs of their customers. Sign my change.org petition asking Comcast to compensate its customers.

Submission + - A Measure of Your Team's Health: How You Treat Your "Idiot" (intuit.com)

Submitted by Esther Schindler
Esther Schindler writes: Every team has someone who at the bottom of its bell curve: an individual who has a hard time keeping up with other team members. How your team members treat that person is a significant indicator of your organization’s health.

That's especially true for open source projects, where you can't really reject someone's help. All you can do is encourage participation... including by the team "dummy."

Submission + - George R R Martin Reveals His Secret Weapon for Writing GOT- Wordstar

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Ryan Reed writes that when most Game of Thrones fans imagine George R.R. Martin writing his epic fantasy novels, they probably picture the author working on a futuristic desktop (or possibly carving his words onto massive stones like the Ten Commandments). But the truth is that Martin works on an outdated DOS machine using Eighties word processor WordStar 4.0, as he revealed during an interview on Conan. "I actually like it," says Martin. "It does everything I want a word processing program to do, and it doesn't do anything else. I don't want any help. I hate some of these modern systems where you type a lower case letter and it becomes a capital letter. I don't want a capital. If I wanted a capital, I would have typed a capital. I know how to work the shift key." “I actually have two computers," Martin continued. “I have a computer I browse the Internet with and I get my email on, and I do my taxes on. And then I have my writing computer, which is a DOS machine, not connected to the Internet."

Submission + - U.S. Military Drones Migrating to Linux (linuxgizmos.com)

Submitted by __aajbyc7391
__aajbyc7391 writes: Raytheon is switching its UAV control system from Solaris to Linux for U.S. military drones, starting with a Northrop Grumman MQ-8C Fire Scout helicopter. Earlier this month Raytheon entered into a $15.8 million contract with the U.S. Navy to upgrade Raytheon’s control systems for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), according to a May 2 Avionics Intelligence report. The overhaul is designed to implement more modern controls to help ground-based personnel control UAVs. Raytheon’s tuxified version of its Vertical Takeoff and Landing Unmanned Air Vehicle (VTUAV) Tactical Control System (TCS) will also implement universal UAV control qualities. As a result the TCS can be used in in all U.S. Navy, Air Force, Army, and Marine Corps UAVs that weigh at least 20 pounds. By providing an open standard, the common Linux-based platform is expected to reduce costs by limiting the types of UAV control systems that need to be built and maintained for each craft.

Submission + - Lucasfilm announced break with Star Wars Expanded Universe (starwars.com)

Submitted by RogueyWon
RogueyWon writes: A recent blog post from Lucasarts had confirmed that the new Star Wars movies planned for release by Disney will formally break continuity with the Expanded Universe novels, comics and video games.

In order to give maximum creative freedom to the filmmakers and also preserve an element of surprise and discovery for the audience, Star Wars Episodes VII-IX will not tell the same story told in the post-Return of the Jedi Expanded Universe.

The news is unlikely to be a surprise, given George Lucas's previous pronouncements on the issue.

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