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Programming

Submission + - Poll: where do you put the curly braces?

raner writes: "Where do you put the curly braces:
* opening brace at end of line, closing brace at beginning
* both braces at the beginning of their own lines
* option 1, with some exceptions
* option 2, with some exceptions
* wherever I see fit
* I'm a COBOL programmer"
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - Best Buy Says Dual-Site System 'Human Error'

An anonymous reader writes: eWeek is reporting that Best Buy is in a bit of hot water with the Conneticut Attorney General. Evidently, the issue stems from having an intra-store Web site that has different prices than the Web prices, but guarantees customers to be the same. Best Buy has gone on the record as blaming employees. From the story:

"Best Buy officials, while admitting 'human error' among its workers, denies any evil intent and says the false statements apparently made by store employees were a result of confusion and inadequate employee training... The intrastore version is showcased in store kiosks using Internet Explorer and is intended to show customers information about products available in the store, along with their official prices. The problem stems from Best Buy's price-matching policy, which promises to match the price of other retailers, and it explicitly includes BestBuy.com... The problematic scenario happened when customers saw a low Web price and went into a Best Buy physical location to trigger the price match and get that low price. Employees would agree to match the price and would say they are calling up the Web site to verify the claim. Instead of calling up the Web site, though, employees would access the intrastore version of the site, which looked identical (other than its pricing) to the site, and then used that to 'prove' the online pricing didn't exist."
Microsoft

Microsoft OneCare Last in Antivirus Tests 144

Juha-Matti Laurio writes "PC World has a story reporting that Microsoft's Windows Live OneCare came in dead last out of a group of 17 antivirus programs tested against hundreds of thousands of pieces of malware. The report of an Austrian antivirus researcher was released at the AV Comparatives Web site this week. Several free AV products were included in the test as well." While the top dog was able to find 99.5% of the malicious code, OneCare clocked in at 82.4%. Of course, there's no metric for the severity of the malware in the 17% gap.
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft Charging Businesses $4K for DST Fix

eldavojohn writes: "Microsoft has slashed the price it's going to charge users on the day light savings time fixes. As you know, the federal law that moves the date for DST goes into effect this month. Although this is 1/10 of the original estimate Microsoft made, it seems a bit pricey for a patch to a product you've already paid for. From the article, "Among the titles in that extended support category are Windows 2000, Exchange Server 2000 and Outlook 2000, the e-mail and calendar client included with Office 2000. For users running that software, Microsoft charges $4,000 per product for DST fixes. For that amount, customers can apply the patches to all systems in their organizations, including branch offices and affiliates, said Sweatt. "All they can't do is redistribute them," he said.""
The Internet

Submission + - Book Publishers Agree to Online Browsing

eldavojohn writes: "Random House & HarperCollins have agreed to allow book browsing and searching on all their books. From the article, "Book publishers are to trying to update their businesses as more young readers consume media via the Web, a trend that already has affected the music, movie and newspaper industries." Although this is a good step forward, I still have no way of searching the thomes of Robert Jordan (Tor) or any of the many standards of Penguin Classics. I am definitely looking forward to more publishers following suit. It's not that far of a stretch to imagine a person searching for a book, finding something else and then buying both books."
United States

Submission + - EU beats North America in Open Access policy

robotninja writes: "Everyone's favourite professor, Michael Geist, provides a great overview of Open Access in this article, published today in the Toronto Star. In it, he briefly outlines how the Eurpoean Union is leapfrogging both the US and Canada in Open Access policies. From the article:

"the European Commission committed over $100 million toward facilitating greater open access" whereas "Neither the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, nor the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, which together have an annual budget of more than $1 billion, are anywhere near incorporating open access requirements into their funding policies"; and that although "last year the Federal Research Public Access Act was introduced in the U.S. Congress", the bill has yet to become law.

For a movement toward openness that started in large part among North American scholars, are the U.S. and Canada dropping the ball on Open Access?"
Announcements

Submission + - $25 Mill for solution to removing greenhouse gases

Anonymous Coward writes: "The Virgin Earth Challenge (of Virgin Airlines fame) is a prize of $25m for whoever can demonstrate to the judges' satisfaction a commercially viable design which results in the removal of anthropogenic, atmospheric greenhouse gases so as to contribute materially to the stability of Earth's climate. http://www.virginearth.com/"
Wireless Networking

Submission + - Welcome to garage door opener hell

coondoggie writes: "The Washington Post has an interesting story of military abuse today: abuse of garage door openers. Seems a large number of folks living near the Quantico Marine base in eastern Virginia have found their garage door openers being rendered useless by a wireless signal coming from the base. And they aren't the first, the story says. Garage door openers have been zapped in other towns near military operations for a couple years now experts say. http://www.networkworld.com/community/?q=node/1184 7"
PlayStation (Games)

Submission + - PS3 Firmware Version Check Circumvented

Chouonsoku writes: "Before yesterday, PlayStation 3 owners had to be running the latest system firmware in order to access the PlayStation Network. The PlayStation Network allows users to play their games online, download demos, trailers and add-ons for their games. However, with a simple DNS request redirection, the firmware check becomes null and void, allowing users to access the PlayStation Network from any firmware, up-to-date or not."
Data Storage

Recording Your Entire Life 211

Scientific American has an article on Gordon Bell's 9-year-long experiment of recording great swaths of his life on digital media. The idea harks back to an article by Vannevar Bush in the 1940s, which arguably presaged hypertext and the Web as well. Bell, the father of the VAX computer and now with Microsoft Research, first published a paper on his experiment in CACM in 2001. The goal is to record "all of Bell's communications with other people and machines, as well as the images he sees, the sounds he hears and the Web sites he visits." Storage requirements are estimated at a modest 18 GB a year, 1.1 TB over a 60-year span. Not a lot if the article's projection comes to pass — that we will all be walking around with 1 TB of storage in our portable devices by 2015. The article is co-authored by Jim Gemmell, who wrote the software for the MyLifeBits project.
Space

Submission + - Temp. difference observed between Sun's poles

ATestR writes: From the Article (science.nasa.gov), one pole of the sun is cooler than the other. That's the surprising conclusion announced today by scientists who have been analyzing data from the ESA-NASA Ulysses spacecraft.

Measurements of the Northern Solar pole taken by Ulysses in 1994 and 1995 observed a temperature difference of 7 — 8 percent from the recent measurements taken of the Southern pole. Since the average Solar temperature has been measured to be constant during this twelve year period, the scientists invovled with the project are scratching their heads over the difference.
Censorship

Submission + - Saudi Free Speech Campaign Goes Online

cultrhetor writes: "Following the arrest of ten Saudi activists involved in circulating a petition in favor of protecting freedom of expression, fellow reform advocates have posted the petition online, according to a BBC news article posted today. According to the article, By placing their petition on the internet, the Saudi activists are taking an enormous risk. From the article:

The petition calls for elections in which both men and women would be allowed to vote.
The signatories want freedom of expression to be protected by law and they want the powers of the interior ministry curtailed.
But the Saudi authorities have made it clear they will not tolerate public calls for political change.
What do you think? Can the Internet be use effectively to change policy in truly authoritarian governments?"
Announcements

Submission + - Wanna be great surgeon? Start playing video games

Anonymous Coward writes: "Surgeons with video game skill appear to perform better than non-gamers, according to a report in the February issue of Archives of Surgery, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. "Training curricula that include video games may help thin the technical interface between surgeons and screen-mediated applications, such as laparoscopic surgery," the authors conclude. "Video games may be a practical teaching tool to help train surgeons.""
Software

Submission + - Hollywood training swedish police in Anti-Piracy

Oxygen writes: "IDG.se reports on it's online newssite that representatives from the MPAA, FBI and the Swedish lobbyorganisation Antipiratbyrån have held seminars for swedish police officers (Swedish only) that are being trained in fighting piracy and copyright violations. From the article: "According to Bertil Ramsell, responsible for the course, the purpose of the visit was to give the invited speakers a chance to explain to the students what their organsation's purpose was. But in a report from the IIPA, the pupose was to educate students in anti-piracy." Educating is one thing, but the acronym MPAA doesn't really spell "objective" or "no hidden agenda" to me."
Desktops (Apple)

Submission + - Dell XPS 710 H2C Watercooled Desktop Tested

MojoKid writes: "Dell's XPS 710 H2C Edition is touted as a top-of-the-line, ultra-performance machine built with performance enthusiasts in mind. Not only does the XPS 710 H2C hold the distinction of being Dell's first volume available, factory overclocked computer, but it also uses Dell's first in-house developed liquid cooling system to keep its quad-core power plant cool. This evaluation at HotHardware has plenty of performance data and goes into great detail on the technologies employed in the XPS 710 H2C Edition. It sure seems like a killer system if you can justify the investment."

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