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Submission + - IE6 Finally Falls Under 5% Market Share 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The latest market share numbers from Net Applications show Internet Explorer was the biggest winner last month. Between August and September, IE gained 0.19 percentage points (from 57.60 percent to 57.79 percent), Firefox slipped 0.22 percentage points (from 18.80 percent to 18.58 percent), and Chrome dipped 0.02 percentage points (from 16.00 percent to 15.98 percent). IE6 slipped a huge 1.22 percentage points to 4.86 percent. This means it has finally fallen below the 5 percent mark, which we weren’t expecting till sometime later this year. Microsoft itself confirms the milestone occurred during September 2013.

Submission + - Pitch Drop caught on camera. (huffingtonpost.com)

Submitted by Bitsy Boffin
Bitsy Boffin writes: As reported by the Huffington Post, a Pitch Drop has finally been caught on Camera...

How long would you be willing to wait for a drop of the black stuff in Dublin? After 69 years, one of the longest-running laboratory investigations in the world has finally captured the fall of a drop of tar pitch on camera for the first time. A similar, better-known and older experiment in Australia missed filming its latest drop in 2000 because the camera was offline at the time.
Businesses

Submission + - Mark Zuckerberg Annoys the Bankers

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Jim Kerstetter writes that as Mark Zuckerberg makes the rounds promoting Facebook's IPO, he shows up in a hoodie, takes private meetings instead of pimping himself on a stage, and does little to conceal the notion that he'd rather be back in his Silicon Valley office working with engineers and doing the things that he's good at. "Mark and his signature hoodie: He's actually showing investors he doesn't care that much; he's going to be him. I think that's a mark of immaturity," complains security analyst Michael Pachter to Bloomberg. "I think that he has to realize he's bringing investors in as a new constituency right now, and I think he's got to show them the respect that they deserve because he's asking them for their money." What cheek! It's not often you find yourself cheering for a guy who is going to become a billionaire before his 30th birthday, but let's face it: Zuckerberg is living the American dream; building a company from scratch, creating more than 3,500 good jobs so far, and getting rich because of it. Isn't that what entrepreneurs are supposed to do? "In the end, what do hoodies and non-worshipful tones mean to Facebook's IPO? Not a dang thing," writes Kerstetter. "Tomorrow, I'll go back to complaining about Facebook's frictionless sharing and its sneaky assault on user privacy... But for today, I have to applaud an executive who refuses to bow and scrape before the plutocrats.""

Comment Re:Four dimensions (Score 2, Insightful) 180

by SillyPerson (#26525713) Attached to: Visualizing Complex Data Sets?

I'm sure it's my mathematics background, but when I saw the headline I assumed the author would be discussing something involving the square root of negative one, to which my response was, "Silly author, you can't visualize four dimensions. (Sober.)"

You have a mathematical background and can not visualize four dimensions? Here is how you do it: Just visualize the problem in n dimensions and then set n=4.
Security

Submission + - Stop Making Us Store Credit Card Data! (communityinvestmentnetwork.org)

Submitted by GeekGrocer
GeekGrocer writes: I agree with NRF CIO David Hogan. Why build an impenetrable fortress made up of millions of merchants to protect cardholder data when it shouldn't be stored in the first place? No data stored, no data to steal. Message to card issuing banks: stop making us retain customer data so we can be PCI compliant. I work for a 20-store independent with over 350mil in annual sales and I can assure you, we don't want to store this data. The problem is easily solved through segmentation: put the payment terminals on a vlan (or other lan) then let the terminal send an approval authorization code to the POS through a serial cable or other LAN/VLAN/USB/ETC. There. Problem solved: our network and systems are no longer part of the "cardholder data environment". I suppose the real reason the PCI SSC does not advocate this is because PCI compliance would then be easy. If this were the case, they wouldn't be able to impose fines and drop top-level merchants into lower tiers (translation: pay higher interchange rates), which would then force merchants worldwide to pay billions extra to... lots of banks and credit card providers, the one's who created the PCI SSC. Hmm....
Programming

Submission + - Hatred for PHP -- in the case of Ruby's Matz (rubyist.net)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I know you believe in the Programmer Hierachy, right? Here's one real world example. Matz, the author of Ruby, posted a blog entry about a bad design of PHP. It began in another guy's blog entry... That guy found out that there is a strange behavior in PHP's round function, and he guessed why it happened in very funny way. Then Matz took it seriously and he said... "Well, this is totally impossible design of programming language, but can PHP user trust the language with such a bad sense of it?? I fee very sad."

I hear a lot of the word of "Love" in Ruby community recently. Isn't it a nice way to love your neighbor huh?

eg: Here's Google Translation of Matz's blog. the diary of hnw — the strange round function of PHP on Matz's blog on May 27, 2007
Bug

Submission + - The Straight Dope on Colony Collapse Disorder

Submitted by
friedo
friedo writes: "Slashdot has been covering the bizarre story of Colony Collapse Disorder — the mysterious disappearance of agricultural beehives all over North America. Now the Straight Dope has weighed in with the unsurprising conclusion that much of the panic is no more than simple media hype. "[T]there's no reason at this point to think European honey bees are going to be wiped out, now or ever. The die-offs so far appear to affect some beekeepers more than others, sometimes in the same area. That's one reason scientists are so puzzled, but it strongly suggests the losses may have something to do with how individual beekeepers are managing their bees. The "significant percentage" of failing hives is still a drop in the bucket when viewed against the global population of honey bees, and there are lots of beekeepers (even in the U.S., which appears hardest hit) who have not had, and may never have, significant losses of colonies. Plenty of honey bees remain to replace the ones that have died."

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