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Comment Re:The 18-year-old Rubyist isn't a good programmer (Score 1) 352

by mtm_king (#36788878) Attached to: Study Shows Programmers Get Better With Age
I totally agree. Web apps have to run in a browser. Native apps get the whole operating system. It is very difficult to get a web app to have the usability of a native app. It takes a lot more resources (cost) to create a good web app. To do a PHP web app you need to use PHP, Java (for Ajax), HTML, Apache configuration, and some database and worry about security. Replace PHP with whatever and Apache with IIS - still it is a mess compared to a native app. Give me client/server any day. If you are not sure how I feel about this, wait - 'Hey, you kids get off my grass.'
Iphone

Submission + - Control Your Demonoid Torrents, with iDemonoid app (ijailbreak.com)

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes: "Demonoid, a popular, private torrent tracker, has released an iOS app, in Cydia. If you do any torrent downloading with Demonoid, this is a must have app. This app allows you to browse all the torrents on the site. Once you find what you’re looking for, you can push the torrent file to your computer, at home, and have the file downloaded by the time you get there. The remote capability is compatible with Vuze, Transmission, and, UTorrent."
Science

Thousands of Blackbirds Fall From Sky Dead 577

Posted by samzenpus from the silent-spring dept.
Dan East writes "In a fashion worthy of a King or Hitchcock novel, blackbirds began to fall from the sky dead in Arkansas yesterday. Somewhere between 4,000 and 5,000 birds rained down on the small town of Beeb, Arkansas, with no visible trauma. Officials are making wild guesses as to what happened — lightning strike, high-altitude hail, or perhaps trauma from the sound of New Year's fireworks killed them."
Image

Thief Posts His Photo To Facebook Victim's Account 222

Posted by samzenpus from the criminal-status-update dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Washington Post reporter Marc Fisher discovered his house had been burgled; money, a winter coat, an iPod and his son's laptop were stolen. Imagine his surprise when Facebook friends of his 15-year-old son reported that a photo of the apparent thief, wearing Fisher's coat and holding a wad of notes, had been uploaded to his son's Facebook account. How addicted do you have to be to a social network to post a status update and upload your photo *while* you're burgling someone's house?"
Image

IT Worker's Revenge Lands Her In Jail 347

Posted by samzenpus from the bad-idea dept.
aesoteric writes "A 30-year-old IT worker at a Florida-based health centre was this week sentenced to 19 months in a US federal prison for hacking, and then locking, her former employer's IT systems. Four days after being fired from the Suncoast Community Health Centers' for insubordination, Patricia Marie Fowler exacter her revenge by hacking the centre's systems, deleting files, changing passwords, removing access to infrastructure systems, and tampering with pay and accrued leave rates of staff."
Image

Debt Collectors Using Facebook To Embarrass Those Who Owe 266

Posted by samzenpus from the pay-up-or-be-unfriended dept.
Not even the tranquility of FarmVille can save you from the long arm of debt collectors. Melanie Beacham says that a collector from MarkOne Financial contacted her relatives about her past due car note via Facebook. She is filing suit alleging that the company is harassing her family. Tampa based consumer attorney Billy Howard of Morgan & Morgan says, "Now Facebook does a debt collectors work for them. Now it's not only family members, it's all of your associates. It's a very powerful tool for debt collectors to use."
Biotech

Chip Allows Blind People To See 231

Posted by samzenpus from the bionic-eye dept.
crabel writes "3 blind people have been implanted with a retinal chip that allowed them to see shapes and objects within days of the procedure. From the article: 'One of the patients surprised researchers by identifying and locating objects on a table; he was also able to walk around a room unaided, approach specific people, tell the time from a clock face, and describe seven different shades of gray in front of him.'"
Image

Cooking With Your USB Ports 188

Posted by samzenpus from the sorry-your-dinner-crashed dept.
tekgoblin writes "Wow, I would never have thought to try and cook food with the power that a standard USB port provides, but someone did. A standard port provides 5V of power, give or take a little. I am not even sure what it takes to heat a small hotplate, but I am sure it is more than 5V. It looks like the guy tied together around 30 USB cables powered by his PC to power this small hotplate. But believe it or not, it seems to have cooked the meat perfectly."
Crime

The Bomb Squad Olympiad Starts Today 43

Posted by samzenpus from the explosions-for-all-ages dept.
The bomb suit relay and the robot obstacle course are just two of the events you can enjoy at the Bomb Squad Olympiad. Over the next three days squads from across South Carolina will compete and showcase their bomb defusing capabilities for the public. I hear the deep fried dynamite is especially good.
Patents

Red Hat Settles Patent Case 76

Posted by Soulskill from the making-it-go-away dept.
darthcamaro writes "Red Hat has settled another patent case with patent holding firm Acacia. This time the patent is US Patent #6,163,776, 'System and method for exchanging data and commands between an object oriented system and relational system.' While it's great that Red Hat has ended this particular patent threat, it's not yet clear how they've settled this case. The last time Red Hat tangled with Acacia they won in an Texas jury trial. 'Red Hat routinely addresses attempts to impede the innovative forces of open source via allegations of patent infringement,' Red Hat said in a statement. 'We can confirm that Red Hat, Inc and Software Tree LLC have settled patent litigation that was pending in federal court in the Eastern District of Texas.'"
Ubuntu

Submission + - Quo Vadis Linux? (go2linux.org)

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: According to the author, internal problems in the Linux community are slowing down, if not stopping the Linux market share in the Desktop area.
He compares the community with a corporation, that needs a board to establish the strategy.
As he states, it seems that all the community has the same goal, but not the same strategy, therefore, the success is still far away.

Comment Re:and plan better for the next time. (Score 1) 765

by mtm_king (#32882516) Attached to: Retrieving a Stolen Laptop By IP Address Alone?
I am using Prey Project. I had a netbook taken from a motel room. Two hours of watching surveillance video it seemed to indicate it had to be the maid. But I could not even prove that the netbook was there. After my limited research/testing I have Prey running on two laptops and my Droid. Yes, it does run on Linux. The price is right, too. Very low overhead and seems well written.

Comment Re:QWEST where 3 = 2.66 (Score 1) 256

by mtm_king (#30549244) Attached to: Really Misleading Ads From Broadband Providers
Good point, I guess. I did not know TCP headers were now referred to as overhead and should not be counted when measuring bandwidth. I am sure that if you have a download limit that all ISPs exclude TCP headers, too.

Funny, at the moment QWEST is advertising on /. and speedtest.net.

I should say QWEST had a couple of good points. A little faster upload speeds than cable and over a 8 years run I would guess the connection was not down 48 hours (I ran a server for a couple of businesses most of the time). And QWEST let me use a ISP of my choosing with a static IP. But when I wanted to cut back cost a little QWEST was a bitch. $60 a month for 2.66 mbps naked DSL is just too much.

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