Afrosheen - Slashdot User

Comment: IE8 is on top for 2 reasons.... (Score 1) 319

by Afrosheen on Monday February 01 2010, @11:43PM (#30991614) Attached to: IE 8 Is Top Browser, Google Chrome Is Rising Fast

I'm surprised nobody has caught the obvious here, that IE8 is gaining ground thanks to a two-pronged strategy. The first is Microsoft pushing IE8 out forcefully to everyone via windows/microsoft update. Even on the server side of things. They rank it as a critical download rather than optional, so if you just have important updates turned on, it will show up all by itself eventually. The second is that Windows 7 and Server 2008 are both gaining momentum as people buy new stuff and companies begin to upgrade their infrastructures. It's a new year which means a new budget and money to spend on replacing dead or dying computers and servers.

All this results in IE8 gaining marketshare. It will end up capturing as much, if not more, of IE7's share over time. There may always be some old holdouts from companies running some crazy in-house web-based app that only works on IE6, but I'm sure there are still NT4 boxen humming away in some dusty server closets somewhere too.

My only beef with IE8 is how the rendering engine destroys some pages. Buttons don't appear, images and text gets cut off, and I'll be damned if the page printing feature doesn't still chop the sides off of pages rather than reformat them to fit the page for printing. MS releases "compatibility" updates for it nearly every week or two, just to get it to render as cleanly (which is relative at this point) as IE7. At many companies I take care of, I have intentionally disabled IE8 from WSUS and unchecked it from Windows Update using the "fuck you don't come back" button due to rendering problems that end up crippling some work-related sites.

New AACS Crack Called "Undefeatable" 554

Posted by kdawson on Thursday May 03 2007, @10:14AM
from the go-ahead-revoke-all-the-keys dept.

Tuoqui writes "With all the focus on the infamous hexadecimal number, people may be ignoring a bigger weakness in the AACS armor, which emerged two weeks ago. Some hackers have figured out how to crack AACS in a way that cannot be defeated, even by revoking all the keys in circulation."

Maggots Rid Patients Of Antibiotic-resistant Infection, MRSA->

From feed by sdfeed on Thursday May 03 2007, @10:13AM

Medical researchers are ridding diabetic patients of the superbug MRSA -- by treating their foot ulcers with maggots. The scientists used green bottle fly larvae to treat 13 diabetic patients whose foot ulcers were contaminated with MRSA and found all but one were cured within a mean period of three weeks, much quicker than the 28-week duration for the conventional treatment.
Link to Original Source

Define: /etc

Submitted by ogar572 on Friday March 02 2007, @02:24PM

ogar572 writes "There has been an ongoing and heated debate around the office concerning the definition of what /etc means on *nix operating systems. One side says "et cetera" per Wikipedia. Another side says it means "extended tool chest" per this gnome mailing list entry or per this Norwegian article. Yet another side says neither, but he doesn't remember exactly what he heard in the past. All he remembers is that he was flamed when he called it "et cetera", but that "extended tool chest" didn't sound right either. So, what does it really mean?"

Blackberry-style smartphone runs Linux

Submitted by on Friday March 02 2007, @02:17PM

An anonymous reader writes "Looks like the Research-in-Motion (RIM) Blackberry and Palm Treo are no longer the only smartphones with full hardware keyboards and "push" email. Dutch consumer electronics giant Grundig has come out with a B700 mobile communicator, a quad-band EDGE phone with a nice sleek design and lots of Linux-based multimedia and messaging goodness."

Alien Technology to Solve Global Warming

Submitted by

sarlos

on Friday March 02 2007, @02:07PM

sarlos writes "Paul Hellyer, former Canadian Defense Minister, has an interesting proposition for solving climate change. Dust off the UFOs from Roswell, New Mexico, figure out their power source, and use it to replace fossil fuels for good!"

Cracking iTunes DRM - A Foolproof Cracking Tutoria

Submitted by

Ryan

on Friday March 02 2007, @02:04PM

Ryan writes "Everyone loves iTunes but hates DRM... Decrypt your downloaded iTunes protected files with this easy tutorial. It highlights existing cracking tools and shows you step-by-step how to remove FairPlay DRM."

The world's most anti-reflective coating

Submitted by

Roland Piquepaille

on Friday March 02 2007, @01:48PM

Roland Piquepaille writes "Researchers from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) have created a material that reflects virtually no light — or absorbs it like a black hole. They've built this new material by stacking layers of 'silica nanorods.' And they reached a refractive index of 1.05. This can be compared with 1.0 for air or 2.4 for diamonds. This coating, which is effective for all wavelengths, could be used for brighter light-emitting diodes (LEDs), more efficient solar cells, and new classes of 'smart' light sources that adjust to their environments. But don't expect to see your next glasses or the windshields of your cars protected with this coating: it's too sensitive to water and it would be destroyed by rain. Here is a link to more details and references about this anti-reflective coating."

Simple Key Generator Cracks Windows Vista

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 02 2007, @01:23PM

An anonymous reader writes "A simply coded key generator, has emerged on the internet that uses a brute force technique to generate a valid Windows Vista product key hours of trial and error. This causes a whole world of problems for Microsoft since the keys that are being generated are considered genuine."

Virtual Black Hole

Submitted by

mounce

on Friday March 02 2007, @01:18PM

mounce writes "NSF News reports a new coating that virtually captures all light and prevents reflection. I heard that NASA spent a lot on developing this type of reflective coating in the 1980's (history clarification, please?), and only managed to about break-even with what you can get in the soot deposited from a burning candle. Why? The soot, which is known as "carbon black," looks like a bunch of tiny fingers when you view them up-close (you might say they are natural carbon nanotubes) which is what the NASA engineers tried to duplicate. Now comes-along Jong Kyu Kim and a team from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, working with National Science Foundation-supported electrical engineer Fred Schubert, using a common silica deposit process to grow ranks of nanoscale rods that look like piles of shag carpet. This high surface-to-volume ratio makes a good pigment, of course, but can also be used to conduct heat, and the authors believe it will be useful for transferring energy in developing solar cells. I think NASA originally wanted the Right Stuff for the ultimate sunglasses. The article was published in the 1 March 2007 issue of Nature Photonics NSF News Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Fred Schubert Nature Photonics"