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Education

Masters or not? 2

Submitted by mx12
mx12 writes "With the semester finishing up, I have been thinking about my education future. I am currently an undergrad in computer engineering and I am thinking about getting my masters. I have a year left in school, and most of my professors seem to think that getting a masters is a great idea, but I wanted to hear from people out in the working world. If I could get my masters paid for by the lab I work in, is a masters in computer engineering better than two years of experience at a company?

Thanks everyone!"
Security

Looking Back At the Other Kind of Virus 147

Posted by timothy
from the shouldn't-this-be-a-list-of-13? dept.
Slatterz writes "All this panic over a strain of flu got these people thinking about some of the more virulent computer pandemics that have hit in recent years. While a computer virus pales in seriousness to a human outbreak, malware attacks can still take a huge toll on businesses throughout the world. This list of the top ten worst viruses includes some interesting trivia, including ARPANET's Creeper virus in 1971, how early attempts at copy protection resulted in Brain, and MyDoom's denial of service attack on SCO."
Microsoft

Ballmer Ordered To Testify In 'Vista Capable' Case 235

Posted by CmdrTaco
from the take-the-stand-monkey-man dept.
alphadogg writes "A federal judge in Seattle has ordered Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to testify in a class action lawsuit against Microsoft that alleges the company misled consumers in a marketing campaign for its Windows Vista operating system in which computers sold with an older Microsoft OS were labeled 'Vista Capable' when in fact they could only run a basic version of Vista. Ballmer has unique personal knowledge of facts surrounding the case, therefore he must face questioning, Judge Marsha Pechman of the US District Court for the Western District of Washington at Seattle ruled, according to court documents released late Friday."
Google

Google Is Taking Spoken Questions 94

Posted by ScuttleMonkey
from the a-sentence-is-worth-a-thousand-search-results dept.
The New York Times is reporting that Google has added a voice interface to their iPhone search software. Expected to make its debut as early as Friday, users will be able to speak into their phone and ask any question they could type into Google's search engine. The audio will be digitized and results will be returned via the normal search interface. "Google is by no means the only company working toward more advanced speech recognition capabilities. So-called voice response technology is now routinely used in telephone answering systems and in other consumer services and products. These systems, however, often have trouble with the complexities of free-form language and usually offer only a limited range of responses to queries."
Space

Number of ET Civilizations In Our Galaxy Is 37,964 544

Posted by CmdrTaco
from the give-or-take-infinity dept.
KentuckyFC writes "The famous Drake equation calculates the number of advanced civilizations in our galaxy right now. But the result is hugely sensitive to the assumptions you make about factors such as the number of habitable planets that orbit a host star, how many of these actually develop life and what fraction of these go on to become intelligent etc. Disagreements about these figures leads to estimates for the number of advanced civilizations ranging from 10^-5 to 10^6. Now an astronomer in Scotland has worked out how to make the calculations more precise so that different theories about the origin of planets, life and civilizations can be compared. His calculations say that the rare-life hypothesis predicts only 361 advanced civilizations in the Milky Way now. However, the so-called tortoise and hare hypothesis predicts 31,573 and the theory of panspermia says that there ought to be 37,964 extraterrestrial civilizations more advanced than our own in the Milky Way."
Space

Esther Dyson To Train For Space Flight 38

Posted by timothy
from the dyson-vacuum-of-space dept.
DynaSoar writes "Esther Dyson, known to many as a founding and consistently guiding member of ICANN, and for working with the startups of Flickr, del.icio.us, Medscape and others, is now expanding her interests upwards. She recently announced that she will be heading to Moscow to train as backup astronaut for Charles Simonyi, who plans to fly aboard Soyuz TMA-14 next year. The US$3 million price tag won't be her first cash contribution towards personal space flight. She's already an investor in Space Adventures, the company that arranges the space tourist flights on Soyuz."

Blizzcon Begins, Diablo 3 Wizard Class Unveiled 142

Posted by Soulskill
from the zap dept.
Blizzcon is officially underway today, starting with a presentation showcasing the Worldwide Invitational tournament held earlier this year. A company spokesman went on to talk about the tournaments being held for World of Warcraft 3v3 Arena, Warcraft 3, and Starcraft 2, followed by word that Starcraft 2 was not yet ready for beta, but that Blizzcon attendees would be included in the first round of testers when the beta program starts. The big news of the presentation, though, was the unveiling of the Wizard class — the third such class to be announced, along with the previously mentioned Barbarian and Witch Doctor. Read on for some more details.
Privacy

Verizon Exposes the Wrong 1,200 Email Addresses 94

Posted by timothy
from the but-this-was-the-before-picture dept.
netbuzz writes "If you're going to market your expertise by inviting 1,200 IT professionals to a seminar about securing data and protecting personal information, it's probably a good idea to protect the personal information of those you invite. On Tuesday, Verizon forgot that advice and blasted each of the 1,200 email addresses to everyone on the list ... and they did it 17 times."
Windows

Windows 7 To Dial Down UAC 390

Posted by kdawson
from the cancel-or-allow dept.
Barence writes "Engineers working on Windows 7 have admitted Vista's User Account Control was too intrusive, and are promising to tone it down in the forthcoming Windows 7. 'We've heard loud and clear that you are frustrated,' says Microsoft engineer Ben Fathi. 'You find the prompts too frequent, annoying, and confusing. We still want to provide you control over what changes can happen to your system, but we want to provide you a better overall experience.' According to Fathi, when Vista first launched, 775,312 unique applications were producing prompts — so some may be annoyed that it won't be scrapped entirely, but at least Microsoft is listening. The comments echo those of Steve Ballmer, who admitted at a conference in London that 'the biggest trade-off we made was sacrificing security for compatibility. I'm not sure the end-users really appreciated that trade-off.'"
Earth

Birth of a New African Ocean 261

Posted by kdawson
from the interesting-times-interesting-places dept.
Khemisty writes "Formation of an ocean is a rare event, one no scientist has ever witnessed. Yet this geophysical nativity is unfolding today in one of the hottest and most inhospitable corners of the globe. Africa is splitting apart at the seams. From the southern tip of the Red Sea southward through Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, and Mozambique, the continent is coming unstitched along a zone called the East African Rift." This stretching of the earth's crust has been going on for 20 million years, and within another 10 million the Red Sea will have broken through to create a new sea.
Security

Ransomware Victims Urged to Try Recovery App->

Submitted by
CWmike
CWmike writes "The security company that two weeks ago said it would lead a group effort to crack an encryption key used in a "ransomware" scam, Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab, has published recovery instructions, which rely on an open-source file-recovery utility, to its writeup of Gpcode.ak, the Trojan horse that it first warned users about on June 8. Two days later, another Kaspersky researcher asked for help. "Along with antivirus companies around the world, we're faced with the task of cracking the RSA 1024-bit key," said Aleks Gostev, a senior virus analyst. "This is a huge cryptographic challenge. We estimate it would take around 15 million modern computers, running for about a year, to crack such a key.""
Link to Original Source

Engadget: BlackBerry Javelin in the wild->

From feed by engfeed

Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds


As we understand it, RIM's so-called Javelin is a new BlackBerry completely devoid of 3G that's currently on track for a mid-2009 (yes, 2009) launch. That sucks, yes, but at least it'll look mighty purty if these shots of an engineering dummy in the wild are any indication. The whole phone is an interesting study in modern, high-end 2.5G design, actually, on account of the rumored WiFi, GPS, expansive display, and generous (by RIM standards, anyway) 3.2 megapixel camera. Don't get us wrong, the Bold would still find its way into our pockets long before this one would -- but hey, diversity in the product line is a good thing. As long as it doesn't involve a Burberry-clad 8800.

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Patents

Non-Newtonian Fluids as shock absorber?-> Screenshot-sm

Submitted by
slapmastered
slapmastered writes "I have an interesting problem which just was posed to me at my job. Since this is proprietary information, I can't give away too much info, or link to anything terribly relevant. There is impetus in my company to design a shock absorber acting in the vertical direction which has the capacity to absorb potentially high accelerative loads (in the hundreds of G's) over a short time interval (on the order of milliseconds) that also (and here is where it gets interesting to design) must be able to repeatably perform this type of shock attenuation. My first thoughts when presented with this thought experiment went to my days as a geekling playing with Ooglek; that wonderfully non-newtonian fluid made from cornstarch molecules suspended in water, which as force applied to it is increased, reacts in a more solid fashion. The video I linked is a local rock radio station's "Science Day" highlight video. At around the 3:55 mark, the demonstrator begins to discuss Ooglek and it's non-newtonian behavior, followed by some fun demonstrations. Language tends to be sophomoric, but generally SFW. My question to you, the Slashdot readers, is this; Do any of you know of research or patented ideas that involve a non-newtonian fluid as part of a shock absorbing system?"
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Privacy

Man Cleared of Child Porn Charges->

Submitted by chromakey
chromakey writes "A Massachusetts man, who was dismissed from his Department of Industrial Accidents job, was cleared of Child Pornography charges after it was concluded that the images on his state-owned laptop where due to viruses that had infected the machine. From the article:

"The overall forensics of the laptop suggest that it had been compromised by a virus," said Jake Wark, spokesman for Suffolk District Attorney Daniel Conley.

Nationally recognized computer forensic analyst Tami Loehrs told the Herald Michael Fiola's ordeal was "one of the most horrific cases I've seen.""
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Earth

Ten Difficult Ways to Save the Environment->

Submitted by
inderjeet26
inderjeet26 writes "http://wildandhappy.org/ten-difficult-ways-to-save-the-environment/ # Take a bus and leave your car home. Don't ever drive an SUV (sports utility vehicle). Say no to diesel cars. # Junk bottled water. Demand clean water for all. Insist water-free and as a right which is entitled to everyone but be ready to pay more if you use more."
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Never have so many understood so little about so much. -- James Burke