Forgot your password?

Close
typodupeerror
Education

MIT admissions dean resigns amid faked credentials

Submitted by jas_public
jas_public writes "USA Today reports that Dean Marilee Jones, a prominent crusader against the pressure on students to build their resumes for elite colleges, resigned Thursday as dean of admissions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after acknowledging she had misrepresented her own academic credentials.

Jones, dean since 1997, issued a statement saying she had misrepresented her credentials when she first came to work at MIT 28 years ago and "did not have the courage to correct my resume when I applied for my current job or at any time since.""
The Almighty Buck

Kodak Challenges HP Printer Sales Model

Submitted by Radon360
Radon360 writes "Kodak has decided to attempt to buck the trend set by HP by offering low cost printers and exorbitantly priced ink cartridges. According to this WSJ review, three of their new printers start at $149, with ink cartridges costing $9.99 for a black cartridge and $14.99 for a five color cartridge. To counter, HP has announced a release of lower-priced cartridges, though with less ink and they are still more expensive than Kodak's. It will be a matter of time to see whether Kodak can upset the practice of ink cartridge extortion."
Linux

Linux Kernel 2.6.21 Released 296

Posted by Zonk
from the a-long-awaited-penguin dept.
diegocgteleline.es writes "Linus Torvalds has released Linux 2.6.21 after months of development. This release improves the virtualization with VMI, a paravirtualization interface that will be used by Vmware. KVM does get initial paravirtualization support along with live migration and host suspend/resume support. 2.6.21 also gets a tickless idle loop mechanism called 'Dynticks', built in top of 'clockevents', another feature that unifies the timer handling and brings true high-resolution timers. Other features are: bigger kernel parameter-line, support for the PA SEMI PWRficient CPU and for the Cell-based 'celleb' Toshiba architecture, NFS IPv6 support, IPv4 IPv6 IPSEC tunneling, UFS2 write, kprobes for PPC32, kexec and oprofile for ARM, public key encryption for ecryptfs, Fcrypt and Camilla cipher algorithms, NAT port randomization, audit lockdown mode, some new drivers and many other small improvements."
Programming

Poll: where do you put the curly braces?

Submitted by
raner
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

Best Buy Says Dual-Site System 'Human Error'

Submitted by
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

Posted by CowboyNeal
from the not-so-great-expectations dept.
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

Microsoft Charging Businesses $4K for DST Fix

Submitted by
eldavojohn
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

Book Publishers Agree to Online Browsing

Submitted by
eldavojohn
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

EU beats North America in Open Access policy

Submitted by
robotninja
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?"

When you make your mark in the world, watch out for guys with erasers. -- The Wall Street Journal