Forgot your password?

Close
typodupeerror

Comment: expect a 5' drop (Score 2, Interesting) 480

by Kyril (#34370672) Attached to: Which Shipping Company Is Kindest To Your Packages?

Advice I've heard is that, especially during the holiday shipping rush, expect your package may take at least one 5' fall, as the fastest way to get a truck unpacked is to take a stack of boxes and spill it. We ship too much crap for them to have time to treat packages properly--and if we didn't ship so much, they'd still treat the packages quite briskly because we're too stingy to pay for proper handling.

Security

Twitter Bans 'Obvious' Passwords 1

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes "President Obama and CNN reporter Rick Sanchez were among dozens of Twitter accounts compromised in January, 2008 after hackers managed to crack their passwords, forcing Twitter to reevaluate its sign-up process and technologies. Now bloggers have discovered that Twitter has a list of banned passwords when new users sign up for the service which is embedded in the source code of the page itself. Banned terms include commonly chosen generic passwords, such as “123456”, “password” and “password1”, as well as car names (“porsche”, “ferrari”) and football teams (“Chelsea”, “arsenal”). Perhaps predictably for a website popular with technology fans, science fiction terms figure in the list too. “THX1138”, the title of the first feature film directed by George Lucas of Star Wars fame, is banned, as is “NCC1701” – the registry number of Star Trek’s starship Enterprise – and “trustno1”, which was Fox Mulder’s password in The X-Files."
Windows

Secure File Transfer with windows/.Net hosting? 4

Submitted by
galego
galego writes "I've done a variety of web development at work and at home. I'm thinking of getting a .Net hosted account to do some work with that. One of the things I always look for when looking at hosting companies is a secure (well, encrypted that is) form of file transfer. For Windows/.Net hosting, are there any good options out there? I've looked around some and I don't really see any so far. I tried once to set up sftp on windows on a system at work (that is without paying for some custom/proprietary version), and it didn't go so well. Some *n*x hosting companies don't offer sftp, but if they allow ssh, then I can at least use scp. I'm not seeing anything equivalent with Windows/.Net hosting ... suggestions?"

China Arrests Thousands in Internet Porn Crackdown->

Submitted by Clandestine_Blaze
Clandestine_Blaze writes "Chinese police have arrested 5,394 people — with another 4,186 criminal cases in the works — in one of the largest crackdowns on Internet porn in the country. Even more arrests were expected in 2010, according to the Ministry of Public Security's website (In Chinese or Google translated into English). According to the Reuters article on the crackdown, one of the justifications was that the pornography was 'threatening the emotional health of children.'

From the English translation of the Ministry of Public Security's website linked above, it appears that certain provinces are also offering 1,000 yuan and 2,000 yuan awards, per person, for reporting illegal websites to the Government."
Link to Original Source
Apple

Why Apple denied Google Latitude App->

Submitted by awyeah
awyeah writes "

Another Apple patent today looks remarkably similar to the functionality of Google Latitude which Apple relegated to WebApp status earlier this year. Obviously if Apple is working on their own version of Google Latitude (or owns the IP rights to this functionality), they'd be hesitant to put an app with the same functionality on their devices from another company.

Glad they're fostering competition!"
Link to Original Source

Programming

Myths About Code Comments

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes "Jason Baker gives his take on the biggest misconceptions about code comments: 1) Comments are free ('When you update the code that the comment references, you usually have to update the comment as well'). 2) Comments make code more readable ('by far the most pervasive myth that I've encountered'). 3) You should comment every function, method, class, and module ('documenting something that needs no documentation is universally a bad idea'). 4) Code must always be 'self documenting' ('would you rather use a one-liner that requires a 3-line comment, or a 10-liner that requires no comments?'). Care to share your comments on programming comments in the comments?"

Comment: Re:You damn well should (Score 3, Interesting) 605

by Kyril (#30606760) Attached to: Do Your Developers Have Local Admin Rights?

I would disagree -- the more years I spend programming the less I remember about system administration. I can do basic setup tasks, but fiddling with Active Directories and stuff like that is beyond what I care to learn and has been for what, a decade now?

At an Ancient Telecom company most folks don't have admin rights (and shouldn't) but there is an exception process developers follow, and otherwise the Company-approved packages don't need admin rights to install, plus the help desk has powers.

Biotech

Researchers Use Salmon DNA To Make LED Lightbulbs 66

Posted by Soulskill
from the bright-ideas-that-smell-fishy dept.
Al writes "Researchers from the University of Connecticut have created a new light-emitting material by doping spun strands of salmon DNA with fluorescent dyes. The material, which is robust because DNA is such a strong polymer, absorbs energy from ultraviolet light and gives off different colors depending on the amounts of dye it contains. A team led by chemistry professor Gregory Sotzing created the new material by mixing salmon DNA with two types of dye, then pumping the solution from a fine needle while a voltage is applied between the needle tip and a grounded copper plate covered with a glass slide. As the liquid jet comes out, it dries and forms long nanofibers that are deposited on the glass slide as a mat. The researchers then spin this nanofiber mat directly on the surface of an ultraviolet LED to make a white-light emitter. The color-tunable DNA material relies on an energy-transfer mechanism between two different fluorescent dyes, and the DNA keeps the dye molecules separated at a distance of 2 to 10 nanometers from each other."

Abraham Lincoln didn't die in vain. He died in Washington, D.C.