seanbird - Slashdot User

Hard Drives Should Meet Rated Capacity-> 1

Submitted by

Maniac-X

on Monday August 13 2007, @03:20AM

Maniac-X writes "A recent petition directed toward hard drive manufacturers telling them that consumers want more accurate drive capacity ratings.

Rate capacity in binary, instead of decimal. We want to take a hard drive home and format it to rated capacity. We're all tired of taking home a rated 320GB drive, and having it format to 298GB. This margin of error is simply unacceptable.

"
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Only 25% of Firefox downloaders are 'active users'-> 0

Submitted by

bheer

on Friday August 10 2007, @11:47AM

bheer writes "The Guardian points to a page on the Mozilla wiki which notes that only 50% of the people downloading Firefox actually try it out, and only a further half of those continue to use it actively." ZDNet has some commentary as well. While a 25% retention rate isn't necessarily bad, Mozilla is trying to improve these figures with a 12 point plan that includes more TV and media advertising, a better start page and several installation tweaks."
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Verizon tech sets fire to house -- accidentally 0

Submitted by

netbuzz

on Friday August 10 2007, @11:02AM

netbuzz writes "Next time the phone company blows off a service appointment you might want to stop for a moment and be thankful that at least they didn't set fire to your house. Of the Verizon tech who started this electrical fire, a deputy fire chief says: "He's lucky he's not dead."

http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/18314"

Schneier: Police data-mining done right-> 0

Submitted by

enharmonix

on Friday August 10 2007, @08:56AM

enharmonix writes "Courtesy of Bruce Schneier, it's nice to hear something good about data mining for a change: predicting and stopping crime. For example, police in Redmond, VA, "started overlaying crime reports with other data, such as weather, traffic, sports events and paydays for large employers. The data was analyzed three times a day and something interesting emerged: Robberies spiked on paydays near cheque cashing storefronts in specific neighbourhoods. Other clusters also became apparent, and pretty soon police were deploying resources in advance and predicting where crime was most likely to occur.""
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Let's Meet a Romanian eBay Scammer 0

Submitted by Aaron on Friday August 03 2007, @10:09AM

Aaron writes "This week Broadband Reports tracked down a Romanian eBay phish & scam ring, infiltrated all of their accounts, posted photos of the scammers, and began warning potential victims they were being conned. In the process they discovered one Russian kid who had lost his entire life's savings ($2,000) in a Nokia phone scam. To help the kid out they dug up the scammers' phone numbers and called, pretended to be the kid's uncle (and part of the Russian Mob), and scared the scammers into returning the funds, in full."

New FingerprintingTechnique to Reveal Race and Sex-> 1

Submitted by

Tech.Luver

on Friday August 03 2007, @04:07AM

Tech.Luver writes "Telegraph reports, " A new fingerprinting technique that can identify the race and sex, and possibly the diet of suspects has been developed. Scientists have shown that using a gelatine-based gel and high-tech chemical analysis can provide significant clues to a person?s identity even if police do not hold existing fingerprint records. ""
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