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Businesses

+ - IT Directors in your company->

Submitted by
wildBoar
wildBoar writes "The Daily mail in the UK is reporting on an IT Director of Barclays being banged up for several for having child porn on his company laptop. He sent his laptop in for repair as it has viruses on it. This is pretty poor from someone allefedly responsible for his companies IT operation and for me shows someone who is not particularly IT literate (at best). Does your company suffer from having someone equally clueless in charge of IT? Given this mans level of access to the companies systems is his cluelessness and his behaviour (viruses and perhaps worse on his PC) dangerous for the company? Last question (am I allowed 3) Good IT types seldom get promoted, why is IT riddled with people like this in management — or is this just a case of Banking IT Director job for one of the Banking boys?"
Link to Original Source

Comment: Re:Painting with a broad brush (Score 1) 431

by wildBoar (#26658907) Attached to: The Case Against Web Apps

I agree that the one or the other premise is nonsense, and that one size will never fit all.

But again I keep hearing this web apps cut development costs argument which I don't buy at all.

Where server based apps such as web do make life better is deployment/publishing and control of the app.

Although a lot of client apps these days are very good at updating themselves over the internet ;-)

Comment: Re:Older developers are scared.. (Score 1) 431

by wildBoar (#26658639) Attached to: The Case Against Web Apps

I have developed Desktop apps and webapps, and my experience is that webapps take longer to develop.

The webapps are fast and versatile to develop claim left me wiping tea off of my keyboard.

Of course things get complicated by people coming out of university only knowing java and having a patterns book stuck up there arse.

Communications

The Effects of the Fibre Outage Throughout the Mediterranean 101

Posted by Zonk
from the need-some-unclogging-of-the-tubes dept.
Umar Kalim writes "Analysts have been studying the effects of the fibre outage throughout the Mediterranean in terms of network performance, by examining the changes in packet losses, latencies and throughput. We initially discussed the outage yesterday. 'It is interesting that some countries such as Pakistan were mainly unaffected, despite the impact on neighboring countries such as India. This contrasts dramatically to the situation in June - July 2005, when due to a fibre cut of SEAMEWE3 off Karachi, Pakistan lost all terrestrial Internet connectivity which resulted, in many cases, in a complete 12 day outage of services. This is a tribute to the increased redundancy of international fibre connectivity installed for Pakistan in the last few years.'"
Medicine

Bionic Arm Might Go Into Clinical Trials 107

Posted by Zonk
from the nice-to-shake-your-hand dept.
prostoalex writes "The bionic arm project sponsored by DARPA is nearing completion, and might undergo clinical trials. 'The arm has motor control fine enough for test subjects to pluck chocolate-covered coffee beans one by one, pick up a power drill, unlock a door, and shake a hand. Six preconfigured grip settings make this possible, with names like chuck grip, key grip, and power grip. The different grips are shortcuts for the main operations humans perform daily.'"
Biotech

Sperm Made From Female Bone Marrow, Men Obsolete? 459

Posted by ScuttleMonkey
from the what-some-women-have-been-saying-for-years dept.
Shaitan Apistos writes "British scientists have discovered a way to turn female bone marrow into sperm, allowing women to reproduce without the need of male companionship. All children born of this method would be female, due the lack Y chromosomes, and there is high chance of birth defects. Eggs also can be created from male bone marrow, but men looking to reproduce would still need to find a surrogate mother to handle the gestation period. I'd like to take a moment to welcome our new amazonian overlords and remind them that men are still very good at mowing lawns and fixing cars."
Windows

Linux Has Better Windows Compatibility Than Vista 347

Posted by ScuttleMonkey
from the wine-keeps-getting-better-with-age dept.
Several readers have written to tell us about one users rant in which he tells the story of being so frustrated with gaming on Windows Vista that he tried comparing gaming on Vista to that on Linux using Wine, with surprising results. "This post is clearly a bit biased. What shocked me though was how easy it was to find games that didn't run under Vista but did in Linux by using Wine or DOSBox. I'm not a huge gamer, so I don't have a huge collection of games to try out, but even still with just a few hours of frustrating work, I have been able to show that not only is Linux a reasonable alternative to Vista for gaming (XP is still king though), but also that Linux handles application failures more gracefully than Vista. Every game but Blackthorne crashed my Vista box, this didn't happen a single time under Linux."
Space

NASA to Announce New Commercial Space Partner 69

Posted by ScuttleMonkey
from the only-32-million dept.
NewScientist is reporting that NASA has kicked their previous space partner, Rocketplane Kistler, to the curb and is in search of a new commercial space partner. The new partnership will try to develop a new shuttle to service the International Space Station. "The GAO's decision clears the way for NASA to select a new COTS partner in addition to SpaceX, whose partnership with NASA continues. Only $32 million was paid to Rocketplane Kistler, leaving $175 million for new partnerships."
Microsoft

+ - What If Gmail Had Been Designed by Microsoft?->

Submitted by
caluml
caluml writes "There is a humourous look at "What would happen if Microsoft had designed GMail". Gems include: "Another security measurement we'll add is that you won't be able to log-in with just username anymore but are required to enter the full username@gmail.com. Furthermore, we will change the browser URL from http://gmail.microsoft.com/ to the more professional looking http://by114w.bay114.gmail.live.com/mail/mail.aspx?rru=home.""
Link to Original Source
Security

+ - Major QuickTime Vulnerability in Latest Version->

Submitted by
SkiifGeek
SkiifGeek writes "Less than a month after news of active OS X fake codec malware, a major vulnerability in the latest version of QuickTime (7.3, only released two weeks ago) has been discovered and has already gone from proof-of-concept exploit code to two readily available exploit samples.

With the ease by which this exploit can be integrated with media streams, it marks a greater threat for end users than a fake codec. At this stage, about the best mitigation recommended is to disable support for RTSP via the File Type / Advanced -> MIME Settings option in QuickTime's Control Panel / PreferencePane. Even though the exploit is only for Windows systems (including Vista — QuickTime apparently doesn't utilise ASLR), OS X users could be at threat from related problems, given historical RTSP vulnerabilities."
Link to Original Source
Robotics

+ - ExoSkeleton Storm Trooper

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "From Endgadget comes a review and video clip: "Have you been waiting for a legion of half-man, half-machine storm troopers to descend upon your city and blaze a round of hellfire in all general directions? If you said yes, that's kind of weird. At any rate, you can consider yourself one step closer to cyborg annihilation thanks to a company called Sarcos and its semi-scary exoskeleton — which will make any regular old soldier into a Terminator-like killing machine (as far as we can tell). Sure, they demo the unit lifting heavy equipment and reducing fatigue of the user, but we know what this thing is really for — and it doesn't involve food drops."

Machines that have broken down will work perfectly when the repairman arrives.

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