kevin_j_morse - Slashdot User

Efficiency Gains Could Prove Proposed Plasma Ban Shortsighted 278

Posted by timothy on Friday January 23, 2009 @02:36AM from the biting-the-invisible-hand dept.

hihopes writes "As the EU calls for a ban on plasma TVs, a leading Harvey Norman executive said that the issue should be left to vendors, who at the recent CES Show in the USA showed an array of low-powered TV display screens."

Researcher Finds No Link Between Violent Games and School Shootings 116

Posted by Soulskill on Thursday January 22, 2009 @02:21AM from the and-i'll-stab-anyone-who-disagrees dept.

GamePolitics writes "A researcher at Texas A&M International University has found no link between playing violent video games and school shootings. Prof. Christopher Ferguson cites 'moral panic' and criticizes politicians, the news media and some social scientists for playing up what he believes is a false connection between video games and school shooting incidents. Quoting: 'Actual causes of violent crime, such as family environment, genetics, poverty, and inequality, are oftentimes difficult, controversial, and intractable problems. By contrast, video games present something of a "straw man" by which politicians can create an appearance of taking action against crime.'"

Largest Data Breach Disclosed During Inauguration 168

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday January 20, 2009 @03:44PM from the debit-cards-at-risk dept.

rmogull writes "Brian Krebs over at the Washington Post just published a story that Heartland Payment Systems disclosed what may be the largest data breach in history. Today. During the inauguration. Heartland processes over 100 million transactions a month, mostly from small to medium-sized businesses, and doesn't know how many cards were compromised. The breach was discovered after tracing fraud in the system back to Heartland, and involved malicious software snooping their internal network. I've written some additional analysis on this and similar breaches. It's interesting that the biggest breaches now involve attacks installing malicious software to sniff data — including TJX, Hannaford, Cardsystems, and now Heartland Payment Systems." One bit of good news out of this massive breach is that, according to Heartland's CFO, "The nature of the [breach] is such that card-not-present transactions are actually quite difficult for the bad guys to do because one piece of information we know they did not get was an address." Heartland just put up a press release on the breach.

Comment What a complete waste of time... (Score 1) 1

by kevin_j_morse on Tuesday January 20, 2009 @02:38AM (#26525767) Attached to: first emoticon found, in 1862 A. Lincoln speech

The fact that they have all these "experts" giving their opinions is ridiculous... The phrase starts with a parenthesis (applause and laughter ;) and ends with one...

If this indeed was an emoticon then why on earth would the author have typed the opening parenthesis (

Tech Publisher O'Reilly Slashes Jobs 207

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday January 20, 2009 @12:41AM from the more-with-less dept.

An anonymous reader writes "According to the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, geeky tech publisher O'Reilly Media has slashed 14% of its workforce, or 31 people. Founder and tech pundit Tim O'Reilly comments on the layoffs by exhorting people to 'get more with less.' According to the article, 'Just this week... both tech giant Google and book retailer Barnes & Noble announced their first layoffs ever. Other publishing houses, including HarperCollins, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Random House, and Simon & Schuster have frozen salaries or cut jobs, or both.'"

First Earth-Sized Exoplanet May Have Been Found 222

Posted by kdawson on Monday January 19, 2009 @08:48PM from the but-not-as-we-know-it dept.

Adam Korbitz writes "New Scientist is reporting the extrasolar planet MOA-2007-BLG-192Lb — whose discovery was announced just last summer — may actually be the first truly Earth-sized exoplanet to be identified. A new analysis suggests the planet weighs less than half the original estimate of 3.3 Earth masses; the new estimate pegs the planet's size at 1.4 Earth masses. The planet orbits a small red dwarf star, some 3,000 light-years from here, at an orbital distance of 0.62 astronomical units, about the same distance as Venus from our sun. One significance of the planet's discovery is that it points to the probable ubiquity of smaller terrestrial planets in somewhat Earth-like orbits around red dwarf stars, the oldest and most numerous stars in the galaxy. Here is a video report from the discoverers."

EC Considering Removing Internet Explorer From Windows 827

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday January 19, 2009 @07:04PM from the epic-struggles dept.

Itsabouttime writes "In a preliminary ruling, the European Commission told Microsoft that linking Internet Explorer to its dominant Windows operating system violates EC rules. The EC's ruling was triggered by a complaint from IE rival Opera. Microsoft could seek to offer a Windows version without IE, as it did in the EC's 2004 ruling on Windows Media Player."

Presidential Inauguration Hardware and Other Challenges 176

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday January 19, 2009 @06:11PM from the big-spend-for-one-off dept.

holy_calamity writes "The FBI has released images of some of the kit that will be deployed to safeguard Obama's inauguration, including mine-proof armored trucks like those used in Iraq to protect against IEDs, and a large armored chamber that any bombs will be shoved inside to be transported away and perhaps detonated inside. Interesting, even though the really good stuff is presumably being kept under wraps." Relatedly, necro81 writes "The Inauguration of Barack Obama tomorrow is expected to put considerable stress on the cellphone network around Washington, DC. The expected crowd could top two million people, and many of them are expected to call, text, tweet, photo, and blog their way through the event. In response, the major wireless carriers in the area have spent millions of dollars upgrading their local networks and will bring in extra 'cells on wheels' (COWs) and 'cells on light trucks' (COLTs). They are also requesting that attendees limit their usage during the event, and avoid bandwidth-heavy activities — like uploading photos — until afterward."

Comment Re:You're right beside me? (Score 1) 264

by kevin_j_morse on Saturday January 17, 2009 @04:49AM (#26495017) Attached to: Wireless Internet Access Uses Visible Light, Not Radio Waves

That's the first thing I thought... How exactly is the requirement for line-of-sight a feature...

Plus all the garbage about putting the technology outside in the street lights? What happens during the day... I see a small problem with the street lights not being turned on.

I almost looked at the calendar expecting it to somehow be April 1st.

Virus Infection Hits UK's Ministry of Defense, Including Warships 290

Posted by timothy on Friday January 16, 2009 @04:10AM from the but-not-windows-for-warships-per-se dept.

Retrovirus writes with a link to a Register story which says that the UK's "Ministry of Defence confirmed today that it has suffered virus infections which have shut down 'a small number' of MoD systems, most notably including admin networks aboard Royal Navy warships."

IBM Wins Most Patents In a Single Year For 2008 99

Posted by timothy on Thursday January 15, 2009 @06:44PM from the that's-a-lot-of-paperwork- dept.

eldavojohn writes "You might have heard or felt that there is little left to patent these days but IBM begs to differ. They came in at over four thousand for the year of 2008. Now, this isn't a good metric to measure success or progress but for those of you who like to keep track: 'IBM said it earned 4,186 U.S. patents in 2008, more than triple the number of patents earned by rival Hewlett-Packard. Microsoft Corp earned 2,030 patents, while Intel Corp had 1,776 and Hewlett-Packard 1,424, according to the report, which compiled data from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Korean electronics giant Samsung Electronics had the second-highest number of patents at 3,515.' You can find the original source of this study here as well as 2007's data and even 2006's data."

Hope For Fixing Longstanding Linux I/O Wait Bug 180

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday January 15, 2009 @12:55AM from the patch-it-up dept.

DaGoodBoy writes "There has been a long standing performance bug in Linux since 2.6.18 that has been responsible for lagging interactivity and poor system performance across all architectures. It has been notoriously difficult to qualify and isolate, but in the last few days someone has finally gotten a repeatable test case! Turns out the problem may not even be disk related, since the test case triggers the bug only by transferring data either between two processes or threads. The test results are very revealing. The developer ran regressions all the way back to version 2.6.15 that demonstrate this bug has more than doubled the time to run the test in 2.6.28. Many, many people working at improving the desktop performance of Linux will be very happy to see this bug die. I know that I, personally, will find a way to send the guy that found this test case his beverage of choice in thanks. Please spread the word and bring some attention to this issue so we can get it fixed!"

Trying To Find White House Missing E-mails 437

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday January 14, 2009 @11:14PM from the they-were-right-here dept.

Gov IT writes "On Wednesday a federal court ordered all employees working in the Bush White House to surrender media that might contain e-mails sent or received during a two and a half year period in hope of locating missing messages before President-elect Barack Obama takes over next week."

Ubuntu 9.04 Daily Build Boots In 21.4 Seconds 654

Posted by timothy on Wednesday January 14, 2009 @06:10PM from the spurious-precision-is-2.6-times-better dept.

Pizzutz writes "Softpedia reports that Ubuntu 9.04 Boots in 21.4 Seconds using the current daily build and the newly supported EXT4 file system. From the article: 'There are only two days left until the third Alpha version of the upcoming Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) will be available (for testing), and... we couldn't resist the temptation to take the current daily build for a test drive, before our usual screenshot tour, and taste the "sweetness" of that evolutionary EXT4 Linux filesystem. Announced on Christmas Eve, the EXT4 filesystem is now declared stable and it is distributed with version 2.6.28 of the Linux kernel and later. However, the good news is that the EXT4 filesystem was implemented in the upcoming Ubuntu 9.04 Alpha 3 a couple of days ago and it will be available in the Ubuntu Installer, if you choose manual partitioning.' I guess it's finally time to reformat my /home partition..."

DC Power Poised To Bring Savings To Datacenters 287

Posted by timothy on Wednesday January 14, 2009 @03:41PM from the anthropomorphism-loves-you dept.

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Logan Harbaugh follows up his '10 IT Power-Saving Myths Debunked' to argue in favor of using DC power in the datacenter. The practice — viewed as a somewhat crackpot means for reducing wasteful conversions in the datacenter just a few short years ago — has gained traction to the point where server vendors such as HP, IBM, and Sun are making DC power supplies available in their server wares. Meanwhile, Panduit and other companies are working to bring down another barrier for DC to the datacenter: a standardized 400-VDC connector and cabling solution. And with GE working to list 600-VDC circuit breakers with the Underwriters Labs, DC's promise of reduced conversion waste could soon be commonly realized."

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