jenik - Slashdot User

Submission + - Six year old girl hacks UK Parliament

Submitted by on Tuesday March 27, 2007 @06:21AM

An anonymous reader writes: http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry1368.html A BBC investigation shows how a six year old girl was able to circumvent security in one of the most heavily guarded buildings in the UK, the House of Commons, and hack the computer of an MP.

Submission + - Vista: more than just a pretty face

Submitted by cristarol on Tuesday March 20, 2007 @10:31AM

cristarol writes: Ars Technica has an in-depth look at the major changes in Vista, including API changes, the window manager, Media Foundation, WinFX, and Windows Presentation Foundation. 'Even though WPF drags Windows GUI development kicking and screaming into the 21st century, it's not the powerful features — Direct3D-accelerated vector graphics and simple programming model, for instance — that really set it apart from other APIs on other platforms. The really unusual feature is that the new API depends heavily on managed code. That is to say, the native, standard way of using it is through .NET.' It's an informative look at many of the technologies underlying Vista and goes a long way towards explaining why Microsoft made some of the choices it did with Vista.

Submission + - No such thing as a constant constant?

Submitted by

Matthew Sparkes

on Tuesday March 20, 2007 @10:16AM

Matthew Sparkes writes: "Feynman called alpha, "one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number". One puzzle is whether this constant of nature has always had the same value. A signal from the early universe could answer that. Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have suggested measuring the 21-cm line from about 400,000 years after the big bang, when neutral hydrogen formed, to about 150 million years later when the first stars flared up, to see if alpha has changed in that time."

Journal Journal: Relationships among scientific paradigms 163

Journal by Alien54 on Tuesday March 20, 2007 @10:02AM

Presenting a giant chart mapping relationships between scientific paradigms, as published in the journal Nature. This map was constructed by sorting roughly 800,000 published papers into 776 different scientific paradigms (shown as pale circular nodes) based on how often the papers were cited together by au

Submission + - Applied Evolution to combat malaria

Submitted by thrawn_aj on Tuesday March 20, 2007 @04:36AM

thrawn_aj writes: Dr Mauro Marrelli and his colleagues from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland have gengineered a strain of mosquito that is resistant to the malaria parasite AND has better survivability than the regular Anopheles. The gene that controls this resistance is passed down through generations and it was found that after only 9 generations, an initially equitable (50-50) distribution of regular Anopheles and the GM strain tipped toward the latter, standing at 30-70! The researchers ingeniously differentiated between the strains by also including a gene that makes the GM strain have fluorescent green eyes. (In other news, Martians file lawsuit for trademark infringement). It is hoped that further research could turn this into a tool to finally eradicate malaria, which is responsible for a million deaths worldwide.

BBC news link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6468381. stm

PNAS link to abstract and full text: http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/060980910 4v1

Submission + - Open Office - what's the downside?

Submitted by

cclangi

on Tuesday March 20, 2007 @02:46AM

cclangi writes: "Hi. I'm a current MSOffice user. I run a small business as a consultant (mining). I've read about Open Office and all the good things about it, but what about the downside? As a small business owner and semi-literate in things computer-ese (as a user, not as a developer or administrator), what support limitations are there for Open Office. I'm particularly interested in/concerned with compatability of software for reports, spreadsheets and database apps that I might need to send to/receive from clients, etc. As I've said, I've read the good stuff, and "how easy it is", but what are things I need to be aware of before considering switching completely to Open Office. Comments and experiences would be welcomed. Regards, Chris"

Submission + - "The Secret" Tested

Submitted by

PhilBowermaster

on Monday March 19, 2007 @10:12AM

PhilBowermaster writes: "As of this morning, The Secret is the #2 ranked book on Amazon.com, lagging behind only the new Harry Potter. As featured recently on Oprah and spoofed even more recently on SNL, The Secret purports to reveal the long-guarded principle that lies behind all human achievement.

Here we assert that a widespread test of The Secret has already taken place, with somewhat disappointing results."

Submission + - Is Daylight Savings Shift Really Worth It?

Submitted by Krishna Dagli on Monday March 12, 2007 @05:13AM

Krishna Dagli writes: Two Ph.D. students at the University of California at Berkeley says that Daylight Savings Shift will not do any good or energy saving. We are already spending money for software upgrades in the name of saving energy and after reading following article I wonder has congress really studied the impact of DST shift?

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/print?id=2938715

Submission + - Defense Contractor Halliburton Moving HQ to Dubai

Submitted by

theodp

on Monday March 12, 2007 @03:33AM

theodp writes: "Much-maligned defense contractor Halliburton is moving its corporate headquarters from Houston to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. Dubai's friendly tax laws will add to Halliburton's bottom line. Last year, it earned $2.3B in profits. Sen. Patrick Leahy called the company's move 'corporate greed at its worst.' Halliburton, once headed by VP Dick Cheney, has received contracts valued at an estimated $25.7B for its work in Iraq."

Submission + - Linspire to be based on Kubuntu

Submitted by

FliesLikeABrick

on Monday March 12, 2007 @03:05AM

FliesLikeABrick writes: "The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter has unveiled that Linspire announced that they will be switching to base their distribution off Ubuntu. With their polished KDE desktop this makes Linspire the latest in the impressive list of operating systems based off Kubuntu.

It was also announced that Linspire's Click and Run install programme would be added to the Ubuntu archive, giving users of all Ubuntu distributions easy access to a large range of free and proprietary software."

Submission + - Scientists Threatened For "Climate Denial"

Submitted by Forrest Kyle on Monday March 12, 2007 @02:20AM

Forrest Kyle writes: A former professor of climatology at the University of Winnipeg has recieved multiple death threats for questioning the extent to which human activities are driving global warming. From the article, "'Western governments have pumped billions of dollars into careers and institutes and they feel threatened,' said the professor. 'I can tolerate being called a sceptic because all scientists should be sceptics, but then they started calling us deniers, with all the connotations of the Holocaust. That is an obscenity. It has got really nasty and personal.' Richard Lindzen, the professor of Atmospheric Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology...recently claimed: 'Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves labelled as industry stooges. Consequently, lies about climate change gain credence even when they fly in the face of the science.'"

Submission + - Making Sense out of Census Data with Google Earth

Submitted by

mikemuch

on Monday March 12, 2007 @01:08AM

mikemuch writes: "Irman Haque has developed a mashup of Google Earth with data from the U.S. Census Bureau, called gCensus. The app uses the XML format known as KML (Keyhole Markup Language), which can create shapes and colors on the maps displayed by GE. Haque had to build custom code libraries (which he's made available as open source) that could generate KML for the project. He also had to extract the relevant data from the highly counter-intuitive Census Bureau files and store them in a database that could handle geographic data. gCensus lets you do stuff like create colorful overlays on maps showing population ages, race, and family size distributions."

Submission + - Everything you need to know about IPv6

Submitted by

Butterspoon

on Thursday March 08, 2007 @06:13AM

Butterspoon writes: "Ars Technica is running an excellent article entitled "Everything you need to know about IPv6", which should be regarded as essential reading for anyone who is overly comfortable with their IPv4 addresses. From the artice:

As of January 1, 2007, 2.4 billion of those [IPv4 addresses] were in (some kind of) use. 1.3 billion were still available and about 170 million new addresses are given out each year. So at this rate, 7.5 years from now, we'll be clean out of IP addresses; faster if the number of addresses used per year goes up.

Are you ready for IPv6?"

Submission + - Just how random is Apple iTunes' random?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 08, 2007 @03:27AM

An anonymous reader writes: Think that song has appeared in your playlists just a few too many times? CNET.com.au analyzes Apple iTunes' song randomizer — and finds some surprising results.

Lionel Richie (Universal) proved to be iTunes' most popular artist, appearing 59 times all told, for an average of 1.475 times per possible playlist. The least frequently played artists were all those whose songs were taken from CD, with the bottom of the rung inhabited by Christina Aguilera and Oasis.

Submission + - User-Privilege Flaw Hits Vista

Submitted by

IT071872

on Thursday March 08, 2007 @02:51AM

IT071872 writes: "According to PC world, A security firm has discovered one of the first security flaws to directly affect Windows Vista, a bug that it claims allows local users to escalate their privileges.

The flaw involves Windows' system for managing user security levels, User Account Control (UAC), which was introduced with Vista. UAC is designed to limit the damage that can be caused by mass attacks such as worms by giving standard users limited privileges, a practice common with other operating systems."

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