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Comment Re:Computers should be designed for an OS (Score 1) 263

by Xamusk (#32314914) Attached to: Asus Budget Ultraportable Notebook Sold Sans OS
Buying a Linux-based laptop doesn't get us free from driver troubles. Once I bought an Acer laptop with a Linux-that-nobody-uses, and even from factory the webcam wouldn't work because it didn't have proper drivers. Luckily enough, I just had to wait a few months before smart people made an experimental gspca driver for it.

Comment For geometry (Score 1) 467

by Xamusk (#31720870) Attached to: Help Me Get My Math Back?

If you're looking for geometry learning, try to make an asteroids-like game.

It's not too challenging as to turn someone down, but lots of fun and you'll learn how to apply geometry. Specially sine and cossine, which my teachers did a terrible job in teaching what that was all about (only teached transformation formulae, never applying them). I only learnt what it was meant to do when I tried to do a subspace-like game.
Linux Business

Can Ubuntu Save Online Banking? 462

Posted by timothy from the make-that-virus-throw-an-error dept.
CWmike writes with a pointer to this ComputerWorld mention of an interesting application of Live CDs, courtesy of Florida-based regional bank CNL: "Recognizing that most consumers don't want to buy a separate computer for online banking, CNL is seriously considering making available free Ubuntu bootable 'live CD' discs in its branches and by mail. The discs would boot up Linux, run Firefox and be configured to go directly to CNL's Web site. 'Everything you need to do will be sandboxed within that CD,' [CNL CIO Jay McLaughlin] says. That should protect customers from increasingly common drive-by downloads and other vectors for malicious code that may infect and lurk on PCs, waiting to steal the user account names, passwords and challenge questions normally required to access online banking." (But what if someone slips in a stack of doctored disks?)
Biotech

Scientists "Print" Human Vein With 3D Printer 94

Posted by CmdrTaco from the because-we-can dept.
An anonymous reader writes "3D Printing technology has recently leapt into a new realm — we've seen printers that can create entire buildings out of stone, delicious meals out of simple ingredients, and now — perhaps weirdest and coolest of them all — a printer that can build body parts from cells!"
Wireless Networking

Auto-Scanning the Names People Choose For Their Wireless APs 422

Posted by timothy from the just-name-them-all-hidden dept.
MichaelSmith writes "I code on the tram, going to and from work, and I noticed that there are a lot of WiFi access points along the way. So one week I made it my job to write an automatic scanner which runs from a cron job every minute during commuting times. My backup script pushes the new AP names to my web server and you can read it online. It is a mixture of the straightforward, naive and funny, with a few pop culture references along the way. The first column in the file is the number of access points with that name. The second column is the AP name, in brackets to pick up white space." Why can't "Dress Me Slowly" and "Domestic Bliss" just share an AP?

Comment Re:I dont use... (Score 1) 896

by Xamusk (#31551866) Attached to: What Free Antivirus Do You Install On Windows?

Nice... Keep thinking that you're safe, and I won't tell you how I would have gotten a virus just today when I downloaded a basic app for my HP calculator, were it not for my AV software, which detected it just when I downloaded the installer from HP's official site.

I hope you never download anything from anywhere, including sites which should be safe and trustful, but just aren't.
GNU is Not Unix

Free Software To Save Us From Social Networks 249

Posted by kdawson from the wall-warts-unite dept.
Glyn Moody writes "Here's a problem for free software: most social networks are built using it, yet through their constant monitoring of users they do little to promote freedom. Eben Moglen, General Counsel of the Free Software Foundation for 13 years, and the legal brains behind several versions of the GNU GPL, thinks that the free software world needs to fix this with a major new hardware+software project. 'The most attractive hardware is the ultra-small, ARM-based, plug it into the wall, wall-wart server. [Such] an object can be sold to people at a very low one-time price, and brought home and plugged into an electrical outlet and plugged into a wall jack for the Ethernet, and you're done. It comes up, it gets configured through your Web browser on whatever machine you want to have in the apartment with it, and it goes and fetches all your social networking data from all the social networking applications, closing all your accounts. It backs itself up in an encrypted way to your friends' plugs, so that everybody is secure in the way that would be best for them, by having their friends holding the secure version of their data.' Could such a plan work, or is it simply too late to get people to give up their Facebook accounts for something that gives them more freedom?"

Comment Re:Python or Java (Score 1) 407

by Xamusk (#31480516) Attached to: Good Language Choice For School Programming Test?
You forgot the most important fact in you advantages list: with Python, lists are a built-in type. Which pretty much means you have built-in powerful sort, without the need for importing nothing, and some other useful methods. Also, it has built-in strings, with many built-in methods. That pretty much covers many of the problems writing competition software, and definitely will give an edge, since properly programming those algorithms take a lot of time.
Security

Security Industry Faces Attacks It Can't Stop 305

Posted by kdawson from the crying-out-for-paradigm-shift dept.
itwbennett writes "The takedown of the Mariposa botnet and so-called advanced persistent threat attacks, such as the one that compromised Google systems in early December, were hot topics at the RSA conference last week. What both Mariposa and the Google attacks illustrate, and what went largely unsaid at RSA, was that the security industry has failed to protect paying customers from some of today's most pernicious threats, writes Robert McMillan. Traditional security products are simply not much help, said Alex Stamos, a partner with Isec Partners, one of the companies investigating the APT attacks. 'All of the victims we've worked with had perfectly installed antivirus,' he said. 'They all had intrusion detection systems and several had Web proxies scan content.'"

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