skidv - Slashdot User

Submission + - natwest bank suffers datacentre loss

Submitted by on Saturday June 02, 2007 @05:42AM

An anonymous reader writes: Apparently Natwest Bank www.natwest.com are having a MAJOR systems failure. All natwest customers are unable to use atms — even of other banks, and online banking is down.

Since 2am every single one of their internal systems went down due to a datacenter failure. Apparently they don't have a backup, and recently outsourced support to india, and their personnel don't know how to restart some systems.

They say that they expect things to be back working by midday saturday.

Submission + - Google Street Maps Even Spots Well Hung Robot (google.com)

Submitted by

Joe Latone

on Thursday May 31, 2007 @10:13PM

Joe Latone writes: "I'm sure millions of these are going to start popping up as a result of the Microsoft & Google videovans, as well as the requests to remove and/or lawsuits. But, let's accept it, this is just another small step towards 1984. How about a service where we all have webcams aimed outside our windows attached to one of those free FON devices, constantly streaming video to free space at those Microsoft/Google data centers! Maybe I'd then identify the dog that keeps crapping on my lawn.

The robot, by the way, has an association to one of the biggest high tech IT companies in the world (exercise left to the reader)."

Submission + - Using Earth's Magnetic Field to Eject CO2 (economist.com)

Submitted by rrkap on Thursday May 31, 2007 @03:11PM

rrkap writes: At last week's meeting of the American Geophysical Union, Alfred Wong of the University of California, Los Angeles proposed using the Earth's magnetic field to eject Carbon Dioxide from the atmosphere.

His proposal comes in two stages. "First, he has to ionise more CO2. There are many ways this might be done, but for a first experiment Dr Wong proposes zapping dust in the atmosphere with powerful lasers, to release electrons that can then combine with CO2. Having created the ions, he will then nudge those that have drifted upwards to the appropriate height with radio waves of exactly 17 cycles a second..."

Submission + - FSF Releases "Last Call" Draft of GPLv3 (fsf.org)

Submitted by

mw13068

on Thursday May 31, 2007 @03:00PM

mw13068 writes: "From the FSF Website: http://www.fsf.org/news/gpl3dd4-released

The new draft incorporates the feedback received from the general public and official discussion committees since the release of the previous draft on March 28, 2007. FSF executive director Peter Brown said, "We've made a few very important improvements based on the comments we've heard, most notably with license compatibility. Now that the license is almost finished, we can look forward to distributing the GNU system under GPLv3, and making its additional protections available to the whole community."

The FSF has also published an essay by Richard Stallman on the benefits of upgrading to GPLv3. "Keeping a program under GPLv2 won't create problems," he writes. "The reason to migrate is because of the existing problems which GPLv3 will fix, such as tivoization, DRM, and threats from software patents. . . . Further advantages of GPLv3 include better internationalization, gentler termination, support for BitTorrent, and compatibility with the Apache license.""

Submission + - The IT department as corporate snoop (networkworld.com)

Submitted by

coondoggie

on Thursday May 31, 2007 @02:44PM

coondoggie writes: "As if we needed more proof that insiders are a seriously worse threat to your corporate jewels than any malicious hacker, a study released today says that one in three of IT employees snoop through company systems and peek at confidential information such as private files, wage data, personal emails, and HR background. The survey, which claims to reveal "the hidden scandal of IT staff snooping," is from Cyber-Ark Software, a company that, naturally specializes in password protection. As if that weren't bad enough, the survey found that more than one-third of IT professionals admit they could still access their company's network once they'd left their current job, with no one to stop them. http://www.networkworld.com/community/?q=node/1573 1"

Submission + - the slashdot flowchart (wellingtongrey.net)

Submitted by

erle

on Thursday May 31, 2007 @01:52PM

erle writes: "This "flowchart" on slashdot was just too cool to pass over. Obviously a frequent reader, since they 'understand' the coolness (oops did I give too much away?). Im sure that all slashdot'ers have a great sense of humour. I came across this site, not sure if anyone has seen it yet, but whoever has done this, sure has one, and a great one. Hope you all enjoy it . (I sure hope my boss does not read this one)"

Submission + - CDW to be acquired by Madison Dearborn Partners LL

Submitted by Justin Michael on Wednesday May 30, 2007 @04:12PM

Justin Michael writes: Madison Dearborn Partners LLC, a private equity firm, has agreed to acquire CDW. The price offered is a significant rise on the May 25 price and CDW stock is reacting to the news. CDW sells via the Internet and retail stores, which distinguishes it from many of its Internet only or big-box only competitors. CDW has done its own acquisitions, including Berbee Information Networks and MicroWarehouse.

Submission + - Putting Captcha's to good use.

Submitted by

Drewsk

on Wednesday May 30, 2007 @03:13PM

Drewsk writes: "A story in CNN suggests that worldwide, we are wasting a total of 150,000 hours per day typing in the useless CAPTCHA's that webservers want in order to ensure we're humans and not robots. A new project underway, dubbed "reCAPTCHA" is an effort to put all that time to good use in much the same way that SETI likes to use our computer's spare time. In essence, all of the worlds books that are being scanned in to the Internet cannot all be read by OCR. Some have to be typed manually and others need passages clarified as words are unclear. The project wants to send those passages (words) out as Captcha's so we can all contribute to the world's online libraries... Read more."

Submission + - The Top 25 CIOs

Submitted by DebNY on Friday May 25, 2007 @09:18AM

DebNY writes: CIO Insight has rated the top 25 most important CIOs today. The list was chosen by editors from CIO Insight, Baseline and eWeek. Topping the list is Patricia Hewlett of ExxonMobil for "developing new information and exploration technologies to achieve the business goal of tapping increasingly hard-to-find oil and gas deposits; among the goals: wring out $1 billion in efficiencies in 2006 from operating costs that totalled $57 billion in 2005, through advances such as virtual drilling technologies." Rick Dalzell of Amazon takes the number 2 spot; GE's Gary Reiner took third.

The entire list (in four annoying parts) is on its homepage.

Submission + - eMail is bankrupt

Submitted by

Gary W. Longsine

on Friday May 25, 2007 @08:45AM

Gary W. Longsine writes: "The Washington Post writes about a Venture Capitalist and blogger, Fred Wilson, who recently declared e-mail bankruptcy, wiping out his inbox and starting over because he couldn't keep up. Spam is cited as one reason. It seems that too much spam is not the only problem that Mr. Wilson has with email. Another curious tidbit mentioned in the article is that Donald E. Knuth gave up email on January 1, 1990 after using it since 1975. Is eMail dead?"

Submission + - MySpace and Social Networks contribute to Phishing

Submitted by skidv on Wednesday May 16, 2007 @06:19PM

skidv writes: While this comes as no surprise, the SANS Internet Storm Center has an interesting diary entry about the ease of phishing once a social network profile like those on MySpace has been compromised. From the article:

According to an Indiana University study, 72% of individuals who received phishing messages spoofed to come from their social network acquaintances were fooled. In contrast, only 15% of the recipients were fooled when the messages came from an unknown party. Clearly, scammers have a strong incentive to data-mine social networks when crafting phishing campaigns.

Submission + - Obama's Massive MySpace Martyr

Submitted by DoTheRightThingBarack on Tuesday May 08, 2007 @09:32AM

DoTheRightThingBarack writes: This is unbelievable. Obama's campaign staff has been successful is killing-off the biggest political fansite on MySpace. The fansite is going to be deleted this morning! 160,000 friends, gone! The crazy thing is, the fansite had been in support of Obama. How smart is that?! For a political candidate to kill-off their biggest fansite?!?! Have any other political campaigns been dumb enough to shoot themselves in the foot like this? (mirror link) More info is available on techPresident, Technorati, and Joe Anthony's site.

Submission + - GPL Integration forcing Product Switch

Submitted by

g8orade

on Tuesday May 08, 2007 @09:11AM

g8orade writes: "The company where I work has in the past couple of years started using BestPractical's Request Tracker (RT) to manage all kinds of internal work processes, and a few that involve clients, that we used to handle with email, and we have adopted Twiki as our internal online documentation platform.

We are a shipping services outsourcing company running a custom program built on/with Oracle internally, with some screens available to our clients and suppliers that allow them to track and perform error resolution.

Because we would like to integrate RT and Twiki's features with our internal ERP system, we are considering dropping both in favor of Atlassian's offerings, Confluence and Jira. Atlassian would sell us perpetual / development rights and we would not incur any GPL liability to our internal code. (Offering some of our ERP functions to our clients through the web is where we run into the "distribution" problem of having to make our code GPL).

I recognize this is just the GPL in action, if my company doesn't share its proprietary ERP oriented code with the world why should we have the benefits of value from Twiki and RT being delivered to our clients as part our offering?

My question to Slashdot readers is, has your company run into this issue, using a GPL product for a while, but then when you want to integrate with proprietary code that you "distribute" electing to buy a similar closed source product to avoid losing ownership of your own? What did you do?

What would happen if someone wanted to integrate Great Plains Accounting into Compiere, or SugarCRM into SAP / JD Edwards ERP?"

Submission + - Justin Steinman on Novell: never been better

Submitted by

gadgetopia

on Monday April 23, 2007 @09:00AM

gadgetopia writes: "Justin Steinman is Novell's PR chief, spreading the SuSe Linux gospel and the benefits of the deal with Microsoft both at home in the US and abroad. On his current visit to Australia, I got the chance to ask him questions — some easy, some tough. Novell doubters and haters beware: Steinman says Novell has never had it so good, and it's only getting better! http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/11546/1103/"

Submission + - Linux-Sponsored Indy 500 Car

Submitted by

Jordon Kalilich

on Monday April 23, 2007 @06:20AM

Jordon Kalilich writes: "Remember Mozilla's successful community-driven campaign to place a Firefox ad in the New York Times? A new community-driven project takes open-source evangelism a step — or, rather, 500 miles — further. The Tux 500 project hopes to raise at least $25,000 (USD) to attain sponsorship of an Indianapolis 500 car. For primary sponsorship, with "Team Linux" in the racing team's name, they'll need at least $350,000. From the site: "If less than 1% of the Linux community donates $1, this will happen... will you do your part?""

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