Comment Re:So... (Score 1) 102
Number of people that care: zero. Number of francophiles that may care: estimated to be >=1.
Comment Re:And this is called "news"? (Score 1) 295
You kids and your fancy high UIDs.
Comment IE8 is on top for 2 reasons.... (Score 1) 319
I'm surprised nobody has caught the obvious here, that IE8 is gaining ground thanks to a two-pronged strategy. The first is Microsoft pushing IE8 out forcefully to everyone via windows/microsoft update. Even on the server side of things. They rank it as a critical download rather than optional, so if you just have important updates turned on, it will show up all by itself eventually. The second is that Windows 7 and Server 2008 are both gaining momentum as people buy new stuff and companies begin to upgrade their infrastructures. It's a new year which means a new budget and money to spend on replacing dead or dying computers and servers.
All this results in IE8 gaining marketshare. It will end up capturing as much, if not more, of IE7's share over time. There may always be some old holdouts from companies running some crazy in-house web-based app that only works on IE6, but I'm sure there are still NT4 boxen humming away in some dusty server closets somewhere too.
My only beef with IE8 is how the rendering engine destroys some pages. Buttons don't appear, images and text gets cut off, and I'll be damned if the page printing feature doesn't still chop the sides off of pages rather than reformat them to fit the page for printing. MS releases "compatibility" updates for it nearly every week or two, just to get it to render as cleanly (which is relative at this point) as IE7. At many companies I take care of, I have intentionally disabled IE8 from WSUS and unchecked it from Windows Update using the "fuck you don't come back" button due to rendering problems that end up crippling some work-related sites.
New AACS Crack Called "Undefeatable" 554
Tuoqui writes "With all the focus on the infamous hexadecimal number, people may be ignoring a bigger weakness in the AACS armor, which emerged two weeks ago. Some hackers have figured out how to crack AACS in a way that cannot be defeated, even by revoking all the keys in circulation."
Feed Maggots Rid Patients Of Antibiotic-resistant Infection, MRSA (sciencedaily.com)
Medical researchers are ridding diabetic patients of the superbug MRSA -- by treating their foot ulcers with maggots. The scientists used green bottle fly larvae to treat 13 diabetic patients whose foot ulcers were contaminated with MRSA and found all but one were cured within a mean period of three weeks, much quicker than the 28-week duration for the conventional treatment.
Submission + - Define: /etc
ogar572 writes: There has been an ongoing and heated debate around the office concerning the definition of what /etc means on *nix operating systems. One side says "et cetera" per Wikipedia. Another side says it means "extended tool chest" per this gnome mailing list entry or per this Norwegian article. Yet another side says neither, but he doesn't remember exactly what he heard in the past. All he remembers is that he was flamed when he called it "et cetera", but that "extended tool chest" didn't sound right either. So, what does it really mean?
Journal Journal: Peter Griffin does a Letterman Top 10
Since I don't watch Letterman, this is new to me, even if everybody else has already seen it
Submission + - Why Do Computers Take Thirty Seconds to Boot Up?
An anonymous reader writes: Computers take too long to boot up, and it doesn't make sense to me. Mine takes around 30 seconds; it is double or triple that for some of my friends' computers that I have used. Why can't a computer turn on and off in an instant just like a TV?
99% of boots, my computer is doing the exact same thing. Then I get to WindowsXP with maybe 50 to 75 megs of stuff in memory. My computer should be smart enough to just load that junk into memory and go with it. You could put this data right at the very start of the hard drive. Whenever you do something with the computer that actually changes what happens during boot, it could go through the real booting process and save the results.
Doing this would also give you instant restarts. You just hit your restart button, the computer reloads the memory image, and you can be working again.
99% of boots, my computer is doing the exact same thing. Then I get to WindowsXP with maybe 50 to 75 megs of stuff in memory. My computer should be smart enough to just load that junk into memory and go with it. You could put this data right at the very start of the hard drive. Whenever you do something with the computer that actually changes what happens during boot, it could go through the real booting process and save the results.
Doing this would also give you instant restarts. You just hit your restart button, the computer reloads the memory image, and you can be working again.
Microsoft drops VBA in Mac Office 2007 374
slashdotwriter writes "Macworld features an article stating that the next version of Office for the Mac will not include Visual Basic scripting. From the article: 'Microsoft Office isn't among the apps that will run natively on Intel-based Macs — and it won't be until the latter half of 2007, according to media reports. But when it does ship, Office will apparently be missing a feature so vital to cross-platform compatibility that I believe it will be the beginning of the end for the Mac version of the productivity suite...'"
Submission + - How do you do your enterprise inventory/document?
An anonymous reader writes: I'm curious as to what tools fellow /.ers use to inventory and document their networks? What got me thinking about this is the part VMWare has really been taking in data centers. You've got your SAN, various physical and logical networks, various VMs, and so forth. It just adds a new layer of complexity in terms of documentation. I'm curious as to what people have been using as for doing things like documenting how their backups work, LAN settings, FW settings, where and what runs what services,etc.
Basically a blueprint if you will of your entire IT infrastructure that someone brand new could start and figure out what does what.
Submission + - DARPA Challenge Prize Money Restored
antispam_ben writes: "This article from The Register reports that "After foraging through thousands of couches in Washington, the government has come up with $3.5m in prize money for the contestants in an upcoming robotic vehicle race." Okay, that's not exactly how it happened, but it's good to see continued interest in this type of incentive to develop technology."
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