BSDstef - Slashdot User

Comment Re:Hangings (Score 5, Informative) 1160

by BSDstef on Friday October 25, 2013 @10:50AM (#45234387) Attached to: US Executions Threaten Supply of Anaesthetic Used For Surgical Procedures

Lifetime imprisonment is actually less expensive than the death penalty. California could save $1 billion over five years by replacing the death penalty with permanent imprisonment. California taxpayers pay $90,000 more per death row prisoner each year than on prisoners in regular confinement.

Source: http://www.deathpenalty.org/article.php?id=42
Also see: http://deathpenalty.procon.org/view.answers.php?questionID=001000

Comment Re:Bonneau's paper (Score 3, Informative) 297

by BSDstef on Sunday July 28, 2013 @10:33AM (#44406075) Attached to: Google Engineer Wins NSA Award, Then Says NSA Should Be Abolished

First line of the Abstract:

We report on the largest corpus of user-chosen passwords ever studied, consisting of anonymized password histograms representing almost 70 million Yahoo! users, [...]

Submission + - Pay Using Facebook to Become Reality (techpp.com)

Submitted by

SmartAboutThings

on Friday August 24, 2012 @07:54AM

SmartAboutThings writes: "A recent story on NY Times talks about a possible partnership between Facebook and mobile billing company Bango. If this will not remain as a rumor, then quite soon we might be able to pay for goods using our Facebook accounts! Could this help Facebook regain the lost trust for their investors?"

Comment Re:Should have looked further (Score 1) 112

by BSDstef on Wednesday August 08, 2012 @07:03AM (#40916383) Attached to: 'Wall of Shame' Exposes 21M Medical Record Breaches

Deciding to outsource data processing doesn't make you any less responsible for the data.

Submission + - Googling for Friendy Flights (itworld.com)

Submitted by

itwbennett

on Friday July 06, 2012 @02:14PM

itwbennett writes: "British Airways wants to be the airline where everybody knows your name. The idea behind the 'Know Me' program is that by using Google Images to ID passengers, they'll be able to recreate the 'feeling of recognition you get in a favourite restaurant,' Jo Boswell, head of customer analysis at BA told the London Evening Standard. But the more privacy minded among us know that the airline could end up seeing a lot more than your face."

Submission + - IT salaries and hiring are up - but just to 2008 levels (infoworld.com)

Submitted by

tsamsoniw

on Friday July 06, 2012 @01:48PM

tsamsoniw writes: "A mid-year salary survey has a mix of good and bad news for IT professionals: The good news, hiring is slowly increasing as companies bring more IT operations back in house and salaries are creeping up a bit. But compensation (including benefits) are just now reaching 2008 levels — and hiring will remain soft, at least until the presidential election is over."

Submission + - Documenting Network Devices 1

Submitted by LoudMusic on Friday July 06, 2012 @12:34PM

LoudMusic writes: One of the many tasks of a network administrator is documenting the network so that other members of the administration and support teams can find devices on the network. Currently my organization uses Excel spreadsheets to handle this, and it's invariably error ridden. We also save a new file with the date in the name each time an update is made.

I'd like to move this to a more intelligent database system, but the driving force for keeping it in spreadsheets is the ability to take the document offline, edit it, then upload this new revision to the file server when we have a connection again. Our clients often don't have reliable internet connections, especially when we're tearing their network apart and rebuilding it.

The information we're currently documenting about an individual device are; device name, device model, description, IP address, MAC address, physical location, uplink switch & port, and VLAN.

What tools exist that would allow us to have multiple users make updates both online and offline simultaneously, and synchronize changes into both the online and offline copies?

Submission + - Storing hydrogen at room temperature (gizmag.com)

Submitted by cylonlover on Wednesday September 21, 2011 @02:59AM

cylonlover writes: Hydrogen storage, along with hydrogen production and the lack of infrastructure, remains a major stumbling block in efforts to usher in hydrogen as a replacement for hydrocarbon-based fuels in cars, trucks and even homes. But with the multiple advantages hydrogen offers, developing hydrogen storage solutions has been the focus of a great deal of research. Now an MIT-led research team has demonstrated a method that could allow hydrogen to be stored inexpensively at room temperature.

(Useful) Stupid Regex Tricks? 516

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday November 10, 2008 @10:17AM from the hope-you-like-reading-lots-of-random-characters dept.

careysb writes to mention that in the same vein as '*nix tricks' and 'VIM tricks', it would be nice to see one on regular expressions and the programs that use them. What amazingly cool tricks have people discovered with respect to regular expressions in everyday life as a developer or power user?"

White Space Debate Intensifies As Vote Approaches 94

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday October 25, 2008 @11:29AM from the my-science-can-beat-up-your-science dept.

Ars Technica reports that the debate between broadcasters and white space supporters has intensified after each side recently made inflammatory comments and suggested that science would vindicate their position. Several organizations are pushing to delay the upcoming white space vote, in part because it takes place on the same day as the US presidential election. We recently discussed Google's claim that a test of this system was rigged to fail. From Ars: "The broadcasters contend that adjacent channel interference would be significant even at the 40 mW level proposed by Kevin Martin. In fact, they claim that such a device would interfere with digital television signals when the viewer is 25 miles from the television tower and the whitespace device is 10m or less from the TV set. At 50 miles from the television tower, a whitespace device within 50m from a set could allegedly cause interference. The broadcasters also want several safeguard requirements put on the technology that go beyond the new, lower-power transmission levels."

Bookmark What Can iTunes Shopper Do? (feedthegeeks.com)

by beastybob on Monday May 21, 2007 @08:00AM

Comment Re:10 things which we know about FreeBSD (Score 3, Informative) 507

by BSDstef on Monday January 12, 2004 @11:09AM (#7952175) Attached to: FreeBSD 5.2 Released

1. You can not play games on it.
You can play Linux games on it (ok, no games)

2. It cannot be used by my grandma.
If your grandma is able to use Gnome or KDE, she can use FreeBSD.

3. It lacks a GUI of any note.
see above.

4. There is no support available for it.
There are a lot of places on the net were you can get help from the community. And some companies provide commercial support for FreeBSD.

5. It is an assortment of fragmented OSes.
FreeBSD is a complete OS by itself, it's an evolution of 4.4BSD.

6. It cannot be run on the x86 platform.
Of course it runs on x86.

7. You have to compile everything and know C.
Thanks to the ports collection, you just have to type "make" to get something compiled for you.

8. Support for the latest hardware is always poor.
Support for the latest hardware is sometimes poor indeed.

9. It is incompatiable with GNU/Linux.
FreeBSD has a complete Linux compatibility layer which allows to run Linux binaries.

10. It is dying.
Well, some people like to repeat that every month since 1993!

Stephane
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Life isn't fair, but the root password helps.

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