ExpressTrain - Slashdot User

Comment I damaged my graphics processor in 4 hours (Score 1) 715

by ExpressTrain on Tuesday September 14, 2010 @10:27AM (#33573660) Attached to: The Last Component To Fail In My Computer Was The...

I got a new laptop assigned at work. On day one, I closed the lid (as I do every evening to put it into "hibernate" mode), slipped it into my bag and headed home for the day. Four hours later I pulled it out of bag to do some work at home and noticed that it was extremely hot. With a sick feeling in my stomach, I opened the lid and realized what I had done. But the only damage I noticed was some flickering pixels. Bottom line, only had the laptop in my possession about 4 hours before it was damaged. Fortunately my IT guy was very understanding.

Comment Missing option: Parents decide (Score 1) 1233

by ExpressTrain on Monday September 28, 2009 @01:43PM (#29568533) Attached to: At What Temperature (F) Do You Prefer Your Nerd Cave?

Missing option: "My mom says I can't mess with the thermostat any more."

Comment Re:Crossing my fingers... (Score 1) 575

by ExpressTrain on Tuesday April 28, 2009 @10:59AM (#27745767) Attached to: To What Age Do You Expect To Live?

Incidentally, you can get a nice even distribution from 3-30 by using d20*3 + d6/2 (rounding up) - 1. You still get some results above 30, but I just throw those out.

Submission + - Phishing for bank info without any pesky malware! (darkreading.com)

Submitted by

Emb3rz

on Thursday January 15, 2009 @05:27PM

Emb3rz writes: "DarkReading.com brings us news of a new approach to phishing that targets online banking sites. Here's the novel part of it: it doesn't involve any of the typical attack vectors we all know and love. Instead, it uses JavaScript from a remote page to detect if you have a banking site open, and prompts you for info via popup if you do. Read on for full details. http://www.darkreading.com/security/attacks/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=212900161"

Submission + - My friend was tricked into buying OpenOffice

Submitted by

mldkfa

on Thursday January 15, 2009 @03:37PM

mldkfa writes: "Recently I told a friend about OpenOffice and how it was a great alternative to the big name pay office suites. She went home and searched on Google for it and thought she found the website, filled typical registration information, and downloaded OpenOffice.org 3.0. The next time she opened her e-mail she found a request for 98 for her 1 year subscription to OpenOffice.org 3.0 from the company that she downloaded it from. Apparently the EULA stated this cost and here in Germany she is required to pay up. So I thought I would ask Slashdot, should she pay? On the OpenOffice.org German website there is a warning of these schemes being legal. Shouldn't Sun change the license of OpenOffice.org to protect their fans or are they doing this to protect someone else? It has really made me think about recommending it to any more friends."

Submission + - Wiretapping Program Legal

Submitted by

BuhDuh

on Thursday January 15, 2009 @11:49AM

BuhDuh writes: "The New York Time is carrying a story concerning that well known bastion of legal authority the "Foreign Intelligence Surveillance" court, which has ruled that the National Security Agency's warrantless eavesdropping program was perfectly legal.
A federal intelligence court, in a rare public opinion, is expected to issue a major ruling validating the power of the president and Congress to wiretap international phone calls and intercept e-mail messages without a court order, even when Americans' private communications may be involved, according to a person with knowledge of the opinion.

Given that the largely derided administration of the last 8 years is expiring, should we be surprised? Should we even care?"

Comment Re:Get out now (Score 1) 1055

by ExpressTrain on Tuesday January 13, 2009 @10:11PM (#26442913) Attached to: How Does a 9/80 Work Schedule Work Out?

I think that it would cost more in terms of accounting to deal with the complexity of carrying over 4 hours from the first week to the second week than they would gain in some nefarious extra labor benefit. However, I worked a 9/80 schedule for years, and LOVED it. However, it was successful largely because my manager was great about respecting the Friday off. Also, I didn't deal with customers outside of the company.

Researcher Publishes Industrial Complex Hack 190

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday September 10, 2008 @07:41PM from the who-runs-the-power-plant dept.

snydeq writes "Security researcher Kevin Finisterre has published code that could be used to take control of computers used to manage industrial machinery, potentially giving hackers a back door into utility companies, water plants, and even oil and gas refineries. The code exploits a flaw in supervisory control and data acquisition software from Citect. The vendor has released a patch and risk arises only for systems connected directly to the Internet without firewall protection. Finisterre, however, sees the issue as indicative of a 'culture clash' between IT and process control engineers, who are reluctant to bring computers off-line for patching due to the potential havoc wreaked by downtime. 'A lot of the people who run these systems feel that they're not bound by the same rules as traditional IT,' Finisterre said. 'Their industry is not very familiar with hacking and hackers in general.'"

Automated News Crawling Evaporates $1.14B 546

Posted by kdawson on Wednesday September 10, 2008 @04:10PM from the who-shall-watch-the-watchers dept.

cmd writes "The Wall Street Journal reports that Google News crawled an obscure reprint of an article from 2002 when United Airlines was on the brink of bankruptcy. United Airlines has since recovered but due to a missing dateline, Google News ran the story as today's news. The story was then picked up by other news aggregators and eventually headlined as a news flash on Bloomberg. This triggered automated trading programs to dump UAL, cratering the stock from $12 to $3 and evaporating 1.14 billion dollars (nearly United's total market cap today) in shareholder wealth. The stock recovered within the day to $10 and is now trading at $9.62, a market cap of $300M less than before Google ran the story." The article makes clear that Google's news bot only noticed the old story because it has been voted up in popularity on the site of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel newspaper. The original thought was that stock manipulation may have been behind the incident, but this suspicion seems to be fading.

Submission + - Data Center Designers in High Demand

Submitted by

Hugh Pickens

on Monday June 16, 2008 @08:05PM

Hugh Pickens writes: "For years, data center designers have toiled in obscurity in the engine rooms of the digital economy, amid the racks of servers and storage devices that power everything from online videos to corporate e-mail systems but now people with the skills to design, build and run a data center that does not endanger the power grid are suddenly in demand. "The data center energy problem is growing fast, and it has an economic importance that far outweighs the electricity use," said Jonathan G. Koomey of Stanford University. "So that explains why these data center people, who haven't gotten a lot of glory in their careers, are in the spotlight now." The pace of the data center build-up is the result of the surging use of servers, which in the United States rose to 11.8 million in 2007, from 2.6 million a decade earlier. "For years and years, the attitude was just buy it, install it and don't worry about it," says Vernon Turner, an analyst for IDC. "That led to all sorts of inefficiencies. Now, we're paying for that behavior." Most of the 6,600 data centers in America, analysts say, will be replaced or retrofitted with new equipment over the next several years so now that costs and energy consumption are priorities, the data center gurus are getting a hearing and new respect. "After 25 years, we're finally elevating mechanical engineering and adding a lot of electrical engineering, computer science and applied physics," says data center designer Chandrakant Patel of Hewlett-Packard. "I wish I were 20 years younger.""

Smart Phones "Bigger Security Risk" Than Laptops 174

Posted by kdawson on Monday June 02, 2008 @08:46PM from the low-hanging-fruit dept.

CWmike writes "A recent survey of 300 senior IT staff found that 94% fear PDAs present a security risk, surpassing the 88% who highlighted mobile storage devices as a worry. Nearly eight in 10 said laptops were an issue. Only four in 10 had encrypted data on their laptops, and the remainder said the information was 'not worth' protecting. A key danger with PDAs was that over half of IT executives surveyed were 'not bothering' to enter a password when they used their phone. A VP at the company that performed the survey said: 'Companies need to regain control of these devices and the data that they are carrying, or risk finding their investment in securing the enterprise misplaced and woefully inadequate.' Is this just iPhone fear-mongering? Do you think the passwords execs could remember would help with securing PDAs and smart phones?"

goosh, the Unofficial Google Shell 310

Posted by kdawson on Monday June 02, 2008 @07:26PM from the land-a-gooshen dept.

ohxten writes "Stefan Grothkopp has come up with a pretty neat tool called goosh. It's essentially a browser-oriented, shell-like interface that allows you to quickly search Google (and images and news) and Wikipedia and get information in a text-only format. This is quite possibly the coolest thing I've seen in a good while."

Submission + - States slam Google Firefox: no match for Microsoft (computerworld.com.au) 4

Submitted by Bergkamp10 on Wednesday November 28, 2007 @07:09PM

Bergkamp10 writes: State antitrust regulators have dismissed companies such as Google and Mozilla Corp, and software technologies such as AJAX and SaaS as "piddling players that pose no threat to Microsoft's monopoly in the operating system and browser markets". According to the report ten US states, including California, New York and the District of Columbia have called for an extension of monitoring of Microsoft's business practices until November 2012. They claim that little has changed in the OS and browser spaces since the 2002 antitrust case ruled against Microsoft. In their most recent brief, the states countered Microsoft's contention that Web-based companies — Google, Salesforce.com, Yahoo, eBay and others — and new Web-centric technologies constitute what Microsoft dubbed a "competitive alternative to Windows." Not even close, said the states, claiming that while these companies' products provide functionality for users they still rely on Operating Systems and browsers — the two spaces where Microsoft dominates. Experts were apparently even more damning, claiming competition in the market has not been restored since 2002 and that the collective powers of Google, Firefox and Web 2.0 are about as effective as a one legged man in a butt-kicking contest when it comes to unsettling Microsoft's monopoly of the market. Ronald Alepin, a technical adviser at law firm Morrison & Foerster LLP, and a frequent expert witness for parties facing Microsoft in court, even claimed Apple is too weak to capitalize on its successes, and ultimately no threat to Microsoft.

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