Comment Meanwhile in the UK... (Score 1) 58
It's really great that the US DoD are doing this; but it should be noted that the UK MOD have been doing exactly this for some time now...
Submission + - More Users Are Shunning Facebook
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Blake Snow writes that evidence suggests that a small but increasing number of users — at least in North America, where Facebook use is especially saturated — may be shunning the site with Facebook losing nearly 6 million users, falling from 155.2 million at the start of May to 149.4 million at the end of the month, the first time the US has lost users in the past year. Some users complain they're spending so much time on Facebook that they're short-changing the rest of their lives. "I figured out that I wouldn't look back as an old man and wish I had spent more time on Facebook," says David Cole, an IT manager from Boston, adding that he believes the popular social-networking site is a useful tool, but not a replacement for what he calls "realbook" experiences. Kip Krieger, a college student from Virginia, says Facebook has become predictable. "It's really gotten to a point where I know pretty much what my friends are going to post. They usually just write the same thing over and over again, and I am getting sick of that." Still there are a lot more satisfied customers of Facebook than disgruntled ones, so are Facebook shunners a tiny minority or part of a growing trend? "Having that connection with others is a very powerful thing," says Toby Bushman who felt so much pressure that she decided to rejoin Facebook, and is glad she did. "It makes me feel like I'm a part of something bigger and more grand than just my life as a stay-at-home mother.""
Submission + - Amazon's Cloud is Full of Holes (itworld.com)
itwbennett writes: "Amazon's Web Services is so easy to use that customers create virtual machines without following Amazon's 'very detailed' security guidelines, says Thomas Schneider, a postdoctoral researcher in the System Security Lab of Technische Universität Darmstadt. Most notably, Schneider and his fellow researchers found that the private keys used to authenticate with services such as the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) or the Simple Storage Service (S3) were publicly published in Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), which are pre-configured operating systems and application software used to create virtual machines. '[Customers] just forgot to remove their API keys from machines before publishing,' Schneider said."
Submission + - Virgin Media UK Begins Throttling P2P Traffic (unitethecows.com)
Anonymous Coward writes: "UK Internet Service Provider (ISP) Virgin Media has announced that it will begin throttling both P2P and Newsgroup traffic at "Peak" times it has emerged.
The ISP which advertises itself as "The fastest in the UK" and offers speeds of up to 100mb has said it needs to throttle file sharing traffic to prevent slowness in other areas such as online multiplayer gaming.
Trialing of the new traffic managment plans commenced on March 2 and will only apply to Upstream traffic, therefore download speeds will be unaffected. The clamp down will apply on top of the existing traffic shaping Virgin Media has in place and will affect all packages, including the previously unmanaged 100mb deal.
A message on the Virgin Media site read
"After the successful out of hours trial of our combined upstream and downstream file sharing traffic management policy we will be trialling this new policy between 17:00 and 00:00 for one week starting on Wednesday 2nd of March.
Between these times P2P and Newsgroup upstream traffic will be managed in a similar way to our current downstream traffic management. If the trial is successful we'll launch the new policy immediately.
We're interested if you could tell us how this affects your gaming experience over the next few days and if you see any general improvement in latency and ping at peak times."
The move comes as a surprise to many as Virgin already manage traffic between 4pm and 8pm. Virgin Medias website details their file sharing traffic management policy and says;
"We moderate the total volume of file sharing traffic on our network between 5pm and midnight on weekdays and midday and midnight on weekends. This policy, which applies to all broadband packages, is restricted to Peer to Peer ("P2P") applications and Newsgroups (which are commonly used to distribute large amounts of data). This policy does not impact any applications other than Peer to Peer and Newsgroups, so things like watching iPlayer, online gaming, making calls via Skype, downloading music tracks from iTunes or streaming them from Spotify and sending an email or normal browsing are unaffected."
So there you have it, Virgin Media ARE the UK's fasstest Broadband Provider, but only because they decided what you can do and when you can do it.
Source: UniteTheCows"
The ISP which advertises itself as "The fastest in the UK" and offers speeds of up to 100mb has said it needs to throttle file sharing traffic to prevent slowness in other areas such as online multiplayer gaming.
Trialing of the new traffic managment plans commenced on March 2 and will only apply to Upstream traffic, therefore download speeds will be unaffected. The clamp down will apply on top of the existing traffic shaping Virgin Media has in place and will affect all packages, including the previously unmanaged 100mb deal.
A message on the Virgin Media site read
"After the successful out of hours trial of our combined upstream and downstream file sharing traffic management policy we will be trialling this new policy between 17:00 and 00:00 for one week starting on Wednesday 2nd of March.
Between these times P2P and Newsgroup upstream traffic will be managed in a similar way to our current downstream traffic management. If the trial is successful we'll launch the new policy immediately.
We're interested if you could tell us how this affects your gaming experience over the next few days and if you see any general improvement in latency and ping at peak times."
The move comes as a surprise to many as Virgin already manage traffic between 4pm and 8pm. Virgin Medias website details their file sharing traffic management policy and says;
"We moderate the total volume of file sharing traffic on our network between 5pm and midnight on weekdays and midday and midnight on weekends. This policy, which applies to all broadband packages, is restricted to Peer to Peer ("P2P") applications and Newsgroups (which are commonly used to distribute large amounts of data). This policy does not impact any applications other than Peer to Peer and Newsgroups, so things like watching iPlayer, online gaming, making calls via Skype, downloading music tracks from iTunes or streaming them from Spotify and sending an email or normal browsing are unaffected."
So there you have it, Virgin Media ARE the UK's fasstest Broadband Provider, but only because they decided what you can do and when you can do it.
Source: UniteTheCows"
Submission + - Forget Google - it's Apple that is turning into t (guardian.co.uk) 2
jira writes: "You may think you own your iPad or iPhone but in reality an invisible string links it back to Apple HQ" writes John Naughton writes in "The Guardian". And ads: "Umberto Eco once wrote a memorable essay arguing that the Apple Mac was a Catholic device, while the IBM PC was a Protestant one. His reasoning was that, like the Roman church, Apple offered a guaranteed route to salvation – the Apple Way – provided one stuck to it. PC users, on the other hand, had to take personal responsibility for working out their own routes to heaven."
Comment Re:"dumb down?" (Score 1) 276
Ah, they've thought of that. Craning one finger around to right click on a normal mouse is very awkward, so Apple lets you use your other hand to hold down the control key while you left click, very comfortably, with the single remaining finger on your mouse hand.
Comment Re:Why I Hate All Programming Languages (Score 1) 299
Programming is done with languages because programming is communication. It's communication between programmer and computer.
Sure, this what it is now because the computer, as we know it, was originally invented by mathematicians for mathematicians (Babbage and Lovelace). As we all know, mathematicians are obssessed with algorithms, i.e., language. The truth is that programming, like all activities having to do with constructing something, should be about construction and nothing else. We understand what we want to construct. We should not have to express it it in a language unless we absolutely have to. Construction implies things like building blocks, parts, and effective tools with which to manipulate said blocks and parts. It has very little to do with syntax, keywords and vocabularies.
Rile as much as you want but the future of computing is not linguistic. It is time to move away from the current descriptive nature of programming to one that is purely constructive. This is where things are going and neither you nor anybody else can stop it. Sorry.
Comment Re:good, not great. (Score 1) 705
The film was based on another short called "Alive in Joberg". Here's a little something about that: "...the film takes place in 1990, while apartheid was still in effect in South Africa, the aliens were forced to live amongst the already-oppressed black population, causing conflict with them as well as the non-white and white population. The story of a race of oppressed alien beings escaping to a new planet only to find even more oppression..."
When this remake was started it was meant to carry that same theme; and it did for the first two acts. But the director's not a fool. He knows that the Halo/RedBull demographic needs their shootouts and explosions or they won't buy the action figures and video games. So he caved and gave you want you need.
When this remake was started it was meant to carry that same theme; and it did for the first two acts. But the director's not a fool. He knows that the Halo/RedBull demographic needs their shootouts and explosions or they won't buy the action figures and video games. So he caved and gave you want you need.
Comment Did anyone else read the title as... (Score 1) 272
"Genetic Mutation Enables Less Sheep"?
Submission + - The UK Fastest Machine (guardian.co.uk)
bmsleight writes: "The Guardian has a story on the HECToR, The largest supercomputer in the UK — around five times more powerful than its predecessor, HPCx, which is also at the University of Edinburgh. It measures up well internationally, sitting at 17 in the top500.org list of the most powerful computers in the world."
Comment Re:Why? (Score 1) 406
That is very true; and CO2 is a less effective greenhouse gas than CH4.
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