NetSurferHI - Slashdot User

Submission + - New York Times Cuts Number of Free Articles to 10 (wsj.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 21, 2012 @12:05AM

An anonymous reader writes: The New York Times has announced that starting in April, visitors to NYTimes.com will only be able to access 10 free articles a month, down from 20 articles currently. The NYTimes paywall was put into effect last year, and seems to have been a success, with nearly half a million digital subscriptions to all of Times Co.'s websites; this despite the fact that the paywall is trivial to circumvent (for example, by deleting all cookies from nytimes.com).

Submission + - Is Television Paying too Much Attention to Fans? (csmonitor.com) 2

Submitted by blackbearnh on Tuesday March 20, 2012 @11:59PM

blackbearnh writes: Forums and chat groups are letting fans organize and discuss their favorite shows with increasing ease, but what happens when the writers and producers of TV shows start paying attention? An article in today's Christian Science Monitor takes a look at how the production staff of recent shows has interacted with their fan base, and how the fans are having an increasing influence on not only the popularity, but also the plot and characters.

Submission + - Not Only Did the Righthaven Troll get Smashed... (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by BenJCarter on Tuesday March 13, 2012 @10:15PM

BenJCarter writes: Righthaven’s first client, Stephens Media of Las Vegas and operator of the Review-Journal, invested $500,000 into the Righthaven operation at its outset. With Judge Pro’s ruling, the media company is losing financial control of hundreds of articles and photos.

"The irony of this? Perhaps those who buy the copyrights could issue DMCA notices to the Review-Journal stopping them from redistributing them?" Randazza said via an e-mail, citing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Las Vegas Review Journal seems to have lost the mana they used to create it. Imagine the ironic justice if they become vulnerable to the Righthaven model as a result...

Giggity!

Submission + - "The Hobbit" pub threatened with lawsuit. (bbc.co.uk) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 13, 2012 @07:44PM

An anonymous reader writes: "The Hobbit" a small pub in Southampton, England has been threatened with a lawsuit by lawyers representing the Saul Zaentz Company (SZC) in California. the pub which has traded under the name for the last 20 years without incident now faces closure if it does not change it's name. Yet another example of big business trying to use it's weight to get it's way.

Submission + - After 244 Years, The End For The Dead Tree Encyclopedia Brittanica 3

Submitted by Rick Zeman on Tuesday March 13, 2012 @06:23PM

Rick Zeman writes: According to the New York Times, it's the ...end of the road for the printed Encyclopedia Brittanica saying, "...in recent years, print reference books have been almost completely wiped out by the Internet and its vast spread of resources, particularly Wikipedia, which in 11 years has helped replace the authority of experts with the wisdom of the crowds." The last print edition will be the 32 volume 2010 edition.

Submission + - Microsoft: RDP Vulnerability Should be Patched Immediately (securityweek.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey on Tuesday March 13, 2012 @04:23PM

wiredmikey writes: Microsoft is urging organizations to apply the sole critical update in this month’s Patch Tuesday release as soon as possible. The critical bulletin – one of six security bulletins issued as part of today’s release – addresses two vulnerabilities in the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP).

Those IT admins who use RDP to manage their machines over the internet, which is essentially the default in cloud-based installations such as Amazon’s AWS, need to patch as quickly as possible, said Qualys CTO Wolfgang Kandek.

Besides the RDP bugs, this month’s Patch Tuesday addressed five other vulnerabilities: two denial-of-service bugs and an escalation of privileges issue in Microsoft Windows; a remote code execution vulnerability in Microsoft Expression Design; and an escalation of privileges issue in Microsoft Visual Studio. All those issues are rated ‘important’ with the exception of one of the Windows’ denial-of-service bugs, which is rated ‘moderate.’

Submission + - The numbers of a life (stephenwolfram.com)

Submitted by porsche911 on Thursday March 08, 2012 @07:53PM

porsche911 writes: Stephen Wolfram has been collecting his own data for over 20 years. I wonder how many of us have left the same trail through our lives but don't even know it?
http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2012/03/the-personal-analytics-of-my-life/

Submission + - Raspberry Pi Fedora Remix ready for download (raspberrypi.org)

Submitted by

TheNextCorner

on Thursday March 08, 2012 @07:41PM

TheNextCorner writes: "The Raspberry Pi Fedora Remix is ready for download! The recommended distro to run on the Raspberry Pi is a Remix of the Fedora open source software mirror.

Get a Glimpse At the Raspberry Pi Fedora Remix

The Remix is a distribution comprised of software packages from the Fedora ARM project, plus a small number of additional packages that are modified from the Fedora versions or which cannot be included in Fedora due to licensing issues – in particular, the libraries for accessing the VideoCore GPU on the Raspberry Pi."

Submission + - Heat emitted from erasing a single bit measured (nature.com)

Submitted by ananyo on Thursday March 08, 2012 @06:17PM

ananyo writes: In 1961, IBM physicist Rolf Landauer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolf_Landauer) argued that to reset one bit of information — say, to set a binary digit to zero in a computer memory regardless of whether it is initially 1 or 0 — must release a certain minimum amount of heat, proportional to the ambient temperature. New work has now finally confirmed that Landauer was right (http://www.nature.com/news/the-unavoidable-cost-of-computation-revealed-1.10186).
To test the principle, the researchers created a simple two-state bit: a single microscopic silica bead held in a ‘light trap’ by a laser beam. The trap contains two ‘valleys’ where the particle can rest, one representing a 1 and the other a 0. It could jump between the two if the energy ‘hill’ separating them is not too high. The researchers could control this height by changing the power of the laser, and could ‘tilt’ the two valleys to tip the bead into one of them by moving the physical cell containing the bead slightly out of the laser’s focus. By monitoring the position and speed of the particle during a cycle of switching and resetting the bit, they could calculate how much energy was dissipated (abstract http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v483/n7388/full/nature10872.html). The results safeguard one of the most cherished principles of physical science: the second law of thermodynamics.

Submission + - Humans are Nicer Than We Think (vice.com)

Submitted by derekmead on Thursday March 08, 2012 @05:16PM

derekmead writes: While everyone’s always waxing like Lord Tennyson about nature being “red in tooth and claw,” neuroscience and psychology are quietly telling us that we may be innately nicer than we think. Sure, we’re not cuddly little bunny rabbits, but many lines of evidence over the past few decades have pointed toward some distinctly physical underpinning of basic morality and aversion to violence, implying that humans (and probably many other animals to) have a strong built-in “try-not-to-punch-that-dude” mechanism.

A recent study published in the journal Emotion, by psychologists Fiery Cushman, Allison Gaffey, Kurt Gray, and Wendy Mendes, provides some further evidence for the link, as the authors put it, “between the body and moral decision-making processes.”

Submission + - Is Onlive pirating Windows and will it cost them? (extremetech.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 08, 2012 @05:05PM

An anonymous reader writes: When Onlive, the network gaming company, started offering not just Microsoft Windows but Microsoft Office for free on the iPad, and now on Android, it certainly seemed too good to be true. Speculation abounded on what type of license they could be using to accomplish this magical feat. From sifting through Microsoft’s licenses and speaking with sources very familiar with them, the ugly truth may be that they can’t.

Submission + - TSA 'Censoring' Media on Body Scanner Failures? (wordpress.com) 1

Submitted by OverTheGeicoE on Thursday March 08, 2012 @05:04PM

OverTheGeicoE writes: When anti-TSA activist Jonathan Corbett exposed a severe weakness in TSA's body scanners, one would expect the story to attract a lot of media attention. Apparently TSA is attempting to stop reporters from covering the story. According to Corbett, at least one reporter has been 'strongly cautioned' by TSA spokeswoman Sari Koshetz not to cover the story. If TSA is worried that this is new information they need to suppress to keep it away from terrorists, that horse may have left the barn years ago. Corbett's demonstration may just be confirmation of a 2010 paper in the Journal of Transportation Security that concluded that 'an object such as a wire or a boxcutter blade, taped to the side of the body, or even a small gun in the same location, will be invisible' to X-ray scanners.

Submission + - 'Of course we are in a post-PC world,' says Ray Ozzie (reuters.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 08, 2012 @04:24PM

An anonymous reader writes: Speaking at a tech conference in Seattle this week, former Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie had some interesting things to say about the state of the computing industry. 'People argue about "are we in a post-PC world?" Why are we arguing? Of course we are in a post-PC world. That doesn't mean the PC dies, that just means that the scenarios that we use them in, we stop referring to them as PCs, we refer to them as other things.' Ozzie also thinks Microsoft's future as a company is strongly tied to Windows 8's reception. 'If Windows 8 shifts in a form that people really want to buy the product, the company will have a great future. ... It's a world of phones and pads and devices of all kinds, and our interests in general purpose computing — or desktop computing — starts to wane and people start doing the same things and more in other scenarios.'

Submission + - Ford Tests DIY Firmware Updates (securityweek.com) 2

Submitted by wiredmikey on Thursday March 08, 2012 @04:05PM

wiredmikey writes: This month, Ford is borrowing something from the software industry: updates. With a fleet of new cars using the sophisticated infotainment system they developed with Microsoft called SYNC, Ford has the need to update those vehicles—for both features and security reasons. But how do you update the software in thousands of cars?

Traditionally, the automotive industry has resorted to automotive recalls. But now, Ford will be releasing thirty thousand USB sticks to Ford owners with the new SYNC infotainment system, although the update will also be available for online download.

In preparing to update your car, Ford encourages users to have a unique USB for each Ford they own, and to have the USB drive empty and not password protected.

In the future, updating our gadgets, large and small, will become routine. But for now, it’s going to be really cumbersome and a little weird. “Honey, I’m updating the car’s firmware right now.”

Play this forward a bit. Image taking Patch Tuesday to a logical extreme, where you walk around your house or office apply all the patches to all the gadgets you own.

Submission + - Astronomers look for black hole at centre of Milky (theregister.co.uk) 1

Submitted by 99luftballon on Wednesday January 18, 2012 @01:44AM

99luftballon writes: Astronomers are planning the Event Horizon Telescope project in Arizona on Wednesday — and say in three or four years they should be able to image the ring of matter around the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way. The black hole is 26,000 miles away but should be large enough to check if Einstein got his equations right.

Slashdot Top Deals