duyn - Slashdot User

Tearing Apart a Hard-Sell Anti-Virus Ad 192

Posted by timothy on Saturday June 12, 2010 @06:36PM from the what-naive-users-face dept.

climenole writes "I came across an email sent by a security vendor, reminding me, no urging me with the liver-transplant sort of urgency, to renew my subscription to their product, lest my pixels perish. I spent a minute or two staring at the email, thinking about all the poor souls out there who do not have the comfort of being a geek and who may actually take the advertisement seriously." That led to this insightful deconstruction of these over-the-top ads, the kind that make it hard to keep straight the malware makers and the anti-malware makers.

Researchers Create Social Engineering IRC Bot 66

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday June 12, 2010 @01:39PM from the eliza-plus-chatroulette dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at the Vienna University of Technology developed an IRC bot that acts as a 'man in the middle' between two unsuspecting users, modifies URLs passed between them, and also is capable of steering the conversation. Not only does this work surprisingly well on IRC — they found a 76.1% click rate for potentially malicious URLs — but four out of 10 people on Facebook Chat also clicked on links after the bot introduced complete strangers to each other. This would have worked even better if the bot were to clone existing friends' profiles and submit friend requests from those, say researchers."

NIST Releases Updated Handbook of Math Functions 128

Posted by kdawson on Friday May 14, 2010 @09:43AM from the essential-reference dept.

An anonymous reader writes "NIST announced the publishing of the NIST Handbook of Mathematical Functions reference text (967 pp), also available in digital form at the Digital Library of Mathematical Functions. Access it with a MathML-enabled browser (Firefox or IE+plugin) to view equations as scalable text rather than bitmaps; the 3-D graphs can also be viewed with a VRML plugin for local rotating / zooming." The original Handbook of Mathematical Functions was published 46 years ago; the revision has been in the works for a decade.

Dragon Age: Origins Expansion Coming In March 80

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday January 06, 2010 @01:41AM from the well-met-warden dept.

ishanjain tipped news that BioWare has announced an expansion for Dragon Age: Origins, called Awakening, that is due out on March 16th. Awakening "is supposed to run about 15 hours and will allow for players to import and edit characters they've broken in from the core game," and it will take place "in the in the role of a Grey Warden Commander who's been tasked with rebuilding the order of Grey Wardens and finding out how the darkspawn survived following the death of the Archdemon dragon." A trailer is available at the official site, as well as some information on a new bit of DLC that will be out shortly, entitled Return to Ostagar. (It was originally due for release on January 5th, but was delayed.)

2016 Bug Hits Text Messages, Payment Processing 340

Posted by Soulskill on Sunday January 03, 2010 @10:01AM from the y2k16-has-more-characters-than-2016 dept.

An anonymous reader writes "It seems some systems are suffering from a Y2K16 bug. When 2009 ticked over to 2010, some Australian EFTPOS machines skipped to the year 2016. Coincidentally, some Windows Mobile users are also having issues with their new year SMSes coming from 2016. What function could cause this kind of error?"

What Computer Science Can Teach Economics 421

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday November 09, 2009 @06:12PM from the just-build-better-computers dept.

eldavojohn writes "A new award-winning thesis from an MIT computer science assistant professor showed that the Nash equilibrium of complex games (like the economy or poker) belong to problems with non-deterministic polynomial (NP) complexity (more specifically PPAD complexity, a subset of TFNP problems which is a subset of FNP problems which is a subset of NP problems). More importantly there should be a single solution for one problem that can be adapted to fit all the other problems. Meaning if you can generalize the solution to poker, you have the ability to discover the Nash equilibrium of the economy. Some computer scientists are calling this the biggest development in game theory in a decade."

Why Doesn't Exercise Lead To Weight Loss? 978

Posted by timothy on Monday November 09, 2009 @02:40AM from the that-would-be-too-easy dept.

antdude writes "The New York Times' Well blog reports that 'for some time, researchers have been finding that people who exercise don't necessarily lose weight.' A study published online in September 2009 in The British Journal of Sports Medicine was the latest to report apparently disappointing slimming results. In the study, 58 obese people completed 12 weeks of supervised aerobic training without changing their diets. The group lost an average of a little more than seven pounds, and many lost barely half that. How can that be?"

Tired of Flash? HTML5 Viewer For YouTube 372

Posted by timothy on Sunday November 08, 2009 @03:32PM from the that-taste-great-together dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Instead of spending the next 10 years trying to find a Flash implementation for Linux or OS X that doesn't drain CPU cycles like there's no tomorrow, NeoSmart Technologies has made an HTML5 viewer for YouTube videos. It loads YouTube videos in an HTML5 video container and streams (with skip/skim/pause/resume) against an MP4 resource, and an (optional) userscript file can update YouTube pages with the HTML5 viewer. The latest versions of Firefox, Chrome, and Safari are supported. Personally, I can't wait until the major video sites default to HTML5 and we can finally say goodbye to Flash."

Comment Paucity of GUI libraries, for one (Score 1) 491

by duyn on Monday June 01, 2009 @12:10AM (#28164093) Attached to: Comparing the Size, Speed, and Dependability of Programming Languages

Try finding a decent GUI library for Windows, for example. Your choices:

LablGTK. GTK on Windows. Yuck.
LablTk. Tk is a toy GUI kit.
OCaml-Win32. If you have to ask what's wrong with the win32 API, you've never had to use it in a language other than C.
Some alpha or out of date binding of wxWidgets or Qt for OCaml.

OCaml programs aren't shorter than scripting languages, and they're limited to a curses interface at best. Together with its speed, OCaml gives off the impression of being a language you'd reach for when you write high performance, low interaction programs---like automated financial trading agents. Not many of us do that. And so not many of us use OCaml.

Comment Upstream Value (Score 1) 2369

by duyn on Saturday November 01, 2008 @12:59PM (#25595695) Attached to: Discuss the US Presidential Election & the Economy

That works very well until I, who lives upstream from you, decide to dump all my perfectly biodegradable human waste into the water supply which drains down into your well.

If getting water out of my own well was really important to me, I would regularly pay you to dump your waste elsewhere. I would end up being happier paying you + being able to drink water from my well than I would be not being able to use the water from my well at all. Otherwise, I would just abandon the well.

It may not feel fair at first, but hey, I paid less for my downstream property than you did for your upstream one. If I didn't, then either I overpaid or you got a bargain on your property, because someone didn't recognise a premium for having priority access to the water.

If I don't like the idea of paying you off, I could always fork out a bit more for a property further upstream from you.

Or even less dramatic I buy a big chunk of land and cap off your water supply because I decided to open a bottling plant. Now you're both out of water and now you have to pay ME for the privilege of drinking it JUST because I happened to buy the property upstream from you.

If being upstream did really confer such benefits, then the value of an upstream property will be greater than a downstream one. I have to pay you for the privilege because I didn't pay the premium to have a property further upstream from you. If I'd been enjoying free water all along, it's only because I'd been lucky that none of my upstream neighbours have realised this bit of economics yet.

Basically what I'm saying is that your viewpoint is shortsighted.

Not necessarily. It might just be the opposite view to "everything I didn't think to pay for should be free", i.e. "someone has to pay for the costs of everything".

However, I think the GP's position deserves some refinement.

(3) I don't consider water under MY ground to be public property.

The water under my ground isn't my property—it's nobody's property. I didn't pay to have it made, I don't have a better claim to it than anyone else. However, that well in my garden is my property. So, you can take the water under the ground, but not from my well. I paid for it, I should be able to decide who gets to reap the benefits of it. Don't like it? Dig your own well, next door.

And if next door is a property upstream from mine? Well, then it's time to negotiate a mutually beneficial deal. =)

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