Comment From you? (Score 2) 171

by dimer0 on Thursday July 05, 2012 @02:55PM (#40555199) Attached to: First iOS Malware Discovered In Apple's App Store

Was curious how these guys could send text messages to people looking like they came from you (because there's no way for an app to get its hands on your phone number) - but realized from TFA that the user was prompted to enter their mobile phone number into a text box (and no validation was done on that). So, for idiots, it might look like it was coming from you. But there's no F'in way I'm entering my phone number into an app I download from the app store.

Comment The flaw in the "system" (Score 3, Insightful) 374

by dimer0 on Wednesday February 02, 2011 @10:56PM (#35087028) Attached to: Statistician Cracks Code For Lottery Tickets

After playing quite a few of these games, I have seen this pattern too. I can look at a ticket (I'm a fan of the crossword game), and look for the less-common letters, and know basically whether or not I stand a good chance of winning. The problem here though - let's say I buy 5 tickets and don't scratch them because they all appear to be losers. What gas station have you been to that will take them back, or exchange for other tickets? None. You're buying the next 5 tickets off the roll. So what if you know that 1 out of the 5 has a really good shot at winning - you already paid for the other 4 and lost.

Comment Whorehouse (Score 3, Funny) 86

by dimer0 on Tuesday January 18, 2011 @07:59PM (#34922170) Attached to: Auto Incorrect

Funniest autocorrect that happened to me (on iPhone 4, but I just checked and it's fixed in most currently release)... I was getting ready to go on a trip to Washington DC and my local representative is pretty active on twitter, so while I quickly posted a tweet:

"Hey I'm heading to DC tomorrow, any chance for VIP tickets to the Whitehouse"?

The problem was, Whitehouse autocorrected to 'Whorehouse'. I didn't realize this until the next day. My rep had a sense of humor when I deleted that tweet and sent another the next day (apologizing for the first)... Something like "Very peculiar typo"..

Comment Conference rooms (Score 4, Interesting) 356

by dimer0 on Thursday December 09, 2010 @09:45AM (#34499724) Attached to: Goodbye, VGA

Only place I use VGA anymore (and have used in the past 4-5 years) is for overhead projectors in conference rooms.

Comment Another leet commercial in the works? (Score 0) 146

by dimer0 on Thursday November 04, 2010 @04:17PM (#34129040) Attached to: Soviet Image Editing Tool From 1987

TO THE CLOUD!

Comment Re:Decisions, decisions... (Score 1) 550

by dimer0 on Tuesday November 24, 2009 @04:47PM (#30218388) Attached to: Police Arrest Man For Refusing To Tweet

Jim is my enemy. But Jim is also his own worst enemy. And the enemy of my enemy is my friend. So, Jim is actually my friend.

But...

Since Jim is his own worst enemy, the enemy of my friend is my enemy. So Jim is actually my enemy.

But...

The Case For Supporting and Using Mono 570

Posted by timothy on Thursday February 05, 2009 @06:29PM from the reason-18-it's-the-kissing-disease dept.

snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister argues in favor of Mono, asking those among the open source community who have 'variously described Mono as a trap, a kludge, or simply a waste of effort' to look past Miguel de Icaza and Mono's associations with Microsoft and give the open source implementation of .Net a second chance, as he himself has, having predicted Mono's demise at the hands of open source Java in 2006. Far from being just a clone of .Net for Linux, McAllister argues, Mono has been 'expanding its presence into exciting and unexpected new niches.' And for those who argue that 'developing open-source software based on Microsoft technologies is like walking into a lion's den,' McAllister suggests taking a look at the direction Mono is heading. The more Mono evolves, the less likely Microsoft is to use patent claims or some other dirty trick to bring down the platform."

How To Diagnose a Suddenly Slow Windows Computer? 835

Posted by timothy on Thursday January 22, 2009 @06:09PM from the ineffably-inexplicable dept.

Ensign Taco writes "I'm sure nearly every one of us has had it happen. All of a sudden your Windows PC slows to a crawl for no apparent reason. Yeah, we all like Linux because it doesn't do annoying things like this, but the Windows desktop still reigns supreme in most managed LAN work environments. I'm running XP with 4G of RAM and a decent CPU, and everything was fine, until one day — it wasn't. I've run spybot, antivirus, and looked at proc explorer — no luck. There is no one offending, obvious process. It seems every process decides to spike at once at random intervals. So I'm wondering if there's a few wizards out there that know what to look at. Could this be a very clever virus that doesn't run as a process? Or could this just be some random application error that's causing bad behavior? I've encountered this a few times with Windows PCs, but the solution has always been to just add more hardware. Has anyone ever successfully diagnosed this kind of issue?" And whether such a problem is related to malware or not, what steps would you take next?

Building Linux Applications With JavaScript 288

Posted by kdawson on Monday January 19, 2009 @07:59PM from the keeping-it-local dept.

crankymonkey writes "The GNOME desktop environment could soon gain support for building and extending applications with JavaScript thanks to an experimental new project called Seed. Ars Technica has written a detailed tutorial about Seed with several code examples. The article demonstrates how to make a GTK+ application for Linux with JavaScript and explains how Seed could influence the future of GNOME development. In some ways, it's an evolution of the strategy that was pioneered long ago by GNU with embedded Scheme. Ars Technica concludes: 'The availability of a desktop-wide embeddable scripting language for application extension and plugin writing will enable users to add lots of rich new functionality to the environment. As this technology matures and it becomes more tightly integrated with other language frameworks such as Vala, it could change the way that GNOME programmers approach application development. JavaScript could be used as high-level glue for user interface manipulation and rapid prototyping while Vala or C are used for performance-sensitive tasks.'"

Steve Jobs Takes Leave of Absence From Apple 429

Posted by timothy on Wednesday January 14, 2009 @06:53PM from the get-well-soon dept.

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Network World: "A number of sites are reporting that Apple's CEO Steve Jobs is taking a leave of absence till June at least. Speculation over Jobs' possibly failing health has run rampant in the past few weeks. Prior to the recent MacWorld show, Jobs said he had a hormone deficiency that had caused him to dramatically lose weight. In a memo today Jobs told workers his health issues are more complex than he thought." Reader Bastian227 adds a link to this letter from Steve Jobs on Apple's website, which also says that Tim Cook will be responsible for daily operations, though Jobs will remain involved with major strategic decisions.

Fewer Than 1% Arrested From TSA's "Behavior Detection" 412

Posted by kdawson on Wednesday November 19, 2008 @09:01AM from the department-of-funny-walks dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Fewer than 1% of airline passengers singled out at airports using the much vaunted 'suspicious behavior detection' techniques are arrested, Transportation Security Administration figures show. The TSA program, launched in early 2006, looks for terrorists using a controversial surveillance method based on behavior detection and has led to more than 160,000 people in airports receiving scrutiny, such as a pat-down search or a brief interview. It has resulted in only 1,266 arrests, often on charges of carrying drugs or fake IDs, the TSA said. The TSA has not publicly said whether it has caught a terrorist through the program." In related news, the odds of sanity coming to the TSA plummeted today when Schneier said he's not interested in the top job there.

A Replica of the First 4004 Calculator 63

Posted by kdawson on Sunday November 16, 2008 @06:05AM from the intel-inside-first-post dept.

mcpublic writes "For the 37th anniversary of Intel's 4004, the world's first off-the-shelf, customer-programmable microprocessor, vintage computer enthusiast Bill Kotaska has successfully built a replica of Busicom's historic 141-PF printing calculator using vintage Intel chips. Decades before the ubiquitous 'Intel inside' sticker, Japanese calculator maker Busicom introduced the first product ever built around an Intel microprocessor. Bill's homebrew replica includes a rare Shinshu Seiki Model-102 drum printer and runs firmware extracted from the original Busicom ROMs. Schematics and photos of his re-creation are available at the unofficial 4004 web site, along with Tim McNerney's new PIC-based emulator of the Model-102 printer. The site includes the Busicom 'source code,' 4004 details, interactive simulators, and other goodies for students, engineers, and computer historians." We discussed the 36th 4004 anniversary project here last year.

Barack Obama Wins US Presidency 3709

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday November 05, 2008 @09:30AM from the enough-of-that-now-this dept.

Last night, around 11pm, all the major networks announced that Senator Barack Obama had won the election. Soon after, Senator McCain conceded. There were no crazy partisan court hearings, just a simple election. This is your chance to talk about it and what it means for the future of our nation.

Reuse Code Or Code It Yourself? 429

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday November 04, 2008 @08:02PM from the good-or-great dept.

eldavojohn writes "I began coding for a project that had simple requirements for my employer — Web services and a test application for them. But requirements have been creeping, as they always do. Initially I had decided to use the Spring Framework with Hibernate. And I re-used a lot of libraries that made things simple and quick for me. The new requests coming in involve capabilities beyond those of the frameworks. Now, I used to be told that good programmers write code and great programmers reuse code. It's starting to look like I would have saved myself a whole lot of time if I had written the database transaction using JDBC instead of Hibernate — now that I'm married to this object model framework, some of this stuff doesn't look doable. So what is better for the majority of software projects out there: reuse code, or code from scratch? What elements or characteristics of a problem point to one option over the other?"

New Approach To Malware Modifies Linux Kernel 170

Posted by timothy on Sunday September 28, 2008 @02:05PM

Hugh Pickens writes "Professor Avishai Wool has unveiled a program to watch for malware on servers with a modification to the Linux kernel. 'We modified the kernel in the system's operating system so that it monitors and tracks the behavior of the programs installed on it,' says Wool. Essentially, Wool says, his software team has built a model that predicts how software running on a server should work (pdf). If the kernel senses abnormal activity, it stops the program from working before malicious actions occur. 'When we see a deviation, we know for sure there's something bad going on,' Wool explains. Wool cites problems with costly anti-virus protection. 'Our methods are much more efficient and don't chew up the computer's resources.'"