62998823
submission
hweimer writes:
German long jumper Markus Rehm has written sports history yesterday, becoming the first disabled athlete to win a national able-bodied championship. His jump to 8.24 meters put him on the 9th place of the current season rankings and make him egligible to compete in the upcoming European championships, further sparking the debate whether his prosthetic leg provides him with an unfair advantage.
9608752
submission
hweimer writes:
Three new papers in Physical Review Letters present the latest results for the Higgs boson mass coming from Fermilab's Tevatron. The new data mandates that the Higgs boson mass within the standard model lies between 115 and 150 GeV.
9203246
submission
hweimer writes:
A novel study analyzes the install base of various office packages among German users. While Microsoft Office comes out top (72%), open source rival OpenOffice is already installed on 21.5% of all PCs and growing. The authors use a clever method to determine the installed office suites of millions of web users: they look for the availability of characteristic fonts being shipped with the various suites. What surprised me the most is that they found hardly any difference in the numbers for home and business users.
7642586
submission
hweimer writes:
Germany is getting a call center to help Windows users with malware infections. I think this has the effect of being a malware bailout for Microsoft, discouraging them and other software companies from writing better code and giving users little incentives to switch to more secure alternatives. How much government money is needed to run the call center is also not revealed.
1697
submission
hweimer writes:
More and more security researchs come to the conclusion that personal firewalls are ineffective in controlling outbound traffic. An article in the Mail & Guardian online mentions a test that 'showed that the software often causes more problems than it solves. Not one of the six firewall programs the magazine tested, regardless of whether commercial or freeware, could prevent all attempts from the test programs at establishing outgoing connections between the PC and the internet.' Simple PoCs are available, too.
