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Software

Thunderbird v60.0 Email Client Released (thunderbird.net) 100

Posted by msmash from the feeds-and-speeds dept.
Thunderbird version 60, featuring a number of new features and changes, is now available as a direct download from thunderbird.net, the email client vendor said. The changelog: When writing a message, a delete button now allows the removal of a recipient. This delete button is displayed when hovering the To/Cc/Bcc selector.
Many improvements to attachments handling during compose: Attachments can now be reordered using a dialog, keyboard shortcuts, or drag and drop. The "Attach" button moved to the right to be above the attachment pane. The access key of the attachment pane (e.g. Alt+M, may vary depending on localization, Ctrl+M on Mac) now also works to show or hide the pane. The attachment pane can also be shown initially when composing a new message. Right-click on the header to enable this option. Hiding a non-empty attachment pane will now show a placeholder paperclip to indicate the presence of attachments and avoid sending them accidentally.
"Edit Template" command. This also solves various problems when saving as template (duplicates created, message ID lost).
"New Message from Template" command.
Allow changing the Spellcheck Language from status bar.
Light and Dark themes.
WebExtension themes are now enabled in Thunderbird.
A default startup directory in the address book window can now be configured.
Individual feed update interval. Read the full-change log here.
Science

How the City Hurts Your Brain 439

Posted by kdawson from the but-not-paris dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "The city has always been an engine of intellectual life and the 'concentration of social interactions' is largely responsible for urban creativity and innovation. But now scientists are finding that being in an urban environment impairs our basic mental processes. After spending a few minutes on a crowded city street, the brain is less able to hold things in memory and suffers from reduced self-control. 'The mind is a limited machine,' says psychologist Marc Berman. 'And we're beginning to understand the different ways that a city can exceed those limitations.' Consider everything your brain has to keep track of as you walk down a busy city street. A city is so overstuffed with stimuli that we need to redirect our attention constantly so that we aren't distracted by irrelevant things. This sort of controlled perception — we are telling the mind what to pay attention to — takes energy and effort. Natural settings don't require the same amount of cognitive effort. A study at the University of Michigan found memory performance and attention spans improved by 20 percent after people spent an hour interacting with nature. 'It's not an accident that Central Park is in the middle of Manhattan,' says Berman. 'They needed to put a park there.'"

Comment Re:Copyright or Tech? (Score 0) 249

by antarctican (#22515896) Attached to: BBC iPlayer Bandwidth Explosion Bodes Ill For ISPs
Could we do a better job if we could cache intelligently and do p2p

That would help, but ultimately the question that's being asked is, "who will pay for this bandwidth?"

The answer of course is the ISP users are already paying for it. The ISPs just don't have the bandwidth they've claimed to have sold their clients. And I would call this bordering on fraud.

Say an ISP has 1,000 clients, and sells them all 1.5Mbps DSL connections. But if 500 people go and try to stream video at the same time, and the infrastructure can't handle it, the ISP has sold you a product it actually didn't have. If a store tried to oversell the latest Harry Potter book, and asked customers to "share" the books because they didn't actually have enough to go around, there'd be lawsuits flying.

Now I know in reality having 1,000 x 1.5Mbps infrastructure probably would never happen, and there would be some bandwidth sharing, that's the point of packet switched networks. But scaling up to meet the needs of customers for what the ISP claimed the customer was buy, is ultimately the ISPs responsibility. Net neutrality should not be used as an excuse to not provide the minimum infrastructure needed for the service ISPs are collecting money for.
Networking

Australian Researcher Boosts ADSL Speeds 114

Posted by Zonk from the pouring-go-faster-juice-down-the-tubes dept.
sea_stuart writes "Like your ADSL connection to go 100 times faster? Despite the grim state of Australian mathematics and science, there is still exciting original work being done Down Under. John Papandriopoulos, a Research Fellow with the ARC Special Research Centre for Ultra-Broadband Information Networks (CUBIN) has developed a method to reduce crosstalk interference in ADSL technologies to bring speeds up the theoretical maxima possible. With an Australian Federal election due in a few weeks, and both parties promising improved broadband speeds and access, this is a welcome development, hopefully enabling higher speeds without huge expenses."
The Internet

Bulletproof Tool For Golden Age Browsing? 366

Posted by kdawson from the just-the-web-ma'am dept.
An anonymous reader writes "I work in a retirement/assisted living home. Many of the residents had never used the Internet but really find it fascinating once they are given a little training. However, I've stopped introducing it to them because of the drain it puts on me. There are a million and one things that a computer novice can screw up, and I don't have time to solve all of them. These folks don't need any sophistication. and they need only the most basic options. Adjustable text size would be nice, but otherwise — no email, no word processing or editing, no printing — just Internet browsing. This may not seem like a big market, but it's getting bigger every day! Is there an absolutely fool-proof device that can provide this without requiring virus scanners and constant attention?"
Media

Three MythTV Linux Distros Compared 176

Posted by Zonk from the penguins-put-on-a-show dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Linux.com has a comparison article up looking at three MythTV-focused Linux distributions. The piece looks at Mythdora, Mythbuntu, and KnoppMyth, with an eye towards ease of installation and the actual utility of the install. From the article: 'For regular system maintenance, KnoppMyth simply isn't in the same ballpark as MythBuntu and MythDora. The live CD heritage of Knoppix means you cannot update individual packages, which is fine if you like that, but for an always-on system like a MythTV back end, I'd prefer flexibility and configurability of a mainline distro. When all is said and done, if I were building my TiVo replacement today, I would do it with MythDora. MythBuntu shows a lot of promise, and I will give the final 7.10 release another look (in part because I run Ubuntu on my desktop machines), but it isn't ready yet.'" Linux.com and Slashdot are both owned by SourceForge.

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