Comment Re:Doing things the slow way (Score 1) 220
alright, go ahead, get them out of your system.. I know you have a couple more analogies in there..
Submission + - Scientists develop 40% efficient solar cells
gtada writes: A story published on Physorg.com states 'Scientists from Spectrolab, Inc., a subsidiary of Boeing, have recently published their research on the fabrication of solar cells that surpass the 40% efficiency milestone — the highest efficiency achieved for any photovoltaic device. Their results appear in a recent edition of Applied Physics Letters.' How much longer until we all have paneled roofs?
Submission + - U.S. leading the world in malware creation?
PetManimal writes: "China, Russia, and the other developing countries usually blamed for the increasing amount of malware are not the biggest culprits, according to Symantec. The security software company just released a report which claims that the U.S. leads the world in a number of malware categories, ranging from the "amount of malicious activity originating from their networks" to "underground economy servers". Preston Gralla says the U.S. lead should come as no surprise, considering the capitalist way of life and the high level of technical knowledge. He also suggests that the some of the "criminals" may actually be Internet entrepreneurs who crossed over to the dark side:
"It's an inevitable result of a thriving free market and tech expertise. An underground economy often mirrors the legal, above-ground one. Scratch a criminal, and sometimes you find a misguided entrepreneur, looking to get rich a little too quick.
Submission + - Google's Blog Software Used for Phishing
jimbojw writes: "In a recent security advisory Fortinet is reporting:
We can only hope that this will not cause Google to remove Blogger.com's templating engine — which is both a source of its strength, and a potential liability as illustrated by these recent attacks."
CNET reported on the situation, quoting an unnamed Google representative:Blogger.com ( Google ) is one of the most visited blog sites. Due to its popularity, hackers have started to embed malicious scripts on some blogs. These scripts have shown up on hundreds of Blogger.com sites. In some cases, a variant of the Stration mass mailer is responsible for directing traffic to the Blogger.com sites.
The blogs in question use meta or JavaScript redirection to push traffic to a phishing or malware site. Links to the blogs are subsequently mass-mailed by infected visitors — typically via worms in the Stration family."These are not legitimate blogs that were compromised. They appear to be deliberately set up to promote phishing, which is against our terms of service. We are investigating, and blogs found to include malicious code or promote phishing will be deleted,"
We can only hope that this will not cause Google to remove Blogger.com's templating engine — which is both a source of its strength, and a potential liability as illustrated by these recent attacks."
Submission + - Google assists Indian goverment censorship
An anonymous reader writes: Google's Orkut has made a deal to provide IP addresses of posters of content deemed objectionable by Bombay police. They object to, among others, posts against certain Indian personalities, young women admiring Indian mobsters, and, amazingly, "anti-Indian words" (!).
Submission + - New Horizons Probe Returns New Images of Jupiter
SeaDour writes: "The Pluto-bound New Horizons space probe, launched a little over a year ago, recently succeeded in passing through a narrow navigational keyhole by Jupiter. Using the gas giant's tremendous gravity, the craft now has a significant boost toward its final destination, shaving three years off its journey. As it passed through the Jovian system, the probe took some fantastic images of the neighborhood, including detailed observations of erupting volcanoes on Io, time-lapse photography of Jupiter's tumultuous atmosphere, and even the faint ring system that was first discovered in Voyager photography. These new images prove the tremendous capabilities of the small probe, which is set to reach Pluto in 2015."
Journal Journal: The best media codec for general use 2
As a general rule I rip all cd's into the FLAC format for archiving. However, that takes up too much space on my computer's disk when my collection grows (I currently have 12,000+ tracks I've ripped from my cd's) so I store those on an external hard drive and re-encode them into a more compact format for usage on my machine. For now I've been using the OGG format but my question is with the sheer number of portable music players that play mp3 and the popularity of the iPod should I be using a
Submission + - Game Theory Computer Model Backs Tim Berners-Lee
Stu writes: "A world without net neutrality is one devoid of intellectual development...so said Sir Tim Berners Lee in a presentation to congress last week. Well, now there's a computer model that uses game theory to back that forecast up. Developed at the University of Florida (the same place that produced the peer-to-peer blocking software, Icarus...which congress might be pushing onto universities across the country), the model shows that everyone looses if the IPs get their way — even, eventually, the IPs.
http://news.ufl.edu/2007/03/07/net-neutrality/"
Submission + - Why Is "Design by Contract" Not More Popul
Coryoth writes: "Design by Contract, writing pre- and post-conditions on functions, seemed like straightforward common sense to me. Such conditions, in the form of executable code, not only provide more exacting API documentation, but also provide a test harness. Having easy to write unit tests that are automatically integrated into the inheritance hierarchy in OO languages "just made sense". However, despite being available (to varying degrees of completeness) for many languages other than Eiffel, including Java, C++, Perl, Python, Ruby, Ada, and even Haskell and Ocaml, the concept has never gained significant traction, particularly in comparison to unit testing frameworks (which DbC complements nicely), and hype like "Extreme Programming". So why did Design by Contract fail to take off?"
Submission + - Paying for Better Math and Science Teachers
Coryoth writes: "While California is suffering from critical shortage of mathematics and science teachers, Kentucky is considering two bills that would give explicit financial incentives to math and science students and teachers. The first bill would provide cash incentives to schools to run AP math and science classes, and cash scholarships to students who did well on AP math and science exams. The second bill provides salary bumps for any teachers with degrees in math or science, or who score well in teacher-certification tests in math, chemistry and physics. Is such differentiated pay the right way to attract science graduates who can make much more in industry, or is it simply going to breed discontent among teachers?"
Submission + - Open Source network management beats IBM and HP
mjhuot writes: Last week SearchNetworking.com announced their Product Leadership Awards for 2007. It was a pleasant surprise to see an open source project, OpenNMS, win the Gold in their Network and IT Management Platforms category. OpenNMS beat out the established players of Hewlett-Packard's OpenView and IBM's Tivoli. This was based on a user survey of all IT solutions, not just open source; it demonstrates that open source software is indeed making inroads into the enterprise.
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We must believe that it is the darkest before the dawn of a beautiful new world. We will see it when we believe it. -- Saul Alinsky
