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Comment Sad to see it go - underrated product (Score 3, Informative) 21

by sigemund (#64471393) Attached to: Meta Will Shut Down Workplace, Its Business Chat Tool

I implemented this back in 2017 with about 2000 users and we made a lot of it. For us, it was a perfect fit - easy to use, offered a lot of developer options, and it was very convenient and easy to use. I'm very sad to see it go - it was a FAR better product than most would realize. It wasn't perfect, but they did a lot to improve it over the years, and especially in the early days, they really worked a lot with the community to improve it. I was on several panels and focus groups and eventually they implemented everything we asked for. I don't think it pivoted well to a more video-focused world - it was never a good alternative to Zoom for video conferencing outside an organization for instance.

For many, the more tightly-integrated options from Microsoft or others are much more conducive to work, but for us it was a spectacular fit and I loved it. Not sure what we'll do now, but switching will be a challenge.

Comment Re:FERPA Violation? (Score 2) 42

FERPA doesn't apply to every institution though. I can't say if it applies to the College Board or not, but it's targeted at "public schools and state or local education agencies that receive Federal education funds". It's possible that it still does because the College Board may receive federal education funds, I'm only saying that most people assume FERPA applies everywhere but it doesn't. Especially if a student is willfully giving you the information.
The Internet

No More Version Numbers For HTML 336

Posted by timothy from the now-they'll-have-threat-level-colors dept.
An anonymous reader writes "HTML5 will be the last version of HTML that carries a version number. Ian Hickson, a Google engineer and editor of the HTML5 standard, announced that the language will be transitioned to a 'living standard' without version numbers. A bit like Chrome, if you will."
United Kingdom

Dogs Can Be Pessimistic 99

Posted by samzenpus from the dog-in-black dept.
Not that it will change anything, but researchers at Bristol University say that your dog might be a gloom-monger. In addition to the downer dogs, the study also found a few that seemed happy no matter how uncaring the world around them was. "We know that people's emotional states affect their judgments and that happy people are more likely to judge an ambiguous situation positively. What our study has shown is that this applies similarly to dogs," said professor Mike Mendl, an author of the study and head of animal welfare and behavior at Bristol University.
Education

Simple Virus For Teaching? 366

Posted by samzenpus from the my-first-malware dept.
ed1023 writes "Currently I am teaching a 101 class on computers. It is more of a 'demystifying the black box' type of class. The current topic is computer viruses; I am looking for a virus with which I can infect the lab computers (only connected to local network, no outside network connection) that would be easy for the students to remove by hand. Can the Slashdot community point me in any directions? Is there an executable out there that would work, or do I try to write one myself, or is there one that is written that I can compile myself?"
Image

Drupal E-commerce With Ubercart 2.x 65

Posted by samzenpus from the read-all-about-it dept.
Michael J. Ross writes "In the past, a Web developer tasked with building an online store would most likely do so using a dedicated e-commerce system, instead of a content management system (CMS), because even though the leading CMSs offered more features and flexibility, they did not provide robust e-commerce capabilities, such as product listings, bulk import, pricing in multiple currencies, a built-in shopping cart, and integration with tax and shipping information sources. Since that time, e-commerce systems have become more like CMSs, by adding features such as blogging and forums. At the same time, CMSs are continually expanding their e-commerce potential, usually in the form of developers adding plug-ins. For developers using Drupal, there traditionally have been two major e-commerce plug-ins (known as "modules"): Ubercart and e-Commerce. The former has emerged as the leader, and is explored in Drupal E-commerce with Ubercart 2.x." Read on for the rest of Michael's review.
Piracy

Warner Bros. Accused of Pirating Anti-Pirating Tech 228

Posted by samzenpus from the just-trying-it-out dept.
psycho12345 writes "German firm Medien Patent Verwaltung claims that in 2003, it revealed a new kind of anti-piracy technology to Warner Bros. that marks films with specific codes so pirated copies can be traced back to their theaters of origin. But like a great, hilariously ironic DRM Ouroborus, the company claims that Warner began using the system throughout Europe in 2004 but hasn't actually paid a dime for it."
Google

Google Releases a Web-App Case Study For Hackers 95

Posted by timothy from the just-this-once dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "The San Francisco Chronicle reports that Google has released Jarlsberg, a 'small, cheesy' web application specifically designed to be full of bugs and security flaws as a security tutorial for coders, and encourages programmers to try their hands at exploiting weaknesses in Jarlsberg as a way of teaching them how to avoid similar vulnerabilities in their own code. Jarlsberg has multiple security bugs ranging from cross-site scripting and cross-site request forgery, to information disclosure, denial of service, and remote code execution. The codelab is organized by types of vulnerabilities." (Read on for more.)

Comment Re:Bad news for democracy (Score 4, Insightful) 279

by Bruce Perens (#32080390) Attached to: The FCC May Decide Not To Regulate Broadband
I agree that in a strictly linear tax system there would have to be a subsidy for the poor to offset the discriminatory effect of the taxation. And anyway I find nonlinear taxation to be fair as long as it increases for the rich rather than the opposite. But taxation with thousands of exceptions doesn't seem fair to anyone.
Biotech

Aphid's Color Comes From a Fungus Gene 132

Posted by kdawson from the long-jump dept.
Iron Nose writes with an account from Byte Size Biology of horizontal gene transfer from a fungus to an insect. The author suspects that we will see lots more of this as we sequence more genomes. "The pea aphid is known for having two different colors, green and red, but until now it was not clear how the aphids got their color. Aphids feed on sap, and sap does not contain carotenoids, a common pigment synthesized by plants, fungi, and microbes, but not by animals. Carotenoids in the diet gives many animals, from insects to flamingos, their exterior color after they ingest it, but aphids do not seem to eat carotenoid-containing food. Nancy Moran and Tyler Jarvik from the University of Arizona looked at the recently sequenced genome of the pea aphid. They were surprised to find genes for synthesizing carotenoids; this is the first time carotenoid synthesizing genes have been found in animals. When the researchers looked for the most similar genes to the aphid carotenoid synthesizing genes, they found that they came from fungi, which means they somehow jumped between fungi and aphids, in a process known as horizontal gene transfer."
Handhelds

The PalmPilots That Never Were 56

Posted by timothy from the cuneiform-input-never-caught-on dept.
harrymcc writes "Among the things that HP is getting in its $1.2 billion takeover of Palm are hundreds of patents for mobile technologies. Many are reflected in Palm's iconic products. But they also include odd keyboard designs, peculiar ideas like a stylus tip that converts into a joystick, and pre-Treo hybrids of phone and PDA that just didn't work. I rounded up some fascinating examples." It's worth clicking through the obnoxious slide-show format to see them.
The Courts

Writer Peter Watts Sentenced; No Jail Time 299

Posted by timothy from the new-spirit-of-openness dept.
shadowbearer writes "SF writer Peter Watts, a Canadian citizen, whose story we have read about before in these pages, was sentenced three days ago in a Port Huron, MI court. There's not a lot of detail in the story, and although he is still being treated like a terrorist (cannot enter or pass through the US, DNA samples) he was not ordered to do any time in jail, was freed, and has returned home to his family. The judge in the case was, I believe, as sympathetic as the legal system would allow him to be."
Books

Apple Raises E-book Prices For Everyone 327

Posted by timothy from the here-a-penny-there-a-penny dept.
Nom du Keyboard writes "I was informed by my publisher this week that they would have to raise my e-book prices because they planned to sell them through the Apple iBooks store. How could this happen? A lot of my individual stories sell in the $1 to $3 range, which is well within the impulse purchase amount for many people. In this price range a 50-cent price difference may well be the difference between a purchase and a pass. Meanwhile, Apple is touting its new 'agency model,' whereby the publishers set the prices. However, it seems that Apple requires books sold in its iBook store have prices ending in .99 — nothing else." (More below.)
Businesses

The End of the PC Era and Apple's Plan To Survive 549

Posted by Soulskill from the moore-money-moore-problems dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Charlie Stross has written a very interesting essay, ostensibly about the 'real reason why Steve Jobs hates Flash,' but really about how Jobs is betting Apple's future on an all-or-nothing push into a new market as Moore's law tapers off and the personal computer industry craters and turns into a profitability wasteland. Stross says that Apple is trying desperately to force the growth of a new ecosystem — one that rivals the 26-year-old Macintosh environment — to maturity in five years flat — the time scale in which they expect the cloud computing revolution to flatten the existing PC industry and turn PC manufacturers into suppliers of commodity equipment assembled on a shoestring budget with negligible profit. 'Any threat to the growth of the app store software platform is going to be resisted, vigorously, at this stage,' writes Stross. 'And he really does not want cross-platform apps that might divert attention and energy away from his application ecosystem.' The long-term goal is to support the long-term migration of Apple from being a hardware company with a software arm into being a cloud computing company with a hardware subsidiary. 'This is why there's a stench of panic hanging over Silicon Valley. This is why Apple have turned into paranoid security Nazis, why HP have just ditched Microsoft from a forthcoming major platform and splurged a billion-plus on buying up a near-failure; it's why everyone is terrified of Google,' writes Stross. 'The PC revolution is almost coming to an end, and everyone's trying to work out a strategy for surviving the aftermath.'"

Comment Sounds better than it is (Score 1) 372

by sigemund (#12825406) Attached to: $70 Cordless Notebook Mouse with No Scroll Wheel
I got all jazzed-up about this mouse a few weeks ago, and decided to pick one up for my new laptop. One week later, I sold it to a friend.

As far as the mouse is concerned, it's really pretty good -- it tracks great, the buttons feel nice, and the RF receiver fits into the mouse, which can collapse. But it just wasn't for me -- the mouse was too small -- if I were just using it once or twice a week, it'd be okay, but every day for 5 to 8 hours was just too much with such a small design. I could never really find a comfortable position when holding it. After three or four days, I realized that my hand was starting to tense up a bit, and it was becoming sore. I decided not to keep trying to get comfortable with it, and just went back to my old mouse. I think my hand might just be a bit too big for that mouse.

IMO, the scroll-pad is overrated. It's a very neat thing, and at first you are very impressed with it. But over time, the novelty wears thin. The most immediate problem is that it doesn't work as a middle-button -- as a Firefox user, I don't like to do without a middle-button. Then there was the problem with finger position. You kind of have to acclimate yourself to using the scroll-pad -- if you start your finger in the middle and move one direction or the other, you're okay. But if you start from the top of the pad, then scroll down, a lot of times it'll go up for a second, then not scroll at all. I found it sort of frustrating having to be even slightly precise with something I use so much and so quickly. Then, since you can't touch the pad without it scrolling something, you can't really position your hand over it. With a scroll-wheel, if you inadvertently touch the wheel, nothing happens. If you accidentally brush the touch-pad, you're going to scroll somewhere. It makes your hand position a bit more difficult, and I think that's part of why I could never really get comfortable with that mouse.

Oh, and there's this annoying clicking sound -- it's a neat sound, but I would love to be able to turn it off . . .

If you have a smaller hand, this might work for you, but for me, I found the mouse too small, and the touch-pad to be a lot more flash than substance. It is definitely the best-looking mouse around, I just think it's a bit lacking on comfort.

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