splatnet - Slashdot User

Comment Who looks? (Score 1) 601

by splatnet on Tuesday December 20, 2011 @03:11PM (#38438370) Attached to: Do Slashdotters Encrypt Their Email?

I don't and never have, what I'd quite like to know is does anyone here know someone who has _intercepted_ email?

Submission + - Geocaching Shuts Down British Town (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by DaveAtWorkAnnoyingly on Wednesday July 06, 2011 @07:33AM

DaveAtWorkAnnoyingly writes: Many geocachers will be thinking twice when planting their treasure in an urban space as one geocacher found out in England after the police cordoned off the centre of a small West Yorkshire town and the Bomb Squad was called in.

Submission + - Did Google Go Instant Just to Show More Ads? (technologyreview.com) 1

Submitted by eldavojohn on Monday September 20, 2010 @04:12AM

eldavojohn writes: Google, already the largest search engine in the United States, went instant a few weeks ago. It's a new feature that none of the competitors have and uses an extra five to fifty kilobytes per search. MIT's tech review asks why Google went instant and is skeptical that users actually look at search results before they finish typing their query. Othar Hansson, Google's lead on the initiative, informs them otherwise and claims that Google's traffic monitors didn't even blink at the extra data being sent across — primarily because of its insignificance next to streaming one video on YouTube. Hansson also reveals that Google's search engine is no longer stateless and therefore takes up a little more memory in their server hives. The Tech Review claims that 'sources at the company say Google Instant's impact on ad sales was a primary focus in testing the service. Google only gets paid for an advertisement, or sponsored link, when a user clicks on the ad, and ads are targeted to specific searches. By displaying a search's ads onscreen a couple of seconds sooner, the frequency of users clicking on those ads could only go up.' So money seemed to be the prime motivator and the article also coyly notes that the average length of time a user spends between typing in any two characters is 300 milliseconds — much too fast for old JavaScript engines. So of course you might recall Google's efforts to change all that with JavaScript speed wars. Do you find Google instant to be useful in anyway or does it strike you as just more ad gravity for your mouse?

Comment OpenDNS (Score 1) 618

by splatnet on Sunday April 11, 2010 @03:28PM (#31810248) Attached to: What Advice For a Single Parent As Server Admin?

Hi, I'd agree with the idea of computers in a shared space as solving lots of issues. Monitoring them for hardware failures and uptime is all very weel but you're not running mission critical webservers on these units, if they crash once in a while that will also be a good life lesson to learn. I've setup openDNS on various friends systems for their kids and the free version is reasonably useful, it will give you full offsite internet logging without letting you know the individual machine thus giving you an overview without violating your users/kids privacy, at the end of the day they should be able to explore some of the web, just not the extreme stuff. Charlie

A Majority of Businesses Will Not Move To Vista 378

Posted by Zonk on Tuesday July 31, 2007 @11:34AM from the happy-where-they-are dept.

oDDmON oUT writes "An article on the Computerworld site quotes polling results from a potentially-divisive PatchLink survey. The poll shows that the majority of enterprise customers feel there are no compelling security enhancements in Windows Vista, that they have no plans to migrate to it in the near term and that many will 'either stick with the Windows they have, or turn to Linux or Mac OS X'. A majority, 87%, said they would stay with their existing version of Windows. This comes on the heels of a dissenting view of Vista's track record in the area of security at the six month mark, which sparked a heated discussion on numerous forums."

Slashdot Top Deals