supporterZ - Slashdot User

Submission + - Nothing to Fear but Fearlessness Itself?

Submitted by theodp on Saturday October 31, 2009 @09:07PM

theodp writes: In last August's Is Technology Evil?, Robert X. Cringely voiced fears that Goldman Sachs and others were not so much evil as 'clueless about the implications of their work,' leaving it up to the government to fix any mess they leave behind. 'But what if government runs out of options?,' worried Cringely. 'Our economic policy doesn't imagine it, nor does our foreign policy, because superpowers don't acknowledge weakness.' And now Cringely's fears are echoed in We're Governed by Callous Children, currently the most-read WSJ story, in which Peggy Noonan frets: 'We are governed at all levels by America's luckiest children, sons and daughters of the abundance, and they call themselves optimists but they're not optimists — they're unimaginative. They don't have faith, they've just never been foreclosed on. They are stupid and they are callous, and they don't mind it when people become disheartened. They don't even notice.' With apologies to FDR, do we have nothing to fear but fearlessness itself?

Submission + - Microsoft's Lost Decade

Submitted by theodp on Saturday October 31, 2009 @05:03PM

theodp writes: Newsweek's Daniel Lyons explains Why Steve Ballmer is no Bill Gates, arguing that what most hurt Microsoft was BillG's decision to step down as CEO in January 2000: 'Gates was a software geek. He understood technology. Ballmer is a business guy.' And the problem with putting nontechies in charge of tech companies, concludes Lyons, is that they have blind spots. So while Microsoft's revenues nearly tripled from $23B to $58B under Ballmer's helm, says Lyons, the company became bureaucratic and lumbering, slowing down while the rest of the world — including Google, Apple and Amazon — sped up.

Submission + - USB 3.0 The Real Deal, SATA 6GB Not Yet (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid on Thursday October 29, 2009 @09:53PM

MojoKid writes: HotHardware has posted a sneak peek at a new motherboard Asus has coming down the pipe with USB 3.0 and SATA 6G support. The Asus P7P55D-E Premium has a PLX PCI Express Gen 2 switch implementation that connects to NEC USB 3.0 and Marvell SATA 6G controller chips. With a USB 3.0 enabled external hard drive connected to a USB 2.0 port and then to the board's USB 3.0 port, there were some rather impressive gains to observe. When connected to a USB 3.0 port, the external hard drive was about 5 — 6x faster versus connecting over USB 2.0, with total throughput in excess of 130MB/sec. On the other hand, benchmarks with Seagate's new Barracuda XT SATA 6G drive show little performance difference but a burst rate that is off the charts. According to ATTO, there are slight overall performance benefits to be had connecting the drive to the SATA 6G controller, but the deltas were quite small; somewhere in the neighborhood of 5MB/s or so.

Submission + - Secretarial mistake costs $1.26 billion to Pepsi (associatedcontent.com)

Submitted by 9gezegen on Thursday October 29, 2009 @09:08PM

9gezegen writes: Pepsi learned that if it needs to continue "Refresh Everything"TM, it needs an extra $1.26 billion. It looks like one of the secretaries forget to inform company lawyers about a a trade secrets case in a Wisconsin state court. When nobody arrived to court, the judge gave $1.26 billion default judgement According to Pepsi lawyers, they were not properly served because the secretary was "so busy preparing for a board meeting." One may think she was working on the refreshments. Perhaps Pepsi should learn more about Spamhaus case.

Comment Re:Internet Archived; Time to Move On (Score 1) 396

by supporterZ on Monday October 26, 2009 @04:16PM (#29876595) Attached to: Geocities Shutting Down Today

No Geocities actually had their free online GUI tool called WebBuilder (it was in Java). You could place your textboxes and images anywhere on the UI's new page feature and when u save to HTML, the tool would calculate the table grids required for the object to appear in that location. The UI also had a tree feature to help navigate/connect your pages (and all that since 1999/2000). Too bad Yahoo never had a good strategy for Geocities, considering all the things we take for granted and are free these days: email, blog, photo host, calendar, facebook... And am sure for latters, the Geocities shut down will only confirm the grim reality that free can't last forever.

Submission + - Canonical halts Ubuntu CD free-for-all (pcpro.co.uk) 1

Submitted by Barence on Monday October 26, 2009 @10:48AM

Barence writes: Canonical has announced that it's to begin limiting the number of free Ubuntu CDs people can order. The ShipIt scheme has proved so popular that Ubuntu will now only ship one free CD to users who haven't ordered a disc before. Users will now be required to upgrade to new versions through online upgrades, or by downloading the latest version as an ISO and burning it to CD themselves."While these CDs are often referred to as 'free CDs', they are of course not free of cost to Canonical," says Canonical's chief operating office Jane Silber. "We want to continue this programme, but Ubuntu’s growth means that some changes are necessary."

Submission + - Book review: Drupal 6 Social Networking (drupaleasy.com)

Submitted by dag on Saturday October 24, 2009 @09:30PM

dag writes: An interesting book about how to build social networks and why Drupal is a good choice as a platform for building communities. Even when you don't have any Drupal experience yet, this book explains what is needed when you start from scratch and looks at the different facets of a social network.

title: Drupal 6 Social Networking
author: Michael Peacock
pages: 290
publisher: Packt Publishing
reviewer: Dag Wieers
ISBN: 978-1-847196-10-1
summary: Building community websites using Drupal as a content management framework

The book starts off with a short introduction about social networks and a list of compelling reasons why one wants to set up her own social network rather than using an existing social network like Facebook or MySpace. It all comes down to what your particular goals are. The first chapter looks into why Drupal is a good fit for building a community website. Its modular design, use of known technologies and ease of installation, as well as the ample availability of modules help in that respect, and also clearly marks where the book is going next. The other half of the first chapter explains in great detail what is needed during the installation of Drupal to have a working setup. If you are already experienced with setting up Drupal you can skim through this chapter to verify that you did not miss anything with earlier installations.

The second chapter prepares the reader for using Drupal specifically targeted for building a community website. To do this the author comes up with his own example (Dino Space) which is used throughout the book. And while the subject may be far-fetched and very different from what you plan to do, it serves its purpose well. Throughout this chapter the author explains many Drupal related concepts and terminology like Nodes, Content Types or Blocks and how to use these to your advantage when designing your site.

So while the first and second chapters explains and prepares the reader, chapter three helps with important decisions regarding user contributed content and all aspects related to it. User Roles, Comments, Polls, Forums and Blogs. One thing that surprised me was how it is possible to write blog entries from Microsoft Word using a standardized API. And while it is not applicable to me (as a Linux user) I can see some benefit for others within the targeted community. Another topic from the book that I had little experience with is collaborating on a Book within your community. I was always amazed by the annotated PHP manual in the past and this possibility reflects that effort a great deal. The chapter also includes attention to how to automatically generate feeds or include feeds from others, something that helps growing the community.

The next chapter goes into how users can maintain their profiles, how profiles can be extended and themed and how profiles can be shared between websites. It also looks into specific modules to help you eg. integrate OpenID or avatars from other websites. Chapter five explains how users can interact and how the User Relationships and User Activity modules allow users to promote their own content and actions on their site. Much like how Facebook becomes a time log of individual actions of our friends. It also looks at Guestbooks, Contact forms and Groups covering more than I was looking for myself.

One thing I recently had to look into myself was how to communicate with your users. Some users register and then loose touch so there is a clear need to regularly update them about what is happening and what new content is available and that's where chapter six explains how to set up Newsletters or connect your social network to online services like Google Groups.

Drupal is mostly respected for its modular design and Drupal's author often states "If it cannot be done from a module, then that's a design bug which needs to be fixed". That said, almost everything is possible from a module, which offers great flexibility to anyone deploying Drupal to customize it to its own needs. Chapter seven explains in some detail how to write your own Drupal modules from accessing the database, interacting with other services as well as making it installable and customizable. The example shows how to interact with Google Maps from a Drupal module. But also points to similar modules for connecting to Facebook.

Another important aspect of any website is its design, chapter eight shows how to install and configure additional themes, but also explains how to modify existing templates and tweak CSS files. It does not go into great detail though, but it sufficiently points out where to look and how to experiment.

The last two chapters are a bit dim, chapter nine explains how to secure your Drupal site from automated spam and lists a few maintenance tasks every admin should know about. Much like chapter nine, chapter ten does not go into a lot of detail about how to promote your website. It mostly lists important aspects and in some cases provides links to experienced websites.

All in all I was surprised by the many items this book covers, especially the chapters about writing modules and modifying themes is something most buyers will not expect in a Drupal book regarding Social Networking. And while I believe there are better books about those topics, in general this book is a good introduction to Drupal and a guide for those who are also interested in the more advanced parts of Drupal.

I was particularly interested in this book as I set up my own family website based on Drupal and I wanted to know what technologies I missed, and what additional modules I could use to make our own family website better. In that regard this book confirmed for a large part that what I did with Drupal was how it was supposed to be, but in addition even I did learn some new tricks and new modules I never investigated before. This knowledge undoubtedly will be useful for some future Drupal-based projects as well.

Submission + - What If They Turned Off the Internet?

Submitted by theodp on Saturday October 24, 2009 @12:08PM

theodp writes: It's the not-to-distant future. They've turned off the Internet. After the riots have settled down and the withdrawal symptoms have faded, how would you cope? Cracked.com asked readers to Photoshop what life would be like in an Internet-addicted society learning to cope without it. Better hope it never happens, or be prepared for dry-erase message boards, carrier pigeon-powered Twitter, block-long lines to get into adult video shops, door-to-door Rickrolling, Lolcats on Broadway, and $199.99 CDs.

Submission + - Music Rights Holders Sue Youtube Again (newteevee.com)

Submitted by bennyboy64 on Saturday October 24, 2009 @12:49AM

bennyboy64 writes: NewTeeVee reports on a criminal investigation that has been launched against senior executives of YouTube and parent company Google in Hamburg, Germany, over allegations of copyright infringement. The case started after a complaint by German music rights holders. Hamburg's prosecutor has formally requested assistance from U.S. colleagues to compel YouTube to produce log files identifying who uploaded as well as who viewed 500 specific videos.

Slashdot Top Deals