u2pa - Slashdot User

Comment Let me ask you, what would you replace COBOL with? (Score 2, Insightful) 274

by u2pa on Saturday September 20, 2008 @11:30AM (#25083505) Attached to: Don't Count Cobol Out

I keep hearing "COBOL is dead", "COBOL IS NOT DEAD".

But if COBOL were to go, what could replace it?

Requirements would have to include:
- performance (when processing millions of transactions)
- reliability (both hardware & software base)
- maintainability of code (easy for someone to take a program they never seen before, and make needed changes)
- follows business logic
- widely used

The Joy of the Flash Drive 332

Posted by Zonk on Sunday March 16, 2008 @03:00AM from the little-quiet-different dept.

An anonymous reader writes "A post to the C|Net site covers the numerous benefits of flash drives, such as speed, temperature, and battery consumption. The perk author Michael Kanellos is most fond of? The distinct lack of noise. 'The notebook I'm testing--a Dell Latitude D830 with a 64GB flash hard drive from Samsung--hasn't emitted a sound in three days. Flash drives, which store data in NAND flash memory, don't require motors or spinning platters. Thus, there are no whirring mechanical noises. Compare that with my T42 ThinkPad. It sounds like a guinea pig got trapped inside, particularly during the start-up phase. Vzoooot. Cronk, cronk, cronk. Zip, zip. (Pause.) Gurlagurlagurla...zweeee. '"

Fingerprint-Protected USB Sticks Cracked 166

Posted by kdawson on Friday March 14, 2008 @11:48AM from the going-around dept.

juct writes "Manufacturers of USB sticks and cards with fingerprint readers promise us that their data safes can only be opened with the right fingerprint. In their tests, heise Security found that it is easy to bypass the authentication and get access to the protected data. This works by sending a single USB command, using the open source tool PLscsi, that changes the accessible partition. They found the vulnerability in several USB sticks that use the same chipset. The article concludes: 'The fingerprint sensors in the products mentioned above apparently only serve one purpose: they mislead interested buyers. They do not provide any significant level of protection. We can only recommend that these products not be purchased.'"

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