Comment Breaking news: Search engine provides website. (Score 0) 445
This just in!
Google provides websites related to your search, not answers to your questions.
Film at 11.
Comment Re:Dvorak (Score 1) 362
What benefit do you get from trading one arbitrary system for another?
And yes, that's what both of them are (both QWERTY/DVORAK and Standard/Metric). They are all arbitrary systems.
Comment That's not how hearing aids work... (Score 5, Informative) 727
Most hearing aids don't amplify (well, not as their primary purpose anyway) anymore. Back in the old days, sure, that's what they did (electronic equivalent of an ear horn).
Modern hearing aids shift frequencies (usually downward, high frequencies have the most energy so you damage the short hairs in your cochlea first) to a frequency range you *can* still hear.
So if you're thinking about making your own, *please* do the proper research first. It will work better, and you will be less likely to damage your hearing further.
Comment Re:Shitty Summary and Article (Score 5, Informative) 483
Comment Re:Newbie Question (Score 1) 511
You can slipstream the Windows XP drivers for everything into a CD so you don't have to install any of them, check out http://driverpacks.net/.
Comment Re:What I want to know is (Score 3, Informative) 318
Only LTS releases will get point releases, but they're not really "releases" just refreshes of the ISOs, it's nothing meaningful as far as installed systems are concerned (I guess it's useful for setting milestone goals or something, but that's not technical). They take the updated packages, throw them on the CD so you don't have to download as many updates after you install.
Having an installed system that you updated completely the day the images were released* would leave you with the same system.
And while we're being thorough they're offset by three months, so January an August.
See http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/146 for more information (including fancy pictures).
* It's likely a day or two before release, whenever the images are created, yadda yadda.
Demonoid Tracker Is Back Online 211
Crymson4 writes "We discussed the shutdown of the Demonoid torrent tracker last fall. For those who don't already know, Demonoid is back up. Looks like they found a new host for the Web site and the tracker is functioning properly as well. For those with old accounts, all the old data has been saved. It's almost as if they never left."
Python 3.0 To Be Backwards Incompatible 438
Stony Stevenson writes "Organizations using Python will be affected in a major way by changes in store for the language over the course of the next twelve months, Linux.conf.au attendees were told this morning. The Python development community is working towards a new, backwards-incompatible version of the language, version 3.0, which is slated for release in early 2009. Anthony Baxter, the release manager for Python and a senior software engineer at Google Australia, said "We are going to break pretty much all the code. Pretty much every program will need changes." Baxter also added another tidbit for attendees, saying that Python accounts for around 15 percent of Google's code base."
Microsoft Says Vista Has the Fewest Flaws 548
ancientribe writes "Microsoft issued a year-one security report on its Windows Vista operating system today, and it turns out Vista logged less than half the vulnerabilities than Windows XP did in its first year. According to the new Microsoft report, Vista also had fewer vulnerabilities in its first year than other OSes — including Red Hat rhel4ws, Ubuntu 6.06 LTS, and Apple Mac OS X 10.4 — did in their first years."
Legalize File Sharing, Say Swedish MPs 545
CrystalFalcon writes "In the past week, the file sharing debate has exploded in Sweden, with numerous mainstream politicians finally having understood the issue. Last week, seven Swedish MPs wrote a prominent opinion piece saying that fully legalized file sharing is not just the best solution, it's the only solution. Now their number has increased to 13, and the issue continues to grow. Good summaries at TorrentFreak and P2P Consortium. Original opinion piece in English here."
Experience with Fighting Domain Farming 259
Lost_my_regs writes "I had a .com domain name relevant only to me, no legal trademark, registered and hosted at a provider that went bust. When attempting to re-host the domain I discovered, to my unpleasant surprise, that the domain is now registered by a domain farming company (name removed). My question is: Is there any way to claim back my domain?"
Beware of "Backspaceware" 257
SubLevel writes "Since conception in 2004, Paint.NET has been generously been offering the software community the taste of successful freeware, by allowing anyone to download and decipher the entire working of their extremely popular photo editing program. As posted in the Official Paint.NET blog by Rick Brewster, "Backspaceware" as he has so coined has become a tremendous issue. "Paint.NET's license is very generous, and I even release the source code. All free of charge. Unfortunately it gets taken advantage of every once in awhile by scum who are trying to profit from the work of others. I like to call this backspaceware*. They download the source code for something, load it up in to Visual Studio (or whatever), hit the backspace key over the software's name and credits, type in a new name and author, and re-release it. They send it to all the download mirror sites, and don't always do a good job covering up their tracks.""
TB-Sized Solid State Drives Announced 130
prostoalex writes "Several companies have announced solid state hard drives in excess of one terrabyte in size. ComputerWorld describes one from BitMicro that's just 3.5". Their flash drive will support up to 4 Gbps data transfer rate. From the article: 'SSDs access data in microseconds, instead of the millliseconds that traditional hard drives use to retrieve data. The BitMicro E-Disk Altima 4Gb FC delivers more than 55,000 I/O operations per second (IOPS) and has a sustained data transfer rate over 230MB/sec. By comparison, a fast hard drive for example will run at around 300 IOPS.'" Ah, the speed of tech. Seems like only last month we were talking about 500GB drives.
PHP5 Vs. CakePHP Vs. RubyOnRails? 469
OldJavaHack writes "If you could start a website (with MySQL for persistence) from scratch and you had a choice of PHP5, CakePHP, or RubyOnRails — which would you choose and why? Things to consider in your decision: 1. Maturity of solution; 2. Features; 3. Size of community of skilled users (to build a team); 4. Complexity/ease of use (for neophytes to master); 5. Greatest strength of your choice, and the greatest weaknesses of the other two. Here is a comparison of capabilities."
Storm Worm Evolves To Use Tor 182
An anonymous reader writes "Seems like the Storm botnet that was behind the last two waves of attacks is also responsible for this new kind of social-engineering based attacks, using spam to try and convince users of the necessity of using Tor for there communications. They 'kindly' provide a link to download a trojaned version of Tor. This blog entry has a link to the original post on or-talk mailing list which has some samples of the messages."
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