UltraMathMan - Slashdot User

Comment Re:Lol (Score 1) 936

by UltraMathMan on Tuesday March 10, 2009 @04:18PM (#27140101) Attached to: Living Free With Linux, Round 2

While on the surface the method of application installation on the Mac may seem to be the simplest, there are cases where it can get you into trouble. Dragging the .app to the Trash doesn't delete the Library files that were created in the course of running the app, containing preferences and such.

While on the whole this generally isn't a big deal, as these files tend to be size insignificant, it does make reinstalling a misbehaving application slightly more tricky. More seriously, abandoned kernel extensions can cause the system to stop booting after a major upgrade; if the extension index is deleted, when the system recreates it on next boot it will try to load the old extension and boom, kernel panic.

On the whole though, yes, I'd agree with you - from a clueless end user standpoint it certainly makes the most sense.

Comment Re:"HP's Linux" (Score 1) 230

by UltraMathMan on Tuesday February 24, 2009 @03:59PM (#26974179) Attached to: 1 of 3 Dell Inspiron Mini Netbooks Sold With Linux

Dell sells their Mini9 with an option to upgrade to 2GB of RAM. Am I missing something here?

http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/laptop-inspiron-9?c=us&cs=19&l=en&ref=lthp&s=dhs

Comment Wait a sec... (Score 4, Informative) 269

by UltraMathMan on Thursday December 18, 2008 @05:25PM (#26165485) Attached to: Indian GPS Cartographers Charged As Terrorists

According to TFA they were arrested for "snooping around Jamnagar" which according to Wikipedia "has shot to prominence as Reliance Industries, India's largest private company, established the world's largest [oil] refinery near Moti Khavdi village."

So very basically, this seems akin so someone driving in a car, decked out with electronics, around say, a nuclear power plant in the U.S. Not saying the charges are or aren't appropriate and there's no information as to how close to said refinery they actually were, but given the area through which they were traveling they should have expected some attention.

Wikipedia Article

Submission + - SPAM: Gmail Account Hacking Tool

Submitted by

Ashik Ratnani

on Tuesday August 19, 2008 @09:13AM

Ashik Ratnani writes: "A tool that automatically steals IDs of non-encrypted sessions and breaks into Google Mail accounts has been presented at the Defcon hackers' conference in Las Vegas.

Last week Google introduced a new feature in Gmail that allows users to permanently switch on SSL and use it for every action involving Gmail, and not only, authentication. users who did not turn it on now have a serious reason to do so as Mike Perry, the reverse engineer from San Francisco who developed the tool is planning to release it in two weeks."
Link to Original Source

Comment Re:What about the Advanced Bash Scripting Guide? (Score 1) 278

by UltraMathMan on Wednesday August 13, 2008 @02:20PM (#24587355) Attached to: Bash Cookbook

Sure, but I find that when I'm scripting it's generally on a computer - IMHO it's easier to reference something online (and to find it) than it is by combing a 598 page printed book.

Don't get me wrong, books have a place too, but I can't run a find on my printed copy. My intention was to point out that good free resources exist and, at least in this case, are well maintained.

Submission + - Warner Music Group Drops DRM (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by SirLurksAlot on Thursday December 27, 2007 @04:28PM

SirLurksAlot writes: According to an article on Ars Technica, Warner Music, Universal, and EMI (leaving Sony BMG as the last major holdout) will now be offering their entire music catalogs on Amazon completely DRM-free This move positions Amazon to be a major competitor for iTunes, and could spell the beginning of the end for DRM altogether.

Submission + - Connecticut enacts opt-out personal info law (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by

Technical Writing Geek

on Thursday December 27, 2007 @02:42PM

Technical Writing Geek writes: "The State of Connecticut wants to bring the consumer-pleasing goodness of the federal Do Not Call registry to other forms of data. Governor Jodi Rell announced this week that she plans to offer a state-wide opt-out service that Connecticut residents can use to keep personal information from being aggregated and acted upon by online data brokers.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071227-connecticut-governor-plans-opt-out-system-for-personal-info.html"

Submission + - Should Wikipedia Allow Mathematical Proofs? (wikipedia.org) 4

Submitted by

Beetle B.

on Saturday December 15, 2007 @08:07PM

Beetle B. writes: "An argument has arisen over whether Wikipedia should allow pages that provide proofs for mathematical theorems (such as this one).

On the one hand, Wikipedia is a useful source of information and people can benefit from these proofs. On the other hand, how does one choose which proofs to include and which not to? Should Wikipedia just become a textbook that teaches mathematics? Should it just state the bare results of theorems and not provide proofs (except as external links)? Or should they take an intermediate approach and formulate a criterion for which proofs to include and which to exclude?"

Submission + - Wii uses elliptic curve cryptography

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 15, 2007 @12:11PM

An anonymous reader writes: A user at the Nintendo-Scene forums just posted a lengthy post about his discovery that the Wii savegame files are signed and encrypted with NIST B 233 bit elliptic curve cryptography. Could this be the first step for a Wii softmod the homebrew community have waited for?

Submission + - The largest underground Mac community faces coup (macserialjunkie.com)

Submitted by

Anonymous Coward

on Sunday September 09, 2007 @11:55AM

Anonymous Coward writes: "In a palace coup only imaginable in one of Shakespeare's tragedies, a moderator faction of one of the largest underground Mac communities was shut out this weekend after it was discovered many staff members were staging a coup, including an attempt to surreptitiously acquire the domain. (http://www.macserialjunkie.com/) In an Steve Jobs-like "Open Letter to the Community", the founders of MSJ explain how a number of people at the highest levels of the underground planned their takeover activities for almost two years, only to be foiled at the last minute. In an age of terrorism, are Western societies now taking cues from hostile countries instead of the other way around?"

Submission + - Einstein's spooky action leads to quantum computer

Submitted by Stony Stevenson on Friday September 07, 2007 @12:25AM

Stony Stevenson writes: Physicists at the University of Michigan have demonstrated how two separate atoms can communicate with a sort of 'quantum intuition' which Albert Einstein referred to as "spooky". In doing so, the researchers have made an advance towards super-fast quantum computing and even a quantum internet.

The scientists used light to establish an "entanglement" between two atoms, which were trapped one metre apart in separate enclosures. "This link between remote atoms could be the fundamental piece of a radically new quantum computer architecture," said Professor Christopher Monroe, the principal investigator on the project who is now at the University of Maryland. "Now that the technique has been demonstrated, it should be possible to scale it up to networks of many interconnected components that will eventually be necessary for quantum information processing."

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