braz - Slashdot User

Cats "Exploit" Humans By Purring 503

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday July 14, 2009 @05:31AM from the frequently-mistaken-for-a-meatloaf dept.

An anonymous reader notes a BBC report on research recently published in the journal Current Biology, indicating that cats manipulate humans by adding a baby-like cry to their purring. "Cat owners may have suspected as much, but it seems our feline friends have found a way to manipulate us humans. Researchers at the University of Sussex have discovered that cats use a 'soliciting purr' to overpower their owners and garner attention and food. Unlike regular purring, this sound incorporates a 'cry,' with a similar frequency to a human baby's. The team said cats have 'tapped into' a human bias — producing a sound that humans find very difficult to ignore."

Google Releases Open Source NX Server 257

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday July 13, 2009 @05:54PM from the free-and-good-together-defies-reason dept.

wisesifu writes with news of a new open source NX server, dubbed NeatX, that was released by Google and promptly lost in the shuffle of the Chrome OS announcement. "NX technology was developed by NoMachine to handle remote X Window connections and make a graphical desktop display usable over the Internet. By its own admission, Google has been looking at remote desktop technologies for 'quite a while' and decided to develop Neatx as existing NX server products are either proprietary or difficult to maintain. 'The good old X Window system can be used over the network, but it has issues with network latency and bandwidth. Neatx remedies some of these issues,' Google engineers wrote on the company's open source blog. NoMachine had released parts of the source code to its NX product under the GPL, but the NX server remained proprietary. [...] Neatx is written in Python, with a few wrapper scripts in Bash and one program written in C 'for performance reasons.'"

R.I.P. FTP 359

Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday July 13, 2009 @11:19AM from the and-good-riddance-to-ye dept.

Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton says "Using FTP to administer a website is insecure -- but not for the reasons that you probably think. You yourself can stop using FTP any time you want, but how do we change the landscape Net-wide, to reduce the number of breakins using stolen FTP credentials?" You know what to click on if you want to read the rest.

Comment Read the book and Cisco IOS Cookbook, my two cents (Score 3, Informative) 228

by braz on Wednesday August 22, 2007 @04:19PM (#20322267) Attached to: Network Warrior

This is a really nicely put together book. It fills a nice niche at Intro to Middle level of the Cisco areas somewhere just after the CCNA and probably touching on some of the CCDA topics. Its not meant as a real cookbook - that's why there is the excellent Cisco IOS cookbook also from O'Reilly which deals with the particular obsure, nutty but damn valuable gems that are out there, from Net engineers who've had the long hours and coffee to hand us great tricks.

How to place this book is like this, so you've finished or are close to your CCNA and would like some sound practical advice to round out the course or maybe to help you revise it, well this is the book for you. If you know more and are in deeper Cisco terrority well you might like this but you'd probably prefer the Cisco IOS cookbook.

Off topic - I also got a copy of Limoncelli et al's revised version of The Practise of System and Network Administration in the same batch, given the first edition was most excellent there is little to say except the second is even better. Common sense and practical knowledge without getting lost in OS or application issues.

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