jkloosterman - Slashdot User

Submission + - Prescription Meds for Windows Vista Sleep Disorder

Submitted by

Arnold O'Connor

on Saturday March 10, 2007 @02:17PM

Arnold O'Connor writes: "NeoSmart Technologies has compiled a list of hotfixes and patches provided by Microsoft for Windows Vista SP1 that address a (large) number of issues related to waking/resuming a Windows Vista (both x86 and x64) PC from sleep or hibernation. Sleep-related disorders have plagued Windows Vista since its release, and most are due to be included in Windows Vista SP1 (Codenam Fiji)."

Submission + - Opera /. easter egg and new speed dial feature

Submitted by Thelomen on Saturday March 10, 2007 @02:02PM

Thelomen writes: Opera Browser contains a fairly unknown Easter Egg: Simply type /. in the address bar and you are taken directly to Slashdot.org. This easter egg was recently reported over at OperaWatch.com .

Other recent news from Opera is their new Speed Dial feature, precent in the most recent build from Desktop Team. Speed Dial is nothing more than 9 bookmarks you can open with CTRL+1 to CTRL+9, however the pages on the Speed Dial are shown as a thumbnail and automatically prefetched in background, making it ideal if you have some heavy pages among your top 10 bookmarks, and you may come to use this feature much more than you thought.

Submission + - Alternatives to SF.net's CompileFarm?

Submitted by cronie on Saturday March 10, 2007 @10:31AM

cronie writes: Not long ago, SourceForge.net announced it shuts down the Compile Farm — a collection of computers running wide variety of OSes, available for compiling and testing open-source projects. SF.net states their resources "are best used at this time in improving other parts" of the service. I seriously consider this sad news for the OSS community, because portability is one of the strengths of OSS, and not many of us, developers, have such variety of platforms in our possession to compile and test our software on. As a consequence, I expect many projects dropping support for some of the platforms they simply don't have access to. Are there any sound alternatives with at least some popular OS/hardware combinations? Any plans to create one? (Perhaps Google or IBM might come up with something?)

Disk Drive Failures 15 Times What Vendors Say 284

Posted by Zonk on Friday March 02, 2007 @05:15PM from the cough-sputter-wheeze-choke dept.

jcatcw writes "A Carnegie Mellon University study indicates that customers are replacing disk drives more frequently than vendor estimates of mean time to failure (MTTF) would require.. The study examined large production systems, including high-performance computing sites and Internet services sites running SCSI, FC and SATA drives. The data sheets for the drives indicated MTTF between 1 and 1.5 million hours. That should mean annual failure rates of 0.88%, annual replacement rates were between 2% and 4%. The study also shows no evidence that Fibre Channel drives are any more reliable than SATA drives."

Worm Exploiting Solaris Telnetd Vulnerability 164

Posted by Zonk on Friday March 02, 2007 @12:26PM from the beware-of-rotten-fruit dept.

MichaelSmith writes "Several news sites are reporting that a worm is starting to exploit the Solaris Telnet 0-day vulnerability. By adding simple text to the Telnet command, the system will skip asking for a username and password. If the systems are installed out of the box, they automatically come Telnet-enabled. 'The SANS Internet Storm Center, which monitors Internet threats, has noticed some increase in activity on the network port used by Solaris' telnet feature, according to an ISC blog posted on Tuesday. "One hopes that there aren't that many publicly reachable Solaris systems running telnet," ISC staffer Joel Esler wrote.'"

Vista Activation Cracked by Brute Force 470

Posted by Zonk on Friday March 02, 2007 @11:02AM from the disturbance-in-the-force dept.

Bengt writes "The Inquirer has a story about a brute force Vista key activation crack. It's nothing fancy; it's described as a 'glorified guesser.' The danger of this approach is that sooner or later the key cracker will begin activating legitimate keys purchased by other consumers. From the article: 'The code is floating, the method is known, and there is nothing MS can do at this point other than suck it down and prepare for the problems this causes. To make matters worse, Microsoft will have to decide if it is worth it to allow people to take back legit keys that have been hijacked, or tell customers to go away, we have your money already, read your license agreement and get bent, we owe you nothing.'"

Comment Citizenship involves Fairness and Kindness (Score 2, Interesting) 202

by jkloosterman on Friday February 23, 2007 @03:47PM (#18126668) Attached to: Microsoft Testing "Pay-As-You-Go" Software

Why must we force people of lower income to either pay what is beyond their reach for our tools or by forced to use inferior versions? In the financial situation of most of us, if we choose to pay Microsoft $400 for the usage of their software, we may complain, but it is really not that much relative to our other costs. For those that have lower income, because this is so much beyond what they could ever afford, M$ is rolling out programs like this. But is it being a "responsible global citizen"? http://www.microsoft.com/about/corporatecitizenshi p/citizenship/default.mspx

Why not adjust the prices according to the relative financial burden on the average person in an area? With Microsoft's activation system, they could prevent having their products imported to other countries.

It is unfair and unkind to either force the less blessed on the earth to use stripped-down versions of software, such as Windows XP Starter Edition, or to gouge out their money through plans like this.

(I'm not trying to be a Microsoft-bashing troll.)

Submission + - AOL Supports OpenID

Submitted by Nurgled on Thursday February 15, 2007 @08:08AM

Nurgled writes: On Sunday John Panzer announced that AOL now has experimental OpenID server support. This means that every AOL user now has an OpenID identifier. OpenID is a decentralized cross-site authentication system which has been growing in popularity over the last few months. AOL is the first large provider to offer OpenID services, and though they do not currently accept logins to their services with OpenID identifiers from elsewhere, they are apparently working on it. The next big challenge for OpenID proponents is teaching AOL's userbase how to make use of this new technology.

Everybody Votes on the Wii 87

Posted by Zonk on Thursday February 15, 2007 @05:41AM from the it's-like-democracy-only-more-efficient dept.

Wired's Game|Life blog has up a post pointing out a surprise from Nintendo: a cute voting application now available on your Nintendo Wii. Unannounced and easy to understand, Everybody Votes appears to be attempting to gain a gestalt view of the Wii-owning population. The app gives you several multiple choice questions to answer, and allows you to submit your own. Chris Kohler hopes that this might be the beginning of downloads for small, entertaining programs Nintendo fans may have never otherwise seen. "If you've ever been to an E3 or read about Nintendo's booth, you know that they often show little demos or applications that never get released. Well, with Wii, it seems that we might actually start seeing those little experiments thrown out to the public. Since Nintendo as a game developer uses this first-prototype-something-fun style of design, we could see all kinds of things that ordinarily wouldn't ever make it out of Nintendo headquarters." I personally hope we get a full-fledged version of the conducting game that Miyamoto used to demo the system at last year's E3.

Power Generating Spacesuits 145

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday February 14, 2007 @10:14PM from the the-electric-slide dept.

Maggie McKee writes "Piezoelectric sensors could help power future space missions. Astronauts' spacesuits may one day be covered in motion-sensitive proteins that could generate power from the astronauts' movement, according to futuristic research being conducted by a new lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US. Such 'power skins' could also be used to coat future human bases on Mars, where they could produce energy from the Martian wind. Eventually, the biologically derived suits might even be able to heal themselves."

VoIP and Home Security Systems Don't Get Along 187

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday February 14, 2007 @08:56PM from the your-door-wants-you-to-stop-calling dept.

coondoggie writes "Here is a story about consumer VoIP services that can cause your home security alarm system to malfunction or not work at all. There have been problems with customer phone systems in Canada who were using Primus but Vonage customers in the U.S have complained too. A number of sites have popped up offering suggestions to help deal with the problem."

NASA World Wind 1.4 Released With Trailer 117

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wednesday February 14, 2007 @06:45PM from the fun-toys dept.

Bull_UK writes "As many of you probably already know NASA had to shift it's priorities to the upcoming Java version of World Wind, leaving 1.4 effectively orphaned, but the Open Source community came together and with a lot of hard work we were able to finish what Chris Maxwell started. Some of the new things which differentiate the new World Wind from the competition are the amazing new visual effects, including HDR, check out the video for some examples. Remember this virtual globe has never had the same goals as Google Earth, if you just want to see your house stick with GE, although many areas have high resolution as good and sometimes better than GE. World Wind is aimed at education and science, all the default imagery is copyright free, you don't need to purchase a license to redistribute the imagery and there are no pro or expert versions to buy, you can happily use World Wind at work or school without fear of any lawyers confiscating your research."

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