Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
Education

Most People Have Never Heard of CTRL+F 567

Hugh Pickens writes "Google search anthropologist Dan Russell says that 90 percent of people in his studies don't know how to use CTRL/Command + F to find a word in a document or web page. 'I do these field studies and I can't tell you how many hours I've sat in somebody's house as they've read through a long document trying to find the result they're looking for,' says Russell, who has studied thousands of people on how they search for stuff. 'At the end I'll say to them, "Let me show one little trick here," and very often people will say, "I can't believe I've been wasting my life!"' Just like we learn to skim tables of content or look through an index or just skim chapter titles to find what we're looking for, we need to teach people about this CTRL+F thing, says Alexis Madrigal. 'I probably use that trick 20 times per day and yet the vast majority of people don't use it at all,' writes Madrigal. 'We're talking about the future of almost all knowledge acquisition and yet schools don't spend nearly as much time on this skill as they do on other equally important areas.'"

Silverlight 3.0 Released, Allows Apps Outside the Browser 335

Many different sources are reporting that Microsoft has unleashed the third major version of Silverlight to the masses. With 3.0 we see things like better 3D graphics support, the ability to offload tasks to a GPU, and the ability to run apps outside of the browser. "Silverlight's video capabilities have always been impressive when compared to Flash, and the new version boasts some new features that should keep the competition with Flash hot. It uses a media broadcasting technology Microsoft calls Smooth Streaming, an adaptive technology for playing the same H.264 video stream at the highest bitrate the device and its bandwidth limitations will allow. So if you've got a fast computer with an HD monitor and a wide open pipe, you'll see super high quality video at up to full 1080p HD. If you've got a dinky smartphone with mid-level data service, you'll see a constrained version of the same video."

Comment Re:Caps lock will be the end of unintended shoutin (Score 1) 586

Ugh, you're kidding, right? Clear where left arrow (backspace) should be? Backspace right next to (reduced in size) enter key?! No, the CoCo 3 layout is pretty awful. I like that they added a real control key (in the right place, but presumably only useful in OS-9 or with a terminal emulator), but the placement of some of the others is just wrong.

Even lacking a control key, the old CoCo 2 layout is better - and the Dragon keyboard is even nicer to type on: better quality keyboard, CoCo 2 layout.

Security

Submission + - Skype Reads BIOS, Motherboard Serial no.

pfp writes: Myria at pagetable.com, among others, noticed that Skype reads the machine's BIOS code on startup. This probably would've gone unnoticed if the operation didn't fail on 64-bit windows. From the post: "It's dumping your system BIOS, which usually includes your motherboard's serial number, and pipes it to the Skype application. I have no idea what they're using it for, or whether they send anything to their servers, but I bet whatever they're doing is no good given their track record. [...] If they hadn't been ignorant of Win64's lack of NTVDM, nobody would've noticed this happening."
Music

Ogg Vorbis Gaining Industry Support 235

An anonymous reader writes "While Ogg Vorbis format has not gained much adoption in music sales and portable players, it is not an unsupported format in the industry. Toy manufacturers (e.g. speaking dolls), voice warning systems, and reactive audio devices exploit Ogg Vorbis for its good quality at small bit-rates. As a sign of this, VLSI Solution Oy has just announced VS1000, the first 16 bits DSP device for playing Ogg Vorbis on low-power and high-volume products. Earlier Ogg Vorbis chips use 32 bits for decoding, which consumes more energy than a 16-bit device does. See the Xiph wiki page for a list of Ogg Vorbis chips."
Security

DNS Root Servers Attacked 311

liquidat and others wrote in with the news that the DNS Root Servers were attacked overnight. It looks like the F, I, and M servers felt the attack and recovered, whereas G (US Department of Defense) and L (ICANN) did less well. Some new botnet flexing its muscle perhaps? AP coverage is here.

Comment Re:GNU/Solaris? (Score 1) 213

That all looks about right.

Which is why the GNU system + the kernel of Solaris (SunOS) should, in the name of accurate representation, be named GNU/SunOS.

That really wasn't any sort of joke post, it was based on the fact that the Solaris kernel is, *actually*, called SunOS. Of course, I've not really been paying attention , so the official name for the Free release could have a totally different naming convention for all I know.

Slashdot Top Deals

On a paper submitted by a physicist colleague: "This isn't right. This isn't even wrong." -- Wolfgang Pauli

Working...