Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:This guy is dumb (Score 0) 398

Ugh. Exactly...

Cross-posting my comment I made over there:

"Why would I buy a laptop or a PC for my staff ever again I could buy them a single tablet – or even pocket sized phone – that just connects to a dock or cable and viola - it’s now a fully fledged PC, running all my corporate software, legacy or otherwise on a full sized monitor with keyboard and mouse."

Because Windows RT (that is: the tablet version of Windows 8, which is most certainly not the same thing as Windows Mobile) - does NOT run "legacy" applications. It's ARM only, which means any Win32 or Win64 application just simply won't execute.

So, certainly feel free to buy Windows RT tablets, and Windows 8 phones - but good luck using them as desktop replacements unless all your applications are Metro applications from the Microsoft store.

Perhaps you need to do a little more research first.

Comment As pointed out in several other places... (Score 5, Informative) 66

There is no evidence Twitter themselves were "hacked".
This is likely the password file from a spambot c&c network.

All* the twitter accounts shown follow the same naming and password rules. This is not typical of how a random selection of users would set up their account.
In addition all/most of these accounts are or were suspended (typically this is for spam).

* I may have missed one, but given several others point out the same...

Ref: Reddit: 55.000+ Twitter usernames and passwords leaked

Comment Git (Score 5, Insightful) 150

"But isn't Git easy to install and use"
Yes, for certain users and environments.
In my experience, The folks who use Mercurial are more likely to be on Windows.

Mercurial tooling isn't as polished as the Subversion equivalents, but it's lightyears ahead of the Git tooling.

I'd be happy enough to pay for good Git tooling on Windows, but there doesn't appear to be a way to do so. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Comment Re:What's the story? (Score 1) 123

All chicken breasts will need to be appropriately covered before being allowed on the intertubes.
Naked chicken breasts will be blocked unless an appropriate 'Proof of Age' mechanism is in place.

Anyone having pictures of naked chicken breasts from a chicken under the age of 18 will be reported to the AFP.

Comment Re:How is using so many VMs more efficient? (Score 1) 122

We're a dev shop. Having a VM farm has saved our IT guys so much time and money.
We used to buy dedicated boxes - some projects would get their own, most would share on some conglomerate box. Weird shit happened, stuff would never get uninstalled after a project was over, and people would be tripping over each other all the time (One person needs to reboot a box, the other was trying to debug some arcane issue). In short: a nightmare.

Now, we buy a AUD$6k box from $brand, hook it up to our SAN, and run anywhere up to 24 VMs on that one box at once.
Each project gets one VM, possibly two or three if we need to simulate complex setups, or need multiple concurrent environments. If one project needs to do something resource heavy like do load testing, we can allocate a bunch more resources, set up a virtual network with a series of load-testing clients on a 10GbE network, and have at it usually without affecting other projects.

At the end of a project, we shut the VMs down for that project, and eventually archive them off. If a client comes back needing changes - that VM can be back online within 15 minutes. It's still in the same state as when we last worked on the project - its a bit more difficult to do that with physical hardware.

Our internal 'production' servers (email, source control, wiki, intranet, etc) are all virtualised too - although they get their own dedicated hardware pool where appropriate.

Backups are as simple as snapshotting the SAN and exporting the backup to tape. Push one button, and in a few hours go to the server room to pick up tapes. Having a huge number of boxes needing to run the backups themselves takes longer, and is generally more error prone.

Even for client production environments we recommend clients use Virtualisation. Most of our clients don't need bare metal performance, and it's generally better (cheaper, faster throughput) to simply clone an existing machine and load-balance the VMs, than go to bare-metal OS+app installs.

If something weird goes on with the production instance that we can't reproduce - we get snapshots sent over.

I'm not sure we could go back to pre-virtualisation now.

Comment Re:Well Dah (Score 1) 78

It wasn't about him using Telstra equipment, time, or resouces (since he didn't - or so he claims).

It was that people assumed just because he worked for Telstra, that his opinions and mocking of Stephen Conroy were somehow planned by Telstra.

Google

Google Search Flagging Everything As Potentially Harmful 407

dowlingw writes "It looks like for the moment at least, all Google results are failing the malware checks and being listed with a warning 'This site may harm your computer,' including all pages from Google themselves. Users trying to visit pages at search results will only be able to proceed via manual manipulation of the search result link to remove the Google click-through (which is also broken). Until Google fixes this bug, it looks Google web search is useless." Update: 01/31 at 15:16 GMT by SS: The problem now appears to be fixed.
Update: 01/31 at 22:01 GMT by KD : Google has now posted an explanation, apologizing and taking responsibility for the "human error" that led to the problem.
Censorship

Blogger.com Banned In Turkey 262

petermp writes "A Turkish court has blocked access to the popular blog hosting service Blogger (Blogger.com and Blogspot.com, owned by Google), since Friday, October 24th, 2008. According to BasBasBas.com, a Dutch blogger based in Istanbul, who alerted readers about the issue: 'It is suspected that the reason for this has something to do with Adnan Oktar, by some considered the leading Muslim advocate for creationism, who has in the past managed to get Wordpress, Google Groups, as well as Richard Dawkins' website [banned].'"

Comment Re:Computer systems need security audits. (Score 5, Insightful) 143

While GET does in practice change stuff on the server, the idea is that it should be repeatable without adverse effect.

So, calling GET on a document might increase a hit counter, or update some other information - having me repeatedly call that function again should be safe.

However using GET for Updating Account Details, or Moving money (just some purely /random/ examples) is just plain bad design.

The example of signing GET requests is useful in some situations, but *mostly* not necessary if the design is right.

Slashdot Top Deals

"A mind is a terrible thing to have leaking out your ears." -- The League of Sadistic Telepaths

Working...