taskforce - Slashdot User

Submission + - How do we deal with a 'Facebook apocalypse'? (wordpress.com) 2

Submitted by taskforce on Monday May 07, 2012 @05:54AM

taskforce writes: There are good reasons to think a web services like Facebook won't be around forever. If Facebook ever were to go down there would be potentially huge costs to its users. We can all take individual steps to protect our data and social network, but is there anything we can do to our economy to mitigate the costs of the failure of these services? The Red Rock looks at the role open source, open standards, consumer cooperatives, and enterprise reform can play. The author concludes that all is not lost, and that there's a lot we can do to reduce both the cost and frequency of failure.

Comment Re:Seven hours from a wall outlet (Score 1) 235

by taskforce on Monday June 16, 2008 @06:35AM (#23808041) Attached to: Early Look At ASUS Eee PC 901 With Intel Atom CPU

Or at least one of those little bags of peanuts which they give you on the plane.

Feed Transcend touts ExpressCard Flash disk (theregister.com)

From feed by registerfeed on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @04:52AM

Use for next-gen PCMCIA slot found at last

Want to do something useful with that unused ExpressCard 34 slot sitting there in your laptop? How about turning it into a Flash-based solid-state disk?

Submission + - Amazon Patents Use of Humans to Assist Computers

Submitted by

theodp

on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @04:42AM

theodp writes: "Amazon's latest patent, the Hybrid Machine/Human Computing Arrangement, reads like scary Sci-Fi, with claims covering the use of humans 'of college educated, at most high school educated, at most elementary school educated, and not formally educated' to perform subtasks dispatched by a computer. From the patent: 'For examples, the task on hand requires French speaking humans, and Task Server has requested that each subtask be performed by at least 10 humans with a past accuracy record of at least 90%.' Yikes."

Feed Regenerative house to grace Greece mountainside (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @04:32AM

Filed under: Household

You've got plenty of options when it comes to healing your own body, but patching up your domicile usually requires days of back-breaking labor and gobs of cash to boot. Thankfully, that awful process could be nearing its end, as a £9.5 million ($18.64 million) European Union-funded project sets out to develop self-healing walls for your average home. The idea is to develop "special walls for the house that contain nano polymer particles, which will turn into a liquid when squeezed under pressure, flow into the cracks, and then harden to form a solid material." The technology would prove quite useful in areas where earthquakes are prominent, and in an effort to test things out before shoving it out to contractors everywhere, a swank villa is being erected on a Greece mountainside to collect information. The house's walls will be built from "novel load bearing steel frames and high-strength gypsum board," but more importantly, they will contain a smorgasbord of wireless sensors and RFID tags meant to collect, store, and disseminate critical data regarding "any stresses and vibrations, temperature, humidity, and gas levels." Now, who's the lucky lad(s) that get to call this their home research dwelling?

[Via Physorg]

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD A new documentary series. Be part of the transformation as it happens in real-time

Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Feed ICANN wants immunity from U.S. law like the International Red Cross (com.com)

From feed by cnetfeed on Tuesday April 03, 2007 @03:32AM

Blog: The closest thing the Internet has to a governing body seems to want the same kind of immunity from national laws that the International...

One Laptop Per Child Security Spec Released 253

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wednesday February 07, 2007 @06:41PM from the no-school-like-the-old-school dept.

juwiley writes "The One Laptop Per Child project has released information about its advanced security platform called Bitfrost. Could children with a $100 laptop end up with a better security infrastructure than executives using $5000 laptops powered by Vista? 'What's deeply troubling — almost unbelievable — about [Unix style permissions] is that they've remained virtually the only real control mechanism that a user has over her personal documents today...In 1971, this might have been acceptable...We have set out to create a system that is both drastically more secure and provides drastically more usable security than any mainstream system currently on the market.'"

Submission + - DVD jon on Job's "give up DRM if I could"

Submitted by

Whiney Mac Fanboy

on Wednesday February 07, 2007 @05:16PM

Whiney Mac Fanboy writes: ""Dvd" Jon Johansen has posted several sceptical blog entries reacting to Steve Job's blog posting about DRM. One post questions Job's misuse of statistics that attempts to prove consumers aren't tied to iPods through ITMS.

Many iPod owners have never bought anything from the iTunes Store. Some have bought hundreds of songs. Some have bought thousands. At the 2004 Macworld Expo, Steve revealed that one customer had bought $29,500 worth of music.
The other question's the DRM-free in a heartbeat claim. There are apparantly, many Indie artists who would love to sell DRM-free music on iTunes, but Apple will not allow them.

It should not take Apple's iTunes team more than 2-3 days to implement a solution for not wrapping content with FairPlay when the content owner does not mandate DRM. This could be done in a completely transparent way and would not be confusing to the users.
"

Slashdot Top Deals