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What SOPA means for business & innovation (infographic)
Southern writes "Several tech companies and online communities have come out against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), a recently proposed piece of legislation that many feel will bring unnecessary censorship to the web. But much less attention has been given to how the bill will affect the overall landscape of business and innovation.
The bill, introduced by Rep. Lamar Smith in late October, gives both the U.S. government and copyright holders the authority to seek court orders against websites associated with infringing, pirating and/or counterfeiting intellectual property. So for example, a website that provides a collection of links to sites that illegally stream copyrighted video content could get shut down and taken to court under SOPA, despite the fact that the site isn’t streaming the content itself.
If the government had the sole responsibility of policing websites that violated copyrighted intellectual property, it would be a much different scenario. However, because the copyright holders also get to enforce the law (under SOPA), it allows them to push around anyone who may compete with them under the guise of upholding the law. Giant media companies — music labels, television networks and movie studios in particular — could easily take advantage of this situation.
Posted by Raven on Friday, January 13, 2012 @ 16:28:42 EST (51 reads) ( | Score: 0)
Connection Strings Explained
Southern writes "Connection strings can be a bit obscure and is not often defined in a consistent way. This article straighten things out and sheds some light on how connection strings are used to connect an application to a data source.
Introduction
When your application connects to a database or a data file you let ADO or ADO.Net utilize a provider to do the job for you. The connection string contains the information that the provider need to know to be able to establish a connection to the database or the data file.
Because there are different providers and each providers have multiple ways to make a connection there are many different ways to write a connection string. It's like the address when sending a regular mail. Depending on the origin and destination and who is going to make the transport you need to write down the address in different ways.
Posted by Raven on Thursday, November 10, 2011 @ 01:33:05 EST (294 reads) ( | Score: 0)
History Of Computers in General
papamike writes "A good friend of mine, Jorge Noon-ya, an IT genius, sent me the following, very interesting web link.
http://smithsonian.yahoo.com/index.html
For those of you who are interested, you will get a listing of dates and events as they occurred and as they relate to the world of computers. Excellent website."
Posted by Raven on Friday, July 29, 2011 @ 23:28:20 EDT (836 reads) ( | Score: 0)
HTML Goodies
papamike writes "I really can't comment on this website other than to say that it is one site everyone should check out. "HTML Goodies" literally has just about any topic you would ever want to know more about whether you're a designer or not."
Posted by Raven on Wednesday, June 22, 2011 @ 18:01:34 EDT (1661 reads) ( | Score: 0)
Posted by Raven on Monday, February 14, 2011 @ 14:46:49 EST (1154 reads) ( | Score: 0)
There you are, Raven
Southern writes "A large-scale scan of the top million web sites (per Alexa traffic data) was performed in early 2010 using the Nmap Security Scanner and its scripting engine.
The area of each icon is proportional to the sum of the reach of all sites using that icon. When both a bare domain name and its "www." counterpart used the same icon, only one of them was counted. The smallest icons--those corresponding to sites with approximately 0.0001% reach--are scaled to 16x16 pixels. The largest icon (Google) is 11,936 x 11,936 pixels, and the whole diagram is 37,440 x 37,440. Since your web browser would choke on that, we have created the interactive viewer below (click and drag to pan, double-click to zoom, or type in a site name to go right to it).
Online lookup : The icon is at (2.327, 10.847) and is 48 × 48 pixels.
NMAP"
Posted by Raven on Sunday, September 05, 2010 @ 15:18:44 EDT (1207 reads) ( | Score: 0)
Glasnost: Test if your ISP is shaping your traffic
Southern writes "The goal of the Glasnost project is to make ISPs' traffic shaping policies transparent to their customers. To this end, we designed Glasnost tests that enable you to check whether traffic from your applications is being rate-limited (i.e., throttled) or blocked.
Glasnost tests work by measuring and comparing the performance of different application flows between your host and our measurement servers. The tests can detect traffic shaping in both upstream and downstream directions separately. The tests can also detect whether application flows are shaped based on their port numbers or their packets' payload.
more: Glasnost"
Posted by Palbin on Monday, August 16, 2010 @ 19:23:41 EDT (3920 reads) ( | Score: 0)
What enterprise still uses IE 6? Try Intel
Internet Explorer 6 is a relic, but corporations continue to cling to it. At this point, IE 6 in the enterprise is common, but it’s nonetheless surprising when Intel—Microsoft’s long-time partner—is still using the ancient browser.
In a blog post walking through its implementation of Windows 7, Intel talked a lot about the “heavy lifting” involved with moving from XP to Windows 7.
Turns out the browser is part of the heavy lifting.
Posted by Raven on Tuesday, March 02, 2010 @ 01:22:18 EST (898 reads) ( | Score: 0)
Expose: Why we don't trust Devil Mountain Software (and neither should you)
From InfoWorld Editor in Chief Eric Knorr:
"On Friday, Feb. 19, we discovered that one of our contributors, Randall C. Kennedy, had been misrepresenting himself to other media organizations as Craig Barth, CTO of Devil Mountain Software (aka exo.performance.network), in interviews for a number of stories regarding Windows and other Microsoft software topics. Devil Mountain Software is a business Kennedy established that specializes in the analysis of Windows performance data. There is no Craig Barth, and Kennedy has stated that this fabrication was a misguided effort to separate himself (or more accurately, his InfoWorld blogger persona) from his Devil Mountain Software business.
Integrity and honesty are core to InfoWorld’s mission of service to IT professionals, and we view Kennedy’s actions as a serious breach of trust. As a result, he will no longer be a contributor to InfoWorld, and we have removed his blog from this site.
Over the past 10 years, Kennedy has contributed valuable information on Windows performance and other technical issues to InfoWorld and its readers — insight and analysis we still believe to be accurate and reliable. Based on our discovery, however, we cannot continue our relationship with Kennedy. Questions about this matter may be directed to Kennedy at rck@xpnet.com. We apologize to our readers."