Several readers sent word that we’re now less than six months away from the end of support for Windows Server 2003. Though the operating system’s usage peaked in 2009, it still runs on millions of machines, and many IT departments are just now starting to look at replacements. Although Microsoft publishes support deadlines long in advance — and has been beating the drum to dump Server 2003 for months — it’s not unusual for customers to hang on too long. Last year, as Windows XP neared its final days of support, there were still huge numbers of systems running the aged OS. Companies lined up to pay Microsoft for extended support contracts and PC sales stabilized in part because enterprises bought new replacement machines. Problems replacing Windows Server 2003 may appear similar at first glance, but they’re not: Servers are critical to a business because of the applications that run on them, which may have to be rewritten or replaced. [In many cases, legacy applications are the sole reason for the continued use of Server 2003.] Those applications may themselves be unsupported at this point, the company that built them may be out of business or the in-house development team may have been disbanded. Any of those scenarios would make it difficult or even impossible to update the applications’ code to run on a newer version of Windows Server. Complicating any move is the fact that many of those applications are 32-bit — and have been kept on Windows Server 2003 for that reason — and while Windows Server 2012 R2 offers a compatibility mode to run such applications, it’s not foolproof. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Cheap, reliable, and strong, the rubber band is one of the world’s most ubiquitous products. It holds papers together, prevents long hair from falling in a face, acts as a reminder around a wrist, is a playful weapon in a pinch, and provides a way to easily castrating baby male livestock … While rubber itself has been around for centuries, rubber bands were only officially patented less than two centuries ago. Here now is a brief history of the humble, yet incredibly useful, rubber band. Read more… 
sciencehabit writes with this excerpt from Science Insider: New analyses of the hundreds of thousands of technical manuscripts submitted to arXiv, the repository of digital preprint articles, are offering some intriguing insights into the consequences — and geography — of scientific plagiarism. It appears that copying text from other papers is more common in some nations than others, but the outcome is generally the same for authors who copy extensively: Their papers don’t get cited much. The system attempts to rule out certain kinds of innocent copying: “It’s a fairly sophisticated machine learning logistic classifier, ” says arXiv founder Paul Ginsparg, a physicist at Cornell University. “It has special ways of detecting block quotes, italicized text, text in quotation marks, as well statements of mathematical theorems, to avoid false positives.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
You’ve heard it a lot, but it bears repeating: you need to back up your computer , because your hard drive will fail one day. Beyond those file backups, though, are many other things we need to have a backup for—ranging from work and finances to personal needs. Read more…