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Comment Learning to wait (Score 5, Interesting) 256

by petehead (#25680223) Attached to: How To Cut In Line and Not Get Caught
I was at Disneyland a couple of weeks ago and a woman was pushing through people in the Pirates line with her ~4 year old son. We let her go by because it looked like they were rejoining someone up front. Then we heard the woman say to a group in front of us, "Sorry, he doesn't know how to wait". Well, how the hell is he going to learn?

Comment Re:Stresstest (Score 1) 1486

by petehead (#25679695) Attached to: Obama Launches Change.gov

Well posting this on slashdot should ensure that their servers get a proper stress-test.

They should know what they're in for. From the Newsweek article, How He Did It: "At the end of August, as Hurricane Gustav threatened the coast of Texas, the Obama campaign called the Red Cross to say it would be routing donations to it via the Red Cross home page. Get your servers ready--our guys can be pretty nuts, Team Obama said. Sure, sure, whatever, the Red Cross responded. We've been through 9/11, Katrina, we can handle it. The surge of Obama dollars crashed the Red Cross Web site in less than 15 minutes."
Image

How To Cut In Line and Not Get Caught Screenshot-sm 256

Posted by samzenpus from the no-cuts dept.
ewenc writes "A psychology study of hundreds of people waiting for front-row access to U2 concerts points to the best ways to cut in line and not get caught. 'Super-fans' are most irked by queue-jumpers. People were equally peeved whether someone cut in front or behind, and cutters who jumped beside a friend were less likely to attract scorn."
Government

Obama Launches Change.gov 1486

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the transparency-in-government-would-be-great dept.
mallumax writes "Obama has launched Change.gov. According to the site 'Change.gov provides resources to better understand the transition process and the decisions being made as part of it. It also offers an opportunity to be heard about the challenges our country faces and your ideas for tackling them. The Obama Administration will reflect an essential lesson from the success of the Obama campaign: that people united around a common purpose can achieve great things.' The site is extensive and contains Obama's agenda for economy and education among many others. They first define the problem and then lay out the plan. Everything is in simple English without a trace of Washington-speak. The site also has details about the transition. According to many sources, Obama's transition efforts started months ago. The copyright for the content is held by 'Obama-Biden Transition Project, a 501c(4) organization'."
Security

Old Malware Tricks Still Defeat Most AV Scanners 122

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the losing-the-arms-race dept.
SkiifGeek writes "A year ago Didier Stevens discovered that padding IE malware with 0x00 bytes would happily slip past most of the scanners in use at VirusTotal.com. Revisiting his earlier discovery, Didier found that detection on his initial samples had improved, but not by much. For all the talk of AV companies moving away from signature based detection to heuristics, it is painfully obvious that not many of the tested engines can successfully handle such a simple and well known obfuscation method and the best of those that can detect the obfuscation can only detect it as a generic malware type. At least the scanning engines that can detect the presence of malware with the obfuscation aren't trying to claim each differential as a new variant."
Medicine

Stretching Before Exercising Weakens Muscles 339

Posted by kdawson from the everything-you-know-is-wrong dept.
Khemisty writes "Back in grade school you were probably taught the importance of warm-up exercises, and it's likely you've continued with pretty much the same routine ever since. Science, however, has moved on. Researchers now believe that some of the more entrenched elements of many athletes' warm-up regimens are not only a waste of time but are actually bad for you. The old presumption that holding a stretch for 20 to 30 seconds — known as static stretching — primes muscles for a workout is dead wrong. It actually weakens them. In a recent study conducted at the University of Nevada, athletes generated less force from their leg muscles after static stretching than they did after not stretching at all. Other studies have found that this stretching decreases muscle strength by as much as 30 percent. Also, stretching one leg's muscles can reduce strength in the other leg as well, probably because the central nervous system rebels against the movements."
Space

First Images From 50-km Enceladus Flyby 95

Posted by kdawson from the over-the-shoulder-spinning dept.
CheshireCatCO writes "The first pictures from yesterday's flyby of Enceladus are now public. At closest approach, Cassini was set spinning to cancel out the apparent motion of Enceladus so as to capture unsmeared images during the 40,000-mph flyby. Although it wasn't clear that this would work (errors in pointing could easily have made the cameras miss their targets), the maneuver panned out beautifully, producing spectacular images of the surface. Images show the 'tiger stripes' at the south pole, including at least one location that has been identified as a source of a jet, as well as considerable vertical relief, easily visible thanks to the low sun-angle near the south pole at present. Processed, enhanced images should follow shortly."
Data Storage

How To Use a Terabyte of RAM 424

Posted by kdawson from the every-factor-of-25-helps dept.
Spuddly writes with links to Daniel Philips and his work on the Ramback patch, and an analysis of it by Jonathan Corbet up on LWN. The experimental new design for Linux's virtual memory system would turn a large amount of system RAM into a fast RAM disk with automatic sync to magnetic media. We haven't yet reached a point where systems, even high-end boxes, come with a terabyte of installed memory, but perhaps it's not too soon to start thinking about how to handle that much memory.
Transportation

New X-Prize for Fuel Efficient Cars Announced 371

Posted by Zonk from the it's-like-the-robot-one-but-with-less-programming dept.
miowpurr writes "A new X-Prize for ultra fuel efficient cars has been announced. The winning car must 'carry four or more passengers and have climate control, an audio system and 10 cubic feet of cargo space. They also must have four or more wheels, hit 60 miles per hour in less than 12 seconds and have a minimum top speed of 100 miles per hour and a range of 200 miles. Those that qualify will race their vehicles in cross-country races in 2009 and 2010 that will combine speed, distance, urban driving and overall performance.'"
Technology

Silent Microchip 'Fan' Has No Moving Parts 136

Posted by samzenpus from the cool-off dept.
Stony Stevenson writes "Researchers in the US have developed a microchip fan with no moving parts that operates silently and generates enough wind to cool a laptop computer. The solid-state fan, developed with support from the US National Science Foundation (NSF), is touted as the most powerful and energy efficient fan of its size. The device produces three times the flow rate of a typical small mechanical fan and is one-fourth the size. The technology has the power to cool a 25W chip with a device smaller than one cubic-cm and can someday be integrated into silicon to make self-cooling chips, according to the researchers."
Cellphones

Submission + - HTC Users Claim Underperforming Hardware

Submitted by Pete
Pete writes: Some HTC users have set up a website claiming that HTC devices which use the Qualcomm MSM7200 and MSM7500 chipsets, including the TyTn II (aka AT&T Tilt) and Sprint Touch, are underperforming due to lack of drivers for the ATI Imageon co-processor. They claim that it is not simply sour grapes about their purchases and have cited as evidence a Youtube video showing a TomTom comparison in which the TyTn II appears to perform worse than the much older HTC Magician. While I doubt it, they claim that they will proceed with a class action lawsuit against HTC if the problems are not rectified. The Register and The Inquirer are among those running stories which mention that the group has established a $3000 reward for someone that fixes the issues.

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