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Wikipedia

Submission + - Old Man Murray entry deleted from Wikipedia (rockpapershotgun.com) 1

Submitted by
shoptroll
shoptroll writes: "In what can be best described as an unfortunate interpretation of the "notability standards" at Wikipedia, Rock, Paper, Shotgun reports that the entry for Old Man Murray, once a mainstay of PC Gaming reviews and commentary, has been deleted. A sad day for gaming journalism everywhere."

Comment Re:Simple option? (Score 1) 360

by bigdanmoody (#34256472) Attached to: Is the Number Up For the Residential Phone Book?
Currently Yellowpagesoptout.com can show you a list of phone books delivered to your zip code, and provides a link to the opt-out form for each. It's not nearly as convenient as having a one-time all-inclusive opt-out, but I found it was well worth it not to have a new phone book appear on my doorstep every other month.

Comment Re:THey should house a server farm in it (Score 2, Informative) 239

by bigdanmoody (#33962558) Attached to: Boeing 747 Recycled Into a Private Residence
Aircraft are not air-tight. Compressed air is constantly pumped into the cabin, and a series of poppet valves allow the correct amount of air to escape to maintain a safe pressure level - this amount varies depending on altitude and how air-tight the rest of the fuselage is. The doors are sealed to minimize the amount of compressed air that needs to be pumped into the cabin, and for sound and temperature insulation.
Image

Magento 1.3 Sales Tactics Cookbook Screenshot-sm 60

Posted by samzenpus from the read-all-about-it dept.
Dmitry Dulepov writes "Magento is a very popular open source e-commerce platform. It was created by the company named Varien in 2007. Varien worked with osCommerce but it did not suit Varien's expanding requirements. After writing more and more changes to osCommerce, Varien finally wrote its own e-commerce software from scratch. It took Varien seven months in 2007 to publish the first public version of Magento." Read on for the rest of Dmitry's review.
Space

Supermassive Black Hole Is Thrown Out of Galaxy 167

Posted by samzenpus from the moving-to-better-quarters dept.
DarkKnightRadick writes "An undergrad student at the University of Utrecht, Marianne Heida, has found evidence of a supermassive black hole being tossed out of its galaxy. According to the article, the black hole — which has a mass equivalent to one billion suns — is possibly the culmination of two galaxies merging (or colliding, depending on how you like to look at it) and their black holes merging, creating one supermassive beast. The black hole was found using the Chandra Source Catalog (from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory). The direction of the expulsion is also possibly indicative of the direction of rotation of the two black holes as they circled each other before merging."

Comment Re:I don't know if this is true (Score 1) 233

by bigdanmoody (#32001232) Attached to: PowerPoint of Afghan War Strategy
I don't know about that. I was on a jury a few weeks ago, and when the prosecution pulled out the PowerPoint presentation, to me it felt incredibly patronizing. We had a pretty sharp group of jurors, and we all felt the prosecutor would have made her case much stronger by cutting the PowerPoint and instead providing more evidence to support her claims.
Space

Neptune May Have Eaten a Planet and Stolen Its Moon 145

Posted by CmdrTaco from the wakka-wakka-wakka dept.
jitendraharlalka noted a piece about the origins of Neptune. There is a theory now that it once ate a super-earth in the outer solar system, and kept its moon as some sort of macabre trophy to make sure that Mars and Venus didn't get any big ideas.
Image

Officers Lose 243 Homeland Security Guns Screenshot-sm 125

Posted by samzenpus from the they-were-right-here-a-second-ago dept.
In a screw up so big it could only be brought to you by the government or a famous athlete, 243 guns were lost by Homeland Security agencies between 2006 and 2008. 179 guns, were lost "because officers did not properly secure them," an inspector general report said. One of the worst examples of carelessness cites a customs officer who left a firearm in an idling vehicle in the parking lot of a convenience store. The vehicle was stolen while the officer was inside. "A local law enforcement officer later recovered the firearm from a suspected gang member and drug smuggler," the report said.
Government

Secret UK Plan To Appoint "Pirate Finder General" 332

Posted by Soulskill from the arrr-me-hearties dept.
mouthbeef writes "A source very close to the UK Labour government just called me to leak the fact that Secretary of State Lord Mandelson is trying to sneak a revision into the Digital Economy Bill that would give him and his successors the power to create future copyright law without debate. Mandelson goes on to explain that he wants this so he can create private copyright militias with investigatory and enforcement powers, and so he can create new copyright punishments as he sees fit (e.g., jail time, three strikes)."
Power

Why Is Linux Notebook Battery Life Still Poor? 907

Posted by timothy from the have-seen-the-same dept.
Ganty writes "I recently purchased a Lenovo W500 notebook, and after 'downgrading' to XP and creating a dual partition, I found that I had a battery life of nearly three hours using the long-life battery, at this point I was a happy camper because it means that I can watch a DVD during a flight. I then tried various Linux distributions and found the battery life under FOS to be very disappointing, with an average of 45 minutes before a warning message. After settling on Ubuntu I then spent three days trying various hardware tweaks but I only managed to increase the battery life to one and a half hours. Unwanted services have been disabled, laptop mode has been enabled, the dual core CPU reduces speed when idle and the hard drive spins down when not needed. Obviously Apple with their X86 hardware and BSD based OS have got it right because the MacBooks last for hours, and a stock install of MS Windows XP gives me three hours of life. Why is battery life on notebooks so poor when using Linux? Some have suggested disabling various hardware items such as bluetooth and running the screen at half brightness but XP doesn't require me to do this and still gives a reasonable battery life."
Spam

Verizon.net Finally Moving Email To Port 587 195

Posted by kdawson from the decade-late-and-a-megabuck-short dept.
The Washington Post's Security Fix blog is reporting that Verizon, long identified as the largest ISP source of spam, is moving to require use of the submission port, 587, in outbound mail — and thus to require authentication. While spammers may still be able to relay spam through zombies in Verizon's network, if the victims let their mail clients remember their authentication credentials, at least the zombies will be easily identifiable. Verizon pledges to clean up their zombie problem quickly. We'll see.

Comment Re:Reading Comprehension D- (Score 2, Informative) 332

by bigdanmoody (#26846067) Attached to: Post-Beta Windows 7 Build Leaked With New IE8

I know I shouldn't feed the troll, but this is one falsehood that I am really tired of hearing. Sorry to burst your bubble, but MS is *not* going to "push Win7 starter for the netbook market." Unlike you I actually have a source for my claim, http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windows7/archive/2009/02/04/a-closer-look-at-the-windows-7-skus.aspx .

The salient paragraph is toward the bottom, wherein he states, "Many of you have been asking about how to think about SKUs and very low-end notebook PCs or "Netbooks." All SKUs of Windows 7 will work on many of these devices, with Windows 7 Home Premium as the recommend SKU on small notebook PCs with sufficient hardware."
Operating Systems

Ubuntu Wipes Windows 7 In Benchmarks 781

Posted by timothy from the such-things-need-more-context-than-substance dept.
twitter writes "Recent and controversial benchmarks for Windows 7 leave an important question unanswered: 'Is it faster than GNU/Linux?' Here, at last, is a benchmark that pits Ubuntu, Vista and Windows 7 against each other on the same modern hardware. From install time to GUI efficiency, Ubuntu beats Windows and is often twice as fast. Where Windows 7 is competitive, the difference is something the average user would not notice. The average GNU/Linux user is now getting better absolute performance from their computer as well as better value than the average Windows user."

Comment Re:Cannot explode but can be used in cars? (Score 1) 603

by bigdanmoody (#26203771) Attached to: EEStor Issued a Patent For Its Supercapacitor

Perhaps this is just arguing semantics, but it is not correct to refer the the combustion event ignited by the spark plug as an explosion. It is a controlled burn of the fuel/air mixture. An engine's combustion chambers are carefully designed to burn the fuel/air mixture in a controlled fashion to extract maximum power from combustion. In a modern engine, the spark plug will fire before the piston is at TDC (top dead center) of the compression stroke, so that the relatively slow-burning fuel/air mixture has a chance to fully ignite before it's required to force the piston back down.

Detonation, or "knocking" is an uncontrolled burn, which as the name "detonation" implies, could be described as an explosion. It usually occurs due to a "hot spot" inside the cylinder which ignites the fuel/air mixture prior to the spark plug firing. Hot spots can be caused by many things, but from what I have seen carbon buildup is the most common. Running a higher-octane fuel will help, since the fuel is more resistant to being ignited, but it's only masking the underlying problem.

IAAFCAM (I Am An FAA Certificated A&P Mechanic).

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