Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Don't use bootcamp, but I use Fusion (Score -1, Troll) 396

by JasonBee (#28971289) Attached to: Windows Drains MacBook's Battery; Who's To Blame?

That just might make up for all the years tha MS crippled QuickTime on windows, throwing up all kinds of fake and mishandled errors. I still get the "QuickTime sucks" line from many IT pros in my workplace despite there being no reasonable method to scrub through video frame by frame in WMV formats.

But yes...it's a sad tactic if it turns out to be so.

Comment Re:What about... (Score 1) 325

by JasonBee (#28956699) Attached to: Expedition To Explore an Alaska-Sized Plastic "Island"
I'm treading on the absurd but your comment stood out.

Tools you suggest in order of appearance:

> 1 humongous ship (It could just be used once in awhile)
> smaller boats (to the coast) ...btw "to the coast is still ~1000km
> the hawaiian volcanos (I know it might be a bit costly)
> a military helicopter (the ones without a bottom)

Wow....seriously? You are a closeted comedy writer BTW.

There is no landfill on the planet that could hold all of this debris. Just how big of a boat were you positing we'd use? Don't get me started on airlifting.

The garbage comes from the continental runoff of every landmass that bounds the pacific. That's a lot of material accumulated over many decades. I know the *bits* seem small but you're talking some seriously gigantic masses when the material is aggregated...not to mention so finely dispersed that the fineness of a net or sieve required to scoop up the material would ensnare all of the plankton and fish along with it.

Essentially we'd have to denude the Pacific ocean of life wherever we're collecting this material. There would be no food left for the fish or whales after we did the cleanup. Even if we could conceivably find a way to build a, oh I don't know, 20-30 km long/wide ship to *try* to tackle the problem. Maybe if we have Beowulf cluster of them.

Big numbers people. Water flows.
Space

Fewer Than 10 ET Civilizations In Our Galaxy? 642

Posted by kdawson from the black-rectangles dept.
Al writes "The Fermi Paradox focuses on the existence of advanced civilizations elsewhere in the galaxy. If these civilizations are out there — and many analyses suggest the galaxy should be teeming with life — why haven't we seen them? Carlos Cotta and Álvaro Morales from the University of Malaga in Spain investigate another angle by considering the speed at which a sufficiently advanced civilization could colonize the galaxy. Various analyses suggest that using spacecraft that travel at a tenth of the speed of light, the colonization wavefront could take some 50 million years to sweep the galaxy. Others have calculated that it may be closer to 13 billion years, which may explain ET's absence. Cotta and Morales study how automated probes sent ahead of the colonization could explore the galaxy. If these probes left evidence of a visit that lasts for 100 million years, then there can be no more than about 10 civilizations out there."
Space

Alien Comet May Have Infiltrated the Solar System 208

Posted by kdawson from the starseed-lure dept.
New Scientist has a piece about Comet Machholz 1, whose uncommon molecular composition suggests, but does not prove, that it may be an interloper from another star system. "Comet Machholz 1 isn't like other comets. David Schleicher of the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, measured the chemical makeup of 150 comets, and found that they all had similar levels of the chemical cyanogen (CN) except for Machholz 1, which has less than 1.5% of the normal level. Along with some other comets, it is also low on the molecules carbon-2 and carbon-3."
Portables

"Netbooks" Move Up In Notebook Rankings 139

Posted by kdawson from the changing-mix dept.
Ian Lamont writes "For the first time, a list of popular notebook reviews shows three 'netbooks' in the top 10. The netbooks use Intel's Atom processor. Notebookreview.com's editor says there has never been more than one netbook in its monthly ratings. The reason for the netbooks' sudden popularity no doubt relates to the price and basic functionality, but there's a catch. Despite calling Atom a 'high-performance' chip, Intel cautions people not to confuse netbooks with notebooks, as netbooks will be unable to take on video editing or other processor-intensive tasks. This leads to the question of how netbooks will be able to handle demanding Web apps — or whether Web apps will have to be slimmed down to accommodate millions of netbook owners."
Microsoft

Microsoft Bids To Take Over Open Document Format 256

Posted by kdawson from the pinching-the-oxygen-feed dept.
what about sends in a Groklaw alert warning that, by PJ's reading, Microsoft may be trying to take over ODF via a stacked SC 34 committee. The article lists the attendees at an SC 34 meeting in July and gives their affiliations, which the official meeting materials do not. (The attendees of the October 1 meeting, which generated a takeover proposal to OASIS, are not known in full.) "Why do I say Microsoft, when this is SC 34? Look at this ... list of participants in the July meeting in Japan of the SC 34 committee. The committee membership is so tilted by Microsoft employees and such, if it were a boat, it would capsize ... Of the 19 attendees, 8 are outright Microsoft employees or consultants, and 2 of them are Ecma TC45 members. So 10 out of 19 are directly controlled by Microsoft/Ecma ... [I]f the takeover were to succeed, SC 34 would get to maintain ODF as well as Microsoft's competing parody 'standard,' OOXML. How totally smooth and shark-like. Under the guise of 'synchronized maintenance,' without which they claim SC 34 can't fulfill its responsibilities, they get control of everything." A related submission from David Gerard points out that BoycottNovell has leaked the ISO OOXML documents, which ISO has kept behind passwords.
Businesses

Best Practices For Process Documentation? 370

Posted by kdawson from the trusting-it-to-the-little-i dept.
jollyreaper writes "I have a nice new IT job with a non-profit. They are a growing organization and management has realized that they need to bring their way of doing business up to a professional level. Several years back, their IT department was still operated like it was in a home office — fine when you're dealing with three people, not so good when there's over a hundred users. IT got its act together and is now running professionally and efficiently. The rest of the organization is a bit more chaotic and management wants to change that. One of the worst problems is a lack of process documentation. All knowledge is passed down via an oral tradition. Someone gets hit by a bus and that knowledge is lost forevermore. Now I know what I've seen in the past. There's the big-binder-of-crap-no-one-reads method, usually used in conjunction with nobody-updates-this-crap-so-it's-useless-anyway approach. I've been hearing good things about company wikis, and mixed reviews about Sharepoint and its intranet capabilities. And yes, I know that this is all a waste of time if there's no follow-through from management. But assuming that the required support is there, how do you guys do process documentation?"
Portables

Replacing a Thinkpad? 902

Posted by kdawson from the swimming-against-the-race-to-the-bottom dept.
An anonymous reader writes "As a very happy Thinkpad T20 user (still working after 7 years), I always planned on replacing it with another Thinkpad T-series. However, Thinkpads are now produced by Lenovo, a Chinese company, and I can't quite bear to buy Chinese while the Burmese military are shooting at monks with the Chinese Government as their biggest backer. Maybe this is silly, as whatever I buy is likely to be made (at least in part) in China... but still, what are my options for something as well built as the Thinkpad T-series?"

Feed Engadget: Printed organic RFID circuits set to collect statistical data (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed

Filed under: Wireless

In order to truly judge the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of a newfangled technology, we all know trial by fire is the only way to go. Hence, it follows logic that about 1,000 printed organic RFID tickets will be tested at the Organic Electronics Conference this September in Frankfurt, Germany. The badges will be converted by Bartsch and are "set to be used to monitor the flow of attendees during the two-day conference and exhibition." Deemed the "first ever printed, low-cost organic tickets," these devices will be trialed in order to judge their data collecting abilities and to show whether or not these would be good candidates for use in "public transportation and logistics" applications. So, for those of you heading over to this here event, make sure you're packin' some sort of RFID jammer when waltzing through the door -- you know, just to give these newb tags an unexpected challenge on their first day at work.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

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

Who Killed the Webmaster? 334

Posted by kdawson from the smoking-guns dept.
XorNand writes "With the explosive growth of the Web in the previous decade, many predicted the birth of a new, well-paying, and in-demand profession: the Webmaster. Yet in 2007, this person has somehow vanished; even the term is scarcely mentioned. What happened? A decade later I'm left wondering: Who killed the Webmaster?"
Power

The Replacement For the Battery? 318

Posted by kdawson from the charge-it dept.
jackd writes "Great article in Technology Review, bordering on 'too good to be true,' about a small company in Texas that is developing the replacement for the electrochemical battery. The device is a kind of hybrid battery-ultracapacitor based on barium-titanate powders. Quoting: 'The company boldly claims that its system... will dramatically outperform the best lithium-ion batteries on the market in terms of energy density, price, charge time, and safety... The implications are enormous and, for many, unbelievable. Such a breakthrough has the potential to radically transform a transportation sector already flirting with an electric renaissance.'"

Slashdot Top Deals

Make sure your code does nothing gracefully.

Close