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Submission + - Physicists claim to have broken the speed of light

Submitted by
bain
bain writes: "The Telegraph report that two German physicists; Dr Gunter Nimtz and Dr Alfons Stahlhofen of the University of Koblenz, claim to have broken the speed of light by 'conducting an experiment in which microwave photons — energetic packets of light — travelled "instantaneously" between a pair of prisms that had been moved up to 3ft apart.' Since this goes against Einstein's special theory of relativity, you can expect a lot of people to dismiss this as rubbish."
Security

Submission + - User ID's

Submitted by inf0rmer
inf0rmer writes: I work for a company that has grown rapidly over the past 5 years, and is now starting to run out of ID's to assign to new people who are being hired.

Employee Number
Each employee has a unique identifier assigned to them which started at ID# 1 and is now at around 30,000. When a person leaves the company the number is not re-used, so in reality we have less then 30,000 employees. We are not running out of this number.

EmployeeID
Each employee also has an identifier assigned to them across the technology domain, which is in effect their login ID. These are 6 characters long, the first three of which signify what sort of user they are, and the last three represents the employee's initials. This is the problem area.

Examples of valid usernames for our company (ABC Corp) could be:

+ ABCMJS — User account belonging to Mary Jane Smith
+ ABCJ9B — User account belonging to John Brown (digit 9 generated randomly to differentiate from other people with the name John Doe)
+ ADMWPS — Adminsitrator account belonging to William Patrick Smith
+ TST123 — Test account used for development

Generally speaking, everyone has ABC in the front of their Login ID (and in some cases this is hard-coded in various applications; another problem altogether). We now have so many employees that we are running out of Employee ID's and an impact study has to be performed to see what systems will be affected if we were to change the format. We could use the Employee Number as the identifier, or a randomly generated number of some length, but after scouring Butler and Gartner as well a number of other reputable sites I could not find any indication of what is the best way forward.

Some people believe that the Employee ID should be reflective of their name (maryjanesmith), and some do not (8293489) — I believe there are merits for both; so, what format Employee ID would you use and why?

+ Random number, or alpha-numeric
+ Sequential Employee Number
+ Firstname+LastName
+ Or something else?
NASA

Submission + - Shuttle Endeavour to be launched today

Submitted by
Klaidas
Klaidas writes: "NASA reports that on the morning before the scheduled liftoff of Space Shuttle Endeavour on the STS-118 mission, launch officials confirmed once again that the countdown is continuing as planned and no issues have surfaced.
On Monday night, workers finished loading the reactants for the orbiter's three power-producing fuel cells. Checks of the space shuttle main engine's avionics and pneumatic systems are planned today, along with inspections of the external tank, activation of ground support equipment, and crew equipment stowage in the crew module. Launch remains on target for Aug. 8 at 6:36 p.m. EDT"
Operating Systems

Submission + - fallacy of function within Linux systems

Submitted by
Gearoid_Murphy
Gearoid_Murphy writes: "I am an admin for a beowulf processing cluster. Time and again, I am struck by the fragmented nature of the functions of these systems. There is never a coherent strategy for providing a specific function, take authentication, for example. We currently maintain several seperate indpendent systems for controlling access on authentication, one for wireless access, one for firehol trusted networks, one for nfs, a set of netgroups, nssswitch configs and pam configs. Many of these systems have considerable overlap in function (ldap and nss, for example). I would like to hear what people make of this situation. Should operating systems be prepared with coherent functions like this in mind?, are we simply observing the limitations of current operating system implementations with respect to todays complex multi-user, multi-device, multi-function systems. Is this a symptom of open source applications, which simply look after their own functions and ignore the bigger picture?, can the same be said for commercial systems?. Should there be an attempt to develop a well defined standard of functions within the context of operating systems, within which applications would provide functionality but never in a fragmented isolated way?, is this just a pipe dream?"
Businesses

Submission + - The First Thing IT Managers Do in the Morning?

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: When I was a wee-little IT Manager, I interviewed for a IT management position at an online CRM provider in San Francisco, a job I certainly was qualified for, at least on paper. One of the interviewer's questions was "What is the first thing you do when you get to work in the morning." I thought saying "Read Slashdot" wouldn't be what he was looking for — so I made up something, I'm sure, equally lame. Needless to say, I didn't get the job. But the question has stuck with me over the years. What do real IT and MIS managers do when they walk in to the office in the morning? What web sites or tools do they look at or use the first thing? Tell me. And remember, this is for posterity, so be honest.
IBM

Submission + - The Mainframe Lives! (networkworld.com)

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes: "If you believe the stories, IBM's mainframe has in the last 10 years been knocked down and gotten back up more times than most of the characters in all the Terminator, Die Hard and Rocky movies combined. And while there are some out there who'd like to see its demise, a true threat to the Big Iron has never really amounted to much. Even today, the proponents of commodity boxes offering less expensive x86/x64 or RISC technologies say the mainframe is doomed. But the facts say otherwise. For example, IBM recently said the mainframe has achieved three consecutive quarters of growth, marked by new customers choosing the platform for the first time and existing customers adding new workloads, such as Linux and Java applications. http://www.networkworld.com/community/?q=node/1713 3"
Google

Submission + - Alternatives to Google?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: It seems that more and more, we're hearing stories about Google that put its "don't be evil" philosophy into question. The problem, however, is that Google is very good at the services it offers. What other alternatives do the slashdot crowd use? Is there another search engine that comes even close to Google for relevancy, that at the same time is no more doubtable in terms of business ethics? What about a free email provider that offers comparible storage and reliability, not to mention free POP access?
I'm perfectly willing to explore alternatives, but I've been using Google for such a long time now that I barely know where to start looking. I can't imagine Yahoo! is much a better company (maybe I'm wrong?), and I don't want to go with Microsoft's offerings. Surely there have to be other worthwhile choices?
Programming

Submission + - GNU Smalltalk seems up and running (gmane.org) 1

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: I've been trying to use Squeak for a while but I cannot cope with their user interface. I've been following GNU Smalltalk recently and they seem to be up for really big changes! The most recent release, 2.95b, adds Python-like generators as well as continuations, which means that porting Seaside should now be really easy. Unfortunately, the mailing list seems close to dead apart from the maintainer's patches. It would be a pity if this became yet another one-man project without any future.
Portables

Submission + - Recovery of lost/stolen gadgets

Submitted by gurps_npc
gurps_npc writes: The explosion of portable electronic devices, can really weigh you down. Carrying a pager, phone, ipod, camera, and game is quite a lot. Worse, it gives you many more such things to misplace, or worse get stolen. This CNN story discusses some of the retrieval services that help you keep what belongs to you. I particularly like the first one, about a new singapore based software that when you download it to your phone, messages everyone in your phone's database whenever a new chip with a new phone number is installed in the phone. This makes it very hard for someone to steal your phone as all your friends get their new phone number.
Programming

Submission + - Major eclipse release adds ruby IDE

Submitted by
sghbirch
sghbirch writes: "The Eclipse Foundation has announced the availability of its annual coordinated project release, this year code named Europa. The new release adds direct IDE support for ruby, new runtime code for server apps, and developer tools for service-oriented architecture. A complete list of changes and new features can be found here

The new release will be available from eclipse.org on Friday 29 June."
Google

Submission + - Google Desktop for Linux released (blogspot.com)

Submitted by
FrankNFurter
FrankNFurter writes: "Today, Google released a native Linux version of their desktop search. Available are packages in the .rpm format (for RedHat/Fedora/Suse/Mandriva) and .deb format (for Debian/Ubuntu), both only for the x86 architecture. Google Desktop for Linux offers the same search features as the Windows version, a quick search box, integration of Gmail and the indexing of man and info pages. Not yet available for Linux are gadgets."

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