Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Turrets! (Score 2, Insightful) 368

by HaloZero (#28285459) Attached to: For Airplane Safety, Trying To Keep Birds From Planes
Yes, but then you include metal rounds as a class of objects that likely will be SUCKED INTO THE ENGINE. If my options for aspirating something are a bird versus a bullet, I think the plane would fair better ingesting a bird. Not to mention the hazard of turning one falling (suckable) objects into many falling (suckable) objects.

Comment Re:Fly Around Them (Score 1) 368

by HaloZero (#28285427) Attached to: For Airplane Safety, Trying To Keep Birds From Planes
Generally, yes, the flocks are difficult to pick up on radar, due to the small cross-section, and generally squishy nature of birds. The speed of an aircraft is also an issue - moving at 600mph (~880 feet per second) - means the flock (given radar / VFR issues) will probably already be upon you even before you have a chance to react. Even if you did have time to react, an Airbus A320 doesn't exactly (safely) turn on a dime.

Comment Re:How to block portable apps (Score 1) 531

by HaloZero (#28186935) Attached to: Internet Explorer 6 Will Not Die
This is so true that it's sad.

And, of course, the apps were originally outsourced to India, developed by GroupX. Now, GroupY will be brought in to re-tool them, and management asks 'But it already works. Why do we need to update it?'

The business doesn't see it as a value - it's not broken, to them, and therefore doesn't need to be fixed (or have a dime spent on it).

Comment Re:Repair a clone of a clone (Score 2, Informative) 399

by HaloZero (#28186711) Attached to: What Data Recovery Tools Do the Pros Use?
SpinRite works to identify bad sectors on a track on magnetic media. Once it locates a bad sector, it attempts to re-read (repeatedly) the bitmap from that sector. If successful, it will re-write that bitmap to an unused sector, mark the original sector as bad, and provide a pointer in the index of the drive to the newly created sector.

For me, SpinRite has successfully corrected fubared Windows installations (STOP error at boot, unreadable boot volume, registry .xxx missing at boot time, etc), repairing a disk with a FileVaulted sparseimage (allowing it to mount), repairing a disk that was TrueCrypted (allowing it to mount), as well as repairing a drive enough to the point where I can make an image copy of it and recover atleast some (and in some cases, most) of the data on it.

SpinRite is also the only tool I'm comfortable running on an encrypted volume.

It's not voodoo, and I run it quarterly for maintenance purposes.

Comment Re:Perfectly theft proof (Score 1) 98

by HaloZero (#28137915) Attached to: Burglar Nabbed By Backup Program
Except those who would simply dBAN the device and run Linux on it. There are quite a few machines out there that can't run Vista for shit, but as soon as you load Ubuntu/Kubuntu/SuSE on them, they handle the task pretty well. The only gripes are super proprietary wireless drivers, and those've come a good long way in the last 18 months.
Role Playing (Games)

How To Help a Friend With an MMO Addiction? 811

Posted by Soulskill from the napalm-solves-more-problems-than-you'd-expect dept.
sammydee writes "I have a friend who is addicted to an MMO (Pirates of the Burning Sea). On a typical day, he will wake up around 9am, browse the forums for a bit, then go online and stay online all day, playing until about 3am the following morning, taking only toilet breaks and stopping to eat ready-meals. While the rest of the house works hard revising for exams, this friend will be playing his MMO instead. Now, I am pretty confident that this comprises an unhealthy addiction; unfortunately, I have no idea what to do about it. Any attempt to physically prevent him from playing the game would most likely result in an outburst of anger and possibly physical violence. Attempts at telling him he has a problem have been met with derision and angry retorts. Slashdotters, what would you do to help out a friend in this situation? Perhaps you are a reformed addict yourself — if so, how did you break out of the habit? Or maybe I should just leave well enough alone and allow him to continue? Any thoughts are gratefully received."
Windows

Windows 7 To Skip Straight To a Release Candidate 856

Posted by Soulskill from the iteration-is-for-wimps dept.
b8fait writes "The head of Microsoft Corp.'s Windows development confirmed that Windows 7 will take the unusual path of moving straight from a single beta, which was launched earlier this month, to a release candidate. Sinofsky fleshed out the plan today and hinted that just as there would be no Beta 2, the company would also not provide a RC2 build. In other words, there may be only one released build of Windows 7 before it ships, possibly much sooner than even some of the most aggressive rumors about Windows 7. How much different can Windows 7 really be with such a shortened beta cycle?"
Math

Miscalculation Invalidates LHC Safety Assurances 684

Posted by timothy from the philosophy-of-science dept.
KentuckyFC writes "In a truly frightening study, physicists at the University of Oxford have identified a massive miscalculation that makes the LHC safety assurances more or less invalid (abstract). The focus of their work is not the safety of particle accelerators per se but the chances of any particular scientific argument being wrong. 'If the probability estimate given by an argument is dwarfed by the chance that the argument itself is flawed, then the estimate is suspect,' say the team. That has serious implications for the LHC, which some people worry could generate black holes that will swallow the planet. Nobody at CERN has put a figure on the chances of the LHC destroying the planet. One study simply said: 'there is no risk of any significance whatsoever from such black holes.' The danger is that this thinking could be entirely flawed, but what are the chances of this? The Oxford team say that roughly one in a thousand scientific papers have to be withdrawn because of errors but generously suppose that in particle physics, the rate is one in 10,000."
Biotech

Family Dog Cloned, Thanks To Dolly Patents 261

Posted by timothy from the better-would-be-to-clone-mougli-and-emily dept.
patentpundit writes "BioArts International announced today that they have delivered the world's first commercially cloned dog, a 10-week old Labrador named Lancey, to Florida residents Edgar and Nina Otto. According to the press release issued by the company, 'BioArts International is a biotech company focused on unique, untapped markets in the global companion animal, stem cell and human genomics industries. The Best Friends Again program is a collaboration between BioArts and the Sooam Biotech Research Foundation in South Korea, home to the best and most experienced dog cloning team in the world.' The technology that makes this animal cloning possible stems from the cloning patents developed at the Roslin Institute for the cloning of the now famous, or infamous depending on your view, Dolly the sheep."
Security

Confessed Botnet Master Is a Security Professional 278

Posted by CmdrTaco from the he-should-know-better dept.
An anonymous reader writes "John Schiefer, the Los Angeles security consultant who in last 2007 admitted wielding a 250,000-node botnet to steal bank passwords, sometimes from work, says he's spent the past 15 months working as a professional in the security scene while awaiting sentencing. Prosecutors are pushing for a five-year sentence, noting the exceptional threat he represented to society."
Red Hat Software

Red Hat Set To Surpass Sun In Market Capitalization 221

Posted by CmdrTaco from the now-that's-a-milestone dept.
mytrip writes "In what may come to be seen as a deeply symbolic moment in the history of operating systems, Red Hat is on the verge of surpassing Sun Microsystems' market capitalization for the first time. Sun, perhaps unfairly, represents a fading Unix market. Red Hat, for its part, represents the rising Linux market. Given enough time for its open-source strategy to play out, Sun's market capitalization will likely recover and outpace Red Hat's."
Businesses

Abused IT Workers Ready To Quit 685

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the thankless-jobs dept.
An anonymous reader writes to tell us that new research is suggesting as many as a quarter of all IT staff in small to medium businesses have suffered some sort of abuse and are looking for careers elsewhere (PDF). "The study also found that over a third have suffered from sleepless nights or headaches as a result of IT problems at work, while 59 percent spend between one and 10 hours a week working on IT systems outside normal hours. ... The biggest cause of stress among IT staff is problems arising from operational day-to-day tasks, the survey found. Another major cause came from loss of critical data, according to Connect."

Slashdot Top Deals

"One lawyer can steal more than a hundred men with guns." -- The Godfather

Close