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Submission + - Air Force Goofs, Flying Live Nukes Across America (forbes.com)

Submitted by
kernel panic attack
kernel panic attack writes: "From the paging Dr. Strangelove dept.

Surely the late Stanley Kubrick is somewhere smiling at this one... Forbes.com has a story about a B-52 Bomber that mistakenly flew 6-nuclear tipped cruise missles across several states last week. The 3-hour flight took the plane from Minot Air Force Base, N.D, to Barksdale Air Force Base, La., on Aug. 30. The incident was so serious that President Bush and Defense Secretary Robert Gates were quickly informed and Gates has asked for daily briefings on the Air Force probe, said Defense Department press secretary Geoff Morrell. He said, "At no time was the public in danger." One Air Force official has already been SACked, in connection with the incident. Couple this with the recent resumption of long range Russian Bomber flights, and it looks like the good old Cold War days just may have returned."
Data Storage

Seagate Firmware Performance Differences 177

Posted by kdawson from the yet-deeper-mysteries dept.
Derkjan de Haan writes "The Seagate 7200.10 disk was the first generally available desktop drive featuring perpendicular recording for increased data density. This made higher-capacity disks with excellent performance cheaper to produce. Their sequential throughput actually exceeded that of the performance king — the Western Digital Raptor, which runs at 10,000 RPM vs. the more common 7,200 RPM. But reports began to surface on the Net claiming that some 7200.10 disks had much lower performance than other, seemingly identical disks. Attention soon focused on the firmware, designated AAK, in the lower-performing disks. Units with other firmware, AAE or AAC, performed as expected. Careful benchmarks showed very mixed results. The claims found on the Net, however, have been confirmed: the AAK disk does have a much lower throughput rate than the AAE disk. While firmware can tune various aspects of performance it is highly unusual for it to affect sequential throughput. This number is pretty much a 'fact' of the disk, and should not be affected by different firmware."
Toys

Submission + - 20 USB Gizmos That Have No Place in the Enterprise

Submitted by
Esther Schindler
Esther Schindler writes: "Sometimes, you can imagine why the IT department wants to put epoxy in the USB drive. CIO.com compiled 20 USB-powered gadgets with very little business value—but that are sure to make you say, at least once, "I want one!" Need a USB-powered rocket launcher? A USB-powered toothbrush? (Why?!) A fridge big enough to hold a single can of soda? They're all here."
GNU is Not Unix

MS-Funded Study Attacks GPL3 Draft Process 206

Posted by kdawson from the academic-astroturf dept.
QCMBR writes "A new Microsoft-funded study by a Harvard Business School professor concludes that developers don't want extensive patent licensing requirements in the GPL3. There are significant problems with the study, however, especially given the very small sample size. 'Although 332 emails were sent to various developers, only 34 agreed to participate in the survey — an 11 percent response rate. Of the 34 developers who responded, many of them are associated with projects like Apache and PostgreSQL that don't even use the GPL.' Ars points out that the GPL3 draft editing and review process is highly transparent and inclusive 'to an extent that makes MacCormack's claims of under-representation seem difficult to accept given the small sample size of the study and the number of respondents who contribute to non-GPL projects.'"
Music

Jobs to Labels- Lose the DRM & We'll Talk Price 459

Posted by CmdrTaco from the ten-bucks-a-gig dept.
eldavojohn writes "Apple CEO Steve Jobs has been talking smack about DRM and has recently issued a verbal offer to major music lables stating that if they are willing to lose the DRM, he'd be willing to raise his 99 cent price for those iTunes songs. These tracks (such as the recent EMI deal) would also have better sound quality & cost about 30 cents more."
Security

Do We Really Need a Security Industry? 297

Posted by CmdrTaco from the only-if-software-had-no-bugs dept.
netbuzz noted that Bruce Schneir's latest column discusses the security industry where he points out that "The primary reason the IT security industry exists is because IT products and services aren't naturally secure. If computers were already secure against viruses, there wouldn't be any need for antivirus products. If bad network traffic couldn't be used to attack computers, no one would bother buying a firewall. If there were no more buffer overflows, no one would have to buy products to protect against their effects. If the IT products we purchased were secure out of the box, we wouldn't have to spend billions every year making them secure."
Linux

Beryl User Interface for Linux Reviewed 271

Posted by CmdrTaco from the yo-ho-ho-and-a-beryl-of-rum dept.
techie writes "OSWeekly.com has published a review of Beryl, a very cool looking UI for Linux. Matt Hartley writes, "This release, in my opinion, was the most over-hyped and bug-filled to date. You will have to really hit Technorati to see more of what I'm talking about, but Feisty is as buggy as the beta I tested a short time ago. After completely tossing into the wilds of the ubber-buggy "network-manager," anything running with Edgy supported RT2500 driver shows up, but it will not connect without a special script. Those of you who are on Feisty and need help with your RT2500 cards are welcome to e-mail me for the bash script."
Privacy

Airships to Patrol Venezuela's Skies 451

Posted by Zonk from the shadowrun-is-now dept.
bprime writes "The BBC reports that officials in the Venezuelan capital, Caracas, have bought three airship UAVs to keep tabs on the local populace. From the article: 'The 15 metre (49 foot) long air ships are emblazoned with government slogans. Written in bright red are the words, We watch over you for your security.' They're not exactly black helicopters, but how long do you think until we see similar measures in high-crime American cities?"
NASA

Tatooine's Double-Sunset a Common Sight 132

Posted by Zonk from the double-shadows-means-twice-as-scary dept.
anthemaniac writes "Thirty years ago, Luke Skywalker beheld something that scientists are just now realizing is likely quite common in the universe: double sunsets. Astronomers have long known that binary star systems are common. And models suggested that planets could form in these systems, even though there's a double-tug of gravity on the material that would have to form a planet. Observations from NASA's Spitzer telescope, show that binary systems are just as likely to be surrounded by planet-forming debris disks are are lone stars."
Communications

Submission + - Cell phone service in a bomb shelter

Submitted by hedgemage
hedgemage writes: I work at a retirement home and we have trouble with the cell phones that our nursing and maintenance staff use. The problem is that our nursing home area is built into a lower level that was originally constructed as a fallout shelter in 1960. There's a lot of solid concrete in the walls and ceiling. We have paid out tens of thousands to try and get an on-site mobile to work using NEC Dterm PSII phones, but they have proven absolutely unreliable (not just in the bomb shelter but throughout the campus) and the only solution our telecom provider has is to install several thousand dollars more in transcievers. If we could use ordinary cell phones, it would be ideal for everyone. Is there an off-the-shelf solution that could boost regular cellular signals in our bomb shelter?
Nintendo

Submission + - WiiCade Opens New Gaming Possibilities

Submitted by
AKAImBatman
AKAImBatman writes: "WiiCade.com has finally done what the Nintendo Wii community has long thought to be impossible. They have found a way to let online games use the full range of buttons on the Wii Remote, potentially opening up new possibilities for online gaming. WiiCade has released a freely available API designed for use with their site."
Music

EMI — Ditching DRM is Going To Cost You 220

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the how-not-to-make-a-buck dept.
33rpm writes "EMI has told online music stores that selling its catalog without DRM is going to cost them a lot of money. 'EMI is the only major record label to seriously consider abandoning the disaster that is DRM, but earlier reports that focused on the company's reformist attitude apparently missed the mark: EMI is willing to lose the DRM, but they demand a considerable advance payment to make it happen. EMI has backed out of talks for now because no one will pay what they're asking.'"

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