dotancohen - Slashdot User

Submission + - German dam bursts (aljazeera.com)

Submitted by dotancohen on Monday June 10, 2013 @04:52AM

dotancohen writes: Thousands of people have been evacuated to safety in eastern Germany after a dam burst on the swollen River Elbe and farmland was flooded in an attempt to spare towns, with meteorologists forecasting more rain.

In Magdeburg, one of the oldest cities in eastern Germany and a regional capital, some 23,000 people were asked to leave on Monday as water levels in the Elbe rose to a record 7.48 metres — about 5 metres above normal and surpassing the level reached during devastating floods in 2002.

Submission + - Linux-friendly major motherboard manufacturers? 2

Submitted by

dotancohen

on Friday December 28, 2012 @03:34AM

dotancohen writes: "I am tasked with building a few Linux machines for a small office. However, all the currently available motherboards seem to be Linux-hostile. For instance, in addition to the whole UEFI issue, my last install was a three-day affair due to the motherboard reporting a Linux-supported ethernet device (the common RTL8168) whilst it was actually using a GbE Ethernet device that does not work with the legacy drivers and didn't even work with a test Windows 7 install until the driver disk was installed. There are no current HCL for Debian or Ubuntu and I've written to Asus and Gigabyte but from both have received the expected reply: No official Linux support, install Windows for best experience.

Note that I did even turn to the two large local computer vendors asking if they could provide Linux-compatible machines ready to go, but neither of them would be of any help. What globally-available motherboards or motherboard manufacturers can one recommend today?"

Submission + - Maplesoft breached, database accessed

Submitted by

dotancohen

on Thursday July 19, 2012 @09:43AM

dotancohen writes: "MapleSoft, makers of MatLAB competitor Maple, just emailed all their customers to inform them about the company's recent security breach. “We deeply regret any inconvenience or concerns that this situation may cause our contacts and customers,” was the most important part of the letter, added by CEO Jim Cooper."

Submission + - Kubuntu 12.04 To Drop Support For Firefox (phoronix.com)

Submitted by

dotancohen

on Monday March 19, 2012 @10:52AM

dotancohen writes: "Yesterday it was brought up that KDE support has been dropped from the Firefox package, so the firefox-kde-support will be stripped from Kubuntu 12.04, which is an LTS release. This is becoming because the Ubuntu Firefox maintainer no longer wants to maintain the KDE support patch, which isn't mainline in Firefox."

Submission + - Man with explosives detained at US airport (aljazeera.com) 1

Submitted by

dotancohen

on Sunday January 01, 2012 @05:01AM

dotancohen writes: "A man has been detained after trying to go through a security checkpoint at a Texas airport with explosives in military-grade wrapping. An FBI spokesman declined to say whether the man was in military uniform or how many explosives were found in the bag. The man identified himself to investigating officials as being active in the military."

Submission + - Study links sexual content on TV to teen pregnancy (cnn.com)

Submitted by

dotancohen

on Sunday December 11, 2011 @09:49AM

dotancohen writes: "Sexual content on television is strongly associated with teen pregnancy, a new study shows. Researchers at the nonprofit organization RAND found that adolescents with a high level of exposure to television shows with sexual content are twice as likely to get pregnant or impregnate someone as those who saw fewer programs of this kind over a period of three years."

Submission + - Greenpeace penetrates French nuclear plant (aljazeera.com)

Submitted by

dotancohen

on Monday December 05, 2011 @02:50PM

dotancohen writes: "Greenpeace activists secretly entered a French nuclear site before dawn and draped a banner reading "Hey" and "Easy" on its reactor containment building, to expose the vulnerability of atomic sites in the country. Greenpeace said the break-in aimed to show that an ongoing review of safety measures, ordered by French authorities after a tsunami ravaged Japan's Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant earlier this year, was focused too narrowly on possible natural disasters, and not human factors."

Submission + - Gigabyte's solution to the ASPM bug: use Windows. (phoronix.com)

Submitted by

dotancohen

on Thursday October 20, 2011 @08:04AM

dotancohen writes: "Gigabyte's response regarding kernel power regression issues due to their BIOS bug:
"...since our products only support Windows OS... We suggest you to install Windows OS to prevent having problems. If you install the Windows OS and still have any problems, please provide the error message screenshot for us, so we can try to see how to help."
I wonder if Gigabyte will provide the unlock keys for the EFI boot loaders with a policy as clear as this?"

Submission + - AskSlashdot: Calculators with 1-2-3 numpads? 2

Submitted by

dotancohen

on Saturday September 24, 2011 @09:02AM

dotancohen writes: "Although the telephone has the 1-2-3 key on the top row, most calculators and keyboards have 7-8-9 on the top row. Switching between the two destroys muscle- and spatial- memory. Do any slashdotters use a scientific calculator with 1-2-3 on the top row? I've already scraped and resoldered my Casio fx-82 calculator to have 1-2-3 on the top, and remapped the numpad in Kubuntu, but if there exist any calculators like this already on the market I'd buy two."

Submission + - Salty Water on Mars (discovery.com)

Submitted by

dotancohen

on Thursday August 04, 2011 @03:03PM

dotancohen writes: "A NASA orbiter has found possible evidence for water on the surface of Mars that flows seasonally. The water likely would be salty, in keeping with the salty Martian environment."

Submission + - Radiation levels surge at Fukushima (aljazeera.net)

Submitted by

dotancohen

on Tuesday August 02, 2011 @05:34AM

dotancohen writes: "Record levels of radiation have been recorded at the damaged Fukushima Daiichi plant.
TEPCO reported that Geiger counters were pegged at the site on Monday. Radiation exceeding 10,000 millisieverts per hour was found at the bottom of a ventilation stack standing between two reactors. The level recorded is "fatal to humans"."

Submission + - Lifehacker hacked again (pastebin.com) 4

Submitted by

dotancohen

on Monday August 01, 2011 @08:23AM

dotancohen writes: "There's not much to elaborate on now that Gawker (Lifehacker) has been hacked again. This is apparently the same group that hacked them back in December."

Submission + - Another Paypal policy update: where to find info?

Submitted by

dotancohen

on Tuesday June 14, 2011 @09:38AM

dotancohen writes: "Today there was yet another policy update on Paypal. There is no diff file, and the policies are all in lawyerese. My bank had a similar policy update recently, as has my domain registrar. Is there any corpus, legal or otherwise, who regulates or at least elaborates on these? Is there a legal forum to discuss these changes? How does the little citizen keep up?"

Submission + - Mars rover Spirit is no more (discovermagazine.com)

Submitted by

dotancohen

on Wednesday May 25, 2011 @09:24AM

dotancohen writes: "fter nearly a year of trying to reestablish communications with the Spirit Mars rover, NASA has decided to suspend efforts. Communications channels used to contact the vehicle (redesignated from "rover" to "spot" when it got stuck in a sand trap) will be used to develop a communications base wit hthe next Mars rover: the ambitious Mars Science Laboratory."

Submission + - Fedora 16 will number user UIDs from 1000 (fedoraproject.org)

Submitted by

dotancohen

on Wednesday May 25, 2011 @09:08AM

dotancohen writes: "Sharing users between Fedora and Debian-based distros just got a little easier. Beginning with Fedora 16, the Red-Hat based distro will number it's human user UIDs starting from 1000, as opposed to the old 500. Though this change is intended to facilitate interoperability with other distros, it risks breaking backward compatibility with older Fedora releases including the newly released Fedora 15."

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