irondonkey - Slashdot User

Submission + - Narowing the Space Flight Gap (associatedcontent.com)

Submitted by

MarkWhittington

on Friday December 07, 2007 @12:42PM

MarkWhittington writes: "Sometime in the fall of 2010 the space shuttle will launch on its last mission. In the early Spring of 2015, barring unforeseen delays, the Orion space craft will become operational, available to take crews and supplies to the International Space Station. This constitutes a gap of four and a half years during which the United States will not be able to fly its own astronauts into space. That worries folks at NASA, members of Congress, and others concerned with the course of the US civil space program."

Submission + - We won't take cash (yahoo.com) 1

Submitted by

stox

on Saturday October 27, 2007 @10:04PM

stox writes: "In an effort to control iPhones sold to unauthorized re-sellers, Apple will require iPhone purchases to be made with a credit or debit card only. This has some scary implications. What next, a three day waiting period?"

Submission + - 10 Things MS can do to fix Vista (chron.com)

Submitted by

Technical Writing Geek

on Tuesday October 23, 2007 @11:25AM

Technical Writing Geek writes: "In day-to-day use, I'm generally happy with Vista, but there are indeed times when I wish it had more polish and was less sluggish. Apple's about to unleash a very impressive operating system, installing it on computers that are compelling in appearance and performance. As indicated by Apple's latest quarterly earnings results, the Macintosh platform is on a roll. Microsoft should not take for granted that its current dominance is something permanent.

List of ten suggestions, including simplify, one-stop driver shopping, fix marketing, etc. follows.

http://blogs.chron.com/techblog/archives/2007/10/10_things_microsoft_should_do_to_fix_windows.html"

Submission + - Seven areas where Linux could get better

Submitted by Stony Stevenson on Tuesday October 23, 2007 @12:28AM

Stony Stevenson writes: This article discusses seven areas that Linux needs to improve on because for Linux, there is no road map, per se. To give a glimpse of the process, here are seven areas of development worth watching, based on interviews with developers and kernel maintainers, and time on www.kernelnewbies.org. Not all are moving ahead smoothly, illustrating the stop-and-go path improvements must travel to get into the kernel.

Submission + - Colorado Rockies - "malicious attack" of 8

Submitted by Juneau on Tuesday October 23, 2007 @12:03AM

Juneau writes: The Denver Post reports on today's World Series ticket sales: (http://www.denverpost.com/ci_7248448)

Spokesman Jay Alves said tonight that the failure of Monday's ticket sales happened because the system was brought down today by an "external malicious attack." The Rockies have suspended online sales for World Series tickets, spokesman Jay Alves said this afternoon. Alves said that several hundred sales that went through before sales were suspended today will be honored. "We are as frustrated and disappointed as (fans) are," Alves said.

Submission + - Site Posts Eclectic Collection of Govt Documents (governmentattic.org)

Submitted by

Anonymous Coward

on Monday October 22, 2007 @11:51PM

Anonymous Coward writes: "A newly published web site posts tons of documents obtained from U.S. government agencies under the Freedom of Information Act — a real variety of stuff.

The GovernmentAttic name is derived from; "rummaging in the government's attic."

Already online — an eclectic collection of files on a wide variety of subjects on line — new content is being posted frequently. The site's motto is Videre Licet, or "it is permitted to see". Check out the neat owl logo: http://www.governmentattic.org/seal.html

The site owners plan to post a number of new documents per week, and are seeking suggestions for additional documents to get.

In the internet age, Government Secrecy is engendered by agencies simply declining to put their documents of public interest online."

Submission + - Apple says 250,000 iPhones Sold to Unlockers 1

Submitted by

Hugh Pickens

on Monday October 22, 2007 @11:40PM

Hugh Pickens writes: "Timothy D. Cook, Chief Operating Officer at Apple, disclosed during Apple's conference call to discuss their fourth quarter earnings that they estimate that 250,000 of the 1.4 Million iPhones that have been sold were bought by people intending to unlock the phone.

[The elasticity in demand with the price drop] enabled us to far surpass our expectation of hitting around a million units cumulatively by the end of the quarter. Some number of these were sold to people that have an intention to unlock and [while] we don't know precisely how many people are doing that, our current guess is there is probably 250,000 of the 1.4 million that we sold where people had bought them with the intention of doing that. Many of those happened after the price cut.
Apple knows how many iPhones have been sold and how many have been activated with ATT. The difference is the number that are unlocked."

Submission + - He died HOW???

Submitted by hyades1 on Monday October 22, 2007 @11:26PM

hyades1 writes: UPI reports that the deputy mayor of New Delhi plummeted to his death during a tussle with aggressive monkeys. http://www.newsdaily.com/TopNews/UPI-1-20071022-20513500-bc-india-monkeys-crn.xml Deputy Mayor S.S. Bajwa was attacked by monkeys while standing on the balcony of his residence Saturday and fell to the ground during the ensuing struggle, CNN-IBN reports. Bajwa was taken to hospital, where he later succumbed to his injuries. Here, for the first time anywhere, is solid, documented proof that spanking the monkey can kill you.

Submission + - SOA could change the way you buy electricity (computerworld.com.au)

Submitted by

StonyandCher

on Monday October 22, 2007 @10:36PM

StonyandCher writes: "Researchers at the US Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), with IBM as a partner, have built a demonstration network called GridWise that showed how an event-driven service-oriented architecture (SOA) can be used to build a power marketplace that lets residential and commercial customers change their electricity consumption nearly in real time, based on price and other factors. During the yearlong, Energy Department-sponsored marketplace demonstration, customers spent less money on power, and utilities easily accommodated spikes in demand without affecting service levels. The marketplace ran on an IBM WebSphere Application Server at PNNL and received data in real time from various Web services about electricity's current wholesale price and most recent closing price, as well as whether those prices were trending up or down. It communicated with specialized, "smart" appliances at participants' sites via IBM-developed middleware built within what IBM calls its event-driven architecture (EDA) framework and running on the WebSphere server. The EDA middleware provided the link between the transaction-oriented marketplace and the more physical world of the controls-based appliances."

Submission + - Homeland Security Confiscates Indie Rock Music (nielsenhayden.com)

Submitted by

ErikInterlude

on Monday October 22, 2007 @10:29PM

ErikInterlude writes: "I don't know if this has already been submitted, but it was too bizarre not to send it. Apparently Homeland Security decided to confiscate a hard drive containing new music by the band Deathcab for Cutie. The link is very light on details, but apparently a courier was bringing freshly produced tracks in from Canada. Apparently he got stopped and the hard drive containing the songs got whisked away. No one knows where it is now or what anyone is looking for on it.

More (well, not much more...) here."

Submission + - Firestorm 2.0 - Using Social Media to Track Fires

Submitted by babooo404 on Monday October 22, 2007 @10:15PM

babooo404 writes: With all of the fires in California today, how are the social services such as Digg, Flickr, YouTube, etc. covering the crisis? Flickr and Wikipedia appear to have the best coverage overall and several local TV stations are using Twitter to get the news out.

Submission + - Why Is There Almost No HIV/AIDS In Japan? (mens-sexual-health.org)

Submitted by

hurr1

on Thursday August 02, 2007 @09:28PM

hurr1 writes: "Total cases in twenty years amount to only 7,500 or 375 a year. By comparison, Cambodia, whose population is less than a tenth of Japan's, had 170,000 people living with HIV or AIDS, according to United Nations estimates. See the Ten Myths Of HIV/AIDS video movie explore this problem in human society."

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