Lurker187 - Slashdot User

Submission + - Open formats save the day

Submitted by

Amnl4ixoye

on Monday January 01, 2007 @07:56PM

Amnl4ixoye writes: "This evening, I had the unfortunate experience of shift-deleting my entire Inbox for one of my accounts in Thunderbird. However, thanks in part to their openness of formats and standards, I was able to save the day by making some simple changes. Thank you open and clear formats!"

Submission + - Google Calculator is Broken

Submitted by

Ozan Guven

on Monday January 01, 2007 @06:24PM

Ozan Guven writes: "Google's built-in calculator function is broken and if you type a math function it only returns weired web search results.

None of the functions described on http://www.google.com/help/calculator.html is working...

Is this a new year gift from Google?"

Submission + - Internet social evolution moving faster than life

Submitted by DarkenWood on Monday January 01, 2007 @06:12PM

DarkenWood writes: What does the Slashdot community think of the idea that the social evolution of the internet is moving more rapidly along the Marxist progression towards a pure Communism? There seem to be many examples of this taking place in the form of Open Source Software, Creative Commons, open hardware, Wikipedia, etc... In what other ways do you see the social evolution of the internet moving faster than the individual, or collective, societies around the globe?

Journal Journal: More ranting

Journal by AceM2 on Monday January 01, 2007 @05:54PM

Even I will admit - the quality of my journal posts has increasingly degraded over the past few months. However I am going to take it a step further, and throw in a random rant-of-the-day.

Submission + - Build or Buy: Hire a Data Center?

Submitted by

bbsguru

on Tuesday December 26, 2006 @02:22PM

bbsguru writes: "Our Government agency has around 100 independent divisions that share a dozen national applications and a private WAN. We are working to consolidate some of these applications (e-mail, SQL databases, specialized web services), and are facing a familiar choice.

One option is to contract out data hosting, e-mail server hosting, and so forth to various vendors (with negotiated SLA's and all the best guarantees, of course). We have already started doing this for our private WAN-to-World gateways, VPN management, and one major SQL application, each with a different vendor so far.

Others are advocating the creation of a national agency-owned facility, where employees would perform these functions instead of contractors. Network management, IDS, data replication and so forth, for all the consolidated applications under one umbrella.

The costs are always a factor, but the one-way nature of the contractor choice is also weighing in this decision. Some are concerned that if the expertise to create and manage these highly custom databases and services is farmed out to contractors, there will be no other choice in the future.

Trouble is, as we evaluate our options, the process of contracting out bits of the whole is already underway. With each new contract, one more service to be brought into a datacenter is lost, making the whole thing less practical.
Are we swimming upstream here? Is a series of contractors really the way to go, or are there real benefits to keeping it in house?"

RFID Fitted Throughout Tokyo Ginza Shopping Center 55

Posted by timothy on Tuesday December 26, 2006 @02:15PM from the dadburned-radiation-burns dept.

Liam Cromar writes "In one of several RFID trials being held in Japan, the famous Ginza shopping area in Tokyo has been blanketed with around 10,000 RFID tags and other beacons. The trial got underway earlier this month, and general trials should start on January 21st 2007. Four languages, including English, will be supported by the service, which uses hand-held RFID terminals to get information about shops in the centre, including special offers and restaurant menus."

Submission + - Memory storage for light-based computers

Submitted by

Roland Piquepaille

on Tuesday December 26, 2006 @02:10PM

Roland Piquepaille writes: "In a brief article, Japanese scientists cage light, The Register reports that scientists working for NTT have used photonic crystals to trap light by over one nanosecond. In fact, light was trapped inside a wavelength-sized micro-cavity, delaying its transmission. So the apparent speed of light was reduced by a factor of 50,000, or just 5.8 kilometers per second. This is not the first time that physicists have 'reduced' the speed of light, but this achievement could lead to new ways of storing information in future light-based or quantum computers. Read more for additional details and a figure showing the photonic crystal used by the NTT researchers."

Submission + - Daylight Savings Time Change

Submitted by mdirish on Tuesday December 26, 2006 @12:25PM

mdirish writes: The U.S. Government has mandated changes to Daylight Saving Time (DST) for 2007. Beginning in the spring of 2007, DST start and end dates for the United States will transition to comply with the Energy Policy Act of 2005. In 2007, DST dates in the United States will start three weeks earlier (2 a.m. on the second Sunday in March) and will end one week later (2 a.m. on the first Sunday in November). I've already started to get mail from software vendors about issuing patches to their software. Sysadmins like myself may be inundated with patches and config changes to reflect this change.

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