17608320
submission
NNUfergs writes:
I work for a university based A/V media and IT office. We are responsible for purchasing, maintaining, and replacing all campus computers (Labs, classrooms, offices, etc.). We manage an inventory of audio/video and recording equipment to serve campus functions as well as rent out to produce some revenue. We are also responsible for all the classroom tech. like projectors, smart boards, and wireless devices. Our computer inventory is currently logged in a very large and cumbersome Excel spreadsheet which is difficult to keep current and accurate. For our media and classroom equipment, we use an old Microsoft Access program to manage the inventory as well as function as a register for cash transactions and inter-departmental billing. Simply put, we have outgrown the particle ability to use these methods which require %100 manual data manipulation. I am on the hunt to find, ideally, a single software solution for all these problems. It would need to keep a detailed inventory of our computers and related hardware, and other classroom tech spread our across our campus. It would also need to manage our product sales and equipment rentals, including cash transactions and inter-departmental billing. This does seem like a tall order to me but I'm hopeful that my holy grail is out there. How do you maintain your equipment inventories? What solution(s) would you recommend?
17607110
submission
digitaldc writes:
Pollution in Beijing was so bad Friday the U.S. Embassy, which has been independently monitoring air quality, ran out of conventional adjectives to describe it, at one point saying it was "crazy bad."
The embassy later deleted the phrase, saying it was an "incorrect" description and it would revise the language to use when the air quality index goes above 500, its highest point and a level considered hazardous for all people by U.S. standards.
The hazardous haze has forced schools to stop outdoor exercises, and health experts asked residents, especially those with respiratory problems, the elderly and children, to stay indoors.
17606194
submission
sturgeon writes:
Yesterday, Slashdot and most of the world's major media outlets reported on China's April 2010 hijack of "15% of Internet traffic," including sensitive US government and defense sites. The alarm came following a US Government report on China / US economic and security relations released on Tuesday.
Unfortunately, no one much bother with fact checking or actually reading the report. The actual study never makes any estimate of Internet traffic diverted during the hijack — it only cites a blog post to suggest large volumes of traffic were involved. And curiously, the cited blog at the heart of the report never mentions traffic at all — only routes. You have to go to an interview with a third-party security researcher in a minor trade magazine to first come up with the 15% number (and this article never explains where the number came from).
In an amazing review of real data and actual facts, Arbor Nework's Craig Labovitz has a blog post looking at the traffic volumes involved in the incident (only a couple of Gigabits per second or a "statistically insignificant" percentage of Internet traffic).
17605644
submission
michaelmarshall writes:
For the first time life has been found in the gabbroic layer of the crust. The new biosphere is all bacteria, as you might expect, but they are different to the bacteria in the layers above: they mostly feed on hydrocarbons that are produced by abiotic reactions deep in the crust. It could mean that similar microbes are living even deeper, perhaps even in the mantle.
17605344
submission
alphadogg writes:
Three California men have pleaded guilty charges they built a network of CAPTCHA-solving computers that flooded online ticket vendors and snatched up the very best seats for Bruce Springsteen concerts, Broadway productions and even TV tapings of Dancing with the Stars.
The men ran a company called Wiseguy Tickets, and for years they had an inside track on some of the best seats in the house at many events. They scored about 1.5 million tickets after hiring Bulgarian programmers to build "a nationwide network of computers that impersonated individual visitors" on websites such as Ticketmaster, MLB.com and LiveNation, the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) said Thursday in a press release. The network would "flood vendors computers at the exact moment that event tickets went on sale," the DoJ said.
They had to create shell corporations, register hundreds of fake Internet domains (one was stupidcellphone.com) and sign up for thousands of bogus e-mail addresses to make the scam work. Wiseguy Tickets then resold the tickets to brokers, at a profit.
"These defendants made money by combining age-old fraud with new-age computer hacking," the DoJ said in its press release.
14475590
submission
NNUfergs writes:
Six Dutch gamers play Red Dead Redemption for 50 solid hours (minus breaks) to break the previous world record for longest time playing a video game of 40 hours 20 minutes.
11630110
submission
NNUfergs writes:
Warner Brothers Home Entertainment Group announced today they have acquired Turbine Inc.
