Have you ever thought about working at a place where the main worry is keeping the equipment from getting too cold? An excellent detailed interview with the IT manager of the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. Getting service is a little tough. They try to maintain at least a year's worth of spare parts. Along with an interesting set of photos

There is no feeling like walking into the office @ 6AM on a Monday only to find out that you have a utility failure and your IT site generator has been running all weekend and will likely run out of fuel before you can get a truck there to re-fill. Servers will go down and heads will roll. This would be known as a Bad Thing(tm) Fortunately there is a solution. The GS5000 is a tiny gadget that will let you know via cellular that your site generator is running, has fuel, has moved from its designated location, and a whole lot more.

It is the opinion of Nyquist Capital that Google has designed and deployed home-grown 10GbE switches as part of a secret internal initiative that was launched when it realized commercial options couldn't meet the cost and power consumption targets required for their data centers. This decision by Google, while small in terms of units purchased, is enormous in terms of the disruptive impact it should have on 10GbE switching equipment providers and their component supply chains. It is as if a MACHO just arrived in the Enterprise networking business and the orbits of the existing satellites have begun to shift without observers knowing why - until now.

It won't make you dinner or rub your feet, but nearly one in four Americans say that the Internet can serve as a substitute for a significant other for some period of time, according to a new poll released today by 463 Communications and Zogby International. The Zogby/463 Internet Attitudes poll examined views of what role the Internet plays in people's lives and whether government should play a greater role in regulating it. The online survey was conducted Oct. 4-8, 2007, included 9,743 adult respondents nationwide, and carries a margin of error of +/- 1.0 percentage point. The full survey included detailed demographic information and is available at 463.blogs.com

After a nuclear holocaust, would cockroaches really be the last creatures standing? That's a question for the same people who've tested whether you can jump in a falling elevator to save yourself, whether throwing a toaster into a bathtub really will electrocute someone and whether dropping a penny from a skyscraper is lethal. The Discovery Channel's Mythbusters are at the Hanford nuclear reservation this week to get to the bottom of the nuclear survival myth. The experiment required 200 cockroaches from a scientific supply company. Fifty will get no radiation so they can be used as a control group. Another 50 will be exposed to 1,000 rad of radiation, the exposure that's lethal to humans. It gets worse from there for the bugs. The next 50 will be exposed to 10,000 rad and the final to 100,000 rad. The show is expected to air in about 4 months.

First, we have this press release from a Statistics Watchdog Group in advance of a hearing held on Capitol Hill. You have to know that when the statisticians are after you, you have really screwed up. Then we have the congressional press release from the House Education and Labor Committee, complete with direct links (PDF warning) to the report and to transcripts of the testimony of several witnesses (1, 2, 3), from the hearing held this week. This is all about a new government report just released that found thousands of allegations of child abuse at private residential treatment programs between 1990 and 2007. Many were horrific. The report also examined in detail ten cases (from many more) of child abuse and neglect that resulted in death between 1990 and 2004. Of course, for those of us who remember (start from the beginning) the Slashdot series Voices from the HellMouth, we have to ask "who are the kids in these camps?"(via)

Linux is carrying a detailed article regarding the security debate raging in corporations about using Open Source. One interesting quote: "We don't do open source because my lawyer says there's no one to sue," says Phil Maier, vice president of information security at Inovant, Visa's technology deployment division. "The lawyers had the final say." Maybe Shakespeare was right after all ....

Internet Astronomy has taken off in a big way. Highlighted by shows like the recent PBS special, Seeing in the Dark, digital imaging and the internet have combined to make many more resources available for the amateur astronomer than were possible even just a few years ago. Now we even have sites like Global-Rent-a-Scope, which let you control a network of research grade telescopes over the Internet with your web browser. This permits amateurs to perform real research, and make important contributions in a number of fields.

Earth to PC World. You have a problem. Via the Register The British retailer stocks a variety of bags including the Pakuma backpack, which it describes on its website as having been specifically "designed for endurance and travel". It goes on to explain that "strong and robust material has been used to make the bags to ensure you will use your Pakuma bag for years to come". One purchaser had a problem with a bag after several months of extensive travel. Since he had only purchased it a few months previously so he decided to return to PC World and request an exchange. However, "I was told, in no uncertain terms, that the bag that I had purchased was 'incompatible with Mac laptops'." This is getting to be as bad as BestBuy or Taco Bell and Two Dollar Bills

Comcast has finally clarified what "excessive use" is as any customer who downloads the equivalent of 30,000 songs, 250,000 pictures or 13 million emails in a month. In short, even if you played a marathon World of Warcraft session for weeks while downloading the massive amount of demos on Xbox 360 and sprinkled with the not so massive amount of demos on the PlayStation Network, you are still not close to getting banned on Comcast. And even I would have a question about a home account sending out 13,000,000 emails in a single month.

I just came across this report iun which a DMOZ editor has apparently tried to shake down a blogger for cash for continued listing in DMOZ.

A while back I got a email from a guy claiming to be a DMOZ editor saying that I had to pay him $5,000.00 or he would have my site [...] removed from the dmoz. I thought nothing of it.... then today I got a email from him saying it was removed and I might want to rethink not paying him. I thought I would check just for grins. It was removed... WOW

Of course this opens an interesting can of worms for debate.

In the virtual gaming world, a plague has ravaged the population, and this time, head crabs and flaming skulls that turn you into Zombies are not the problem. The new illness is a psychological one. It is called 'FPSS' or 'First Person Shooter Syndrome.' FPSS is a psychological condition that causes gamers to feel like they are in a first person shooter, when they are really walking around in the real world. FPSS can apparently lead to paranoia and aversion to certain surroundings such as railroads and industrial warehouses, and certain problems dealing with the real world. Yes, it's satire.

Both legal documents and computer programs are written in a language that looks somewhat like English, but isn't. You may recognize many words, but you are sadly mistaken if you think that fluency in English translates into LEGAL or COBOL. On the other hand, Legal is a lousy language as far compared to C, or even Cobol. Why is this so?

Eventually when Vista SP1 is released it might cost us. Yes, I did say that we will have to pay for it. Keep in mind this is just a rumor. If it does come true how many of us will actually pay for it, and how many of us will move to something free like Linux?

I recently came across this interesting predicament:

Jerry, XCOR needs an aerodynamicist. I have refrained from sending out this "help me Obi-wan" message for over a year, but we are getting desperate. No, that's not accurate. We are beyond desperate and into seriously frantic. We must have someone with trans-sonic and supersonic experience.

One would like to think that such exists in America, but so far I have no evidence to support the assumption. We do have resumes from people who are qualified, but none is a U.S. citizen, or holds a "Green Card." We can't hire foreigners. The U.S. State Department says what we do comes under ITAR, so we cannot hire qualified non-citizen engineers, neither can we sell our products to anyone who is not a U.S. citizen or entity. I just this morning had to turn down a job from a Brit who wants to set a world record with one of our engines. That is several million dollars in revenue that will now not come to the U.S.

But that's beside the point at this moment. XCOR needs to find someone who has some experience with trans-sonic and supersonic design. I have written to and called many schools, colleges and universities. Crickets chirping. With a single exception, the University of Maryland, not one professor or teacher or college or university has returned a query. I understand that they graduate students, but apparently helping them find jobs is beyond the academic ken.

For the past year I have placed ads everywhere: Av Week, ASME, SAE, all the alphabet organizations and associations remotely connected with aerodynamics. The result: resumes for everything _but_ an aerodynamicist. I have engaged three head hunters, several job shops and other professional recruiting organizations. The score so far: 0.

XCOR is a private space company located in Mojave. They make and fly rocket planes, and are planning a number of vehicles and engines; the goal is an economic means for going to space. They're all infected with the dream out there. As someone said: "If I were an aerodynamicist interested in going to space, I'd be living in Mojave right now"