Comment Re:Friend/ employee hates Oracle (Score 4, Funny) 91
So, you use Solaris? Me too. And looking at alternatives now. It's a shame really, as the most stable gear I've run has been Solaris on Sparc.
Firefox Mobile 1.1 Released 57
An anonymous reader writes "Firefox Mobile 1.1 has been released for Maemo devices such as the Nokia N900. Madhava Enros has put together a field guide for Firefox Mobile 1.1 which highlights what's new and notable in this release."
Comment Re:Hmm... (Score 0) 839
I hate to break it to you, but snow in Illinois and Colorado contain the same amount of water.
Comment Re:Solvable. (Score 1) 839
Except that in a 5 light cluster, the bottom lights are always the TURN ARROWS. Green Light is always the 3rd from the top.
And even if it is green it does not mean you are clear to plow through with reckless abandon. Green means that you are clear to proceed through the intersection as long as it is clear of obstructions ( like other cars, pedestrians, etc. ).
Comment Re:Hmm... (Score 5, Informative) 839
The ones you see around Denver *are* designed differently.
The shield around the lights is open on the top, so that it funnels wind downwards and blows the snow off of the light. The ones in Illinois are not. The Colorado shields cost ~$30.
This isn't a case of LEDs being bad. Nor is it "greens run amuck". It's idiots run amuck.
The driver of the truck should be prosecuted. In every light cluster with turn arrows, the turn arrows are on the bottom. They are NOT the solid green. And being from Illinois, in Driver's Ed we were all taught that Green does not mean 'Go'. It means *proceed when the intersection is clear*. So, failure on several points by the driver of the truck.
Illinois needs to install the same snow shields that Colorado and other states have successfully done with their LED light installations.
We'd probably have them already, except we spent all our DOT money on 'Rod R. Blagojevich - Governor' signs.
Big Dipper "Star" Actually a Sextuplet System 88
Theosis sends word that an astronomer at the University of Rochester and his colleagues have made the surprise discovery that Alcor, one of the brightest stars in the Big Dipper, is actually two stars; and it is apparently gravitationally bound to the four-star Mizar system, making the whole group a sextuplet. This would make the Mizar-Alcor sextuplet the second-nearest such system known. The discovery is especially surprising because Alcor is one of the most studied stars in the sky. The Mizar-Alcor system has been involved in many "firsts" in the history of astronomy: "Benedetto Castelli, Galileo's protege and collaborator, first observed with a telescope that Mizar was not a single star in 1617, and Galileo observed it a week after hearing about this from Castelli, and noted it in his notebooks... Those two stars, called Mizar A and Mizar B, together with Alcor, in 1857 became the first binary stars ever photographed through a telescope. In 1890, Mizar A was discovered to itself be a binary, being the first binary to be discovered using spectroscopy. In 1908, spectroscopy revealed that Mizar B was also a pair of stars, making the group the first-known quintuple star system."
Comment Re:Foundation (Score 1) 444
I thought of the same thing when I read the article. "Gee, that sounds like the miniaturized nuclear devices the Foundation created!".
Science Fiction again becoming science reality. Cool.
Space Shuttle Atlantis Will Carry Basketballs Into Space 38
Having figured out everything there is to know about space, and being huge fans of Space Jam, NASA has left some of their sciencey stuff behind and made room for a pair of basketballs on the Space Shuttle Atlantis. One of the balls comes courtesy of The Harlem Globetrotters, and the other is on loan from the University of Chicago. It was used by Edwin Hubble in a 1909 victory against Indiana University. "It is only fitting that the team that has seen more of the world than any other in history would have a presence beyond the stratosphere," Globetrotters chief executive officer Kurt Schneider said in a news release.
Scientists Discover Proteins Controlling Evolution 436
Khemisty writes "Evolutionary changes are supposed to take place gradually and randomly, under pressure from natural selection. But a team of Princeton scientists investigating a group of proteins that help cells burn energy stumbled across evidence that this is not how evolution works. In fact, their discovery could revolutionize the way we understand evolutionary processes. They have evidence that organisms actually have the ability to control their own evolution."
Washington Post Blog Shuts Down 75% of Online Spam 335
ESCquire writes "Apparently, the Washington Post Blog 'Security Fix' managed to shut down McColo, a US-based hosting provider facilitating more than 75 percent of global spam. " Now how long before the void is filled by another ISP?
Skype Blames Microsoft Patch Tuesday for Outage 286
brajesh writes to tell us that Skype has blamed its outage over the last week on Microsoft's Patch Tuesday. Apparently the huge numbers of computers rebooting (and the resulting flood of login requests) revealed a problem with the network allocation algorithm resulting in a couple days of downtime. Skype further stressed that there was no malicious activity and user security was never in any danger.
Comment Re:Virus checker companies (Score 1) 69
You could easily rework your post to comment on the federal government and it's color coded warning system. Hmm ... I wounder why they might want to keep the perception of impending doom alive ...
Comment Re:Curioser and curioser, and more curioserererer (Score 2, Interesting) 438
more or less gives them a license to discipline (oh, but only after some undisclosable anonymous source expresses 'concern', of course)
I know how this feels first hand. In the 6th grade my parents sent me and my two younger sisters to a private school. The Dean was pretty strict, but we were getting a good education, a lot of individual teacher attention and really exceeding in our studies. The second year the Dean decided that we (the students, not just me and my siblings) were rebels that needed to be controlled, which he thought he could do through a strict dress code. The kicker was that it was to be enforced even when we weren't at school. We (supposedly) were not allowed to wear jeans (ever) and the girls had to wear skirts or knee length shorts, always. Even on Saturday. That, and no "excessive jewelry".
We didn't stay much longer. These poor kids in the article though.. I don't imagine they have that luxury.
Comment Forget QOS (Score 1) 362
QOS is not what you need to focus on.
Latency in this application will kill your sound quality far more than a few dropped packets. Optimally you'll want to be under 300ms for things to be manageable.
The other main thing to look for is a CODEC you can use with your chosen provider that uses as little bandwidth as possible and supports loss concealment. You need to worry about those two factors long before QOS becomes relevant to the equation.
Journal Journal: Corporate Censorship Not Interesting Engough for /.
2004-01-30 17:22:09 CBS Takes Partisan Censorship, Blocks SuperBowl Ad (yro,media) (rejected)
Hi Michael, you great bastion of upstanding editorial stewardship!
