Comment So much for the cloud (Score 4, Insightful) 239
The idea of sticking all my data out in cyberspace on somebody else's servers always seemed a little fluffy anyway.
Comment Except when you actually need it (Score 1) 233
My aunt, acting on the advice of her doctor, had a baseline mammogram done when she turned 40. Fast-forward 15 years, when a mammogram showed some abnormalities and she was told to bring in her old ones for comparison. She went to the hospital where the first test was done and they said, "Oh, we only keep X-rays on file for 10 years."
Comment Tabernash, Colorado -- we be chillin' (Score 1) 525
We had a bit of frost yesterday morning in our little mountain hamlet (elevation 8,500 ft). Summer mornings run in the 30s-40s range; afternoons can climb to the 70s or even low 80s for short periods. The wildflowers are blooming profusely. There are still patches of snow on the surrounding higher mountains. So I guess you could say it's "not so hot" here, but that hardly describes the situation.
Comment Native Alaskan/African American, or what? (Score 2, Interesting) 489
We are so-called Caucasians. We were living in Alaska when our son was born. He amused himself on taking the PSAT test, by checking off the box for "Native Alaskan." His classmate, a so-called Caucasian who was born in South Africa to a white South African family who later immigrated to the USA, wondered if he should check off the box "African-American."
By the way, what "color" are people who actually live in the Caucasus, how do they describe themselves, and how did we "white folks" happen to be called Caucasians? My ancestors came from Ireland. I think there is a new book out called "The History of White People" that tackles this bizarre subject.
Comment A newspaper reporter's notebook (Score 1) 373
They are somewhat thinner in width than a stenographer's notebook and fastened with a spiral ring at the top. It fits in the palm of your hand, so you can hold it in one hand and scribble notes with the other. It's especially handy for a left-handed person. When you're finished, you can stand it up on your desk and transcribe the notes, flipping through the pages as you like. Another good option is the yellow legal pad - either letter or legal size
Comment ThankYouThankYouThankYou (Score 5, Insightful) 120
Most people who live in cities never get to see even a fraction of the night sky. Even thougb I live in rural Colorado where we can see the Milky Way fairly regularly, I want to thank you so much for sharing with everyone what we are missing out on, night after night. This is way better than TV.
Cheers.
The Night Sky In 800 Million Pixels 120
An anonymous reader recommends a project carried out recently by Serge Brunier and Frédéric Tapissier. Brunier traveled to the top of a volcano in the Canary Islands and to the Chilean desert to capture 1,200 images — each one a 6-minute exposure — of the night sky. The photos were taken between August 2008 and February 2009 and required more than 30 full nights under the stars. Tapissier then processed the images together into a single zoomable, 800-megapixel, 360-degree image of the sky in which the Earth is embedded. "It is the sky that everyone can relate to that I wanted to show — it's constellations... whose names have nourished all childhoods, it's myths and stories of gods, titans, and heroes shared by all civilisations since Homo became sapiens. The image was therefore made as man sees it, with a regular digital camera." The image is the first of three portraits produced by the European Southern Observatory's GigaGalaxy Zoom project.
Comment Dogs in the manger (Score 1) 353
These are the same guys who arrogantly rejected digital cellphones for a long time because it would interfere with their market share grasp of analog cellphones.
Comment Drugs'll get ya thru times of no $ (Score 1) 873
Better than $ will get ya thru times of no drugs.
Comment Busiest day of the year for Mom (Score 2, Informative) 586
There's the grocery shopping, baking pies, thawing out the turkey, reaching your arm inside its cavities to pull out the neck bone and giblets, boiling up the cranberry sauce, making the stuffing, peeling all the potatoes to cook and mash, trying to figure out how to make gravy from the drippings, carving the damn turkey after it's roasted, not to mention hauling out all the wedding china and "good" wineglasses (which can't go in the dishwasher of course), ironing that mile-long tablecloth, poihsing the silver, dirtying up every pot and pan in the house. Not to mention relatives who come and stay for the entire weekend and have to be fed and entertained. Whew! I'm glad to have my family gather together, but I give thanks when it's all over!
Facebook Scrabble Rip-off Capitalizes on Mattel's Lethargy 216
mlimber writes "The Facebook app Scrabulous was written by two Scrabble-loving brothers in India, has over 700,000 users, brings in about $25,000 per month in advertising revenue, and is in flagrant violation of copyright law. The corporate owners of Scrabble, Hasbro and Mattel, have threatened legal action against the creators and have made deals with Electronic Arts and RealNetworks to release official online versions of the game. But according to an NYTimes article, 'Scrabulous has already brought Scrabble a newfound virtual popularity that none of the game companies could have anticipated,' and according to one consultant to the entertainment industry, 'If you're Hasbro or Mattel, it isn't in your interest to shut this down.' Hasbro's partner RealNetworks is 'working closely' with the piratical brothers, but Mattel says that 'settling with the [brothers] would set a bad precedent' for other board games going online."
'Death Star' Aimed at Earth 400
An anonymous reader writes "A spectacular, rotating binary star system is a ticking time bomb, ready to throw out a searing beam of high-energy gamma rays that could lead to a major extinction event — and Earth may be right in the line of fire. Australian science magazine Cosmos Magazine reports: 'Though the risk may be remote, there is evidence that gamma ray bursts have swept over the planet at various points in Earth's history with a devastating effect on life. A 2005 study showed that a gamma-ray burst originating within 6,500 light years of Earth could be enough to strip away the ozone layer and cause a mass extinction. Researchers led by Adrian Melott at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, U.S., suggest that such an event may have been responsible for a mass extinction 443 million years ago, in the late Ordovician period, which wiped out 60 per cent of life and cooled the planet.'"
PHP Optimized for Windows Server 2008 182
Stony Stevenson writes "It used to be that popular PHP applications would run more poorly on Windows Server than on a Linux or Unix servers, for which PHP had been optimized. Specialist in the PHP language Zend Technologies now says that's no longer the case. The Zend Core commercially supported form of PHP has been certified by Microsoft as ready to run 'with performance and stability' on Windows Server 2008, said Andi Gutmans, co-founder and CTO of Zend. Previously, PHP 'didn't run as well as it should on Windows,' said Gutmans, despite the fact that 75% to 80% of PHP users were developing on Windows workstations."
