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Best Man Rigs Newlyweds' Bed To Tweet During Sex 272

Posted by samzenpus from the nice-feed dept.
When an UK man was asked to be the best man at a friend's wedding he agreed that he would not pull any pranks before or during the ceremony. Now the groom wishes he had extended the agreement to after the blessed occasion as well. The best man snuck into the newlyweds' house while they were away on their honeymoon and placed a pressure-sensitive device under their mattress. The device now automatically tweets when the couple have sex. The updates include the length of activity and how vigorous the act was on a scale of 1-10.
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The Perfect Way To Slice a Pizza 282

Posted by samzenpus from the equal-distribution-of-the-pie dept.
iamapizza writes "New Scientist reports on the quest of two math boffins for the perfect way to slice a pizza. It's an interesting and in-depth article; 'The problem that bothered them was this. Suppose the harried waiter cuts the pizza off-center, but with all the edge-to-edge cuts crossing at a single point, and with the same angle between adjacent cuts. The off-center cuts mean the slices will not all be the same size, so if two people take turns to take neighboring slices, will they get equal shares by the time they have gone right round the pizza — and if not, who will get more?' This is useful, of course, if you're familiar with the concept of 'sharing' a pizza."
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NASA Tests Flying Airbag 118

Posted by samzenpus from the drop-the-cloud-anchor dept.
coondoggie writes "NASA is looking to reduce the deadly impact of helicopter crashes on their pilots and passengers with what the agency calls a high-tech honeycomb airbag known as a deployable energy absorber. So in order to test out its technology NASA dropped a small helicopter from a height of 35 feet to see whether its deployable energy absorber, made up of an expandable honeycomb cushion, could handle the stress. The test crash hit the ground at about 54MPH at a 33 degree angle, what NASA called a relatively severe helicopter crash."

Comment Re:FreeVMS (Score 5, Informative) 405

by bpechter (#30253864) Attached to: OpenSolaris Or FreeBSD?

Instead of FreeVMS which isn't ready for prime time... Get the OpenVMS hobbiest edition, load up SimH and run OpenVMS on a real emulated Vax. For fun you could boot OpenBSD, NetBSD or BSD4.x on the emulated Vax.

As far as Solaris vs. BSD -- I run 'em both here. Solaris mostly on Sparc and BSD on x86. I've done Solaris x86
and it's ok, but it's really fun to set up a jumpstart server and load up some old Sparcs.

I've even got SunOS 4.1.4 up...

Take a look at the software available on the http://www.openvmshobbyist.com/ site. A ton of VMS languages including C, ADA, Pascal, Macro32... TCP/IP and Clustering.

http://simh.trailing-edge.com/
Science

Programmable Quantum Computer Created 132

Posted by Soulskill from the four-out-of-five-ain't-bad dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A team at NIST (the National Institute of Standards and Technology) used berylium ions, lasers and electrodes to develop a quantum system that performed 160 randomly chosen routines. Other quantum systems to date have only been able to perform single, prescribed tasks. Other researchers say the system could be scaled up. 'The researchers ran each program 900 times. On average, the quantum computer operated accurately 79 percent of the time, the team reported in their paper.'"

Comment Old Linux (Score 1) 507

by bpechter (#29929863) Attached to: Installing Linux On Old Hardware?

Use only old Linux.

Corel 1.2 is quite nice on my Pentium 166 with 60Mb.
RH6.2, Slackware, older Debian. I ran FreeBSD 3.x on a Thinkpad 365 with 486 and 28 mhz. I usuallly rebuild the OpenSSL and OpenSSH from source to avoid major security holes for when I need to ssh to a work site.

I'm amazed how much more power even these $250 Netbooks have.

Bill

Comment Re:Getting old in IT is the kiss of death. (Score 1) 783

by bpechter (#29899093) Attached to: Moving Away From the IT Field?

Having been in IT for 25 years now and looking a lot like the description... Thank you 8-).

The main thing is there are good techies and bad techies. A lot of folks jumped for the high salary without having the skill set needed to troubleshoot or communicate effectively.

I came to IT after a couple of years in Journalism and PR. I retrained after a period of unemployment on my dime becoming an electronics tech and working through from Field Service on minicomputers to Minicomputer Hardware Instructor to Unix Admin and Sys Admin trainer.

The problem is that in the old days the folks that ran IT came up the line from operator to systems programmer/administrator/manager to IT operations head and CIO.

Now the folks running stuff often don't have the technical background and experience or the will to fight the corporate battles with the bean counters who demand instant quick fixes and ROI before the implementation is complete.

Give me an old pre-pc computer type who understands how an ALU works or how software paging and swapping work and I think I've got a better chance of getting something fixed.

There are few professionals out there who can read a crash dump or run with a debugger on an app or even run tcpdump/wireshark and lots of "I reboot and reload the app and server completely" to try to get it up.

--another old greybeard.

>>> B DBA0

Submission + - Church of Scientology Convicted of Fraud (timesonline.co.uk) 1

Submitted by IceDiver
IceDiver writes: As most Slashdotters know, the Church of Scientology's practices are widely scorned and even mocked. Now, however, the so-called Church has been convicted in France of fraud and one of its leaders given a 2 year sentence. Yes, the sentence is only a suspended one, and the effect this will have on the worldwide church is still to be determined, but we can hope. Is this the beginning of the end for L.Ron Hubbard's five-decade-old scam?

Submission + - Your Brain On Junk Food (sciencedaily.com)

Submitted by pdragon04
pdragon04 writes: "Brain pleasure centers became progressively less responsive in rats fed a diet of high-fat, high-calorie food, a new study has found. As the changes occurred, the rats developed compulsive overeating habits — and became obese. The overeating continued even when it meant the rats had to endure an unpleasant consequence (a mild foot shock) in order to consume the food."

Submission + - SCO Terminates Darl McBride (linuxtoday.com)

Submitted by bpechter
bpechter writes: Linux Today reports SCO has terminated Darl McBride and linked to the SCO 8K SEC report.
The report found also at the SCO site http://ir.sco.com/secfiling.cfm?filingID=1144204-09-53428 which states:

"Item 5.02 Departure of Directors or Certain Officers
On October 14, 2009, The SCO Group, Inc., (“SCO”, “us”, “we”or the “Company”) announced that the Company has eliminated the Chief Executive Officer and President positions and consequently terminated Darl McBride. The current management team comprised of Chief Operating Officer, Jeff Hunsaker, Chief Financial Officer, Ken Nielsen and General Counsel, Ryan Tibbitts, along with the rest of the management team will continue to work closely with the Chapter 11 Trustee and his advisors."
   

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