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Happy Towel Day 122

Posted by samzenpus from the wringing-out-the-wit dept.
An anonymous reader writes "While Douglas Adams continues his attempt to set a new record for the longest extended lunch break, geeks all over the universe pay tribute to the beloved author by celebrating the tenth edition of Towel Day. Towel Day is more alive than ever. This year Richard Dawkins, one of Adams' best friends, has tweeted a Towel Day reminder to his numerous followers. The CERN Bulletin has published an article on Towel Day. There has been TV coverage and there will be a radio interview. The Military Republic of the Deltan Imperium, a newly formed micronation, has recognized Towel Day as an official holiday. In Hungary several hundreds of hitchhiker fans want to have a picnic together in a park. And there's a concert, a free downloadable nerdrap album, a free game being released, the list goes on and on."
NASA

Dying Man Shares Unseen Challenger Video 266

Posted by Soulskill from the new-perspective-on-an-old-tragedy dept.
longacre writes "An amateur video of the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger explosion has been made public for the first time. The Florida man who filmed it from his front yard on his new Betamax camcorder turned the tape over to an educational organization a week before he died this past December. The Space Exploration Archive has since published the video into the public domain in time for the 24th anniversary of the catastrophe. Despite being shot from about 70 miles from Cape Canaveral, the shuttle and the explosion can be seen quite clearly. It is unclear why he never shared the footage with NASA or the media. NASA officials say they were not aware of the video, but are interested in examining it now that it has been made available."

Comment Dead trees (Score 1) 401

by AKAJack (#26918491) Attached to: How Do You Document Technical Procedures?

paper and PDF files cannot be "messed" with and passed on with new, incorrect, information added in (without some extra work beyond the problems in that area a wiki presents)

Remember - you are showing people how to use a product and NOT teaching them a new skill or how to do their jobs (hopefully).

It is not unexpected that your company would require some basic knowledge beyond remembering to breath in order to provide security services.
PlayStation (Games)

Submission + - Gentoo on the PS3 - Full install instructions

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: My friend Jake just bought a PS3, and he wanted to install Linux on it. Since he didn't know much about Linux, it was my responsibility to help him with it. His requirements — Install a distribution which is easy to maintain and run. He wanted to make the full use of his Linux install, so he needed a distro which wouldn't hold him back with frustrating problems. The only solution was using a distro which had a better package management system, and did its work without bothering you, the end user. Having used Gentoo extensively, I knew that this would be the solution to my problems. What follows is full install instructions, plus personal opinions, on why Gentoo is better than Fedora Core or YDL on the PS3
Handhelds

Submission + - Apple iPhone Preview

Submitted by
Saro
Saro writes: "Looks like the Apple iPhone is real. Boasting a 480 x 320 (3.5") touchscreen, 4 or 8GB of storage, 2 megapixel camera, Bluetooth with EDR, WiFi and a quad band GSM radio with EDGE. This all fits in a 11.6 mm thin shell. The kicker? It runs OSX. Plenty of pictures over at Engadget."
Media (Apple)

Submission + - Apple announces name change, Apple TV, iPhone, ...

Submitted by
guruevi
guruevi writes: "Apple announces a lot of new stuff today at MacWorld. Steve Jobs announced that Apple Computers, Inc. is becoming Apple, Inc. a name change reflecting the change from a computer company to a more media-centered company?

They announced a lot of new toys to tinker with (soon). There is the Apple TV which is basically iTunes (Store) on steroids, a new Airport Extreme Base Station (which looks suspiciously a lot like the Apple TV, they announced the long waited for iPhone (with 2 year cell phone plan) — single button, looks a lot like a better version of the Apple Newton and includes a mini-Mac OS X which can run iTunes and more, new iPod and Switch-to-Mac advertisements.

It's all on Apple.com (already). http://www.apple.com/

A lot of change for this company, in other news... Redmond ordered a new truckload of chairs"
Upgrades

Submission + - Kernel 2.6.20

Submitted by
mcalwell
mcalwell writes: "For only being a release candidate the Linux 2.6.20 kernel has already generated quite a bit of attention. On top of adding asynchronous SCSI scanning, multi-threaded USB probing, and many driver updates, the Linux 2.6.20 kernel will include a full virtualization (not para-virtualization) solution. Kernel-based Virtual Machine (or KVM for short) is a GPL software project that has been developed and sponsored by Qumranet. In this article we are offering a brief overview of the Kernel-based Virtual Machine for Linux as well as offering up in-house performance numbers as we compare KVM to other virtualization solutions such as QEMU Accelerator and Xen.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item =623&num=1"
Security

Submission + - Critical Security Issues 2006: Firefox vs. IE

Submitted by
bean_tmt
bean_tmt writes: "SecurityFocus has a nice little quip about the number of days IE and Firefox both spent in 2006 with unpatched critical security issues. As you might have guessed, IE had more days with unpatched critical security issues than Firefox, but check out the numbers! The article states that based on information published by Microsoft and from information gathered by interviews with researches, the Washington Post learned that these critical security issues put IE users were at risk for 284 days in 2006. Firefox only had *one* instance of a critical security issue that was patched after nine days."
Security

Submission + - MS Patch Day Misses Word Zero-Days

Submitted by
bungee jumper
bungee jumper writes: "Microsoft released four bulletins with patches for 10 vulnerabilities but there are no fixes for known (and under-attack) MS Word zero-day flaws, eweek.com reports. The January batch covers critical bugs in Excel, Outlook and Windows. The first confirmed Windows Vista flaw, a denial-of-service issue that was publicly released on an underground hacker site in Russia, also remains unpatched."
Google

Submission + - Google Earth has left beta.... again

Submitted by dickeya
dickeya writes: Approximately one year after the Google Earth version 3 client moved out of beta, the version 4 beta has done the same. The official announcement hasn't posted, but from the Google Earth Blog:

Google Earth 4 is officially released! The beta program began 6 months ago, and now almost exactly 1 year after GE 3 was released, GE 4 is no longer in beta (latest version is 4.0.2722). See the Google Earth home page for details, or just go download GE 4 now. GE 4 has many new features not available in the earlier version. Many of the features have been described in this blog over the past few months. Here are some highlights and why you should definitely consider upgrading.

If you haven't checked it out lately, now's a good time.

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