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Space

Milky Way May Have Dark Matter Satellite Galaxies 174

Posted by CmdrTaco from the whirling-and-twirling dept.
rubycodez writes "Berkeley astronomer Sukanya Chakrabarti has detected perturbations in the gases surrounding our Milky Way and concludes there is a satellite 'Galaxy X' 250,000 light years away that is mostly dark matter, but that may contain dwarf stars visible in infrared. She expects many more such dark matter satellites to the Milky Way to be discovered using her technique."
United States

Journal Journal: My Netgear Router is Dumber Than It Thinks It Is

Journal by pudge

I upgraded the firmware on my Netgear router today and it wouldn't let me use the LAN IP I usually use for it, 10.0.1.1, because it thinks my ISP uses that subnet, because I set the router to read from my own internal DNS. Took me awhile to figure out why it thought what it did, because it didn't occur to me that it would care what DNS addresses I gave it.
Businesses

How Do You Volunteer Professional Services? 366

Posted by timothy from the with-caution dept.
keefus_a writes "My wife and I usually take a week long vacation in the Spring and I tossed out the idea of volunteering abroad. Neither of us has a problem with doing manual labor, or whatever task is needed. However, I thought it might be of some value, and substantially more rewarding than our daily grind, if we could volunteer our professional services (I'm a network guy and my wife has a master's degree in counseling). The problem is that I haven't found any resources for doing so on a short-term basis. So I ask Slashdot. Has anyone ever done short-term volunteer work in your professional field? What organization did you contact? Or are we better off donating money to a particular cause and just working on a tan?"
Science

The Neuroscience of Screwing Up 190

Posted by samzenpus from the nobody-is-right-all-the-time dept.
resistant writes "As the evocative title from Wired magazine implies, Kevin Dunbar of the University of Toronto has taken an in-depth and fascinating look at scientific error, the scientists who cope with it, and sometimes transcend it to find new lines of inquiry. From the article: 'Dunbar came away from his in vivo studies with an unsettling insight: Science is a deeply frustrating pursuit. Although the researchers were mostly using established techniques, more than 50 percent of their data was unexpected. (In some labs, the figure exceeded 75 percent.) "The scientists had these elaborate theories about what was supposed to happen," Dunbar says. "But the results kept contradicting their theories. It wasn't uncommon for someone to spend a month on a project and then just discard all their data because the data didn't make sense."'"
Earth

Modeling the Economy As a Physics Problem 452

Posted by kdawson from the gazintas-and-comezoutas dept.
University of Utah physicist Tim Garrett has published a study that approaches the economy and its relation to global warming as a physics problem — and comes to some controversial conclusions: that rising carbon dioxide emissions cannot be stabilized unless the world's economy collapses or society builds the equivalent of one new nuclear power plant each day. The study was panned by economists and was rejected by several journals before its acceptance in the journal Climatic Change. "[Garrett discovered that] Throughout history, a simple physical constant... links global energy use to the world's accumulated economic productivity, adjusted for inflation. So it isn't necessary to consider population growth and standard of living in predicting society's future energy consumption and resulting carbon dioxide emissions. ... 'I'm not an economist, and I am approaching the economy as a physics problem,' Garrett says. 'I end up with a global economic growth model different than they have.' Garrett treats civilization like a 'heat engine' that 'consumes energy and does "work" in the form of economic production, which then spurs it to consume more energy,' he says. That constant is 9.7 (plus or minus 0.3) milliwatts per inflation-adjusted 1990 dollar. So if you look at economic and energy production at any specific time in history, 'each inflation-adjusted 1990 dollar would be supported by 9.7 milliwatts of primary energy consumption,' Garrett says. ... Perhaps the most provocative implication of Garrett's theory is that conserving energy doesn't reduce energy use, but spurs economic growth and more energy use."
Earth

New Research Forecasts Global 6C Increase By End of Century 746

Posted by Soulskill from the yelling-match-begins-now dept.
jamie writes with this snippet from the UK's Independent: "The world is now firmly on course for the worst-case scenario in terms of climate change, with average global temperatures rising by up to 6C by the end of the century, leading scientists said yesterday. ... [The study] found that there has been a 29 per cent increase in global CO2 emissions from fossil fuel between 2000 and 2008, the last year for which figures are available. On average, the researchers found, there was an annual increase in emissions of just over 3 per cent during the period, compared with an annual increase of 1 per cent between 1990 and 2000. Almost all of the increase this decade occurred after 2000 and resulted from the boom in the Chinese economy. The researchers predict a small decrease this year due to the recession, but further increases from 2010."

Comment Re:Here's an idea... (Score 1) 301

by ChadAmberg (#30038196) Attached to: Reporting To Executives

Capacity planning: "Based on our performance monitoring over the last 6 months, (show the charts you've made) we have 4 systems that will require additional disk within six months at a cost of $x, and two that need additional memory immediately. My projections go out to a year based on current growth rates of our service."
What, you don't have performance monitoring statistics? You'd better start now. And learn how to do projections based on business growth rates.

Bottlenecks: "When we look at the end to end system, it seems that our primary bottleneck is in our backed SQL database. Transactions take 1.2 seconds to complete, while the rest of the system completes in .2 seconds. We'd like to spend $$ on a DBA to go over and optimize the queries."

Costs: "Running our entire data center costs $y per month. The electric company is due to raise rates in 3 months (yes, you call them and ask!) so our costs will increase to $z. We think we can offset that cost by calling the server manufacturers and ensuring that our warranty will cover things if we reduce our air conditioning by 3 degrees. We also have 6 servers coming off of warranty in 6 months. The cost to replace them will be $x which includes migration costs, and the cost to extend the warranty is $y."

Comment Re:Hands-free is allowed (Score 1) 364

by ChadAmberg (#29565327) Attached to: For New Zealanders, No More Phones as Sat-Nav Devices

Or in other words, most people on cell phones are intelligent enough to realize they are not driving under perfect conditions and react accordingly.

I think you have "cause" and "effect" backwards here. Drivers on cell phones drive so noticeably bad, that all the other drivers back up and avoid the selfish moron. Cell phone users are also the ones that tend to think they have a right to jam themselves in the passing lanes and then drive slower, thus jamming up traffic all around. Again, they're too damn selfish to just shut the fuck up for a few minutes and get to their destination.
Censorship

Real-World Consequences of Social Networking Posts 451

Posted by kdawson from the world-is-watching dept.
gbulmash sends in a classic Streisand Effect story of a Chicago landlord suing a tenant over a tweet complaining of mold in her apartment. The landlord claims that the tweet caused $50,000 damage to their reputation. If it didn't, then the fallout from their own ill-advised lawsuit surely will. The woman's Twitter account is now gone (possibly on advice of counsel), but the tweet that started it all lives on. And in a similar vein, reader levicivita notes a firing over a political comment on a Facebook page. "Lee Landor, who had been the deputy press secretary to Manhattan Borough President Scott M. Stringer since May, posted comments on her Facebook page criticizing Mr. Gates [Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr.] and the president, whom she referred to at one point as 'O-dumb-a.' ... The borough president has accepted Ms. Landor's resignation, effective immediately."
Earth

Formerly Classified Global Warming Spy Photos Released 791

Posted by kdawson from the inconvenient-images dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The Obama administration has released more than a thousand intelligence images of Arctic ice, following a declassification request by the National Academy of Sciences. The images feature a 1m resolution, and scientists who have had to base climate models on 15m- or 30m-resolution photos are rejoicing. The photos, kept classified by the Bush administration, show the impact of global warming in the Arctic and the retreat of glaciers in Washington and Alaska."
Earth

Greenpeace Decries Lack of Environmental Progress From Console Makers 143

Posted by Soulskill from the it's-not-easy-being-green dept.
SwiftyNifty writes with an update to Greenpeace's 2007 criticism of game console manufacturers over environmental concerns. Their claim was that some of the chemicals used to make the consoles were toxic, and that the manufacturers' recycling practices were not up to snuff. Two years have passed, and Greenpeace now says that progress is either slow or non-existent. "... Nintendo has little plan to remove PVC and almost no plans to remove [brominated flame retardants]. Slightly further up the scale, Microsoft was again awarded a poor ranking due to the use of toxic waste materials. And Sony, who rank rather well in their mobile phone partnership with Ericsson (scoring 6.5 out of 10 for improved toxic waste and efficient energy usage) didn't perform as well in the console category, failing to eliminate PVC or BFRs from their gaming products."

Comment Easy (Score 2, Informative) 149

by ChadAmberg (#28213723) Attached to: Directory Service Implementation From Scratch?

Use AD.
Even though folks will fuss and whine about AD being not pure LDAP, for all intents and purposes it is, and we've got lots of Linux and other *nix boxes using it for authentication. And remember, you can always extend AD for your custom applications easy enough. It's simple enough that MCSEs can run it.
Space

NASA Names Space Station Treadmill After Colbert 383

Posted by Soulskill from the running-man dept.
willith writes "The SF Chronicle reports on the results of the International Space Station Node 3 naming contest (which we previously discussed). Comedian and fake-pundit Stephen Colbert conducted a bombastic write-in campaign and repeatedly urged his show's fan base (the 'Colbert Nation') to stuff the ballot box with his name, which resulted in 'Colbert' coming in first in the write-in contest with almost a quarter-million votes. Although the Node 3 component will not be named 'Colbert' — NASA has instead chosen to call it 'Tranquility' — one of the Node 3 components will bear the honor: the second ISS treadmill, which will be installed in Node 3, will be named the Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill. The formal announcement was made on the air yesterday at 22:30 EDT on the Colbert Report by astronaut Sunita Williams."
Space

The Lower Atmosphere of Pluto Revealed 109

Posted by CmdrTaco from the they-should-buy-a-space-heater-haha-get-it-so-funny-blam-blam dept.
Matt_dk writes "Using ESO's Very Large Telescope, astronomers have gained valuable new insights about the atmosphere of the dwarf planet Pluto. The scientists found unexpectedly large amounts of methane in the atmosphere, and also discovered that the atmosphere is hotter than the surface by about 40 degrees, although it still only reaches a frigid minus 180 degrees Celsius. These properties of Pluto's atmosphere may be due to the presence of pure methane patches or of a methane-rich layer covering the dwarf planet's surface."

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