Comment Re: A rare item. (Score 1) 507
True, but you can run any linux command line programs on it if you recompile them.
Cure For Radiation Sickness Found? 385
Summit writes "A scientist has claimed to have discovered a radioprotectant that all but eliminates acute radiation sickness even in cases of lethal doses of radiation in tests on rats and monkeys, when injected up to 72 hours after exposure. They also claim the drug, a protein, has no observed negative effects in humans. They have not irradiated any people just yet, but if this turns out to be true, it could mean everything from curing cancer to making manned interplanetary space expeditions feasible... not to mention treatment for radiation exposures in nuclear/radiological accidents/attacks. If this drug works, it would mean a true breakthrough as past experiments with radioprotectants were not particularly promising in any respect." The only source for the story at this time is an exclusive in YNet News, a site with the subtitle "Israel At Your Fingertips." Such a radioprotectant would be huge news for Israel. Make of it what you will.
Comment Re:The Fix (Score 1) 785
Maybe one could get around that problem by setting their computer's clock to an earlier date, or using an alternative to the zune software to load their files?
Comment The Fix (Score 5, Informative) 785
According to Herman at gizmodo, this is the solution:
"Your zune will need a "hard reset."
To do this, use a small screwdriver to pop off the plastic shielding where the zune cable plugs into and remove the two screws on either side of the plug. Next pop the cover off and locate the battery plug at the top left corner of the zune, using your screw driver, pop the cable connection half way off, and do this to the other plug on the right side. Wait 3 seconds, then push down the right connector and then the left battery connecter. Your zune should start up immediately. Press the backing of the zune down (make sure headphone jack is aligned) and put the screws and cover back in place.
It's an easy process but if you're unsure don't attempt it if you think you'll screw it or something.
Not pretty, but it might help those of you who have this problem.
According to others on the forum, it is caused by the new firmware, so you might not want to update it. Changing the clock might be a temporary fix if you want the new firmware.
Submission + - WSJ: Gaming, or Democratizing 'Most Viewed' Lists?
journalistguy writes: "The Wall Street Journal has an has an article on on how the content on news and other sites is manipulated by users. The article talks about a start-up called Collactive, which has been discussed here before .
What's newsworthy, IMHO, is the fact that Collactive has opened their Web 2.0 site hammering service for use by anyone . They even put up an example on how a bunch of guys pwned the top photo slot on Yahoo News, albeit for a good cause.
What I wonder is whether Collactive's APB system for taking collective action is truly a democratization of the Web, the world's first Web 3.0 service, or just another way to manipulate the news cycle?"
Submission + - DDoS attack against finnish broadcasting company
Iloinen Lohikrme writes: The Finnish broadcasting company Yle has been targeted by an DDoS attack. The matter was reported in an net article by Helsingin Sanomat. Because of the attack, Yle's net pages aren't reachable. Currently it's not known from where the attack comes and who is responsible for it. It has been speculated that this attack may be related to recent attacks against Estonian governments web services and government sites [More about attacks in Estonia]. The attacks came as a surprise to Estonia and current attack against Yle comes as more, as there hasn't been any apparent reason for any individual or group to hold grudge against Yle. It could also be that some government, be it any great power, is running the attack against Yle as an live exercise to measure it's information war power and the readiness of other governments and government agencies to respond to this kind of attack.
Submission + - SCO goes for Groklaw. Again...
beav007 writes: SCO has subpoenaed Pamela Jones of Groklaw again.
According to this article on TheRegister,
According to this article on TheRegister,
The attempted deposition will be seen by many as SCO's latest gambit to unmask Jones, who, it has claimed, to be in reality a group of IBM employees or an individual paid by IBM to portray SCO in an unfavorable light. Quoting press articles, SCO's action claims IBM "funneled" between $40,000 and $50,000 into Groklaw, which tracks the minutiae of SCO's cases against Novell and IBM. Also cited as proof of bias is the fact Groklaw is hosted for free on IBM servers at ibiblio.org. According to SCO, Jones has important information and has avoided its subpoenas by going on holiday.
Submission + - ODF Standardization Process Suspended in Malaysia
An anonymous reader writes: In a surprising move that has dismayed open standards supporters in Malaysia, the Malaysian Standardization National Body (SIRIM) has suspended standardization discussions on the OpenDocument Format. ODF was proposed as a voluntary Malaysian standard a year ago but discussions have languished at the technical body level with Microsoft Malaysia as the singular voice of opposition. The document format battles have gotten plenty of press in Malaysia in recent weeks with Microsoft Malaysia publicly accusing IBM of orchestrating ODF and anti-OOXML strategies in Malaysia without any proof. The SIRIM CEO agrees with Microsoft as much when he claims that "ODF supporters" are "proxies of international bodies with a business interest in promoting ODF" which led to his unilateral decision in suspending the standardization process. Microsoft employees blogging the document format battles are cheering the latest developments. This is the second setback in the last 6 months for open source and open standard initiatives in the country and there are fears that Microsoft lobbying is driving the Malaysian initiatives down the path of Massachusetts.
Submission + - Google Desktop for Macs Security Risk
ansemond writes: "Google Desktop on the Mac silently installs an Input Manager whose function appears to be to load bundles of code into applications targeted by Google. The Input Manager is installed in a location where it will be loaded into every application run by any user of the Mac. The fact that it loads other code on demand is worrying as it could be used for malicious purposes. Moreover, it is odd that Google installs this software without requesting the user's permission given the recent controversy on this very topic. Hopefully Google will fix the issues outlined in the article in upcoming revisions of their software."
Submission + - Better Virtual Desktops
Joseph Fung writes: There are a number of virtual desktop applications out there that will allow you to change which applications appear to be open at any given time — however, I'm wondering whether or not there's anything out there that would allow you to create virtual desktops that include application and process/service states?
Be they called profiles, desktops, or what-not, I'm looking for a way to tell my computer to switch to "development mode" which would load up my php, mysql, and apache services, then switch to "design mode" which would terminate those processes and load up Photoshop and perhaps change my monitor's display mode. Beyond that, there are umpteen different modes that would be useful, such as "media machine" or "gaming box" that would be helpful as well.
Does anyone know if there's something like this out there?
Be they called profiles, desktops, or what-not, I'm looking for a way to tell my computer to switch to "development mode" which would load up my php, mysql, and apache services, then switch to "design mode" which would terminate those processes and load up Photoshop and perhaps change my monitor's display mode. Beyond that, there are umpteen different modes that would be useful, such as "media machine" or "gaming box" that would be helpful as well.
Does anyone know if there's something like this out there?
Submission + - Can Slashdot save the world?
r3gx writes: "Hypothesis: There is no problem that the collective wisdom of /. can't solve.
Test case: Global Warming
There has got to be a viable scientific solution to the problem of Global Warming. Is there another easily produced gas we can release into the atmosphere? Can C02 be converted into another stable state? C02 exist in the ocean as it is highly soluble, could this natural process be expedited, and what would this do to the PH of the ocean? Can we take all the excess C02, make dry ice and re-freeze Greenland? OK, so that last one is more funny than viable, but we all know the situation is no laughing matter. Yet we go on with our daily lives slashdotting about how to build a faster computer or who is suing who while we continue to emit thousands of tons of C02 and other greenhouse gasses daily. Is it possible to cut C02 and other greenhouse gas emissions significantly enough in the near future to counter global warming? I personally do not think so. There has to be another scientific solution."
Journal Journal: Hillary 1984: Web generation's "Daisy ad"?
A new ad on Youtube attacking Sen. Hillary Clinton is leading some to speculate on major shifts in how presidential campaigns are run, according to this San Francisco Chronicle article. Though the ad presents itself as an ad for BarackObama.com, the Obama campaign insists it had nothing to
Submission + - USB over IP - Beat the 5m limit.
Justin Chudgar writes: "From the project's SourceForge site:
I've wished for something like this on and off for a few years now; and, it seems like there is real progress towards a working open-source solution. More technical info can be found here."
The USB/IP Project aims to develop a general USB device sharing system over IP network. To share USB devices between computers with their full functionality, USB/IP encapsulates "USB requests" into IP packets and transmits them between computers. Original USB device drivers and applications can be also used for remote USB devices without any modification of them. A computer can use remote USB devices as if they were directly attached...
I've wished for something like this on and off for a few years now; and, it seems like there is real progress towards a working open-source solution. More technical info can be found here."
Submission + - Sharepoint: Microsoft's new operating system
AlexGr writes: "InfoWorld
Matt Asay has an interesting observation:
"I've been beating on the Sharepoint drum for nearly two years now, but this is the first time I've seen anyone outside the ECM industry think along the same lines. Sharepoint is very clearly the future of Microsoft. And, not coincidentally, it is the future of how Microsoft locks customers into its software (benevolently or malevolently — you choose)."
http://weblog.infoworld.com/openresource/archives/ 2007/03/sharepoint_micr.html"
Submission + - TextMate: Power Editing for the Mac
honestpuck writes: "About six months ago I switched to using TextMate, a text editor with a clean and well designed interface that hides a great deal of power, replacing both BBEdit and vim. I felt like a baby duck that had been ripped away from its mother, but I was determined to switch to a single editor. I have since become familiar with the power of TextMate and it's extensions. Getting a copy of "TextMate — Power Editing for the Mac" (TPEftM) made me feel like I'd gone from baby duck to Leo DiCaprio, dating a supermodel.
TextMate, like many Mac applications, seems like a simple, easy to use application but underneath the hood it has four types of additions to customize the editing experience — snippets, macros, commands and language grammars — and a method of tying them together into a mode called a bundle. Grammars control syntax colouring, indentation, text folding among other features. TextMate also seems to have been designed from day one to integrate well with Mac OS X and its Unix underpinnings. First, it includes a great command line tool, "mate", that has a couple of neat tricks like automatically creating a project when passed a list of files or a directory name, and a GUI that can easily run shell commands and scripts. TextMate can't give me a list of unique lines in a file but it is trivially easy to pass a selection to 'uniq' and have the results replace the selection, for example.
I don't want to spend half this review describing TextMate, suffice to say that it is an incredibly powerful and conformable editor. The extended features are all well covered by TPEftM.
Taken as a whole this book is a marvelous second volume to the TextMate manual. Though the first section summarizes information covered in the TextMate manual the rest of the book takes a huge leap forward and gives you details on how to get the best from one of the finest text editors it has been my pleasure to use. If you want a well written manual for the advanced and malleable parts of TextMate then this book is pretty good, the details it is missing, such as the plugin API, are covered by the manual and where the manual is thin on detail this book fleshes it out nicely.
It's broken up into three sections, "Editing" which contains three chapters (and the introduction) covering the basics of creating projects and files, moving around, selecting text and find and replace (a nice little regular expresson engine), "Automations" which contains five chapters covering the built in bundles and how to write your own snippets, macros and commands and "Languages" which covers the development of language grammars, preferences and themes.
This is a useful book. It's not a classic, it won't revolutionize your thinking about anything, nor will you learn new coding techniques. It will, however, reward any effort you make towards working through it with a much improved editing experience.
TPEftM is also a hard book, reading it can be almost a chore with the need to digest and try out some fairly complicated topics. TPEftM isn't a great learning aide, it's more a technical manual than a textbook. I wish I could blame the writing but the book is well written and edited, it just has a technical style. At times I thought a lighter touch in the writing would have been good to allay some of the density. It also seems light on examples, while the discussion of each topic is well constructed and understandable a little more attention to the number, length and content of examples would have improved the book's usability.
It is best to give TPEftM a quick read and then use it as a guide to doing some customizing of your TextMate environment. The chapter that I remember well is the one on snippets since I've used the book to guide me in writing several. In fact my first foray into 'programming' TextMate was to alter some snippets in the built-in automation.
The O'Reilly page for the book just contains a book description and some marketing information. For more useful information you can go to the Pragmatic Programmer's page for the book which has a link to download the code, an errata list, a table of contents and links to two excerpts from the book. You can also buy the PDF version or both the PDF and paper versions on the Pragmatic site.
In conclusion this is a great book if you are currently toying with using TextMate as your Mac OS X editor. It is a good book and second manual if you are already a heavy TextMate user and want to know how to get the best out of the programmability of TextMate. So all TextMate users should consider this book a must buy. This is one hunk of extra documentation for TextMate, at only 182 pages it isn't a large book but it is full of information. For your $30 (or less, almost everywhere) you'll have an immediately useful book that will take you months to digest."
TextMate, like many Mac applications, seems like a simple, easy to use application but underneath the hood it has four types of additions to customize the editing experience — snippets, macros, commands and language grammars — and a method of tying them together into a mode called a bundle. Grammars control syntax colouring, indentation, text folding among other features. TextMate also seems to have been designed from day one to integrate well with Mac OS X and its Unix underpinnings. First, it includes a great command line tool, "mate", that has a couple of neat tricks like automatically creating a project when passed a list of files or a directory name, and a GUI that can easily run shell commands and scripts. TextMate can't give me a list of unique lines in a file but it is trivially easy to pass a selection to 'uniq' and have the results replace the selection, for example.
I don't want to spend half this review describing TextMate, suffice to say that it is an incredibly powerful and conformable editor. The extended features are all well covered by TPEftM.
Taken as a whole this book is a marvelous second volume to the TextMate manual. Though the first section summarizes information covered in the TextMate manual the rest of the book takes a huge leap forward and gives you details on how to get the best from one of the finest text editors it has been my pleasure to use. If you want a well written manual for the advanced and malleable parts of TextMate then this book is pretty good, the details it is missing, such as the plugin API, are covered by the manual and where the manual is thin on detail this book fleshes it out nicely.
It's broken up into three sections, "Editing" which contains three chapters (and the introduction) covering the basics of creating projects and files, moving around, selecting text and find and replace (a nice little regular expresson engine), "Automations" which contains five chapters covering the built in bundles and how to write your own snippets, macros and commands and "Languages" which covers the development of language grammars, preferences and themes.
This is a useful book. It's not a classic, it won't revolutionize your thinking about anything, nor will you learn new coding techniques. It will, however, reward any effort you make towards working through it with a much improved editing experience.
TPEftM is also a hard book, reading it can be almost a chore with the need to digest and try out some fairly complicated topics. TPEftM isn't a great learning aide, it's more a technical manual than a textbook. I wish I could blame the writing but the book is well written and edited, it just has a technical style. At times I thought a lighter touch in the writing would have been good to allay some of the density. It also seems light on examples, while the discussion of each topic is well constructed and understandable a little more attention to the number, length and content of examples would have improved the book's usability.
It is best to give TPEftM a quick read and then use it as a guide to doing some customizing of your TextMate environment. The chapter that I remember well is the one on snippets since I've used the book to guide me in writing several. In fact my first foray into 'programming' TextMate was to alter some snippets in the built-in automation.
The O'Reilly page for the book just contains a book description and some marketing information. For more useful information you can go to the Pragmatic Programmer's page for the book which has a link to download the code, an errata list, a table of contents and links to two excerpts from the book. You can also buy the PDF version or both the PDF and paper versions on the Pragmatic site.
In conclusion this is a great book if you are currently toying with using TextMate as your Mac OS X editor. It is a good book and second manual if you are already a heavy TextMate user and want to know how to get the best out of the programmability of TextMate. So all TextMate users should consider this book a must buy. This is one hunk of extra documentation for TextMate, at only 182 pages it isn't a large book but it is full of information. For your $30 (or less, almost everywhere) you'll have an immediately useful book that will take you months to digest."
