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A Klingon Christmas Carol Screenshot-sm 170

Posted by samzenpus from the not-so-tiny-tim dept.
Have you always wished that Christmas classics were written in Klingon? If so, then a theater in Chicago has just the thing for you, "A Christmas Carol" in thIngan Hol, the language of the Klingon race. Written by Christopher O. Kidder and Sasha Walloch, the play features English Supertitles, and narrative analysis from The Vulcan Institute of Cultural Anthropology. "The story of Ebeneezer Scrooge is eternal and universal. But that alone isn't what does it. Also, Star Trek has worked its way into the fabric of American pop culture so much, that even those people who aren't Trekkies (or, Trekkers) understand what's going on," Kidder says.
Google

Google Enhances Street View With User Photos 133

Posted by kdawson from the pick-your-point-of-view dept.
Google has launched a competitor or counterpart to Microsoft's Photosynth, which employs user-contributed photos of much-photographed sites to supplement the street-level view in an immersive way. Google's offering is called simply Navigate through User Photos, and unlike Photosynth — which requires Sliverlight and therefore is not available on Linux — is implemented in Flash. This YouTube video (also embedded at the link above) offers a quick tour of the new feature, which can use photos uploaded to Panoramico, Flickr, and Picasa.
Windows

Journal Journal: C:\Windows directory

Journal by SurturZ

My C:\Windows directory (I'm running Vista Business) has 86,874 files in 15,214 folders.

I'm not sure this is a good thing.

Even if someone from Microsoft took one minute for each file to explain its function, it would take sixty days without sleep to hear it all.
Data Storage

Single Drive Wipe Protects Data 625

Posted by CmdrTaco from the two-wipes-are-better-than-one dept.
ALF-nl writes "A forensics expert claims that wiping your hard drives with just one pass already makes it next to impossible to recover the data with an electron microscope." But that's not accounting for the super secret machines that the government has, man.

Comment Re:Commodore BASIC (Score 1) 213

by SurturZ (#25637159) Attached to: Scripting In Commodore BASIC For Windows & Linux

encouraged practices that made programs hard to read, like omitting comments and whitespace.

I think that is a bit unfair. Given the limited memory of the C64, best programming practice was to omit comments in favour of code. Remember, C64 BASIC was interpreted, not compiled, so comments chewed up memory... memory measured in KILObytes. Comments (actually, they were called REMarks back then) were a luxury.

I was a bit young to do any serious programming on the C64, but I do remember my father rewriting a line of code to save two BYTES of code. If you didn't use up all the single letter variables before using double letter variables, or you added spaces between commands, you were simply doing it wrong.

Now we have gigabytes of RAM and terabytes of hard disk space yet computer programs don't run any faster than they used to (if anything, slower!). I think modern programmers could do worse than writing a few programs for the C64 to expose them to resource-scarce programming.
User Journal

Journal Journal: CheckedListBox that only allows one check at a time

Journal by SurturZ


Private mblnUpdating As Boolean
Private Sub CheckedListBox1_ItemCheck(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.Windows.Forms.ItemCheckEventArgs) Handles CheckedListBox1.ItemCheck
Dim clb As CheckedListBox = CType(sender, CheckedListBox)
If e.CurrentValue = CheckState.Unchecked Then
The Internet

Submission + - Internet pedophile ring busted: girl saved

Submitted by SurturZ
SurturZ writes: One of the oldest and most sophisticated internet pedophile rings has been busted, and a nine-year-old abuse victim has been rescued. The Australian newspaper details how an international police effort tracked the perpetrator through clues from images of the victim, and cracking into an internet pedophile ring's secured servers. A key piece of evidence was the Myspace page of the perpetrator's wife.
Security

Mac OS X Root Escalation Through AppleScript 359

Posted by timothy from the oh-snap-crispy-apples dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Half the Mac OS X boxes in the world (confirmed on Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and 10.5 Leopard) can be rooted through AppleScript: osascript -e 'tell app "ARDAgent" to do shell script "whoami"'; Works for normal users and admins, provided the normal user wasn't switched to via fast user switching. Secure? I think not." On the other hand, since this exploit seems to require physical access to the machine to be rooted, you might have some other security concerns to deal with at that point, like keeping the intruder from raiding your fridge on his way out.
Space

Rings Discovered Around a Moon for the First Time 144

Posted by Soulskill from the chip-off-the-old-block dept.
Riding with Robots writes "It turns out that one of the Ringed Planet's moons has rings of its own. The robotic spacecraft Cassini at Saturn has discovered that the icy moon Rhea is orbited by an extensive debris field and at least one ring, the first such system found. 'Many years ago we thought Saturn was the only planet with rings,' said one mission scientist. 'Now we may have a moon of Saturn that is a miniature version of its even more elaborately decorated parent.'"
Education

Industry Group Sponsors College Course To Create Fake Blog 124

Posted by kdawson from the paid-me-to-do-it dept.
Scott Jaschik writes "At Hunter College, professors are debating the ethics of a course in which an industry group paid for a class to develop a fake student who would write a fake blog to discourage other students from buying knockoff products. The controversy involves both commercial interference with academic freedom and the ethics of 'guerilla marketing.'"

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