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Science

Scientists Discover Why Sharks Can Swim So Fast 103

Posted by timothy from the goosebumps-might-help-evade-them dept.
MediaSight writes "Shortfin mako sharks can shoot through the ocean at up to 50 miles per hour (80 kilometres an hour). Now a trick that helps them to reach such speeds has been discovered — the sharks can raise their scales to create tiny wells across the surface of their skin, reducing drag like the dimples on a golf ball."
The Military

40 Years Ago, the US Lost a Nuclear Bomb 470

Posted by kdawson from the chrome-dome-down dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "A BBC investigation has found that in 1968 the US abandoned a nuclear weapon beneath the ice in northern Greenland after a nuclear-armed B52 crashed on the ice a few miles from Thule Air Base. The Stratofortress disintegrated on impact with the sea ice and parts of it began to melt through to the fjord below. The high explosives surrounding the four nuclear weapons on board detonated without setting off the nuclear devices, which had not been armed by the crew. The Pentagon maintained that all four weapons had been 'destroyed' and while technically true, investigators piecing together fragments from the crash could only account for three of the weapons. Investigators found that 'something melted through ice such as burning primary or secondary.' A subsequent search by a US submarine was beset by technical problems and, as winter encroached and the ice began to freeze over, the search was abandoned. 'There was disappointment in what you might call a failure to return all of the components,' said a former nuclear weapons designer at the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory. 'It would be very difficult for anyone else to recover classified pieces if we couldn't find them.'"
Microsoft

Windows 7 Benchmarks Show Little Improvement On Vista 369

Posted by kdawson from the second-verse-same-as-the-first dept.
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Randall Kennedy examines Windows 7 from the kernel up, subjecting the 'pre-beta' to a battery of benchmarks to find any signs that the OS will be faster, more responsive, and less resource-intensive than the bloated Vista, as Microsoft suggests. Identical thread counts at the kernel level suggest to Kennedy that Windows 7 is a 'minor point-type of release, as opposed to a major update or rewrite.' Memory footprint for the kernel proved eerily similar to that of Vista as well. 'In fact, as I worked my way through the process lists of the two operating systems, I was struck by the extent of the similarities,' Kennedy writes, before discussing the results of a nine-way workload test scenario he performed on Windows 7 — the same scenario that showed Vista was 40 percent slower than Windows XP. 'In a nutshell, Windows 7 M3 is a virtual twin of Vista when it comes to performance,' Kennedy concludes. 'In other words, Microsoft's follow-up to its most unpopular OS release since Windows Me threatens to deliver zero measurable performance benefits while introducing new and potentially crippling compatibility issues.'"

Where Have All the Pagers Gone? 584

Posted by kdawson from the long-time-paging dept.
oddRaisin writes "After recently sleeping through a page for work, I decided to change my paging device from my BlackBerry (which is quiet and has a pathetic vibrate mode) to an actual pager. After looking at the websites of Cingular, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint, I'm left scratching my head and wondering where all the pagers went. I can't find them or any mention of them. Pagers of yore offered some great features that reflected the serious nature of being paged. They were loud. They had good vibrate modes. They continued to alert after a page until you acknowledged them. I didn't have to differentiate between a text from a friend and a page from work. Now that pagers seem to have become passé, what are other people doing to fill this niche? Are some phones better pagers than others? Are there still paging service providers out there?"
Space

Submission + - Orion Nebula Gets New Milepost Marker, Now Closer

Submitted by twilight30
twilight30 writes: Discovery News is reporting that 'One of the most famous and scrutinized heavenly objects is 10 to 20 percent closer than we thought, say two teams of radio astronomers who have made some of the most precise cosmic distance measurements ever, with a telescope nearly as big as Earth. The Orion Nebula is the closest major stellar nursery to Earth, so it has been heavily studied to learn about the lives of stars. Its distance from Earth, however, has long been a matter of uncertainty, with an estimate made about 25 years ago in need of revision.'
Enlightenment

Submission + - Low-tech inventions that help change lives (popularmechanics.com)

Submitted by
angelaelle
angelaelle writes: "The current issue of Popular Mechanics features their Breakthrough Awards program for inventors. Some of the winning inventions help improve the living conditions for people in third world countries using low-tech materials and assembly methods like this cookstove for people in Darfur, and in the case of this Windbelt developed by Shawn Frayne, could be used to provide cheap, clean energy alternatives here. On their web site they have videos of each winner. These videos are really fascinating and inspiring because they talk about the inventor's eureka moment, instead of just talking about their inventions. Here the link to all the winners: http://www.popularmechanics.com/breakthrough07"
The Internet

Submission + - Email is for Old People (web-strategist.com)

Submitted by
LotTS
LotTS writes: "A relatively young analyst at Forrester Research discovered that email is only for old people. He writes:

I often ask my younger cousins, sisters, and their friends about their internet usage, they consider me "old". I ask them about which websites they use, how they learn about new products, and what influences them. In my casual ethnographic research, my kid sister in college recently told me two things that still resonate in my head. My college age kid sister told me that, "Out of my hundreds of friends, only ONE does not use facebook or myspace." She also shared her email usage, "I only use email to get a hold of old people like you.""
Power

Submission + - Internet Dismantling State Church in Finland (eroakirkosta.fi)

Submitted by Agnostic
Agnostic writes: The Freethinkers of Tampere, who advocate separation of state and church in Finland, created a web site in 2003 to assist people in resigning from the church. The Web site became a big success, as 80% of all resignations in 2006 went through the web site. This article covers the decline of Finnish state church and its current status. Resigning from the church is as easy as filling one web form, and hence resignation rates have been increasing rapidly for several years. Finnish state church has many privileges set in law, including that every company has to pay taxes for the church. It can collect membership taxes through state officials, and avoids paying several taxes.
Microsoft

Mom Blasts Ballmer Over Kid's Vista Experience 767

Posted by Zonk from the i-know-bill-gates-i-call-him-money-for-short dept.
Lucas123 writes "While on stage at a Gartner's ITxpo conference today, Ballmer got an ear-full from the mother of a 13-year-old girl who said after installing Vista on her daughter's computer she decided only two days later to switch back to XP because Vista was so difficult. Ballmer defended Vista saying: 'Your daughter saw a lot of value'; to which the mother replied: 'She's 13.' Ballmer said that Vista is bigger than XP, and 'for some people that's an issue, and it's not going to get smaller in any significant way in SP1. But machines are constantly getting bigger, and [it's] probably important to remember that as well.' Says the mother: 'Good, I'll let you come in and install it for me.'"
The Military

Submission + - DARPA Testing Numenta's Brain Tech

Submitted by lousyd
lousyd writes: CNN Money DARPA and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency have given $4.9 million to Lockheed Martin to develop an image recognition system that will be used to scan satellite images and photographs for familiar objects. Called Object Recognition via Brain-Inspired Technology (ORBIT), the system will fuse commercial airborne EO and LIDAR sensor data into a three-dimensional, photorealistic model of the landscape. The brains of the system, so to speak, will be Numenta's Hierarchical Temporal Memory technology, modelled on the technology growing inside human heads. The system is expected to increase image analysts' productivity by 100 times.
Wireless Networking

Submission + - free WiFi on Buses (www.cbc.ca)

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: The CBC is reporting that buses in Moncton, NB Canada are getting free WiFi on its 4 express bus routes. What a great way to encourage people to take the bus. Actually making time spent travelling useful.
Space

Submission + - Warmth makes the world more humid

Submitted by
gollum123
gollum123 writes: "The atmosphere is becoming more humid in a pattern consistent with man-made climate change, researchers have found ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7038278.stm ). Their study, reported in the journal Nature, confirms the global increase in humidity found in previous studies. Water vapour is a greenhouse gas, and it is thought that having more of it in the air could amplify temperature rise. The major report released earlier this year by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said that this amplification was the largest "positive feedback" mechanism they had identified. Previous research has shown that humidity increases in Europe, a response to higher temperatures, were amplifying the temperature rise by about a factor of two."
Security

Submission + - Tracking zombies and botnets?

Submitted by mveloso
mveloso writes: Like many people here, I run a couple of servers that do various things. The machines run firewalls as a matter of course, and have large numbers of log entries showing machines that, for one reason or another, are poking and prodding them.

But — besides proactively shutting off access to the machines by blocking their IPs (which may or may not be useful), I was wondering: is there a repository somewhere for tracking infected machines or botnets? Some of the signatures match known vectors used by infected machines, and some don't...but it all may be useful informtion for somebody.

Does anyone know of a blacklist-type service that can use this information?
Technology (Apple)

Submission + - Apple, AT&T sued over iPhone restrictions (msn.com)

Submitted by Serzen
Serzen writes: MSNBC may not be the most popular website for hordes of Slashdotters, but they are running a story about two new lawsuits filed against Apple and AT&T as a result of the use restrictions and recent updates to the iPhone's soft/firmware. From the article:

Two separate lawsuits were filed in San Jose on Oct. 5 — one in federal court and the other in state court and both seeking class-action status. Both cases accuse the companies of unfair business practices and violations of antitrust, telecommunications and warranty laws.
The suit also alleges that: "The companies are unlawfully restricting consumer choice by preventing users from 'unlocking' their iPhones, and Apple intentionally disabled unofficial third-party programs or rendered unlocked phones useless with its software update..."
Microsoft

How Microsoft Inadvertently Helps To Fund FOSS 122

Posted by kdawson from the i-has-ur-monies-kthxbye dept.
christian.einfeldt writes "The State of California sued Microsoft for anti-trust violations, and now the proceeds of the settlement of that case are being used to fund the acquisition of computers for any school district in California. The terms of the settlement allow every school district in California to be reimbursed a set dollar amount for the purchase of computers with the software of their choice. Microsoft probably anticipated that school districts would mainly use the settlement to buy more Microsoft products, with a few Apple purchases sprinkled in here and there. But now that Free Open Source Software is being commercialized by hardware vendors such as Dell, System76, EmperorLinux, Zareason.com, and TechCollective.com, acquiring computers powered by FOSS is straightforward. I'm a volunteer sysadmin at a northern California public charter school and in my Slashdot journal I detail the step-by-step process for using Microsoft's money to pay for the Linux purchases of your school's choice." And then there's the Ubuntu team in Belgium that is raising funds by auctioning off a copy of Windows Vista Ultimate that a Microsoft rep gave them at a trade show. So far the bidding is up to 101.76 Euros, about $144.

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