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Comment Re:How do they do it? (Score 1) 145

by nostrad (#26213867) Attached to: Repair Crews Reach Vicinity of Damaged Cables In Mediterranean
You can, that's the good part about it, many times signals reflect when they hit an improperly terminated connection (impendance mismatch). This holds for both optical and electrical signals. Given the propagation time and speed, length is trivially calculated. There's special hardware to do this for you. See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impedance_mismatch
Earth

Space Is Just a Little Bit Closer Than Expected 130

Posted by timothy from the winter-shrinkage dept.
SpuriousLogic points out a BBC story which begins "The upper reaches of Earth's atmosphere are much lower than expected, a US Air Force satellite has found. Currently, the ionosphere — a layer of charged particles that envelopes the planet — is at an altitude of about 420km, some 200km lower than expected. The behaviour of the ionosphere is important because disturbances in its structure can upset satellite communications and radar."
Cellphones

(Useful) Stupid BlackBerry Tricks? 238

Posted by kdawson from the maze-of-twisty-stupid-tricks dept.
Wolfger writes "Continuing the recent (useful) stupid theme: I've recently become a BlackBerry user, and I'm in love with the obvious(?) tricks, such as installing MidpSSH to access my home box remotely. But I'd like to know what more experienced Crackberry addicts can share."
Math

Major Advances In Knot Theory 230

Posted by kdawson from the if-it's-not-theory-then-it-must-be-practice dept.
An anonymous reader sends us to Science News, which is running a survey of recent strides in finding an answer to the age-old question: How many ways are there to tie your shoelaces? "Mathematicians have been puzzling over that question for a century or two, and the main thing they've discovered is that the question is really, really hard. In the last decade, though, they've developed some powerful new tools inspired by physics that have pried a few answers from the universe's clutches. Even more exciting is that the new tools seem to be the tip of a much larger theory that mathematicians are just beginning to uncover. That larger mathematical theory, if it exists, may help crack some of the hardest mathematical questions there are, questions about the mathematical structure of the three- and four-dimensional space where we live. ... Revealing the full ... superstructure may be the work of a generation."
The Internet

Opera Develops Search Engine For Web Developers 31

Posted by Soulskill from the web-devs-need-love-too dept.
nk497 writes "The Metadata Analysis and Mining Application (MAMA) doesn't index content like a standard search engine, but looks at markup, style, scripting and the technology behind pages. Based on those existing MAMA-ed pages, 80.4 per cent of sites use cascading style sheets (CSS), while the average web page has 47 markup errors and 16,400 characters. Should you want to know which country is using the AJAX component XMLHttpRequest the most, MAMA can tell you that it's Norway, with 10.2 per cent of the data set." Additional coverage is available at Computerworld, and a deeper explanation is up at Opera's Dev site.
Bug

e1000e Bug Squashed — Linux Kernel Patch Released 111

Posted by Soulskill from the good-news-everyone dept.
ruphus13 writes "As mentioned earlier, there was a kernel bug in the alpha/beta version of the Linux kernel (up to 2.6.27 rc7), which was corrupting (and rendering useless) the EEPROM/NVM of adapters. Thankfully, a patch is now out that prevents writing to the EEPROM once the driver is loaded, and this follows a patch released by Intel earlier in the week. From the article: 'The Intel team is currently working on narrowing down the details of how and why these chipsets were affected. They also plan on releasing patches shortly to restore the EEPROM on any adapters that have been affected, via saved images using ethtool -e or from identical systems.' This is good news as we move towards a production release!"

Comment Re:Not the only choice (Score 1) 278

by nostrad (#24590497) Attached to: Bash Cookbook

I did, the major reason when that I switched back was due to UTF-8 problems, and as far as I know the line editor is still blissfully unaware of multibyte characters.

There was also trivial stuff like coloring the prompt, which for me makes things easier to find on a terminal full of text and additionally highlight that you're root (in addition to the #-sign).

In all fairness, coloring (and probably everything else I was annoyed at) is doable and wouldn't have stopped me from trying it out a bit longer though.
Sci-Fi

Submission + - Wormholes Can Be Built, Scientists Say

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: According to Wired News' DANGER ROOM blog, scientists have theorized a way to build "Wormholes — those hypothetical short cuts in the space-time continuum — that have been theorized to allow everything from warp speed spacecraft to time travel. Now, researchers are suggesting we can actually create a type of wormhole using those fun metamaterials that everyone is all excited about lately."
Google

Submission + - Google blocks academic

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: It appears that Google takes a very dim view of people "screen scraping" their content (slightly ironic, given that this is how Google gets the content in the first place). An academic, Associate Professor Michael Schwartzbach at the University of Aarhus, Denmark has been offering a service to other academics to enable them to find their h-index (a measure of how often their articles are referenced by others) from Google Scholar. Because this involves screen scraping Google Scholar, Google has blocked his website from accessing their servers. Google has apparently not replied to his requests to allow him to do this for academic and research purposes.

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