21093936
submission
thesandbender writes:
My girlfriend's family lives in Japan and is very interested in obtaining geiger counters for testing food and other materials. Geiger counters are now impossible to get in Japan and are on long back order from most providers in the U.S. which makes me suspicious of anything we can get our hands on. My question is, what's the best way to test/verify a geiger counter. I know I can point it at a smoke detector and it should go off but I'm not sure what I should see on the gauge. We'd even take it to any reasonable local facilities for testing (NYC area). Any input would be greatly appreciated!
4813437
submission
thesandbender writes:
The recent post about GM opening it's own battery research facility led me to wonder why the US government is pouring billions into buying companies instead of heavily funding useful research. You can give $10 billion to a company to squander or you can invest $10 billion into a battery research and just give the findings to the whole of the US industry for free. From a historical standpoint, the US government has little experience with commercial enterprise... but has an amazing record for driving innovation. The Manhattan Project and the Apollo Moon missions are two of the pinnacles of the 20th century scientific achievement, yet it seems to me that this drive died in the 70's and that's when the US started it's slow decline.
To be true to the "Ask Slashdot" theme... what practical research do you think the US government embark upon to get the most return for it's citizens and the world?
1854397
submission
thesandbender writes:
I know this is not the usual forum for this and I realize Enlightenment is actually a window manager (just seemed appropriate).
I was reading Digg this morning and there was a prominent post about a Saudi Arabian author instructing men on how to beat their wives. This was followed by several comments quoting the Qur'an.
As a Christian... I can point out at least a few dozen passages from the bible that are regularly taken out of context or have been superseded. For example the Old Testament is generally "an eye for an eye", while the New Testament is about forgiveness and scorns this approach.
I've never read the Qur'an and ... frankly... I'm ignorant in that regard. However, I'm really interested in hearing from the Muslim/Islamic readers what are the most common misinterpretations, misrepresentations, etc that they encounter.
1236819
submission
thesandbender writes:
Ford is set to release a management system which will restrict certain aspects of the cars performance based on which key is in in the ignition. The speed is limited to 80, you can not turn off traction control and you can't turn the stereo up to eleven. It's targeted at parents of teenagers and seems like a generally good idea, especially if you get a break on your insurance.
827733
submission
thesandbender writes:
I don't watch TV but keep an HTPC for watching movies. One of my relatives is very ill and I'll have a lot of family rotating through my apartment and I'd like to have a little more entertainment. I'm running Vista MCE and bought a Hauppauge HVR-1800 with a DB8 HDTV antenna and I've used AntennaWeb to point the DB8 in the best direction. The results have been terrible and I'm looking for recommendations/suggestions for hardware and setup. I am on the first floor of a three story apartment building and I can't mount any external antennas (I know this is a major issue). Thankfully almost all the transmitters are located in the same place so a good, compact directional antenna might be effective. And please ... no platform bashing ... they all have their issues (I have a lot of h.264 encoded files... hardware/GPU acceleration on Linux is very, very limited at the moment).
689981
submission
thesandbender writes:
I was at a Memorial Day party this weekend and sitting around with a very diverse group of people (age, education, background, etc.) and we all ended up talking about cars. A large majority of the population loves cars, not what they do the environment but what they represent. For some it's a throaty American V-8, other's it the high pitched whine of a Ferrari or the freedom of a Jeep but most all of us have a car we secretly lust after. And this is true all across the world.
This got me thinking, It's no secret that cars are safer, faster and more efficient because of racing. Why can't this be extended to new power trains? How much interest would there be in a fledgling no-emissions league? Imagine if an established league created the class and had them run the night before a few of their major races and charged $5-10 to watch the race. You'd generate some interest and give Honda, GM, Toyota, Ford, BMW, etc. a place to really show off what they've been doing. Most people hear hydrogen, electric or fuel-cell and shrug... you get one to blow by them at 150mph+ and they'll have a different opinion. It would make sense for established teams to create a no-emission car and race it b/c they're there for the primary race anyway and would probably receive a lot of support from their backing manufacturer who would want the publicity and the data.
Just curious... how many Slashdotters would support this type of thing by buying tickets?
248165
submission
thesandbender writes:
There was a rather ironic/humorous link on Digg this afternoon. An article about how the Digg architecture was setup to handle it's average load was dugg/slashdoted/farked by the time it made the main page.
Why don't the aggregators prime caches like Coral Cache before they activate the post? For instance, before Digg actually displayed the article it would hit the linked url(s) through Coral. The posted article would still reference the original URL's but at least there would be some chance of Coral being able to access the content and cache it before the hoard arrived on the victims doorstep. I understand there are issues here like hits, impressions, etc... which is why I wouldn't recommend posting "Coral-ized" links. But I would argue that it would be better for people to be able to see at least the first page of your content rather than nothing at all. If the backend primed the cache there there is some hope of it.
69890
submission
thesandbender writes:
I've inherited my companies DST patching project and I have to schedule upgrades for 7000+ servers over the course of the next few weeks. Of course each group inside the company has different SLA's and outage windows. I need to somehow turn the pile of spreadsheets I have into a database and create a schedule that spreads the load over our pool of system administrators. There is no way I can reasonably accomplish this by hand and there will be updates every day I'm sure.
Does anyone know of a rule based scheduling system where I provide the available outage windows and a priority ranking for each system and the scheduler will recommend the order in which they should be upgraded? Even software for other industries/applications that could take a few steps out of the process would be appreciated.
