curtHendzell - Slashdot User

Adobe Pushing For Flash and PDF In Open Government Initiative 172

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday October 31, 2009 @09:20AM from the open-is-relative dept.

angryrice tips news that Adobe seems to be campaigning for the inclusion of Flash and PDF in the Obama administration's efforts at increasing government transparency and openness. A post from the Sunlight Labs blog is critical of Adobe's undertaking, in part since PDF is often "non-parsable by software, unfindable by search engines, and unreliable if text is extracted." They also say government's priority should be to publish datasets and the APIs to interact with them, rather than choosing how they're displayed in fancy graphs and charts.

Why Computers Suck At Math 626

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday October 31, 2009 @08:16AM from the must-be-lit-majors dept.

antdude writes "This TechRadar article explains why computers suck at math, and how simple calculations can be a matter of life and death, like in the case of a Patriot defense system failing to take down a Scud missile attack: 'The calculation of where to look for confirmation of an incoming missile requires knowledge of the system time, which is stored as the number of 0.1-second ticks since the system was started up. Unfortunately, 0.1 seconds cannot be expressed accurately as a binary number, so when it's shoehorned into a 24-bit register — as used in the Patriot system — it's out by a tiny amount. But all these tiny amounts add up. At the time of the missile attack, the system had been running for about 100 hours, or 3,600,000 ticks to be more specific. Multiplying this count by the tiny error led to a total error of 0.3433 seconds, during which time the Scud missile would cover 687m. The radar looked in the wrong place to receive a confirmation and saw no target. Accordingly no missile was launched to intercept the incoming Scud — and 28 people paid with their lives.'"

Disease May Prevent Manned Journey To Mars 177

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday October 31, 2009 @05:14AM from the get-your-penicillan-to-mars dept.

Pickens writes "Science Daily News reports that human missions to Mars and all other long-term space flights might be compromised by disease, first because space travel appears to weaken astronauts' immune systems; and second, because it increases the virulence and growth of microbes. 'When people think of space travel, often the vast distances are what come to mind first,' says Jean-Pol Frippiat from Nancy-University in France, 'but even after we figure out a way to cover these distances in a reasonable amount of time, we still need to figure out how astronauts are going to overcome disease and sickness.' Frippiat says studies show that immune systems of both people and animals in space flight conditions are significantly weaker than their grounded counterparts and that common pathogens such as Salmonella, E. coli and Staphylococcus reproduce more rapidly in space flight conditions, leading to increased risk of contamination, colonization and serious infection."

Contest To Hack Brazilian Voting Machines 101

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday October 31, 2009 @12:09AM from the hack-the-vote dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Brazilian elections went electronic many years ago, with very fast results but a few complaints from losers, of course. Next month, 10 teams that accepted the challenge will have access to hardware and software (Google translation; original in Portuguese) for the amount of time they requested (from one hour to four days). Some will try to break the vote's secrecy and some will try to throw in malicious code to change the entered votes without leaving traces."

Comment Re:Circuit City shoppers are the Slashdot standard (Score 0) 663

by curtHendzell on Friday February 08, 2008 @01:36PM (#22350910) Attached to: Hostile ta Vista, Baby

Definitely agree. This wasn't about why Vista is such a let-down of an OS as much as a single user's complaints about why it's different from XP. I'm really tired of hearing all these complaints about how Vista sucks because of a bunch of personal dislikes about what they changed/took out/moved since XP. Don't like Microsoft's new OS, then put your money behind something else. Don't buy from Circuit City, go online to Dell/HP/Lenovo, etc. where you can still buy an XP machine. Buy a Mac and go that direction, or switch to Linux and donate some cash to your favorite distro and tell them what you want in upcoming releases. I've been using Vista since the Beta/RC days, and would never go back to XP after, but that's my personal opinion, it's not that XP sucks comparatively. I really wish we'd stop seeing all this kind of press, and maybe see some real arguments for/against Vista.

10-Year Anniversary of Open Source 161

Posted by kdawson on Friday February 08, 2008 @01:26PM from the corks-a-poppin dept.

Bruce Perens writes "Saturday is the 10-Year Anniversary of Open Source, the initiative to promote Free Software to business. Obviously, it's been incredibly successful. I've submitted a State of Open Source message discussing the anniversary of Open Source, its successes, and the challenges it will face in the upcoming decade."

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