Comment Woke up an Aquarius... (Score 1) 468
goin' to bed Capricorn. Boy are my arms tired.
Comment Re:News for nerds, stuff that mattered... (Score 1) 211
Yeah but something has happened recently, maybe the spammers got a new tool or something because I have noticed a whole bunch of spam being posted on my reCAPTCHA protected sites. This just started in the last couple of days where previously I had none.
+1 I've had the same thing on my Drupal page that uses ReCAPTCHA. Getting about 3-5 spam bot hits an hour trying to sign up for accounts. It started happening about 4 days ago.
Comment The problem is not the chasers... (Score 5, Informative) 402
As a chaser, emergency first responder, and media chaser... I can say that the problem is NOT the chasers but the "Chaser-chasers". The article references May 19th in Oklahoma where most commonly you could find local folks with their kids and dogs in the back of the family pickup truck taking pictures with their phones and point and shoots.
Regardless of what the masses in Oklahoma think... just because you have an iPhone app with radar does NOT classify you as a "chaser"!
On top of VORTEX2's caravan of 40+ vehicles, you have NBC/The Weather Channel following the VORTEX2 project that are not included with that count. You've also got the Discovery Channel's team of production vehicles coupled with the "Dominator" and TIV2, which both were captured passing miles worth of vehicles on a two lane highway in a no passing zone! Throw a few tour groups, emergency management, a couple media chasers in the mix... and you've got yourself a problem on the roadways. But those numbers nowhere add up to the amount of local yahoos who gathered up the family and put themselves in more harm than anything.
This situation defiantly makes me think twice of chasing in Oklahoma again.
Has 2.4 GHz Reached Maximum Capacity? 250
An anonymous reader writes "There's been a lot of talk lately about the concept of Personal Area Networks. At CES Intel and Connectify both released software that turns Windows laptops into Access Points for file transfers, wirelessly syncing pictures from cameras, and Internet sharing. This is good, maybe great, if you're a road warrior, but what about the rest of us holed up in apartment buildings and small neighborhoods? We already have to deal with the wireless chatter of the 50 or so other Linksys routers in the vicinity. What will happen when every laptop also acts as a software router? To add fuel to the fire, Intel and Netgear also announced the Push2TV device that allows you to stream your display, including Netflix videos straight to your television. Isn't this going to kill lower powered 2.4 GHz devices, like Bluetooth mice and headsets? When does the 2.4 GHz band collapse completely? Why can't we push all this short range, high bandwidth stuff onto 5 GHz?"
Oracle To Invest In Sun Hardware, Cut Sun Staff 135
An anonymous reader writes "There's been much speculation as to what Oracle plans to do with Sun once the all-but-certain acquisition is complete. According to separate reports on InfoWorld, Oracle has disclosed plans to continue investing in Sun's multithreaded UltraSparc T family of processors, which are used in its Niagara servers, and the M series server family, based on the Sparc64 processors developed by Fujitsu. However, Larry Ellison has reportedly said that once the Sun acquisition is complete, Oracle will hire 2,000 new employees — more people than it expects to cut from the Sun workforce. Oracle will present its plans for Sun to the public Wednesday."
Comment 500 Internal Server Error (Score 1) 572
Fake Steve Jobs should have gotten the 'Unlimited Plan' from his hosting provider.
Parrots Can Dance 104
juuri sends in an NPR article about the consensus created among scientists that some birds actually dance to music. "The results of this study are reported in the journal Current Biology, along with another scientific paper inspired by YouTube videos of dancing animals. Adena Schachner is a graduate student in the psychology department of Harvard University. She says she was familiar with the idea that some people had made videos of birds supposedly dancing. ... She and her colleagues eventually analyzed more than 5,000 videos. 'Imagine watching YouTube eight hours a day for a month,' she says. 'That's pretty much what we did. It was amusing for perhaps the first couple of hours.'" juuri adds, "While this makes them somewhat unique in the animal world, as only three animals are now known to dance by verifiable proofs, what struck me more was that this was the first time YouTube had helped forge a new scientific understanding. Given the explosive growth of uploading videos and people watching them, what other new understandings and popular misconceptions will be proven or disproved due to this emerging media?"
Hawking Expecting To Make Full Recovery 103
explosivejared writes "Yesterday we discussed the medical scare that physicist Stephen Hawking was going through. Happily, his website has posted a succinct statement that he is being kept for observation, but he is comfortable and expecting a full recovery."
Sun To Include SSDs On Server Motherboards 79
snydeq writes "Sun has announced plans to integrate solid-state drives onto server motherboards to provide faster data access for I/O intensive applications. For now, the company is offering SSDs that customers can slide into their storage bays, but long term, Sun will locate SSDs closer to the server CPUs to cut the bottleneck that occurs when powerful, multicore CPUs have to wait for data to be delivered from hard drives, according to the company. The move could mark a change in how Sun servers are designed going forward, including the possibility of servers that have no hard drive, relying entirely on SSDs."
Combining BitTorrent With Darknets For P2P Privacy 325
CSEMike writes "Currently popular peer-to-peer networks suffer from a lack of privacy. For applications like BitTorrent or Gnutella, sharing a file means exposing your behavior to anyone interested in monitoring it. OneSwarm is a new file sharing application developed by researchers at the University of Washington that improves privacy in peer-to-peer networks. Instead of communicating directly, sharing in OneSwarm is friend-to-friend; senders and receivers exchange data using multiple intermediaries in an overlay mesh. OneSwarm is built on (and backwards compatible with) BitTorrent, but includes numerous extensions to improve privacy while providing good performance: point-to-point encryption using SSL, source-address rewriting, and multi-path and multi-source downloading. Clients and source are available for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows."
DragonFly BSD 2.2 Released 44
An anonymous reader writes "DragonFly BSD 2.2 is now available. The second release to feature the HAMMER (versioning, among other things) filesystem — now considered production-ready — it includes 'major stability improvements across the board, new drivers, much better pkgsrc support and integration.' Apart from the CD ISO, this release has a DVD ISO with 'a fully operational X environment,' as well as a bootable USB disk-key image."
Google Router Rumors 267
An anonymous reader writes "There's a new rumor that Google is developing its own router. The company won't comment on the story, but it's been in the hardware business for a while and expanded its presence with Android. If Larry Ellison can go halvsies with HP on a server, then Eric Schmidt should certainly be able to make Cisco nervous."
Artist Wants to Replace Lost Eyeball With Webcam 156
A one-eyed San Francisco artist, Tanya Vlach, wants to replace her missing eye with a Web cam. There has even been talk of her shooting a reality TV show using the video eye. "There have been all sorts of cyborgs in science fiction for a long time, and I'm sort of a sci-fi geek, with the advancement of technology, I thought, 'Why not?'" said Vlach. I'm a bit perplexed that the obvious things you'd want in a cyborg eye: range finder, infrared/lowlight vision, and a hypno-ray are not discussed in the article.
(Useful) Stupid Vim Tricks? 702
haroldag writes "I thoroughly enjoyed the recent post about Unix tricks, so I ask Slashdot vim users, what's out there? :Sex, :b#, marks, ctags. Any tricks worth sharing?"
Obama, McCain Campaigns Both Hacked, Files Compromised 255
dunezone writes "As the election ends, news is coming out from both campaigns on what happened behind closed doors. During the summer, the Obama campaign had their systems hacked, but so did McCain — and not by each other, but by a third party. '... both the FBI and the Secret Service came to the campaign with an ominous warning: "You have a problem way bigger than what you understand," an agent told Obama's team. "You have been compromised, and a serious amount of files have been loaded off your system." The following day, Obama campaign chief David Plouffe heard from White House chief of staff Josh Bolten, to the same effect: "You have a real problem ... and you have to deal with it." The Feds told Obama's aides in late August that the McCain campaign's computer system had been similarly compromised.'"
Also from the article: "Officials at the FBI and the White House told the Obama campaign that they believed a foreign entity or organization sought to gather information on the evolution of both camps' policy positions — information that might be useful in negotiations with a future administration."
