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Comment: Re:WTF??? (Score 0) 168

by flabbergasted (#26537131) Attached to: Largest Data Breach Disclosed During Inauguration
Your comments have nothing to do with reality. I read this story on line this morning before I left the house. That would have been about 9am EST--three hours before the inauguration. Since I scan the headlines for three news services before leaving, I can't say for certain which it was. Probably either the AP or NYT.
Software

ESA Embraces Open Source With New SAR Toolbox 62

Posted by ScuttleMonkey
from the other-applications dept.
phyr writes "The European Space Agency (ESA) has released its Next ESA SAR Toolbox (NEST) freely as GPL for Linux and Windows. It provides an integrated viewer for reading, calibrating, post-processing and analysis of ESA (ERS 1&2, ENVISAT) and 3rd party (Radarsat2, TerraSarX, Alos Palsar, JERS) SAR level 1 data and higher. ESA has chosen to distribute the software as fully open source to allow the remote sensing community to easily develop new readers/writers and post-processors for SAR data with their NEST Java API. The software provides both a command line interface and GUI for all features including data conversion, graph processing, coregistration, multilooking, filtering, and band arithmetic."

Comment: Re:Age difference? (Score 2, Informative) 423

by flabbergasted (#26083957) Attached to: My top-level book organization is based on ...

What, only 356 books in your LibraryThing collection? Please, I've got 1128 cataloged so far at LibraryThing, and I still have a couple of boxes to go.

Seriously though, LibraryThing was a god send. I couldn't keep track of what I owned. I have multiple copies of a couple of books because of that. Now I have an up-to-date list that I can access from anywhere. Plus it's a great resource for finding new and interesting books.

Another good tool is the MacOS X shareware application Bookpedia. It gives you more information about your own library, but it doesn't allow you to troll other libraries for new book suggestions and reviews. Their iPhone app Pocketpedia is also worth having. It's great for keeping a wish list as you walk around a book store.

Businesses

+ - Wikileaks, JP Morgan and the Insider-Trading Howto-> 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Wikileaks hits the locusts again! In an internal JPM document published today, Wikileaks exposes JP Morgan's efforts to circumvent insider trading regulations, enabling the really wealthy clients to profit even when others are losing. The document reads like a how-to and explains such maneuvers under the hood of SEC Rule 10b5-1, which had been considered subject to abuse for some time already. Now this abuse is publically documented and shall not pass unnoticed!"
Link to Original Source
Medicine

+ - Researchers could put penicillin back in battle->

Submitted by esocid
esocid writes "Research led by the University of Warwick has uncovered exactly how the bacterium Streptococcus pneumoniae has become resistant to the antibiotic penicillin. The same research could also open up MRSA to attack by penicillin and help create a library of designer antibiotics to use against a range of other dangerous bacteria. Worldwide Streptococcus pneumoniae causes 5 million fatal pneumonia infections a year in children. In the US it causes 1 million cases a year of pneumococcal pneumonia in the elderly of which up to 7% are fatal. This new research has completely exposed how Streptococcus pneumoniae builds its penicillin immunity and opens up many ways to disrupt that mechanism and restore penicillin as a weapon against these bacteria.

Penicillin normally acts by preventing the construction of an essential component of the bacterial cell wall: the Peptidoglycan. This component provides a protective mesh around the otherwise fragile bacterial cell, providing the mechanical support and stability required for the integrity and viability of cells of Streptococcus pneumoniae and other bacteria including MRSA. This research provides a valuable collection of targets for pharmaceutical companies seeking ways of disrupting antibiotic resistance in such bacteria."
Link to Original Source
Programming

+ - GCC 4.3 released

Submitted by JOrgePeixoto
JOrgePeixoto writes "The GCC team has released GCC 4.3.0 . GCC has been integrated with the MPFR library, allowing it to evaluate and replace at compile-time calls to built-in math functions having constant arguments with their mathematically equivalent results. With MPFR GCC can generate correct results regardless of the math library implementation or floating point precision of the host platform, independent of the compilation configuration being native or cross-compile.

Among many optimization changes is a new forward propagation pass on RTL, awareness of stack frame consumption by the inliner heuristics and enhancements in interprocedural optimization. Some of the changes enhance compilation speed and memory use.

Also new is tuning for Intel Core 2 and AMD Geode and support for SSSE3, SSE4.1 and SSE4.2 built-in functions and code generation. Some targets have been removed and some added, including the SPU of the CELL, ARMv7 and Thumb-2.

C has gained fixed-point data-types and operators, better checking and better warnings.
Fortran has gained better Fortran 2003 support.
The integration of Eclipse Java compiler and enhancements in libgcj provide better Java support.
C++ gained better warnings, a parallel mode and some support for C++0x and TR1.
Also the update and enhancement of the documentation are among a huge number of changes ."
It's funny. Laugh.

+ - US Military Secrets Emailed to Factory Hand

Submitted by
The Narrative Fallacy
The Narrative Fallacy writes "Factory worker Gary Sinnott had no idea when he set up his website to promote the town of Mildenhall in England that he would end up getting classified e-mails from the United States Air Force. The website has been sent hundreds of emails outlining highly classified information, including emails about military tactics and passwords intended for personnel at the neighboring US airbase. What began as a slow trickle of mundane messages soon escalated and hundreds of classified emails were sent from around the world after people mistook www.mildenhall.com for the military website www.mildenhall.af.mil. Sinnott said that when he initially reported the problem airbase officials did not appear phased. "At first their attitude was we are not worried, we are American, our security is great" but that after he informed the base that he had received information detailing the flight path to be used by the plane carrying President Bush on a visit to the region, officials went 'mental'. Now after years of trying to resolve the issue, Sinnott has been forced to close down his website because he is unable to cope with the sheer number of emails arriving in his inbox every day. A statement released by RAF Mildenhall confirmed that officials had tried to help Sinnott: "In November, we confirmed that our base servers blocked any emails going to this site and we sent out a base-wide email advising everyone to use appropriate government email domains and inform family and friends.""
Google

+ - Google Sites in the Corporation...->

Submitted by Hey Mum!
Hey Mum! writes "A decision got passed down today to block Google Sites — http://www.google.com/sites/ — inside our network. The reason: It directly competes with our Sharepoint solution. I'm a fan of Google but I can only 'agree' with this decision when I consider our investment in MS Sharepoint.

I'm just after some opinions of Google Sites and Google Apps. Has anyone used it in a medium-large business? Can it be successful? Are there privacy concerns, compatibility problems? What's your opinion of companies (I assume we're not the only one) simply blocking Google Sites — or any other possibly useful, but competing, applications — all together rather than proving the solutions offered by ICT are the way to go?

Hopefully this doesn't turn into a Sharepoint bashing free-for-all. Thank you in advance."
Link to Original Source
Space

+ - Finding planets by our nearest neighboring stars->

Submitted by
Shag
Shag writes "A lot of astronomers look for planets around other stars, but a team in California have come up with a plan for finding Earth-like planets around Alpha Centauri B, one of our nearest neighboring stars, less than 5 light-years away. Manned spacecraft would take 100 millennia to get there at speeds we've already achieved, but if the faster speeds necessary for interstellar travel are ever attained, this star system could be an excellent first stop."
Link to Original Source
Intel

+ - First Menlow board -- oooh, tiny

Submitted by nerdyH
nerdyH writes "German board vendor Lippert has unveiled what it claims to be the first motherboard based on Intel's "Menlow" chipset for ultra-mobile PCs. The CoreExpress-Menlow is smaller than a credit card, yet clocks to 1.5GHz, has 1GB of RAM soldered onboard, has multiple PCI Express lanes, USB 2.0, HD audio, an IDE interface, and a digital LVDS video interface. The board is the first in a proposed "CoreExpress" standard motherboard form-factor measuring 2.6 by 2.3 inches (65 x 58 mm)."
It's funny. Laugh.

Journal: The things we do for Science 4

Journal by peacefinder

"Professor Gert Holstege and colleagues asked 13 heterosexual couples aged 19-49 to take part in an experiment. One half of the couple was asked to lie down, with their head inside a scanner, while their partner stimulated them manually to achieve orgasm. To aid the mood, the room lighting was dimmed and all noise distractions shut out. The couples then switched positions and the experiment was repeated. [...] The women were also asked to fake an orgasm so that these scan results could be com

Security

+ - Antivirus Inventor: Security pros are wasting time-> 1

Submitted by
talkinsecurity
talkinsecurity writes "Peter Tippett, chief scientist at the ICSA and the inventor of the progam that became Norton Antivirus, had some interesting things to say Monday about the state of the security industry. In a nutshell, Tippett warned that about a third of the work that security departments do today is a waste of time. Tippett goes on to systematically blow holes in a lot of security's current best practices, including vulnerability research/patching, strong passwords, and the product evaluation process. Some of his arguments are definitely debatable, but there is a lot of truth to what he's saying as well. It definitely makes you think. http://www.darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=145224&WT.svl=news1_1"
Link to Original Source
AMD

+ - Teen takes on donor's immune system

Submitted by Leibel
Leibel writes "The Australian ABC News is reporting that a 15-year-old Australian liver transplant patient has defied modern medicine by taking on her donor's immune system. Demi-Lee Brennan had a liver transplant. Nine months later, doctors at Sydney's Westmead Children's Hospital were amazed to find the teenager's blood group had changed to the donor's blood type. They were even more surprised when they found the girl's immune system had almost totally been replaced by that of the donor, meaning she no longer had to take anti-rejection drugs.

PS Editors. I can't find a suitable topic for this in the list. Sorry!"
Media (Apple)

+ - Old Braun Products Hold Secrets to Apple's Future->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "'The year 2008 marks the 10th Anniversary of the iMac, the computer that changed everything at Apple, hailing a new design era spearheaded by design genius Jonathan Ive. What most people don't know is that there's another man whose products are at the heart of Ive's design philosophy, an influence that permeates every single product at Apple, from hardware to user-interface design. That man is Dieter Rams, and his old designs for Braun during the '50s and '60s hold all the clues not only for past and present Apple products, but their future as well.' The comparisons in the article are striking, as well as the thoughts on the matter. However, it's even more interesting to see so many old amazing products and trying to figure out what elements the Next Big Thing from Apple may take."
Link to Original Source
Editorial

+ - Using Google Earth to find ancient lost cities->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "A story in the online site of the Aussie science mag Cosmos discusses how archaeologists are using sophisticated sateliite images to find previously undiscovered cities. What 's really cool is how some are simply using Google Earth — and discovering all sorts of previously unknown sites!"
Link to Original Source

Eternity is a terrible thought. I mean, where's it going to end? -- Tom Stoppard

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