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Cellphones

Submission + - T-Mobile's German Cell Phone Network Down

Submitted by botticelli
botticelli writes: Yesterday, the german T-Mobile cell phone network went down for about 3 hours (german) (Babelfish translation here), official press release (also german) (Babelfish translation here). They took their time fixing the problem as they were not able to contact many of their own technicians since those own the company's cell phones, of course. Now, T-Mobile offers free short messaging on sunday as a compensation but no money as reported by Deutsche Welle. Why am I glad not to be a customer?
Space

Submission + - Is "Space Junk" always?

Submitted by Hqrsie
Hqrsie writes: After reading the article on Brazilian pirates using US military satellites for communication, I've wondered what's done with decommissioned satellites. I always thought they would be viewed as a precious commodity due to their complexity, expense, and status. However, with many critical systems reliant on them, it seems likely that replacements are sent prudently before critical failure. What I wonder is if there are functional satellites that are simply not in use. Or is anything in orbit that continues to work already re-purposed until it is of no further use at all? Is "space junk" always truly that?
Programming

Submission + - Humor in code: unprofessional or not? 2

Submitted by DrVomact
DrVomact writes: Do you ever inject humor into the comments of your code or—heaven forfend—into the code itself? I recently had a "code review" of a Perl automation program I had written for my department. The salient criticism that emerged was that there was "sarcasm" in my comments, and that this was unprofessional. In retrospect, it was not surprising that the criticisms concentrated on my comments, as no one else in this group does much programming (the PHB claims to have "been a coder" once upon a time...I think he wrote COBOL on punch cards); nevertheless I was dumbstruck. What kind of world is it where you aren't allowed the occasional funny comment in your code? Do we have to be serious all the time? I asked a programmer in the "R & D" group of this paleolithically conservative company I work for, and he responded with a complete unsolicited psychoanalysis: he advised that I should develop a "professional personality" that was different from my real one I use at home. I was shocked—nay, mystified: where do you learn how to do that?

But let's concentrate on the smaller, more manageable issue: is humor in comments truly verboten? Am I the only one who makes the occasional light remark, or even a self-deprecating reminder to "Change this, you idiot...what were you thinking"? I've resolved to take the humor issue to a jury of my peers: to wit, the esteemed denizens of Slashdot.

I received an annotated copy of my code from my PHB, pointing out all my lapses into "unprofessionalism." Here are a few of the lines from my program that were deemed "unprofessional", along with my comments, and meta comments). I cannot actually guarantee that there is any genuinely funny stuff here, only that my completely humorless PHB suspected that it might be tainted. (Sorry about the lack of indenting...couldn't figure out how to make Slashdot's subset of HTML do that.)

BEGIN {
if ($^O eq 'MSWin32') {
use Win32::Console;
Win32::Console::Free( );
}
}
Weirdly, nobody thought this was at all funny or objectionable.

# Set the directory if we got lucky
This was in a set of nested conditional tests that tried to find a file, no matter what crazy place the person running the program had stuck it. I fail to see this as sarcasm...I call it "cheerful optimism".

# Fix nasty problem where...
Comment in code that fixes crazy stuff in input files. Apparently, the word "nasty" is nasty.

$sysreturn = $proc->wait; # This gets exit code of process (it's already gone, so it's not really going to wait)
The parenthetical comment was marked as objectionable. You got me; I thought this was a potentially confusing line of code, and that the comment helped.

} else { # For all others, we just need to recover the original declarations that got eaten by the XSLTs
The word "eaten" was deemed unprofessional, sarcastic, or something.

my $status = shift @_; # 1 means the error causes certain death, undef or 0 means it's a warning (user gets to try again), 2 means it's a "notification"
Describes possible values passed to an error handler; "certain death" was deemed objectionable. Perhaps it was construed as a threat?

my %args = @_; # Stuff arguments into a hash, so we can look them up one at a time
"stuff" is an offensive word, apparently. All instances of "stuff" were marked as offensive. Good thing I didn't use "slurp", or "suck", huh?

if($name ne "subsection") { # We want the minor stuff included with first subsect file
To my great consternation, "stuff" is objectionable both as a verb and a noun! I think maybe PHB was using search-and-replace for his code analysis, though.

$button_text="Bummer!"; # It's NOT OK, man!
This one caused the most outrage. It's actually part of the code, unlike the other cases—it's the text of a button in a fatal error dialog. I completely hate when an application notifies me of a fatal error and asks me to click a button labeled "OK"—as if asking for my approval for having screwed up. Like my comment says...it's not OK. PHB wanted "OK", but I finally changed it to "Exit".

So, I ask you, my peers of Slashdot, to pass judgment on me: am I hopelessly unprofessional? Or have I discovered the real reason why so many programmers don't comment their code?
Censorship

Submission + - Time Warner attempting to Ban small ISPs (engadget.com)

Submitted by Mants
Mants writes: Time Warner and Embarq cannot compete with a local publicly owned Broadband ISP so they are attempting to make it illegal to have community-owned broadband services this is also one of the areas where the metered/tiered internet service idea was dropped Source: http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/22/time-warner-and-embarq-cant-compete-with-city-owned-isp-trying/ http://savencbb.wordpress.com/about/ http://www.greenlightnc.com/ http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=14934 If you live in North Carolina, write your Governor!
Security

Submission + - Mariners Develop High Tech Pirate Repellents 1

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "NPR reports that owners of ships that ply the dangerous waters near Somalia are looking at options to repel pirates including slippery foam, lasers, electric fences, water cannons and high-intensity sound — almost anything except guns. One defense is the Force 80 squirt gun with a 3-inch nozzle that can send 1,400 gallons a minute 100 yards in any direction. "It is a tremendous force of water that will knock over anything in its path and will also flood a pirate's ship very quickly," says Roger Barrett James of the the Swedish company Unifire. Next is the Mobility Denial System, a slippery nontoxic foam that can be sprayed on just about any surface making it impossible to walk or climb even with the aid of a harness. The idea would be to spray the pirate's vessel as it approached, or to coat ropes, ladders, steps and the hull of the ship that's under attack. The Long Range Acoustic Device, or LRAD, a high-powered directional loudspeaker allows a ship to hail an approaching vessel more than a mile away. "Knowing that they've lost the element of surprise is half the battle," says Robert Putnam of American Technology Corp. The LRAD has another feature — a piercing "deterrent tone" that sounds a bit like a smoke detector alarm with enough intensity to cause extreme pain and even permanent hearing loss for anyone directly in the beam of sound that comes from the device. But Capt. John Konrad, who blogs for the Web site Gcaptain.com, says no anti-pirate device is perfect. "The best case scenario is that you find these vessels early enough that you can get a Navy ship detached to your location and let them handle the situation.""
The Internet

Submission + - 1.8M websites to disappear. (geocities.com) 1

Submitted by
FAT-BOY88
FAT-BOY88 writes: "The following has appeared on geocities.com home page.
"After careful consideration, Yahoo! has decided to close GeoCities later this year. You can continue enjoying your GeoCities service until then — we just wanted you to let you know about the closure as soon as possible. We'll share more details this summer. For now, please visit the help center for more information."
No new accounts are accepted. Geocities has about 1.8 million users. It usually ranks between 100-110 on traffic. There are over 20,000,000 links to it according to several search engines."
Operating Systems

Submission + - Ubuntu 9.04: Nothing Short of Amazing (itnewstoday.com)

Submitted by
Jeremy LaCroix
Jeremy LaCroix writes: "Ubuntu 9.04 (codenamed the "Jaunty Jackalope") was released this week after an extensive six months (or so) in development. It brings with it some of the most controversial features in the distribution's history, and the development versions of Jaunty have been fairly well received by just about all the blogs I have read. Is Ubuntu 9.04 worth the download? The answer is clear: DEFINITELY.
Read more..."
Spam

Submission + - One Bot-Infected PC = 600,000 Spam Emails A Day (computerworld.com)

Submitted by
CWmike
CWmike writes: "Some bot-infected PCs can crank out as many as 25,000 spam messages per hour, or 600,000 a day, says new research released Wednesday. Marshal8e6 deliberately infected machines in the lab of its research arm, TRACElabs, with the malware responsible for the world's nine biggest spam botnets, then observed the PCs' behavior, including each bot's top-end spam capacity. They concluded that Rustock and Xarvester, the latter perhaps linked to the down-and-out Srizbi botnet, are the most efficient spam spewers of the nine bots. The next most effective spam bot was found to be Mega-D, one of the bots that took advantage of the November 2008 takedown of McColo, a hosting company that harbored the command-and-control servers for several big botnets, including Srizbi and Rustock."
The Internet

Submission + - Time Warner wants to kill city-owned ISPs in NC (dailytech.com)

Submitted by suraj.sun
suraj.sun writes: Time Warner and Embarq wants to kill city-owned ISPs in North Carolina :

Time Warner has teamed up with Embarq to persuade the North Carolina state government into banning community-owned broadband services. Why? Well, turns out the 47,000 residents of Wilson, NC got tired of paying for slow broadband, so the city government launched its own fiber ISP called Greenlight that offers some pretty solid packages ranging from $99 for 81 cable channels, unlimited phone service, and 10Mbs (down and up) internet to to $170 for every single channel including premiums and 20Mbps up/down internet.

Of course, these prices blow TWC and Embarq out of the water — the comparable basic Time Warner plan has fewer channels and less bandwidth for an "introductory rate" of $137 — and rather than compete, the two giants decided to lobby the North Carolina legislature into proposing bills that outlaw community services like Greenlight.

DailyTech : http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=14934

Save NC Broadband blog : http://savencbb.wordpress.com/about/
Supercomputing

Submission + - DoE's supercomputing gurus talk next-gen cooling (itnews.com.au)

Submitted by schliz
schliz writes: The Department of Energy's Argonne Leadership Computing Facility is working with IBM to increase the chilled water requirements — thus lengthening the free cooling period — of next-generation supercomputers. By analyzing the historical power consumption profile of its one-year-old IBM Blue Gene/P supercomputer, the ALCF has already managed to lengthen its free cooling period by two months in a year, resulting in more than US$50,000 in savings.

Supercomputers are 'a sort of time machine', according to Pete Beckman, ALCF director. In an interview with iTnews, Beckman and colleague Jeff Sims describe the ALCF's cooling techniques, research into future machines with IBM and the University of Chicago, and how current supercomputing power management techniques are spreading into enterprise data centres.

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