RFSharpe - Slashdot User

Comment WordPerfect for DOS... (Score 1) 422

by RFSharpe on Tuesday July 12, 2011 @08:33PM (#36743270) Attached to: How Do You Get Your Geek Nostalgia Fix?

I get my "Geek Nostalgia Fix" by using WordPerfect for DOS 5.1.

I have it installed on three of my Windows XP computers. Using the function keys takes me back to the old days when my fingers never had to leave the keyboard to reach for the mouse. I have it running under TameDOS to make it operate more smoothly under Windows XP. I have not tried running it on a 64bit OS yet.

If I really want to take a trip back in time, I can look at the first edition of WordPerfect magazine that I have kept. It has a great picture of a Wizard on the front and expounds "The Wizardry of 5.0". I remember when I moved my users from version 4.2 to 5.0 of WordPerfect... They thought I was a Court Jester, not a Wizard... but they learned to love it.

Comment The Cure for Erectile Dysfunction was also... (Score 1) 404

by RFSharpe on Monday April 04, 2011 @05:51PM (#35714190) Attached to: Accidental Find May Lead To a Cure For Baldness

Yes... Viagra
Viagra was discovered in much the same way... And where would we be today if did not have our Viagra spam messages?

According to:

http://www.suite101.com/content/the-discovery-of-viagra-a27733

Excerpt:
In the late 1980s, a Pfizer research group were looking for a compound which would treat hypertension. They were working on a method to enhance the activity of a compound called "atrial natriuretic peptide" (ANP). This compound was a natural diuretic, causing the kidneys to produce more urine, but it also relaxed blood vessel walls. So a drug which enhanced this activity would reduce high blood pressure.

For several different reasons, the compound was almost binned, but one side comment in some of the trials was that after four or five days of taking the drug, penile erections were observed. This attracted the attention of some of the Pfizer scientists who realized that the inhibition of the activity of PDE-5 was overcoming a proposed cause of erectile dysfunction.

Comment Experts Exchange is on my list too... (Score 1) 323

by RFSharpe on Friday March 11, 2011 @02:52PM (#35455378) Attached to: Google Introduces Domain Blocking To Search

The "Experts Exchange" is definitely on the top of my list.
According to something that I read, they are using techniques "banned" by Google to get their high rankings.
The technique involves "..showing you the user one page and the Google SEO bot a different page."

Supermassive Black Hole Is Thrown Out of Galaxy 167

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday May 12, 2010 @07:50PM from the moving-to-better-quarters dept.

DarkKnightRadick writes "An undergrad student at the University of Utrecht, Marianne Heida, has found evidence of a supermassive black hole being tossed out of its galaxy. According to the article, the black hole — which has a mass equivalent to one billion suns — is possibly the culmination of two galaxies merging (or colliding, depending on how you like to look at it) and their black holes merging, creating one supermassive beast. The black hole was found using the Chandra Source Catalog (from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory). The direction of the expulsion is also possibly indicative of the direction of rotation of the two black holes as they circled each other before merging."

Athena's Free Firewall Browser 23

Posted by timothy on Friday March 19, 2010 @08:30PM from the should-you-choose-to-accept-it dept.

athenasec writes "Firewall Browser is a free configuration analyzer (download here), released by Athena Security, which works on Cisco, Check Point, and Netscreen firewalls for searching rulebases based on address or service ranges — the way change requests are actually made. The tool is available as a free download with no limitations, user license restrictions, or registration hurdles. Users can slice and dice any firewall-related question about the network, service objects, and security rules for a multi-vendor environment from a single flexible interface. There is also this how-to guide for applying the tool to day-to-day operational tasks."

Brain Surgery Linked To Sensation of Spirituality 380

Posted by timothy on Thursday February 11, 2010 @05:30PM from the applied-psychology dept.

the3stars writes "'Removing part of the brain can induce inner peace, according to researchers from Italy. Their study provides the strongest evidence to date that spiritual thinking arises in, or is limited by, specific brain areas. This raises a number of interesting issues about spirituality, among them whether or not people can be born with a strong propensity towards spirituality and also whether it can be acquired through head trauma." One critic's quoted response: "It's important to recognize that the whole study is based on changes in one self-report measure, which is a coarse measure that includes some strange items."

Dying Man Shares Unseen Challenger Video 266

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday February 02, 2010 @12:27PM from the new-perspective-on-an-old-tragedy dept.

longacre writes "An amateur video of the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger explosion has been made public for the first time. The Florida man who filmed it from his front yard on his new Betamax camcorder turned the tape over to an educational organization a week before he died this past December. The Space Exploration Archive has since published the video into the public domain in time for the 24th anniversary of the catastrophe. Despite being shot from about 70 miles from Cape Canaveral, the shuttle and the explosion can be seen quite clearly. It is unclear why he never shared the footage with NASA or the media. NASA officials say they were not aware of the video, but are interested in examining it now that it has been made available."

Astronomers Discover 33 Pairs of Waltzing Black Holes 101

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday January 04, 2010 @04:59PM from the teach-them-to-foxtrot dept.

Astronomers from UC Berkeley have identified 33 pairs of waltzing black holes, closing the gap somewhat between the observed population of super-massive black hole pairs and what had been predicted by theory. "Astronomical observations have shown that 1) nearly every galaxy has a central super-massive black hole (with a mass of a million to a billion times the mass of the Sun), and 2) galaxies commonly collide and merge to form new, more massive galaxies. As a consequence of these two observations, a merger between two galaxies should bring two super-massive black holes to the new, more massive galaxy formed from the merger. The two black holes gradually in-spiral toward the center of this galaxy, engaging in a gravitational tug-of-war with the surrounding stars. The result is a black hole dance, choreographed by Newton himself. Such a dance is expected to occur in our own Milky Way Galaxy in about 3 billion years, when it collides with the Andromeda Galaxy."

IDEs With VIM Text Editing Capability? 193

Posted by timothy on Wednesday December 30, 2009 @03:30PM from the one-keybinding-to-rule-them-all dept.

An anonymous reader writes "I am currently looking to move from text editing with vim to a full fledged IDE with gdb integration, integrated command line, etc. Extending VIM with these capabilities is a mortal sin, so I am looking for a linux based GUI IDE. I do not want to give up the efficient text editing capabilities of VIM though. How do I have my cake and eat it too?"

Facebook Mafiosi Go To the Mattresses vs. Zynga 102

Posted by Soulskill on Thursday December 17, 2009 @01:15AM from the concrete-galoshes dept.

sympleko writes "Zynga has the lion's share of traffic in Facebook applications, and Mafia Wars is one of their most popular social games. Collapsing under the weight of over 26 million users, Zynga has been scrambling to thwart hard-core gamers who reverse-engineer URLs or script the game to optimize their enjoyment. Many of the workarounds have annoyed users who were accustomed to various game features, and even worse, the hastily-deployed changes have resulted in many players losing access to the game, in-game prizes, or statistics. Fed up with a software company seemingly bent on discouraging people from enjoying their product, a number of tagged players have organized a boycott of all Zynga games. The first 24-hour boycott on Sunday 12/13 resulted in an 11% decline in Daily Active Users, and an emergency thread on Zynga's forums (from which most of the flames were deleted). The current boycott, extending Wednesday through Sunday is being supported by a 428K strong Facebook group. At issue is the social contract between software companies and their devoted user base, as well as the nefarious tactics Zynga has used to raise cash."

NYT's "Games To Avoid" an Ironic, Perfect Gamer Wish List 189

Posted by Soulskill on Friday December 11, 2009 @07:48AM from the more-or-less dept.

MojoKid writes "From October to December, the advertising departments of a thousand companies exhort children to beg, cajole, and guilt-trip their parents for all manner of inappropriate digital entertainment. As supposedly informed gatekeepers, we sadly earthbound Santas are reduced to scouring the back pages of gaming review sites and magazines, trying to evaluate whether the tot at home is ready for Big Bird's Egg Hunt or Bayonetta. Luckily, The New York Times is here to help. In a recent article provokingly titled 'Ten Games to Cross off Your Child's Gift List,' the NYT names its list of big bads — the video games so foul, so gruesome, so perverse that we'd recommend you buy them immediately — for yourself. Alternatively, if you need gift ideas for the surly, pale teenager in your home whose body contains more plastic then your average d20, this is the newspaper clipping to stuff in your pocket. In other words, if you need a list like this to understand what games to not stuff little Johnny's stocking with this holiday season, you've got larger issues you should concern yourself with. We'd suggest picking up an auto-shotty and taking a few rounds against the horde — it's a wonderful stress relief and you're probably going to need it."

FreeNAS Switching From FreeBSD To Debian Linux 206

Posted by Soulskill on Sunday December 06, 2009 @12:29PM from the changing-horses dept.

dnaumov writes "FreeNAS, a popular, free NAS solution, is moving away from using FreeBSD as its underlying core OS and switching to Debian Linux. Version 0.8 of FreeNAS as well as all further releases are going to be based on Linux, while the FreeBSD-based 0.7 branch of FreeNAS is going into maintenance-only mode, according to main developer Volker Theile. A discussion about the switch, including comments from the developers, can be found on the FreeNAS SourceForge discussion forum. Some users applaud the change, which promises improved hardware compatibility, while others voice concerns regarding the future of their existing setups and lack of ZFS support in Linux."

Can We Really Tell Lossless From MP3? 849

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday November 17, 2009 @11:11PM from the single-blind-testing dept.

EddieSpinola writes "Everyone knows that lossless codecs like FLAC produce better sounding music than lossy codecs like MP3. Well that's the theory anyway. The reality is that most of us can't tell the difference between MP3 and FLAC. In this quick and dirty test, a worrying preponderance of subjects rated the MP3 encodes higher than the FLAC files. Very interesting, if slightly disturbing reading!" Visiting with adblock and flashblock is highly recommended, lest you be blinded. The article is spread over 6 pages and there is no print version.

Submission + - New Ad-Aware Offers Behavioral Detection (cnet.com)

Submitted by

ScuttleMonkey

on Monday October 12, 2009 @03:01PM

ScuttleMonkey writes: "Lavasoft has updated its popular malware and spyware detection and removal tool Ad-Aware. Rather than a dramatic redo, version 8.1 builds on the improvements made in the previous version. Read this blog post by Seth Rosenblatt on The Download Blog."

Man Jailed After Using LimeWire For ID Theft 241

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday August 12, 2009 @12:31PM from the guess-his-making-available-defense-didn't-work-either dept.

angry tapir sends along this excerpt from PC World: "A Seattle man has been sentenced to more than three years in prison for using the LimeWire file-sharing service to lift personal information from computers across the US. The man, Frederick Wood, typed words like 'tax return' and 'account' into the LimeWire search box. That allowed him to find and access computers on the LimeWire network with shared folders that contained tax returns and bank account information. ... He used the information to open accounts, create identification cards and make purchases. 'Many of the victims are parents who don't realize that LimeWire is on their home computer,' [said Kathryn Warma of the US Attorney's Office]."

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