U-Boot_96 - Slashdot User

Economic Crisis Will Eliminate Open Source 753

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday October 22, 2008 @10:53AM from the why-so-gloomy dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The economic crisis will ultimately eliminate open source projects and the 'Web 2.0 free economy,' says Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur. Along with the economic downturn and record job loss, he says, we will see the elimination of projects including Wikipedia, CNN's iReport, and much of the blogosphere. Instead of users offering their services 'for free,' he says, we're about to see a 'sharp cultural shift in our attitude toward the economic value of our labor' and a rise of online media businesses that reward their contributors with cash. Companies that will survive, he says, include Hulu, iTunes, and Mahalo. 'The hungry and cold unemployed masses aren't going to continue giving away their intellectual labor on the Internet in the speculative hope that they might get some "back end" revenue,' says Keen."

How Mobile Phones Work Behind the Scenes 220

Posted by timothy on Tuesday October 07, 2008 @01:20PM from the they-all-suck-to-different-degrees dept.

adamengst writes "We seldom think about how our mobile phones actually work, but in this TidBITS article, Rich Mogull pulls back the covers and peels away the jargon to explain why text messages work when voice calls are dropped, why your battery lasts longer in some places than in others, why you're not allowed to use phones on airplanes, why you can be notified of a voicemail message when your phone never rang, and more."

Particle Physicists Share the Physics Nobel 67

Posted by timothy on Tuesday October 07, 2008 @09:39AM from the wave-physicists-get-it-simultaneously dept.

somegeekynick writes "The 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics has been jointly awarded to Yoichiro Nambu of the University of Chicago 'for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics,' and Makoto Kobayashi of the KEK lab and Toshihide Maskawa of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics, both in Japan, 'for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature.'"

Fungus Fire Spores With 180,000 G Acceleration 69

Posted by timothy on Tuesday October 07, 2008 @09:22AM from the easy-at-that-size dept.

Hugh Pickens writes "Although a variety of spore discharge processes have evolved among the fungi, those with the longest ranges are powered by hydrostatic pressure and include 'squirt guns' that are most common in the Ascomycota and Zygomycota. In these fungi, fluid-filled stalks that support single spores or spore-filled sporangia, or cells called asci that contain multiple spores, are pressurized by osmosis. Because spores are discharged at such high speeds, most of the information on launch processes from previous studies has been inferred from mathematical models and is subject to a number of errors, but now Nicholas Money, an expert on fungi at Miami University, has recorded the discharges with high-speed cameras at 250,000 frames-a-second and discovered that fungi fire their spores with accelerations up to 180,000 g, calling it 'the fastest flight in nature.' Money and his students, in a justified fit of ecstasy, have created a video of the first fungus opera."

Be Part of the 2008 Presidential Youth Debate 513

Posted by Roblimo on Sunday September 28, 2008 @05:29PM from the they've-already-promised-to-answer dept.

We participated in this project back in 2004. This year it's hosted by Walden University, and the format is a little less cumbersome than it was four years ago. So go ahead, ask some questions you'd like to see McCain and Obama answer, and they'll go into the pot along with questions submitted through other channels. Later this week you'll have a chance to help moderate the final questions chosen from all sources, and on October 20 you'll be able to see video responses from the two major party candidates. Please limit to yourself to one question per post, and note that questions must be posted no later than 4 p.m. US EDT on Monday, September 29, to be considered.

Comment Another convenient source of patches (Score 1) 604

by U-Boot_96 on Wednesday September 10, 2003 @06:36PM (#6925825) Attached to: Microsoft Identifies, Patches Another Critical RPC Hole

Hi, I thought this could be useful and worth +5 [Informative]:

In case of difficulties one might experience trying to get to M$ update site to get patches, here is another source:

http://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/9/en/iso/i3 86/*.iso

These files are quite large, yes I know, but the installation is quite straightforward once you burn them onto CDs. Just reboot with the first CD in the tray and follow on screen instructions. As a system administrator you may be also interested in knowing that those patches do not break the system and are guaranteed to leave you with a perfectly well working and stable OS.

Oh, and a, er, don't try to register this as a patch level with M$ or anything like that. Since the system will be exceptionally stable once you patch it you may never need to contact M$ seeking support anyway. So why bother.

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