blahblahblah105 - Slashdot User

Comment Titan Missile Museum (Score 2) 85

by blahblahblah105 on Thursday December 17, 2015 @08:41AM (#51136175) Attached to: FOIA'd Documents Give Tour of Minuteman Missile National Historic Site

For a better tour, I recommend the Top-To-Bottom tour at the Titan Missile Museum near Tucson, AZ. 5 hours long and it takes you from launch control through all 8 levels of the silo itself. Nothing like standing at the bottom of the launch duct looking up at the missile.

NAMCO Takes Down Student Pac-man Project 218

Posted by Soulskill on Monday August 02, 2010 @06:30PM from the chasing-ghosts dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The core of how people first learn to do stuff — programming, music, writing, etc. — is to imitate others. It's one of the best ways to learn. Apparently a bunch of students using MIT's educational Scratch programming language understand this. But not everyone else does. NAMCO Bandai sent a takedown notice to MIT because some kids had recreated Pac-man with Scratch. The NAMCO letter is pretty condescending as well, noting that it understands the educational purpose of Scratch, but 'part of their education should include concern for the intellectual property of others.'"

Unix Dict/grep Solves Left-Side-of-Keyboard Puzzle 423

Posted by timothy on Thursday November 20, 2008 @06:40PM from the mysteries-of-the-ages dept.

destinyland writes "For decades, people have been asking this brain teaser: 'What's the longest word you can type with only the left-hand letters on a keyboard?' The answer is supposed to be 'stewardesses,' but grepping the standard dictionary that ships with Unix reveals a much better answer. There's nearly 2,000 shorter words that can typed with only the left hand — including one word that's even longer. (The article also quotes a failed novel attempt using nothing but words typed on the keyboard's left side.)"

Data Center Designers In High Demand 140

Posted by timothy on Tuesday June 17, 2008 @09:53AM from the blinky-blue-is-the-new-dull-amber dept.

Hugh Pickens writes "For years, data center designers have toiled in obscurity in the engine rooms of the digital economy, amid the racks of servers and storage devices that power everything from online videos to corporate e-mail systems but now people with the skills to design, build and run a data center that does not endanger the power grid are suddenly in demand. 'The data center energy problem is growing fast, and it has an economic importance that far outweighs the electricity use,' said Jonathan G. Koomey of Stanford University. 'So that explains why these data center people, who haven't gotten a lot of glory in their careers, are in the spotlight now.' The pace of the data center build-up is the result of the surging use of servers, which in the United States rose to 11.8 million in 2007, from 2.6 million a decade earlier. 'For years and years, the attitude was just buy it, install it and don't worry about it,' says Vernon Turner, an analyst for IDC. 'That led to all sorts of inefficiencies. Now, we're paying for that behavior.'" On a related note, an anonymous reader contributes this link to an interesting look at how a data center gets built.

Even Before Memex, a Plan For a Networked World 119

Posted by timothy on Tuesday June 17, 2008 @09:05AM from the da-vinci-invented-everything dept.

phlurg writes "The New York Times presents an amazing article on 'the Mundaneum,' a sort of proto-WWW conceived of by Paul Otlet in 1934. 'In 1934, Otlet sketched out plans for a global network of computers (or "electric telescopes," as he called them) that would allow people to search and browse through millions of interlinked documents, images, audio and video files. He described how people would use the devices to send messages to one another, share files and even congregate in online social networks. He called the whole thing a "réseau," which might be translated as "network" — or arguably, "web."' A fascinating read." (You may be reminded of Vannevar Bush's "Memex," which shares some of the same ideas.)

R2-D2 Monitors Your Web Servers 70

Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday June 16, 2008 @06:04PM from the because-you-can dept.

1sockchuck writes "What happens when you hire Star Wars enthusiasts as the system admins for your data center? You end up with the R2-D2 server monitoring system. The staff at Japan's Syun (only if you read Japanese) have converted an R2-D2 DVD projector into a Nagios-based server monitoring system that alerts them whenever a server goes offline." Say what you will, but that's a lot harder to ignore than a beeper.

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