Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
Earth

Magnetic Pole Shift Affects Tampa Airport 317

Posted by timothy from the it's-also-why-they-repaint-bridges dept.
RFSSystems writes "I thought this was an amazing and rather rare phenomenon and wanted to share. 'The airport has closed its primary runway until Jan. 13 to repaint the numeric designators at each end and change taxiway signage to account for the shift in location of the Earth's magnetic north pole.' It appears that the shifting poles have begun to affect air travel in a somewhat modest way. Could this also be the explanation for the falling/dead birds this week?" I hope the gradualists are right, but scenarios for rapid magnetic pole shift are fun to think about.
Bug

PHP Floating Point Bug Crashes Servers 213

Posted by timothy from the inexactly-wrong dept.
angry tapir writes "A newly unearthed bug in certain versions of the PHP scripting language could crash servers when the software is given the task of converting a large floating point number, raising the possibility that the glitch could be exploited by hackers. The bug will cause the PHP processing software to enter an infinite loop when it tries to convert the series of digits "2.2250738585072011e-308" from the string format into the floating point format. The bug only seems to affect version 5.2 and 5.3 of the language." Adds reader alphadogg: "Computer scientist Rick Regan first reported the bug on Monday, and the PHP development team issued patches the following day."
Cellphones

Smartphones For Text SSH Use Re-Revisited 359

Posted by CmdrTaco from the serious-business dept.
Kainaw writes "This was asked in 2005 and 2008. I think it should be revisited yet again... With iPhone, Android, and Windows smartphones running around, which (if any) of them are well-suited to Unix/Linux server administration on the run? SSH is a must. A good screen resolution. A physical keyboard won't block the screen with a virtual keyboard. Many physical keyboards omit the numeric keys now, making the typing of numbers rather difficult. Nearly every smartphone has WiFi capability now. Some will do an X display through SSH tunnelling. So, pushing through all the bells and whistles that have nothing to do with effective server administration, what is left?"
Programming

The State of Ruby VMs — Ruby Renaissance 89

Posted by Soulskill from the take-your-pick dept.
igrigorik writes "In the short span of just a couple of years, the Ruby VM space has evolved to more than just a handful of choices: MRI, JRuby, IronRuby, MacRuby, Rubinius, MagLev, REE and BlueRuby. Four of these VMs will hit 1.0 status in the upcoming year and will open up entirely new possibilities for the language — Mac apps via MacRuby, Ruby in the browser via Silverlight, object persistence via Smalltalk VM, and so forth. This article takes a detailed look at the past year, the progress of each project, and where the community is heading. It's an exciting time to be a Rubyist."
GNU is Not Unix

Taking Free Software To the Streets 184

Posted by Soulskill from the spreading-the-word dept.
An anonymous reader writes "It's that time of year again; the nights are drawing in, the leaves are beginning to turn, and literally hundreds of teams of dedicated F/OSS enthusiasts from around the world are preparing to hit the streets in celebration of Software Freedom Day 2009. In an effort to increase awareness of free and open source software among the general public, SFD teams will be standing around town centers and shopping malls, holding talks at schools and universities, giving demonstrations and handing out Linux and FOSS collections for Windows on CD. With money being tight and paranoia about malware and viruses at an all-time high, the time is right to help consumers switch to the myriad of quality open source applications available. If you would like to check for an SFD team in your area and consider attending, be it to help out or simply learn more about free software for yourself, there's an interactive map to help you find your way."
Programming

Apple Open Sources Grand Central Dispatch 342

Posted by kdawson from the waitin'-for-a-train dept.
bonch writes "Apple has open sourced libdispatch, also known as Grand Central Dispatch, which is technology in Snow Leopard that makes it easier for developers to take advantage of multi-core parallelism. Kernel support is not required, but performance optimizations Apple made for supporting GCD are visible in xnu. Block support in C is required and is currently available in LLVM (note that Apple has submitted their implementation of C blocks for standardization)." Update: 09/11 15:32 GMT by KD : Drew McCormack has a post up speculating on what Apple's move means to Linux and other communities (but probably not Microsoft): "...this is also very interesting for scientific developers. It may be possible to parallelize code in the not too distant future using Grand Central Dispatch, and run that code not only on Macs, but also on clusters and supercomputers."
Software

Submission + - URL shortener goes community-owned/FOSS (blog.tr.im)

Submitted by
Death Metal
Death Metal writes: "1. We will renounce all ownership interest in the tr.im domain name and donate it to the community. We will work out the legalities of this over the coming weeks, but it will ensure no one is ever able to hijack tr.im URLs in the future. They will always exist, period. Everyone can use tr.im with confidence.

2. We will release the source code used to implement tr.im for anyone to use, help develop, or privately extend as they like. We will release it under the MIT open-source license. It is our sincere hope that every URL shortener becomes as good or better than tr.im, or can learn from our architecture and feature set."

Comment Validate (Score 1) 1146

by fwez (#28954823) Attached to: Navigating a Geek Marriage?
I agree with most of what's been posted. You seem to already have a leg up on "non-geeks" by being who you are. I learned the following two things after I turned 30. (1) "Validate her:" basically in the middle of an argument, paraphrase back to her what you think she is saying (not what you think of what she is saying). This has an awesome disarming effect on her, and it will give you her perspective. (2) Pick your battles. There are some arguments that you will never win. It's not always about who makes more sense.

And, specifically don't do the following costly mistakes:
1- Don't cite statistics about divorce or break up rate, no matter how useful or reasonable such a citation might seem TO YOU. Two months into my relationship with my current fiance I told her that the statistical probability of people who have been dating for two months (like us) to end up together on the long run is slim. Nevermind that I was using that statistic as an example why people SHOULDN'T be complacent and that men should not take women for granted. All SHE HEARD was me saying that I don't think that we stand a chance together. This was the first occasion where I realized the awesome power of tips (1) and (2) above.

2- If she flirtingly asks you to say something nice to her, never ever EVER tell her that she is the SECOND prettiest girl you know especially if you really believe that. It turns out that truth does not add force to a compliment (#1 girl was an older married chick that was realistically never in my reach). As a guy, I'd be very happy if a girl - especially the one I'm asking to marry me - would say that to me. Being number two after an unattainable guy like Brad Pitt type is pretty good to me. Well, no... they don't see it that way.
Communications

Navigating a Geek Marriage? 1146

Posted by kdawson from the waiting-for-taco-to-weigh-in dept.
JoeLinux writes "I am soon to marry my true love (a girl! yes! they do exist!). She is a literary geek, whereas I am a gaming/Linux geek. Being the RTFM-style geeks that we are, we have been reading up on marriage, making things work, etc. Unfortunately, all of the references seem to be based around an alpha-male jock and a submissive cheerleader-style wife. A lot of the references to incompatibility in the books don't apply to us (neglect due to interest in sports, etc.). What are some of the pitfalls and successes learned in the course of a more geek-oriented marriage?"
Social Networks

Submission + - Montana City Requires Workers' Internet Accounts (montanasnewsstation.com)

Submitted by justinlindh
justinlindh writes: Bozeman Montana is now requiring all applicants for city jobs to furnish Internet account information for "background checking". A portion of the application reads, "Please list any and all, current personal or business websites, web pages or memberships on any Internet-based chat rooms, social clubs or forums, to include, but not limited to: Facebook, Google, Yahoo, YouTube.com, MySpace, etc.". The article goes on to mention, "There are then three lines where applicants can list the Web sites, their user names and log-in information and their passwords." This seems a pretty blatant violation of privacy, to me.
Businesses

Borland Being Purchased By Micro Focus 351

Posted by Soulskill from the reaching-the-bottom-of-the-hill dept.
An anonymous reader tips news that Micro Focus is in the process of buying Borland Software for $75 million. They also picked up Compuware's application testing and automated software quality business. Quoting ZDNet: "The boards of both companies agreed to the deal, which is expected to complete around mid-2009. ... In 2008, Texas-based Borland made a pre-tax loss of $204m, almost four times the size of the previous year's loss. It had revenues of $172m, part of a consistent downward trend since at least 2004. ... Borland was one of the oldest software companies in the PC software business, having been founded in 1981. Its most successful era was in the late 1980s via massive sales of Sidekick, a DOS-based terminate-and-stay-resident personal productivity application, and development tool Turbo Pascal, which challenged Microsoft's dominance in the application-development market."
Earth

Submission + - Bacteria Could Help Stop Desertification (inhabitat.com)

Submitted by
Bridgette Steffen
Bridgette Steffen writes: "In attempt to slow down desertification, a student at London's Architectural Association has proposed a 6000 km sandstone wall that will not only act as a break across the Sahara Desert, but also serve as refugee shelter. Last fall it won first prize in the Holcim Foundation's Awards for Sustainable Construction, and will use bacteria to solidify the sandstone."
Image

Stoner Discovers He Was Never Married 10 Years Later 1

Posted by samzenpus from the yeah-well-you-know-that's-just-like-your-opinion-man dept.
A man confused by years of pot smoking, believed he was married for almost a decade, but discovered he wasn't after trying to marry a new partner. When the The Births, Deaths and Marriages Registry could find no record of the marriage he said he could not remember a wedding ceremony taking place but always believed he had been married. He told the Family Law Court in Sydney that the details of the wedding must have slipped his mind because he was so stoned. In fact he had no "meaningful recollection" of significant portions of the marriage. He and his "wife" fought all the time and in 2003 she gave him a document to sign, which he believed was their divorce papers. When he contacted her for proof of their divorce, she told him it was a residential tenancy agreement. The new couple are free to marry now provided he can remember where the ceremony will take place, who she is and why all these people are here?

Slashdot Top Deals

A bug in the code is worth two in the documentation.

Close