gimre - Slashdot User

Will Capped Data Plans Kill the Cloud? 530

Posted by samzenpus on Sunday June 19, 2011 @12:10PM from the that's-enough-for-you dept.

theodp writes "With the introduction of its Chromebook, Google is betting big on the Cloud. As is Apple, with its iCloud initiative. So too are Netflix and Skype. Unfortunately, their very existence is threatened by data-capping carriers, who have set a course to make sure that the network is NOT the computer. 'I don't know what the solution is,' writes David Pogue. 'I don't know if anyone's thinking about this. But there are big changes coming. There are big forces about to shape our lives online. And at the moment, they're on a direct collision course.'"

Personal Electronics May Indeed Disrupt Avionics 505

Posted by timothy on Thursday June 09, 2011 @01:38PM from the so-we'll-sell-you-wifi-service dept.

mattrwilliams writes "There is a growing body of anecdotal evidence that points to personal electronics being a real issue on board planes. Dave Carson of Boeing, the co-chair of a federal advisory committee that investigated the problem of electronic interference from portable devices, says that PEDs radiate signals that can hit and disrupt highly sensitive electronic sensors hidden in the plane's passenger area, including those for an instrument landing system used in bad weather."

Have We Reached Maximum Sustainable Population Size? 1070

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday June 08, 2011 @06:18PM from the a-little-elbow-room dept.

Hugh Pickens writes "Pulitzer prize winning writer Thomas Friedman writes that in few years we may be looking back at the first decade of the 21st century — when food prices spiked, energy prices soared, world population surged, tornados plowed through cities, floods and droughts set records, populations were displaced and governments were threatened by the confluence of it all — and ask ourselves: What were we thinking? 'We're currently caught in two loops,' writes Friedman. 'One is that more population growth and more global warming together are pushing up food prices; rising food prices cause political instability in the Middle East, which leads to higher oil prices, which leads to higher food prices, which leads to more instability.' According to the Global Footprint Network we are currently growing at a rate that is using up the Earth's resources far faster than they can be sustainably replenished, so we are eating into the future. Right now, global growth is using about 1.5 Earths. 'Having only one planet makes this a rather significant problem,' says Paul Gilding. 'We either allow collapse to overtake us or develop a new sustainable economic model. We will choose the latter. We may be slow, but we're not stupid.'"

Australian Tax Office Seeks Keylogger To Combat RSI 138

Posted by timothy on Monday May 09, 2011 @01:55AM from the hot-key-for-naughty dept.

schliz writes "The Australian Tax Office plans to track employees' keystrokes and mouse clicks in attempts to address the growing incidence of repetitive strain injuries (RSI) among staff. It hopes to purchase commercial, off-the-shelf 'pause or exercise break software' that delivers safety messages to users, while determining 'more information about the nature of computing use in the workplace.'"

Comment Re:Wait a second... (Score 1) 207

by gimre on Thursday May 05, 2011 @03:11AM (#36032716) Attached to: AMD Launches Fastest Phenom Yet, Phenom II X4 980

another +1

The Car Faster Than a Speeding Bullet 405

Posted by Soulskill on Monday March 07, 2011 @06:24PM from the yeah-but-how's-the-suspension dept.

pbahra writes "Formula 1 is seen as the apogee of engineering excellence and automotive power. So it says something that in Bloodhound SSC — the car that, if all goes well, in 2013 will shatter the current land speed record — the Cosworth Formula 1 engine is just the fuel pump. 'We are creating the ultimate car; we're going where no-one has gone before,' said Richard Noble, the project director. The car, which Mr. Noble says takes £10,000 a day just to keep it ticking over, will be powered by not one, but two other engines. The smaller one, the EJ200, is normally found in the British Royal Air Force's Typhoon jet. Its job is to get the 13.4 meter long car up to 350 mph. That's when the big one kicks in. The big one is the 18-inch diameter, 12-foot-long Falcon rocket, the largest of its kind ever made in the UK. Its job is to catapult the car through the sound barrier to its maximum speed of 1,050 mph. That is, literally, faster than a speeding bullet."

Korean DDoS Bots To Self-Destruct 501

Posted by timothy on Friday July 10, 2009 @01:41AM from the someone-needs-a-little-hanging-before-bed dept.

tsu doh nimh writes "Several news sources are reporting that the tens of thousands of Microsoft Windows systems infected with the Mydoom worm and being used in an ongoing denial of service attack against US and S. Korean government Web sites will likely have their hard drives wiped of data come Friday. From The Washington Post's Security Fix blog, the malware is 'designed to download a payload from a set of Web servers. Included in that payload is a Trojan horse program that overwrites the data on the hard drive with a message that reads "memory of the independence day," followed by as many "u" characters as it takes to write over every sector of every physical drive attached to the compromised system.' ChannelNews Asia carries similar information."

What Would You Want In a Large-Scale Monitoring System? 342

Posted by timothy on Wednesday July 08, 2009 @05:30PM from the detect-curse-words-and-fine-a-quarter-apiece dept.

Krneki writes "I've been developing monitoring solutions for the last five years. I have used Cacti, Nagios, WhatsUP, PRTG, OpManager, MOM, Perl-scripts solutions, ... Today I have changed employer and I have been asked to develop a new monitoring solution from scratch (5,000 devices). My objective is to deliver a solution that will cover both the network devices, servers and applications. The final product must be very easy to understand as it will be used also by help support to diagnose problems during the night. I need a powerful tool that will cover all I need and yet deliver a nice 2D map of the company IT infrastructure. I like Cacti, but usually I use it only for performance monitoring, since pooling can't be set to 5 or 10 sec interval for huge networks. I'm thinking about Nagios (but the 2D map is hard to understand), or maybe OpManager. What monitoring solution do you use and why?"

RC Submarine Lays Fiber Through Sewers In Italy 122

Posted by timothy on Friday July 03, 2009 @04:57AM from the let's-not-see-the-camera-view-please dept.

Francesco Fondi writes "An Italian Company is using RC scale model submarines to lay fiber through Milan's sewage system. The RC submarine used is the Neptune SB-1, produced by Taiwanese company Thunder Tiger. It costs ca $600 in US hobby shops." In Italian, but the pictures speak for themselves.

Race For the "God Particle" Heats Up 397

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday February 17, 2009 @09:14AM from the mister-higgs-i-presume dept.

SpuriousLogic writes "CERN is losing ground rapidly in the race to discover the elusive Higgs boson, its American rival claims. Fermilab say the odds of their Tevatron accelerator finding it first are now 50-50 at worst, and up to 96% at best. CERN's Lyn Evans admitted the accident which will halt the $7B Large Hadron Collider until September may cost them one of the biggest prizes in physics."

NASA to Launch Solar Sail 147

Posted by timothy on Saturday June 28, 2008 @01:31PM from the cue-bad-brains dept.

arbitraryaardvark writes "Physorg reports that NASA will launch a solar sail around the end of July. It'll be the first of its kind; a previous attempt blew up. It's a small proof-of-concept gizmo, not a full-on spaceyacht. Solar sails operate on photon pressure from sunlight. They are well known to science fiction readers, otherwise not so much." C-net has coverage, too.

Last "Hackers On Planet Earth" Conference In July 102

Posted by kdawson on Monday June 09, 2008 @07:55PM from the springs-eternal dept.

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The Last H.O.P.E. ('Hackers on Planet Earth') Conference is set for July 18-20, 2008, at the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York City. The organizers have announced their supplemental speaker list, adding on to the initial list. Topics will include 'Crafting a Security-Enhanced Wikipedia,' 'VoIP (in)security: Italians Do It Better,' 'AntiSocial Networking: Vulnerabilities in Social Nets,' 'SWF and the Malware Tragedy,' 'Simulating the Universe on Supercomputers,' and my personal favorite, 'RIAA Litigations: How the Tech Community Can Help.'"

Astronomers Find Huge Hole in Universe 628

Posted by CowboyNeal on Friday August 24, 2007 @02:54AM from the no-it's-not-rosie-o'donnell dept.

realwx writes "Astronomers are surprised by a recent discovery of a space hole that is nearly a billion light years across. "Not only has no one ever found a void this big, but we never even expected to find one this size," said researcher Lawrence Rudnick of the University of Minnesota. Rudnick's colleague Liliya R. Williams also had not anticipated this finding. "What we've found is not normal, based on either observational studies or on computer simulations of the large-scale evolution of the universe," said Williams, also of the University of Minnesota.""

Interstellar Ark 703

Posted by CmdrTaco on Sunday February 18, 2007 @10:17AM from the yeah-good-luck-with-that dept.

xantox writes "There are three strategies to travel 10.5 light-years from Earth to Epsilon Eridani and bring humanity into a new stellar system : 1) Wait for future discovery of Star Trek physics and go there almost instantaneously, 2) Build a relativistic rocket powered by antimatter and go there in 22 years by accelerating constantly at 1g, provided that you master stellar amounts of energy (so, nothing realistic until now), but what about 3): go there by classical means, by building a gigantic Ark of several miles in radius, propulsed by nuclear fusion and featuring artificial gravity, oceans and cities, for a travel of seven centuries — where many generations of men and women would live ? This new speculation uses some actual physics and math to figure out how far are our fantasies of space travel from their actual implementation."

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