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IT

Confessions of a SysAdmin 385

Posted by Soulskill from the type-with-your-fists dept.
Mr.Fork writes "Scott Merrill from CrunchGear has a confession. He really, really hates computers. He writes: 'No, really, I hate them. I love the communications they facilitate, I love the conveniences they provide to my life, and I love the escapism they sometimes afford; but I actually hate the computers themselves. Computers are fragile, unintuitive things — a hodge-podge of brittle hardware and opaque, restrictive software.' Does his editorial speak to all of us in similar IT-related fields? Do we all silently hate the complexities and idiosyncrasies computers have, like error messages and UI designs that make no sense to the common user, which make our tech professions miserable?"
Entertainment

Marge Simpson Poses For Playboy 413

Posted by samzenpus from the drawn-to-please dept.
caffiend666 writes "'Marge Simpson is posing for Playboy . The magazine is giving the star of The Simpsons the star treatment, complete with a data sheet, an interview and a 2-page centerfold. 'We knew that this would really appeal to the 20-something crowd,' said Playboy spokeswoman Theresa Hennessey. Playboy even convinced 7-Eleven to carry the magazine in its 1,200 corporate-owned stores, something the company has only done once before in more than 20 years." Worst issue ever!
News

FOSS Sexism Claims Met With Ire and Denial 1255

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the girls-don't-write-foss dept.
Last Friday Bryce Byfield gave us a little insight into the fallout surrounding his article on sexism in the FOSS world. Unfortunately it seems that FOSS junkies did little better than the rest of the world with respect to sexism, displaying similar levels of denial, abuse, and ignorance. "But the real flood of emotion comes from the anti-feminists and the average men who would like to deny the importance of feminist issues in FOSS. Raise the subject of sexism, and you are met with illogic that I can only compare to that of the tobacco companies trying to deny the link between their products and cancer. Because I took a feminist stance in public, I have been abused in every way possible — being called irrelevant, a saboteur, coward, homosexual, and even a betrayer of the community. I know that many women in the community have been attacked much more savagely than I have, so I'm not complaining. Nor am I a stranger to readers who disagree with me, but the depth of reaction has taken me back more than once. I think the reaction is an expression of denial more than anything else."
First Person Shooters (Games)

Left 4 Dead 2 Approved In Australia After Edits 134

Posted by Soulskill from the going-out-on-a-limb dept.
Last month we discussed news that Valve's upcoming shooter Left 4 Dead 2 had been denied classification in Australia, which meant the game could not be legally sold there. Now, after a series of edits which removed "considerable amounts of gore from gameplay," Australia's classification board has given the game an MA15+ rating. Their new report (PDF) says, "No wound detail is shown and the implicitly dead bodies and blood splatter disappear as they touch the ground. ... The board notes that the game no longer contains depictions of decapitation, dismemberment, wound detail or piles of dead bodies lying about the environment." The unmodified version of the game may still be approved, pending a review that concludes on October 22nd.
Security

Sloppy Linux Admins Enable Slow Brute-Force Attacks 391

Posted by kdawson from the time-lapse-intrusion-monitering dept.
badger.foo passes on the report of Peter N. M. Hansteen that a third round of low-intensity, distributed brute-force attacks is now in progress — we earlier discussed the first and second rounds — and that sloppy admin practice on Linux systems is the main enabler. As before, the article links to log data (this time 770 apparently already compromised Linux hosts are involved), and further references. "The fact that your rig runs Linux does not mean you're home free. You need to keep paying attention. When your spam washer has been hijacked and tries to break into other people's systems, you urgently need to get your act together, right now."
The Courts

UK Court Order Served Over Twitter, To Anonymous User Posing As Another 205

Posted by timothy from the summon-our-powers-of-indignation dept.
SpuriousLogic spotted this story on the BBC, from which he excerpts: "The High Court has given permission for an injunction to be served via social-networking site Twitter. The order is to be served against an unknown Twitter user who anonymously posts to the site using the same name as a right-wing political blogger. The order demands the anonymous Twitter user reveal their identity and stop posing as Donal Blaney, who blogs at a site called Blaney's Blarney. The order says the Twitter user is breaching the copyright of Mr. Blaney. He told BBC News that the content being posted to Twitter in his name was 'mildly objectionable.' Mr. Blaney turned to Twitter to serve the injunction rather than go through the potentially lengthy process of contacting Twitter headquarters in California and asking it to deal with the matter. UK law states that an injunction does not have to be served in person and can be delivered by several different means including fax or e-mail."
Transportation

'09 Malibu Vs. '59 Bel Air Crash Test 496

Posted by kdawson from the slight-knee-injury dept.
theodp writes "To celebrate their 50th anniversary, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety crashed a 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air into a 2009 Chevrolet Malibu. Hate to spoil the ending of the video, but if you find yourself participating in a similar car-jousting contest, pick the Malibu over the Bel Air. (Not that you'll be complaining afterwards if you don't, or doing much of anything.) Guess there is something to those crumple zones after all."

Comment Re:Flame on (Score 1) 641

by rbowles (#29474771) Attached to: Most Useful UNIX Tool?

As mentioned, in other posts, "killall" or "pkill" do the trick. Additionally, awk is pretty handy for regex (and logic) matching on its own. Piping grep into awk is one of my pet peaves (of which I have 69105).

This might be cleaner (but still kills things with emacs as an argument):
# kill -9 `ps -ef | awk '/emacs/{print $2;}'`

This might be a bit more specific...
# kill -9 `ps -eopid,comm | awk '/emacs/{print $1;}'`

Alot of my old-school friends decry the use of xargs, but I'd rather pipe than arg-mangle (plus this gets rid of those visually deceptive singlequote+backquote):
# ps -eopid,comm | awk '/emacs/{print $1;}' | xargs kill -9

If you simply want to confound and taunt emacs users...
# pkill -STOP emacs

Or unending terror.
# { crontab -l ; echo '* * * * * pkill -STOP emacs' ; } | crontab

SKA Telescope To Provide a Billion PCs Worth of Processing 186

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the scaling-up-scalability dept.
Sharky2009 writes "IBM is researching an exaflop machine with the processing power of about one billion PCs. The machine will be used to help process the Exabyte of data per day expected to flow off the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) telescope project. The company is also researching solid state storage technology called 'racetrack memory' which is much faster and denser than flash and may hold the secret to storing the data from the SKA. The story also says that the SKA is unlikely to use grid computing or a cloud-based approach to processing the telescope data due to challenge in transferring so much data (about one thousand million 1Gb memory sticks each day)."
Government

DHS Ponders "Improving" Terrorism Alert System 320

Posted by kdawson from the stock-up-on-duct-tape dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The DHS's color-coded terrorism risk warning system has often been criticized on a number of grounds. However, it seems that at last DHS has taken note of these criticisms and is finally planning to fix one of its problems. Which one? Well, since the two lowest levels have never been used in the history of the program, the solution is obvious: just get rid of them! In the new system, the lowest level would be yellow, 'guarded,' representing 'A constant state of vigilance to protect against a terrorist attack.' While it's nice that they're at least no longer maintaining a pretense of it being for anything other than fear-mongering, I don't think this was the kind of change most people were hoping for."
Biotech

Birdsong Studies Lead To a Revolution In Biology 117

Posted by kdawson from the growing-a-new-one dept.
Smithsonian.com covers research that began with the study of birdsong and ended by overturning the common belief that adult animals can't produce new brain cells. "Deconstructing birdsong may seem an unlikely way to shake up biology. But [Fernando] Nottebohm's research has shattered the belief that a brain gets its quota of nerve cells shortly after birth and stands by helplessly as one by one they die — a 'fact' drummed into every schoolkid's skull. [Nottebohm] demonstrated two decades ago that the brain of a male songbird grows fresh nerve cells in the fall to replace those that die off in summer. The findings were shocking, and scientists voiced skepticism that the adult human brain had the same knack for regeneration. ... Yet, inspired by Nottebohm's work, researchers went on to find that other adult animals — including human beings — are indeed capable of producing new brain cells. And in February, scientists reported for the first time that brand-new nerves in adult mouse brains appeared to conduct impulses — a finding that addressed lingering concerns that newly formed adult neurons might not function."
Privacy

A History of Wiretapping 128

Posted by Soulskill from the i-blame-the-telegraph dept.
ChelleChelle writes "Wiretapping technology has grown increasingly sophisticated since the police first began to utilize it as a surveillance tool in the 1890s. What once entailed simply putting clips on wires has now evolved into building wiretapping capabilities directly into communications infrastructures (at the government's behest). In a modern society, where surveillance is often touted as a way of ensuring our safety, it is important to take into consideration the risks to our privacy and security that electronic eavesdropping presents. In this article, Whitfield Diffie and Susan Landau examine these issues, attempting to answer the important question: does wiretapping actually make us more secure?"
Image

Dad Builds 700 Pound Cannon for Son's Birthday 410

Posted by samzenpus from the targets-only-no-shooting-birds dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "The Charleston Daily Mail reports that machinist Mike Daugherty built his son a working cannon for his birthday — not a model — a real working cannon. 'It looks like something right out of the battle at Gettysburg,' says Daugherty. The 700 pound cast iron and steel howitzer, designed to use comparatively small explosive charges to propel projectiles at relatively high trajectories with a steep angle of descent, has a 4-inch gun barrel that is 36 inches long mounted on a wooden gun carriage with two 36- inch diameter wheels and took Daugherty about two weeks to build at a cost of about $6,000. 'I've always been interested in the Civil War and cannons, so I thought it would be a good gift,' says Daugherty's 11-year old son Logan. Daugherty said he is not worried about the federal government coming to get his son's cannon because he spoke to the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and found it is legal to own such a cannon because it does not use a firing pin and is muzzle loaded so the government does not consider the weapon a threat. Two days after the family celebrated Logan's 11th birthday, father and son offered a field demonstration of the new cannon on top of a grassy hill overlooking Fairmont, West Virginia and on the third try, the blank inside the barrel went boom and a cannon was born. For a followup they popped a golf ball into the gun barrel, lit the fuse, and watched the golf ball split the sky and land about 600 yards away. 'Any rebels charging up this hill would be in trouble with a cannon like this at the top,' Logan says."

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