ykoehler - Slashdot User

Expensive U.S. Spy Satellite Not Working 251

Posted by Zonk on Friday January 12, 2007 @02:49PM from the should-have-had-an-open-beta-first dept.

Penguinshit writes to mention a Reuters article about some trouble the U.S. is having communicating with a spy satellite. The sensor package was launched last year by the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office, and is worth hundreds of millions of dollars. It has apparently hung in a low orbit for months now, and efforts to communicate with it have been unsuccessful. From the article: "The official said the problems were substantial and involved multiple systems, adding that U.S. officials were working to reestablish contact with the satellite because of the importance of the new technology it was meant to test and demonstrate. The other source said the satellite had been described to him as 'a comprehensive failure.' There was no suggestion by either of the sources that the satellite had been purposely damaged as part of a terrorist attack. Another government official said he had no information about any attacks on U.S. satellites."

Gaming Platform of Choice - Console 390

Posted by Hemos on Monday September 11, 2006 @11:00AM from the one-two-three-four-i-declare-a-flame-war dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Sick of PC snobs bragging about their "superior" gaming rigs? This opinion piece (a rebuttal lobbed at a previous article taking the opposite stance) presents the other side of the eternal debate over gaming preference — consoles vs. PCs. Get 10 good reasons why consoles are a better way to game with your hard-earned dollars. "

MS06-049 Causing Silent Data Corruption 205

Posted by Hemos on Monday September 11, 2006 @10:30AM from the oh-who-wants-encryption-anyway dept.

Uncle Mike writes "It looks like there is a problem with the recently released MS06-049 / KB920958 patch. If you have compression activated on any folder, then the compressed data is at risk from corruption. New files that are close to a multiple of 4K in size will have their last 4,000 bytes or so overwritten with 0xDF. Although this problem has been reported to Microsoft, as yet there appears to have been no official announcement. "

Federal Prosecutors Launch Probe of Dell 94

Posted by Hemos on Monday September 11, 2006 @10:15AM from the continuation-really dept.

An anonymous reader writes, "The U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York has launched an investigation into Dell's finances and has subpoenaed company documents going back to 2002. Dell execs had previously said they didn't think any of this would add up to any material impact, but that seems to be a possibility now." More accurately, this is a continuation of an ongoing "informal" SEC probe. That probe has caused Dell to delay its financial reporting and raised the possibility of needing to restate previous quarters' earnings.

Faster Global Warming From Permafrost Melt 119

Posted by Hemos on Monday September 11, 2006 @10:02AM from the not-just-siberia dept.

jc42 writes, "A recent study published in Nature documents the accelerating release of methane from melting permafrost. Methane is a greenhouse gas 23 times more potent than carbon dioxide, so this may signal more rapid warming in the near future. If you don't subscribe to Nature, the Guardian has a good summary of the piece." It's not just Siberian permafrost. One of the major concerns is bogs — they account for a relatively small percent of total surface space, but have a large amount of carbon locked up. No one is sure if the greenhouse effect will cause them to lock up more, or to release more carbon.

German TOR Servers Seized 427

Posted by Hemos on Monday September 11, 2006 @08:39AM from the sometimes-being-an-AC-is-abad dept.

mrogers writes "Servers participating in the TOR anonymizing network have been seized by public prosecutors during a child porn crackdown in Germany. TOR provides anonymity for clients and servers by redirecting traffic through a network of volunteer-operated relays; the German prosecutors may have been trying to locate an anonymous server by examining the logs of the captured relays."

Comment The answer is in the question... (Score 3, Interesting) 434

by ykoehler on Thursday January 22, 2004 @10:22AM (#8054333) Attached to: Who Needs Case-Sensitivity in Java?

Why is Visual BASIC trying to preserve the case-sensitivity? If you think as you said that it is only to please the eye, think again.

The BASIC language was to introduce people to programming and is a language that try to remove rules to allow faster results (faster != better all the time...).

If they preserve case it probably is because people requested it and if people requested it probably has something to do more the need to have consistency.

In english, why do we put name with a Capital in front? Or why to sentence required to be uppercase? Because case, like a letter create different pattern which may be easily recognized by the brain and treated in a different way.

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