king wilson - Slashdot User

Submission + - Massive Black Hole Devours Star (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by H3xx on Thursday June 16, 2011 @10:01PM

H3xx writes: Astronomers have observed a black hole shredding a star and sending a powerful beam of energy towards Earth. When it was first observed March 28th by the Swift spacecraft, it was thought to be the implosion of an aging star, but is now believed to be the result of a star wandering too close to a black hold, imploding and converting 10% of the star's mass into gamma radiation. The energy burst is still visible by telescope more than two-and-a-half months later, the researchers report in the journal Science.

Submission + - Building a Gygax Memorial (gygaxmemorialfund.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 16, 2011 @09:04PM

An anonymous reader writes: It looks like approval to build a memorial to E. Gary Gygax has been granted in Lake Geneva City. The Gygax Memorial Fund is still taking donations for the memorial that may begin construction as early as later this year.

I (like many on /.) spent many years of my youth using Gygax inspired creations as an excuse to socialize, roll dice, and eat chips at impromptu gatherings before computers intruded on the RPG realms.

Submission + - Obama's CIO Quits (computerworld.com)

Submitted by CWmike on Thursday June 16, 2011 @05:47PM

CWmike writes: The first person ever appointed as the CIO of the federal government, Vivek Kundra, is resigning after two and a half years on the job, the White House said Thursday. There was no hint in the announcement made by Jack Lew, director of the Office of Management and Budget, that Kundra's exit was prompted by a shift in the White House's view on IT. Lew, who praised the CIO's work, said Kundra was leaving to take a fellowship at Harvard. Kundra was appointed CIO a few months after President Barack Obama took office. He immediately outlined an agenda that emphasized cloud adoption, use of consumer technologies, and making data available to the public on new sites, such as data.gov. He was critical of big IT contracts that moved too slowly and were at risk of failing.

Submission + - Microsoft released Kinect SDK for Windows (reviewhorizon.com) 1

Submitted by

soricon

on Thursday June 16, 2011 @01:27PM

soricon writes: "Microsoft did good on its promise to release an official Kinect SDK for Windows, opening the door for multiple educational, research and enthusiasts groups to create new and innovative uses for the popular full body movement sensor. Currently in beta, the SDK requires Windows 7 and at a minimum, a dual core machine with a DirectX 9.0c capable graphic card and it is free to download."

Submission + - Google Earth to include Google Deep Sea (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk on Saturday April 09, 2011 @09:21AM

mikejuk writes: You may have heard about the swash buckling adventures to be undertaken by Virgin Oceanic — visits to the bottom of the deepest parts of the oceans of the world. What you might not have noticed is that in the future we can all join in. The data from video cameras taken down on the five planned dives will be fed back to Google Earth.
As Sir Richard Branson said at the launch of Virgin Oceanic, more men have been to the moon than have ventured further down than 20,000 feet. As long as everything goes according to plan, the entire population should be able to experience a trip to the bottom of the oceans — if only virtually courtesy of Google Earth.

Comment Re:Bad Summary... sigh (Score 5, Informative) 152

by king wilson on Wednesday August 05, 2009 @09:19PM (#28966379) Attached to: Mac OS X v10.5.8 Ready For Download

I would really recommend that everyone use the Combo updater, whether you need it or not....

Every time Apple releases an update, there are a bunch of small problems that occur to a minority of users, that are fixed by re-applying the Combo updater.

This has been standard procedure among Mac Techs for a number of years.

Submission + - Oz govt offers $500k unbreakable protocol for free (computerworld.com.au)

Submitted by mask.of.sanity on Tuesday April 28, 2009 @10:08PM

mask.of.sanity writes: Australia's national welfare agency will release its "unbreakable" AU$560,000 smart card identification protocol for free.

The government agency wants other departments and commercial businesses to adopt the Protocol for Lightweight Authentication of ID (PLACID), which withstood three years of design and testing by Australian and American security agencies.

The agency has one of Australia's most advanced physical and logical converged security systems: staff can access doors and computers with a single centrally-managed identity card, and user identities can be automatically updated as employees leave, are recruited or move to new departments.

PLACID, which will be available here, will be used in the agency's incoming fleet of contact-less smartcards that are currently under trial by staff. It will replace existing identity cards that operate on PKI encryption.

The agency says hackers cannot break the PLACID protocol because it uses two cryptographic algorithms in its scrambling process in rapid succession — typically less than a quarter of a second — whereas other systems use a single algorithm.

"PLAID is the only system that preserves the privacy of the cardholder from ID leakage. Other systems 'talk' from card to mainframe using easily captured personal information and unique identifiers in the ID-authentication process."

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