negyvenot - Slashdot User

LHC Forces Bookmaker To Lower Odds On the Existence of God 457

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday November 06, 2008 @03:59AM from the god-particle dept.

A UK bookmaker has lowered the odds on proving that god exists to just 4-1 to coincide with the switching on of the Large Hadron Collider. The chance that physicists might discover the elusive sub-atomic object called the "God particle" has forced the odds lower. Initially the odds that proof would be found of God's existence were 20-1, and they lengthened to 33-1 when the multi-billion pound atom smasher was shut down temporarily because of a magnetic failure. A spokesman for Paddy Power said, "The atheists' planned advertising campaign seems to have renewed the debate in pubs and around office water-coolers as to whether there is a God and we've seen some of that being transferred into bets. However we advise anyone still not sure of God's existence to maybe hedge their bets for now, just in case." He added that confirmation of God's existence would have to be verified by scientists and given by an independent authority before any payouts were made. Everyone getting a payout is encouraged to tithe at least ten percent.

Air Force To Rewrite the Rules of the Internet 547

Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday November 03, 2008 @01:59PM from the because-they-can dept.

meridiangod writes "The Air Force is fed up with a seemingly endless barrage of attacks on its computer networks from stealthy adversaries whose motives and even locations are unclear. So now the service is looking to restore its advantage on the virtual battlefield by doing nothing less than the rewriting the 'laws of cyberspace.'" I'm sure that'll work out really well for them.

OpenOffice.org 3.0 Is Officially Here 284

Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday October 13, 2008 @08:30AM from the who-needs-office-anyway dept.

SNate writes "After a grinding three-year development cycle, the OpenOffice.org team has finally squeezed out a new release. New features include support for the controversial Microsoft OOXML file format, multi-page views in Writer, and PDF import via an extension. Linux Format has an overview of the new release, asking the question: is it really worth the 3.0 label?"

The Rise of the (Financial) Machines 403

Posted by Soulskill on Sunday October 12, 2008 @08:32AM from the come-with-me-if-you-want-a-loan dept.

BartlebyScrivener writes "A New York Times Op-Ed quoting Freeman and George Dyson wonders if Wall Street geeks and 'quants' outsmarted themselves with computer algorithms to create the current financial debacle: 'Somehow the genius quants — the best and brightest geeks Wall Street firms could buy — fed $1 trillion in subprime mortgage debt into their supercomputers, added some derivatives, massaged the arrangements with computer algorithms and — poof! — created $62 trillion in imaginary wealth. It's not much of a stretch to imagine that all of that imaginary wealth is locked up somewhere inside the computers, and that we humans, led by the silverback males of the financial world, Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson, are frantically beseeching the monolith for answers.'" The quoted essay from George Dyson is available at Edge.

Comment Speaking as an IT coordinator (Score 2, Interesting) 152

by negyvenot on Wednesday December 13, 2006 @08:33AM (#17221318) Attached to: Who Owns Deployments - Dev or IT?

I could not agree more. We have a fairly large projects where the devs do the deployments and I can tell you its all a big mess. Since the devs have the right to do deployments, naturally they can make small changes to the production environment invisible to the operation team. Since there are quite some incidents occuring on the production environment, the dev team tends to fix the problems on the production environment on the spot because "oh, its just a matter of fixing this and that", therefore the acceptance environment is not used for testing as it should be.

Although I know it would put considerabe workload on operation team to take over deployments, I'm sure there would be less incidents and more stability on the production system. sure the deployment process would slow down updates, but would give a chance for a more transparent and controllable process with clear ownership of responsibility, etc.

Now that the project is for more than half a year in production, I see no real chance to change the deployment ownership, but still I wish it could be done.

Kororaa Releases XGL LiveCD 65

Posted by CowboyNeal on Friday March 10, 2006 @03:21AM from the try-before-you-buy dept.

Tony Tony Chopper writes "The team from Kororaa who brought us a GUI based Gentoo installer have just released the first live CD to use xgl technology. From Kororaa.org, the lead developer Chris writes 'Today I am happy to release a Kororaa Live CD showcasing Xgl technology.' The response so far have been incredibly positive, an article at tuxmachines.org is glowing with much praise and few complaints. For those who love eye-candy but don't want to mess with their existing installs, this is the perfect opportunity to see what Xgl is about. The torrent can be downloaded from LinuxTracker."

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