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I hate this kind of stuff.  NASA has advised we should “Duck and Cover” as 15 pieces of a jettisoned toxic ammonia tank from the ISS hit earth tomorrow…some where…at some time…

From Slashdot:

A refrigerator-sized tank of toxic ammonia, tossed from the international space station last year, is expected to hit earth tomorrow afternoon or evening. The 1,400-pound object was deliberately jettisoned — by hand — from the ISS’s robot arm in July 2007. Since the time of re-entry is uncertain, so is the location. “NASA expects up to 15 pieces of the tank to survive the searing hot temperatures of re-entry, ranging in size from about 1.4 ounces (40 grams) to nearly 40 pounds (17.5 kilograms). … [T]he largest pieces could slam into the Earth’s surface at about 100 mph (161 kph). …’If anybody found a piece of anything on the ground Monday morning, I would hope they wouldn’t get too close to it,’ [a NASA spokesman] said.”

From an interview with the UK’s Guardian:

Web-based programs like Google’s Gmail will force people to buy into locked, proprietary systems that will cost more and more over time, according to the free software campaigner.

The concept of using web-based programs like Google’s Gmail is “worse than stupidity”, according to a leading advocate of free software.

Richard Stallman is the founder of the Free Software Foundation and creator of the computer operating system GNU.  It’s sure to create a fuss.  You can read the article here.

If you own a car like the Subaru WRX STi you most likely also like to have some track time with your car.

One of the readers of IWSTI posted a HOWTO on adapting your tow-mount to hold a camera or video camera for movie like shots of the road.  Excellent write up and great photos.

This Slashdot article brings up a very valid point.

Everyone talks about wiping hard drives and securing their data, but what about that old firewall that no one remembers how to get into that you eventually decide to sell eBay without understanding what it did, what configurations it had, or how to wipe them?

“A security expert was stunned to discover a VPN device he’d bought on Ebay automatically connected to a local council’s confidential servers. Bought for just 99p for use at work, when plugged in it automatically connected with the login details which had been carelessly left on the device. ‘The whole selling point of the device was that it was extremely easy to configure. It’s pretty horrific really,’ says the intrusion-detection professional. The council says it is ‘deeply concerned’ by the news, but is confident that ‘multiple layers of security have prevented access to systems and data.’”

Now we’re talkin’.

I love Time Machine on my Mac but timing for backups can leave much to be desired.  The freeware on this French website now offers a way to change the schedule of Time Machine from 1 hour intervals to whatever suits your needs best.  Nice.

There seems to have been a bit of a feud on a cloud computing related Google Group with the moderator banning anyone who criticized his company.  The result is the CloudComputing: Incidents Database (or CCID) from the cloudcommunity.org wiki.

The Cloud Computing Incidents Database (CCID) records and monitors verifiable, noteworthy events that impact cloud computing providers, such as outages, security issues and breaches, both as they are happening and on an ongoing historical basis.

It aims to find a balance of tensions between different stakeholders in cloud computing incidents with different drivers; vendors tend to give factual (but terse) reports, journalists want a story that is appealing to their readers and users just want the truth. By subjecting such issues to a community consensus process the hope is that a useful resource will be created with a neutral point of view for providers, vendors, users as well as researchers, and to that end the database is offered to all under a Creative Commons (CC-BY-SA 3.0) license.

Feel free to add missing incidents using the template below (and yourself to the contributor list or to update existing ones as while the database has been seeded with some of the more noteworthy issues it is not (yet) comprehensive.

This is an important database as the future perception of the reliability and security of external clouds will likely depend on what the CCID’s data reveals.

From Slashdot:

“Intel officially unveiled its six-core ‘Dunnington’ Xeon 7400 processor Monday… As expected, Intel launched the Dunnington chip for high-end servers… The Xeon 7400 is also one of the first Intel chips to have a monolithic design. In other words, all six cores will be on one piece of silicon. To date, for any processor having more than two cores, Intel has put two separate pieces of silicon… inside one chip package.”

Ouch.

So, the Google News bots crawled an old article from 2002 when United Airlines was on the brink of bankruptsy because a Florida newspaper had voted up the old article.  It then runs the article (without a date) and that gets picked up by other news aggregators and eventually appears on financial site Bloomberg.com.

The result?

Automated systems pick up on the supposed troubles at UAL and start dumping the stock.  It falls from $12 to $3 to later recover to just under $10.  That’s still $2 to $3 less than before the “incident” which is $300M of shareholder wealth…gone.

Bots talking to bots, and making decisions worth $300M.  Things are looking good.

Okay, no one’s noticed this, but it’s a 9 on the DSLR Richter scale.

From Jim Jannard himself on the REDuser forums:

We believe, and are developing for late 2009, a replacement for DSLRs. Currently, we call it a DSMC (Digital Still & Motion Camera).

While (insert code name) is not a replacement for Epic or Scarlet, it is strategically targeted at the DSLR space. As Nikon and Canon release their 720P and 1080P, respectively, DSLRs with video capture… RED has a more advanced view of the future. We look forward to rapidly pushing the “big guys” along in feature sets and capabilities.

RED firmly believes in higher resolution, higher S/N, higher DNR, higher frame rates, smaller bodies, more system flexibility, and many more options as we move forward in camera development.

The strength of RED is in our sensor development program, REDCODE, and having no legacy platforms to deal with. That left us free to explore, develop and prepare to deliver a new platform. DSMC.

We think all our customers already know what the future will bring. They are just afraid to wish for it for fear of disappointment. Fear not. Sleep tight. RED is awake.

I won’t comment on any specifics until the 1st of the year. But “revolution” applies more to this than the RED ONE did to cinema.

Viva La Revolución!

After recently having lost 40 lbs in one month myself, and struggled to keep weight on for a while, I find myself suddenly sensitive to other people’s weight loss.

The health of Steve Jobs has been the subject of much speculation lately, especially when recent event pictures are compared to past ones.  Today was no expeception.  It seems to have gotten serious enough that Jobs began his speech today with this written in huge letters behind him:

The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.

That said, and Apple’s future apparently secure, I still think he doesn’t look good.  Fortune Magazine has a great write up from June on what might be going on, why it all makes sense, and why his weight loss might be expected as opposed to worrisome.  Apart from his short message today, Steve Jobs has never spoken publicly about it.

See Why Does Steve Jobs Look So Thin over at CNN’s Fortune Magazine.