Slashdot Mirror
Domain: zonnet.nl
Stories and comments across the archive that link to zonnet.nl.
Stories · 3
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Ban On Photographing Near Gulf Oil Booms
boombaard writes "The day before yesterday CNN's Anderson Cooper reported that, from now on, there is a new rule in effect, which de facto bars photographers from coming within 65 feet of any deployed boom or response vessel around Deepwater Horizon (official announcement). The rule, announced by the US Coast Guard, forbids 'photographers and reporters and anyone else from coming within 65 feet of any response vessel or booms out on the water or on beaches. In order to get closer, you have to get direct permission from the Coast Guard captain of the Port of New Orleans,' while 'violators could face a fine of $40,000 and Class D felony charges. What's even more extraordinary is that the Coast Guard tried to make the exclusion zone 300 feet, before scaling it back to 65 feet.'" Read below for the Coast Guard's statement on the new rule. "The Coast Guard Captain of the Port of New Orleans has delegated authority to the Coast Guard Incident Commander in Houma to allow access to the safety zones placed around all Deepwater Horizon booming operations in Southeast Louisiana. The Coast Guard Incident Commander will ensure the safety of the members and equipment of the response before access is granted. The safety zone has been put in place to prevent vandalism to boom and to protect the members and equipment of the response effort by limiting access to, and through, deployed protective boom." -
On Measuring the Effectiveness of a Search Engine?
younix asks: "I am working at a major telecom provider in the Netherlands and we are implementing a new system for knowledge management. Our system works quite good at the moment, but there is no way to actually measure the effectiveness of the search engine we are using. With effectiveness I mean how much effort do I have to make to find a particular solution that is present in the knowledgebase. Is it possible to express this in a number? Has anyone in the slashdot community done anythin similar before? I would really appreciate any pointers to work done by others on this subject." I think that the single most important aspect of a search engine is the mean time it takes to get useful results out of it. Now, about regarding measuring such a thing (or any other usable characteristic) in an objective manner?...Therein lies the problem. -
Patch To Allow Linux To Use Defective DIMMs
BtG writes: "BadRAM is a patch to Linux 2.2 which allows it to make use of faulty memory by marking the bad pages as unallocatable at boot time. If there were a source of cheap faulty DIMMs this would make building Linux boxes with buckets of memory significantly cheaper; it also demonstrates another advantage of having the source code to one's operating system." The BadRAM page has a great explanation of the project's motivation and status. Now where can I pick up some faulty-but-fixable 512MB RAM sticks?