Selinger

Does that last bit of mayonnaise or peanut butter at the bottom of a jar really bother you? I usually hand the jar over to my dog and let her take care of it, but for some reason not everyone has a dog. That’s why some entrepreneurs have harnessed the technology behind deodorant sticks to eliminate this problem.

Their product video isn’t polished, but their prototypes make sense. Instead of dirtying spoons or wasting product, you can just twist, twist, twist to get to the bottom of a jar easily. As long as these products are just as recyclable as the glass and plastic jars we use today, it’s an amazing idea.

Unfortunately, this product won’t hit the market until next year at the very earliest, which means that we’re going to have to suffer through using butter knives to get food products out of jars. Like a bunch of animals.

Jar With A Twist! [Official Site] (via Foodbeast)

During Ulrich’s days as an undergraduate, he landed a part-time gig at a nuclear power plant. It was an anxious time to be on board at the nuke plant- the late 1990s. The dreaded Y2K loomed over all of their aging systems. One decimal point in the wrong spot at midnight on January 1st, 2000 and… well, nothing good would come of it.

Ulrich’s job for the big conversion was more benign though. He needed to update the simple graphics on the monitoring program the nuclear technicians used to keep tabs on the reactor. The very basic macro language generated Commodore 64-quality graphics; it displayed the position of the control rods, neutron flux, water temperatures & pressure, turbine and generator stats, and how many three-eyed fish were caught in the neighboring lake. All of this was then shown on 10 massive CRT monitors mounted around the main control room.

Ulrich worked diligently to get his screens prepared, and the day came for him to roll out the changes. They didn’t have a “test control room”, so the demo needed to be run live. He invited the engineers to gather ’round the monitors to see his spectacular new designs. When the program booted and Ulrich went to pull up the control rod screen, all 10 monitors went as black as the cloak on a member of the Night’s Watch. As the engineers chuckled, Ulrich turned bright red and ran back to the server room to see what happened. It didn’t take him long to realize that whatever he screwed up caused the entire mainframe to go down.

Thus began a two-week battle to troubleshoot the mainframe issue, during which time the computer monitoring was completely unavailable. This caused the nuclear technicians to have to leave their air conditioned control room so they could use primitive analog monitoring tools from the 1970’s to check on the reactor. Every time Ulrich walked past one of them, he could sense them glaring and thinking “There’s that little pipsqueak that killed the monitors!”

The tools Ulrich had to debug the program weren’t merely useless to him. They went beyond uselessness into outright opposition. The custom macro-language had no debugger or real documentation. The mainframe was purchased from the Czech Republic and one would have to know Czech in order to read the error logs. He was able to locate a sticker on top of the server with the phone number of the vendor. He was able to reach one of their ‘experts’ named Miklos, who asked him for the serial number of the product. Ulrich provided it but the expert retorted “That is not full number! This is too short. What you need help with? Toaster? Coffee maker?”

Confused, Ulrich replied, “Ummm, a mainframe?” Had the nuclear plant bought their server from some sort of Czech Coffee, Toaster, and Mainframe Corp.? Miklos said “Oh no, Miklos can not help you. I give you number for Blazej. He does help with mainframe.” Blazej was an engineer at another nuclear power plant in the Czech Republic, who also had the same mainframe. Ulrich called there, not expecting much.

Through a series of conversations with Blazej, Ulrich was able to finally narrow down the problem to the presence of circles in the screen outputs. Apparently drawing fancy circles was far too much for the monitoring program to handle. He removed all the circles from his screens, uploaded the changes to the mainframe and finally the engineers could see the reactor statistics on the bright, beautiful monitors; without any circles. The result was ugly, boxy, and barely readable, but it worked. Ulrich breathed a sigh of relief then decided to call Czech Coffee, Toaster, and Mainframe Corp. back to notify them of the horrible bug in their program.

Ulrich once again got connected to his buddy Miklos. “Hi Miklos, this is Ulrich. I called a while back concerning our power plant monitoring program crashing the mainframe. You’ll be glad to know that Blazej and I were able to determine the problem. It all had to do with circles being drawn on the screen. I know it sounds silly, but that causes the whole mainframe to come down.”

Miklos seemed to be offended by such an accusation. “You do a circle and server come down? You want Miklos to fix this? You stupid? If you know circle cause trouble, then DO NOT USE CIRCLE!” Miklos abruptly hung up. Ulrich shrugged it off since his job was done. He eventually finished his undergrad program before Y2K and moved on from the nuclear power plant. When New Years 2000 rolled around, he made sure he was far, far away at a ski resort just in case anyone else slipped a circle into the graphics and the plant melted down as a result.

Nuclear Reactor image from the public domain

Chris Q had a reputation for being a bit of a maverick. He didn't make changes directly to production, dare the two-week-old butter chicken in the back of the lunchroom fridge, or even particularly like 1986's Tom Cruise / Val Kilmer vehicle Top Gun. But as part of an elite development team that had split from Government Department's mainframe dev group, Chris couldn't help being branded "other". When he walked by, the old-school mainframe developers whispered: there went a guy who thought dangerously out of the box.

The original reason for the split was called The Internet. As the Thermodynamic Arrow of Time dragged them relentlessly towards the heat-death of the universe, Government Department needed a web presence and a modern intranet. While the budgetary committee would have been perfectly happy to somehow run the new system on the Department's existing mainframes, sanity prevailed (this time) and a new-ish PC server machine landed on Chris's doorstep. Since a majority of the senior-most developers wanted nothing to do with the newfangled equipment, the PC / Server Team was formed. While having perhaps not as much experience as the mainframe developers, Chris and co. knew their server needed an uninterruptible power supply and regular disaster-recovery testing. Every quarter, at a scheduled time, they would pull the plug on the UPS and ensure the server shut down gracefully before the batteries died. And the server always did.

Everything was fine until that pesky Arrow of Time saw fit to move Government Department forward a couple years and into new offices. The "mainframe" support team had since added (or, some said, been forced to add) modern servers to their roster, running things like their new helpdesk system. Though the PC / Server Team and their senior counterparts remained separate in mind, body, and certainly in coding conventions, their hardware huddled close together in the new office's compact server room. All was well... for a few months. When quarterly testing time arrived, Chris pulled the plug on their UPS. As expected, their server logged the UPS warning messages and did a proper shutdown. Once the batteries were flat, Chris would record the maximum emergency window provided by the UPS, and he was just reaching for his logbook when he heard the screaming.

The mainframe support team poured into the server room, looming over Chris. Their systems were crashing! What had he done?!

It was a tense moment, but Chris - that maverick - answered a question with a question: had they plugged a server into his team's UPS? They had: three of them, in fact. After all, the three empty outlets on the power supply, blaze orange as they were, looked so inviting. And, Chris - thinking outside the box - followed with another question, had they installed UPS-monitoring software on those servers? They had not. So while Chris's server had realized it was on battery power and began its shutdown sequence, theirs had cheerfully dawdled until darkness fell.

That was how Chris wound up giving Government Department's senior developers a riveting Powerpoint presentation on how to properly use a UPS with their servers. After the talk, one of the mainframe gurus stopped Chris and shook his hand.

"You're still dangerous, maverick... but you can be my wingman any time."

We've all heard it before when troubleshooting a router: unplug your router, wait ten seconds, and plug it back in. More often than not, this fixes whatever problem we have. But why is that? Superuser user Phoshi has an explanation.

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You never want to be stranded without your tools, especially if you are in the middle of nowhere. And what's middle-of-nowhere-er than the vacuum of space?

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We delete files all the time to free up space, or to get rid of pesky evidence, but the whole process is a lot more complicated than it seems from the outside. When you go to "delete" something, you're just pressing the start button on a much more involved, much more random process. So what actually happens to that data?

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Virtual reality only immerses two of your senses: sight and hearing. Not that we're dying for smell and taste in video games (bleh! Imagine first person shooters), but tactical feedback makes things feel a lot more real. Disney Research's Aireal does this by blowing puffs of air in your face, and it's not nearly as crazy as it sounds.

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A music store in Wisconsin claims that an elderly woman came into the shop to try a drum set and became an Internet viral video star. Who is she? Where did she learn to play? Will she join my band? All of these questions remain unanswered so far. All we have are two videos of her totally rocking out.

Maybe she isn’t anyone’s grandmother, but way to smash stereotypes about the elderly being dull. (The continuing profitability of the Rolling Stones shows that it is at least possible for senior citizens to rock.)

“We have no idea where this lady came from, what her name is, or where she went, but she rocked our faces off!” the shop noted in a caption on the video.

Why didn’t they get her name before posting the video online? It could be that someone is dressing up as an older person before rocking out in order to promote the store’s new YouTube channel, but that does seem rather roundabout.

On the other hand, we’re watching their videos, so maybe it isn’t roundabout at all.

Never too old to rock out! [Facebook] (via Gawker – thanks, Mindy!)

One of the longest standing experiments has finally yielded a result. Started in 1944, it only took 69 years but the tar-like pitch at Trinity College Dublin has finally dropped.

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Microsoft had to eat $900 million last quarter in unsold Surface RT tablets, which might help explain that $150 price drop the other week. We'll be listening in on the earnings call later to day for any more details and to try to pinpoint exactly how many things Steve Ballmer smashed when he heard the news.

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Practice makes perfect. That includes the ability to accurately fire some of the biggest, baddest, and deadliest weapons systems in the US Navy. But since the indiscriminate shelling of passing ships is generally frowned upon by the maritime community, here's what US sailors take aim at instead.

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Dilbert readers - Please visit Dilbert.com to read this feature. Due to changes with our feeds, we are now making this RSS feed a link to Dilbert.com.

Automatic license plate readers are the most widespread location tracking technology you’ve probably never heard of. Mounted on patrol cars or stationary objects like bridges, they snap photos of every passing car, recording their plate numbers, times, and locations. At first the captured plate data was used just to check against lists of cars law enforcement hoped to locate for various reasons (to act on arrest warrants, find stolen cars, etc.). But increasingly, all of this data is being fed into massive databases that contain the location information of many millions of innocent Americans stretching back for months or even years.

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Tumblr just fessed up to a frankly embarrassing security flaw that exposed millions of users' passwords. Actually, "embarrassing" might be an understatement in the broader spectrum of screw ups a company like Tumblr could make. "Astonishingly stupid" works, too.

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Apple's had a turbulent time with Samsung, both in the courtroom and the marketplace—which in part helped inspire Cook and co's recent move away from Sammy as a chip supplier. But according to a new report, Apple is hopping back into the silicon bed with South Korea's finest.

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As Yahoo continues to fight for relevance, they’ve made some changes to the e-mail system. We haven’t heard from anyone who actually likes these changes, but customers remain loyal. Reader Raven is one of those customers, and is frustrated because the e-mail system wouldn’t deliver a message that he didn’t think was malicious: just a porn link he had e-mailed to himself.

Porn or not, we’ve all done this: there’s something interesting that you want to look at later, so you quickly e-mail it to your main address or an address that you only check at home. In this case, the link was a video on a public video-sharing site, and definitely not something malicious. Or so he thought.

It bounced, though, and the error code he got led to this unhelpful information:

This error message indicates that your email was not accepted because the mail in question may contain characteristics that Yahoo! Mail will not accept for policy reasons. For instance, it is against Yahoo! Mail’s policy to accept messages with malicious content or manipulated header information, such as a falsified origination point, altered sending date, or forged email address.

For his part, Raven grumbles:

Yahoo! is now, after having done some heinous upgrades that make the e-mail website literally no longer even work and completely ignoring the literal thousands of complaints about it on user voice, is now refusing to send porn… even though this is a link I sent to myself.

What’s even worse then that is that I have literally never seen a porn-blocking software that does not also block an insane amount of things that are unrelated to porn.

Microsoft has offered a Teredo server to allow users behind NAT gateways to obtain an IPv6 connection. Teredo was always considered as a transition technology to obtain IPv6 connectivity is nothing else works to connect to a particular resource ("path of last resort"). With native IPv6 connectivity becoming more common, there will be less need for transition technologies like Teredo. 

As we reported earlier, the host name for Microsoft's Teredo server (teredo.ipv6.microsoft.com) doesn't resolve currently. This is appearantly part of a "test" to measure the impact of the service being turned off. As an alternative, Microsoft still offers the "test.ipv6.microsoft.com" hostname to connect to it's Teredo servers. To adjust your settings, use:

netsh interface teredo set state client test.ipv6.microsoft.com

Of course, one may argue that with native IPv6 connecitvity becoming more common, transition technologies like Teredo will be more important for those of us left out in the legacy internet.

Thanks to our reader Gebhard for pointing out these URLs with more details:

http://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&hl=en&ie=UTF8&prev=_t&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=auto&tl=en&u=http://ipv6.br/teredo-sunset-mais-um-passo-na-transicao-para-o-ipv6/&usg=ALkJrhgoYr5-CiFM3iwhL2Ann78qqng-_A

http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.heise.de%2Fnewsticker%2Fmeldung%2FIPv6-Tunnel-Microsoft-testet-Teredo-Nutzung-mit-Serverausfall-1916499.html

------
Johannes B. Ullrich, Ph.D.
SANS Technology Institute
Twitter

(c) SANS Internet Storm Center. http://isc.sans.edu Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

An anonymous reader writes "It turns out Amazon has its own sketchy method of snooping on all your browser traffic — even SSL traffic — through their one-click extension for Chrome. As designed, the extension reports every URL you visit, including HTTPS ones, to Amazon. It uses XSS to provide some of its functionality. It also reports contents of some website visits to Alexa. The Amazon extension has also been exploited to allow an attacker to gain access to SSL traffic on browsers that have it installed."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cliff Stoll writes "Along with 7000 containers, ship MOL Comfort broke in half in high seas in the Indian Ocean. The aft section floated for a week, then sank on June 27th. The forward section was towed most of the way to port, but burned and sank on July 10th. This post-panamax ship was 316 meters long and only 5 years old. With a typical value of $40,000 per container (PDF), this amounts to a quarter billion dollar loss. The cause is unknown, but may be structural or perhaps due to overfilled containers that are declared as underweight. Of course, the software used to calculate ship stability relies upon these incorrect physical parameters."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As my Great Aunt Gertie’s nephew by marriage via her third husband used to say, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. While on the face Sprint’s new unlimited plans guaranteed for life would appear to be catch-free, easy and breezy, a little digging goes a long way to show that’s far from the case.

Thanks to our stalwart and observant Consumerist readers like Rudolph and Steven, we’ve parsed out some of the finer points of the new guaranteed forever and ever unlimited plans Sprint is crowing about today.

Unlimited talk, text and data is guaranteed forever — but that doesn’t mean the prices will stay the same for those services.
It says it right there on the Sprint site in fine print: Sure you can pay $80 for now (or more, depending on the amount of lines), but Sprint could just decide to hike those rates whenever it wants and charge you for it.

And heck, Sprint might also inform customers that their phones aren’t eligible, either, potentially requiring customers to get a new phone if they want to stay on the unlimited track(emphasis ours):

Unlimited Guarantee: Available while line of service is activated on Unlimited, My Way Plan or My All-In Plan. Applies to unlimited features only [Ed: excludes other data options and mobile hotspot]. Price and phone selection subject to change. Account must remain in good standing and non-payment may void guarantee. Non-transferrable.

There’s no assurance you’ll get much use out of that highly-touted 4G LTE.
Our fears of slow data speeds is a valid one — and unlimited customers might just find themselves skipped over in favor of other plans. More fun with fine print:

Usage Limitations: Other plans may receive prioritized bandwidth availability. Streaming video speeds may be limited to 1 Mbps. Sprint may terminate service if off-network roaming usage in a month exceeds: (1) 800 min. or a majority of min.; or (2) 100 MB or a majority of KB.

It’s not necessarily going to save you any money.
Consumerist reader Steven points out that compared to the Sprint plan he has for two lines right now, the math works out to a whopping savings of $0.01.

He writes that his two lines are on a 1,500-minute “Everything Data” plan, breaking it all down thusly:

Unlimited My Way plan
$50 first line
$40 second line
$30 “premium data add-on” first phone
$30 “premium data add-on” second phone.
Total: $150/month plus surcharges and taxes

Current 1,500-minute “Everything Data” plan
$110 first line
$19.99 second line
$10 “premium data add-on” first phone
$10 “premium data add-on” second phone
Total: $149.99/month plus surcharges and taxes

He adds that if he were to add a third smartphone line, it costs $60 extra on the new plan, but only $30 on the old one. Or for four lines, $50 extra instead of $30.

Perhaps there will come a day when a service is actually as wonderful and life-changing as wireless carriers purport them to be, but because it is essential to our vital organs for oxygen to reach them in order to live, we won’t be holding our breath.

*Shout-out to Rudolph for the tips!

The NSA is creepy as hell. Luckily, the Internet found a way to make the whole spying-on-you clusterdiddle fun with a poignant animation that channels the playful Pixar Lamp of yore. Adorbz.

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