Cody Taylor

Windows 7’s about ready to come out of the oven, and now everybody can shove their hands in the warm OS pie. And really, you should. Here’s everything you need to know to dive in.

The MPAA trying to convince the Copyright Office that videotaping a flatscreen is an acceptable alternative to ripping a DVD. Seriously. It’s hard to say if we’ve even seen an organization make a more tone-deaf, flailing argument than this.

Regular expressions (or regex) are a powerful way to traverse large strings in order to find information. They rely on underlying patterns in a string’s structure to work their magic. Unfortunately, simple regular expressions are unable to cope with complex patterns and symbols. To deal with this dilemma, you can use advanced regular expressions.

Yes, there is more to Linux than Ubuntu. As you are probably aware, there are many different types of Linux to choose from, even though not all get the attention they deserve. This guide sheds more light on some of the more common distributions in use today and covers the distinct advantages or disadvantages of each.

Can you feel that? That electricity in the air? Yes, it means that the final release of iPhone OS 3.0 is closer than ever, and here is iPhone beta 5—build 7A312g—to demonstrate it.And of course, it comes with a new beta of the SDK and iTunes 8.2. Start your torrents now.

smooth wombat writes “With the end of the Cold War came warmer relations with old adversaries, increased trade and a world less worried about nuclear war. It also brought with it an unexpected downside: lack of nuclear fuel to power deep space probes. Without this fuel, probes beyond Jupiter won’t work because there isn’t enough sunlight to use solar panels which probes closer to the sun use. The fuel NASA relies on to power deep space probes is plutonium-238. This isotope is the result of nuclear weaponry and since the United States has not made a nuclear device in 20 years, the supply has run out. For now, NASA is using Soviet supplies, but they too are almost exhausted. It is estimated it will cost at least 0 million to resume making the 11 pounds per year that is needed for space probes.”

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wintersynth writes “I’ve posted a review of Virgin America’s in-flight internet provided by Gogo. Here’s the scoop: Avg. .90 megabits/sec DL, .283 megabits/sec UL, ping: 130.6 msecs, .95 for the duration of the flight. Verdict: AWESOME. In fact, I’m posting this from 36,000 feet right now. Skype did not work for voice, even though I’m pretty sure those stats are over the minimums. Any ideas from the slashdotters on what might be going on?”

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CarnegieScience writes “Scientist calculate that, compared to ethanol used for internal combustion engines, bioelectricity used for battery-powered vehicles would deliver an average of 80% more miles of transportation per acre of crops, while also providing double the greenhouse gas offsets to mitigate climate change.”

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judgecorp writes “A new vendor group has promised a Gigabit wireless specification by the end of this year. The Wireless Gigabit (WiGig) spec is apparently 80 percent done and, since it is aimed at high-definition TV, it has to go at more than 3Gbps. There’s around 7GHz of spectrum freely available in the 60GHz band, so it’s technically feasible, and with all the major Wi-Fi silicon vendors on board (as well as Microsoft, Dell, Nokia and others) WiGig looks to have the political muscle too. They should be aware of the Sibeam-led WirelessHD group, though, already in the 60GHz space, and Ultrawideband (UWB) is not dead, as there are actual, real UWB products.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.