niobium - Slashdot User

Submission + - NVIDIA Gets Away With Bait-and-Wwitch (pointoflaw.com)

Submitted by racquetballguy on Monday May 02, 2011 @04:41PM

racquetballguy writes: As part of a December 2010 settlement agreement, NVIDIA agreed to provide all owners of laptops with a defective NVIDIA GPU with a laptop of similar kind and value. In February, NVIDIA announced a $279 single-core Compaq CQ56 would be provided as a replacement to all laptops — from $2500 dual-core tablet PCs to $2000 17" entertainment notebooks. Ted Frank, from the Center for Class Action Fairness, filed an objection to the court, which was overruled by Judge Ware today. Once again, the consumers of a class action lawsuit lose.

Submission + - Osama Bin Laden killed, says US (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 01, 2011 @11:24PM

An anonymous reader writes: Al-Qaeda founder and leader Osama Bin Laden is dead, according to US officials. The al-Qaeda leader was killed in a mansion outside Islamabad in an operation based on actionable US intelligence, CNN reported. President Barack Obama is due to make a statement shortly.

Submission + - Bin Laden reported Dead (yahoo.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 01, 2011 @11:19PM

An anonymous reader writes: Various news outlets are reporting that Osama Bin Laden was killed by a "U.S. asset" in a mansion outside of Pakistan and that the United States is in possession of the body.

Let the speculation begin!

Submission + - "Micro drum" bangs 11 million times per sec. (networkworld.com)

Submitted by

coondoggie

on Wednesday March 09, 2011 @05:02PM

coondoggie writes: "Some heavy metal rock band might love this technology. Scientists with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have demonstrated an electromechanical micro drum that can vibrate an astounding 11 million times per second. The scientist said the drum looks like an Irish percussion instrument called a bodhrán, the NIST drum is a round aluminum membrane 100 nanometers thick and 15 micrometers wide."

Submission + - Massachusetts lets you register as a Pirate (rawstory.com)

Submitted by quarterbuck on Wednesday March 09, 2011 @03:21PM

quarterbuck writes: The Massachusetts Election Division has approved the Massachusetts Pirate Party as a political designation, allowing voters in the state to register as a "Pirate."

Submission + - Leslie Valiant Wins 'Nobel Prize' of Computing (ispyce.com)

Submitted by

autospa

on Wednesday March 09, 2011 @12:57PM

autospa writes: "ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery today named Leslie G. Valiant of Harvard University the winner of the 2010 ACM A.M. Turing Award for his fundamental contributions to the development of computational learning theory and to the broader theory of computer science. Valiant brought together machine learning and computational complexity, leading to advances in artificial intelligence as well as computing practices such as natural language processing, handwriting recognition, and computer vision. He also launched several subfields of theoretical computer science, and developed models for parallel computing. The Turing Award, widely considered the "Nobel Prize in Computing", is named for the British mathematician Alan M. Turing. The award carries a $250,000 prize, with financial support provided by Intel Corporation and Google Inc."

Submission + - Facebook may bust up the SMS profit cartel (cnn.com) 3

Submitted by

AndyAndyAndyAndy

on Monday March 07, 2011 @02:36PM

AndyAndyAndyAndy writes: " Fortune has a very interesting article today about wireless providers and their exorbitant profit margins for SMS handling, especially when looking at modern data plans.

'Under the cell phone industry's peculiar pricing system, downloading data to your smartphone is amazingly cheap — unless the data in question happens to be a text message. In that case the price of a download jumps roughly 50,000-fold, from just a few pennies per megabyte of data to a whopping $1000 or so per megabyte.'

A young little application called Beluga caught the attention of Facebook, which purchased the company yesterday.

The app aims to bring messaging under the umbrella of data plans, and features group messaging, picture and video messaging, and integration with other apps.

The author argues that, if successful, Beluga (or whatever Facebook ends up calling it) could potentially be the Skype/Vonage or Netflix-type competitor to the old-school cellular carriers and their steep pricing plans."

Submission + - Facebook Resumes Talks With Skype (zdnet.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 07, 2011 @01:10AM

An anonymous reader writes: You may soon be able to start a Skype video call with your friends on Facebook. The latest rumor suggests that Facebook and Skype have resumed talks about integrating the video conferencing technology on the social network.

The two companies first talked about a potential partnership in September 2010, but they could not reach an agreement. When Skype 5.0 was released in October 2010, the new version offered voice calling between Facebook friends, but it did not include a video chatting feature.

Submission + - DHS Screws Up Domain Seizures Again (techdirt.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 16, 2011 @03:44PM

An anonymous reader writes: Once again, it appears that Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) group has screwed up seizing domains. This time it took a dynamic DNS provider mooo.com, because apparently a few people who used it may have done something involving child porn. In doing so, however, ICE turned every one of the over 84,000 websites that use mooo.com into an image claiming they were taken down for child porn. Perhaps some of those website owners will decide to file defamation charges against the US government for falsely claiming they were involved in child porn.

Submission + - How to Built a Telescope That Trumps Hubble (discovermagazine.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 16, 2011 @03:39PM

An anonymous reader writes: In cleanrooms around the country NASA and its contractors are building the James Webb Space Telescope, a marvel of engineering scheduled to launch in 2014. This gallery shows the features that will allow Webb to take the universe's baby pictures in infrared — most notably an 18-segment mirror and a 5-layer sunshield. I can't wait until Webb settles into its Lagrangian point way out beyond the moon and gets to work.

Submission + - Printed Photos for the Blind (discovery.com)

Submitted by disco_tracy on Wednesday February 16, 2011 @02:45PM

disco_tracy writes: Software reads online content aloud and printers generate Braille text, but there hasn't been a fast and easy way to create recognizable images for the blind. Now, computer scientists in Arizona are generating social networking profile pictures the blind can "see."

Submission + - Do Vibrating Molecules Give Us Our Sense of Smell? (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit on Wednesday February 16, 2011 @12:38PM

sciencehabit writes: That tingling in your nose may not be allergies. In a provocative new paper, a team of scientists suggests that tiny molecular vibrations give us our sense of smell. Some experts are skeptical, but if the work holds up it could upturn over a century of physiological research, as well as help engineers better design artificial noses that can assess food quality and even sniff out explosives.

Submission + - Scientists overclock people's brains (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by arshadk on Friday November 05, 2010 @12:22AM

arshadk writes: "Applying a tiny electrical current to the brain could make you better at learning maths, according to Oxford University scientists."
"The effects were not short-lived, either. When the volunteers whose performance improved was re-tested six months later, the benefits appear to have persisted."

Submission + - Mr. Pike, Tear Down This ASCII Wall! 2

Submitted by theodp on Sunday October 31, 2010 @02:13AM

theodp writes: To move forward with programming languages, argues Poul-Henning Kamp, we need to break free from the tyranny of ASCII. While Kamp admires programming language designers like the Father-of-Go Rob Pike, he simply can't forgive Pike for 'trying to cram an expressive syntax into the straitjacket of the 95 glyphs of ASCII when Unicode has been the new black for most of the past decade.' Kamp adds: 'For some reason computer people are so conservative that we still find it more uncompromisingly important for our source code to be compatible with a Teletype ASR-33 terminal and its 1963-vintage ASCII table than it is for us to be able to express our intentions clearly.' So, should the new Hello World look more like this?

Submission + - Facebook buys a private file sharing service (drop.io)

Submitted by Entrpy on Sunday October 31, 2010 @02:10AM

Entrpy writes: Drop.io, a private file sharing service that focused on ease of use, announces that Facebook has purchased most of their technology and assets. What is Facebook planning to do with it? Only time will tell.

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