Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Security

Submission + - Hackers Launch Major Attack on US Military Labs (pcworld.com)

Submitted by Bazards
Bazards writes: http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,140390/article.html Hackers have succeeded in breaking into the computer systems of two of the U.S.' most important science labs, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee and Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. In what a spokesperson for the Oak Ridge facility described as a "sophisticated cyber attack," it appears that intruders accessed a database of visitors to the Tennessee lab between 1990 and 2004, which included their social security numbers and dates of birth. Three thousand researchers reportedly visit the lab each year, a who's who of the science establishment in the U.S.
The Internet

Submission + - Microsoft Plans Data Center in Siberia (datacenterknowledge.com)

Submitted by
miller60
miller60 writes: "Microsoft has announced plans to build a data center in Siberia. The facility near the city of Irkutsk will be able to hold 10,000 servers. Officials in Microsoft's Russian business unit said the region had a stable power supply, and will be able to support a 50 megawatt utility feed. The average winter temperature is below zero in Irkutsk (which is perhaps best known to gamers as a territory in Risk). Microsoft recently announced huge data center projects in Chicago and Dublin, Ireland, and is clearly ramping up its worldwide infrastructure platform as it competes with Google. The power and cooling challenges in modern data centers are well documented. But a data center in Siberia?"
Space

Submission + - Arecibo Observatory's Future in Doubt

Submitted by
NewYorkCountryLawyer
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: "The future is hazy for the legendary Arecibo radio observatory in Puerto Rico, a 'jewel of space instruments'. The New York Times reports that the National Science Foundation, which pays for the observatory's operation, has slashed Arecibo's annual budget from $10.5 million to $8 million, and may close it altogether in four years, imperiling its historic work, including its detection of the near-Earth asteroid KW4 eight years ago. "The planetary science community is in danger of losing one of its instrumental crown jewels," Donald K. Yeomans, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told the House subcommittee on space and aeronautics."
Input Devices

Submission + - Police Taser Man in Airport to Death (cnn.com)

Submitted by
Lucas123
Lucas123 writes: "A video was just released showing the last moments of a Polish immigrant who died after police shocked him with a taser and restrained him at Vancouver's airport last month. Robert Dziekanski, 40, of Pieszyce, Poland, was going on a rampage out of frustration for waiting 10 hours for his mother in the airport, but witnesses said he was hurting no one. Police shot him with the taser after he refused to place his hands on a table. They apparently gave him two jolts. He later died."
Math

Submission + - A New Theory of Everything?

Submitted by goatherder
goatherder writes: The Telegraph is running a story about a new Unified Theory of Physics. Garrett Lisi has presented a paper called "An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything" which unifies the Standard Model with gravity — without using string theory. The trick was to use E8 geometry which you may remember from an earlier Slashdot article. Lisi's theory predicts 20 new particles which he hopes might turn up in the Large Hadron Collider.
Math

Submission + - Surfer dude's Theory of Everything (telegraph.co.uk)

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: NewScientist (subscription required) and others are running a story about a promising new Theory of Everything from surfer/snowboarder/physicist, Garrett Lisi. Based on a mathematical shape called E8, An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything has many in the physics community taking notice:
"Lee Smolin at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, describes Lisi's work as "fabulous". "It is one of the most compelling unification models I've seen in many, many years," he says.
"Although he cultivates a bit of a surfer-guy image its clear he has put enormous effort and time into working the complexities of this structure out over several years," Prof Smolin tells The Telegraph.
"Some incredibly beautiful stuff falls out of Lisi's theory," adds David Ritz Finkelstein at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta. "This must be more than coincidence and he really is touching on something profound."
Oracle

Submission + - Over 1,500 Customers Using Oracle's Linux (prnewswire.com)

Submitted by kripkenstein
kripkenstein writes: Oracle has released a press release stating that in a short 9 months it has signed up over 1,500 paying customers to its Linux offering, Oracle Unbreakable Linux, which is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and has previously been covered on Slashdot.

Oracle's press release stresses Oracle's various contributions to FOSS. Given that Oracle is now the largest corporation selling and and contributing to Linux (in terms of overall revenue at least; not Linux-specific), the FOSS community's reaction to Oracle's Linux moves is becoming increasingly important. Will Oracle be welcomed, or scorned?
The Matrix

Submission + - Virtual Earth with dynamic real world weather (blogs.com)

Submitted by
gmezero
gmezero writes: "Hamlet Au writes about his recent visit to a virtual recreation of the Earth within Second Life built entirely from Sculptie prims and featuring a real-time cloud layer to track weather around the world. This mashup features data from several sources including NASA's Blue Marble, and live cloud data from satellite tracking feeds. This installation provides a dramatic view on how weather patterns interact with the Earth's topology. A short video is also provided as a preview to the build."
Enlightenment

Submission + - Original Marvel comics going online

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In a tentative move onto the internet, Marvel is putting some of its older comics online Tuesday, hoping to reintroduce young people to the X-Men and Fantastic Four by showcasing the original issues in which such characters appeared. The publisher is hoping fans will be intrigued enough about the origins of those characters to shell out $9.99 a month, or $4.99 monthly with a year-long commitment. For that price, they'll be able to poke through, say, the first 100 issues of Stan Lee's 1963 creation "Amazing Spider-Man" at their leisure, along with more recent titles like "House of M" and "Young Avengers." Comics can only be viewed in a Web browser, not downloaded, and new issues will only go online at least six months after they first appear in print. Dark Horse Comics now puts its vibrant and large images of "Dark Horse Presents" up for free viewing on its MySpace site. DC Comics has also put issues up on MySpace, and recently launched the competition-based Zuda Comics, which encourages users to rank each other's work, as a way to tap into the expanding Web comic scene.
Portables (Apple)

Submission + - Microsoft - The real reason for an iPhone SDK (tribalmedia.com)

Submitted by
veenstr
veenstr writes: "We posted a fun rumor mongering about Apple's iPhone/iPod Touch SDK and how Microsoft will announce Office for the iPhone during this February event. This explains the delay in the SDK announcement and is a classic Apple move. It is a fun story that will irk the Slashdot Linux crowd, but make a fun read for the pro Apple/MS crowd."
XBox (Games)

Submission + - Circuit City Refuse to Give up COD3 citing misprin (consumerist.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Circuit City is refusing to make good on their advertised offer of a free copy of Call of Duty 3 with purchase of Call of Duty 4. They cite a misprint in the advertisement. I accept that sometimes companies might misprint a critical digit in reduced pricing, but this seems too likely to be a ploy to get customers to purchase from their retail chain. I depend on stories such as these to weather my purchases from retail chains like Circuit City and Best Buy, an example being the recent 1T floor tile incident. I saw this deal over the weekend and was planning on purchasing there until I came across this story.
Music

Submission + - 62% paid nothing for Radiohead's In Rainbows (custompc.co.uk)

Submitted by
arcticstoat
arcticstoat writes: "When asked how much they wanted to pay for Radiohead's In Rainbows album, most of the tight-assed general public (unsurprisingly) chose to pay nothing at all, but what does this mean for the music industry? Does the remaining 38% who paid mean that this business model is sustainable, or will we have to suffer over-priced, DRM-loaded downloads for the rest of the future?"
The Internet

Submission + - Does FiOS stand for Fire is Our Specialty?

Submitted by
netbuzz
netbuzz writes: "The saga continues: A young Pennsylvania couple and their newborn daughter, Layla, are the latest to learn the hard way that a missed service appointment is the least of your worries when it comes to Verizon FiOS installation. Two months after a fire sparked by a FiOS installer caused a reported $58,000 worth of property damage and lost living expenses — including Layla's baby gifts — the family's attorney says they're still living in a hotel and that Verizon's best offer to compensate them has been $1,800. Similar tales abound.

http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/21579"

Slashdot Top Deals

To do nothing is to be nothing.

Close