Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Space

TheSpaceGame — Design Your Route To Jupiter 76

Posted by Soulskill from the try-the-clarke-kubrick-corridor dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The Advanced Concepts Team of the European Space Agency is celebrating World Space Week (4-10 October 2010) with the release of 'The Space Game,' an online game for interplanetary trajectory design. The Space Game is an online crowdsourcing experiment where you are given the role of a mission designer to seek the best path to travel through space. The interactive game, coded in HTML5, challenges the players to devise fuel-efficient trajectories to various bodies of the Solar System via a user-friendly interface. The aim of the experiment is get people from all ages and backgrounds to come up with better strategies that can help improve the effectiveness of the current computer algorithms. As part of the events organized worldwide for Space Week, the first problem of the game is to reach Jupiter with the lowest amount of propellant. The best scores by 10 October will be displayed on the Advanced Concepts Team website and the three best designs will also receive some ESA prizes."
IT

Submission + - Take This GUI and Shove It (infoworld.com) 1

Submitted by
snydeq
snydeq writes: "Deep End's Paul Venezia speaks out against the overemphasis on GUIs in today's admin tools, saying that GUIs are fine and necessary in many cases, but only after a complete CLI is in place, and that they cannot interfere with the use of the CLI, only complement it. Otherwise, the GUI simply makes easy things easy and hard things much harder. 'If you have to make significant, identical changes to a bunch of Linux servers, is it easier to log into them one-by-one and run through a GUI or text-menu tool, or write a quick shell script that hits each box and either makes the changes or simply pulls down a few new config files and restarts some services?' Venezia writes. 'And it's not just about conservation of effort — it's also about accuracy. If you write a script, you're certain that the changes made will be identical on each box. If you're doing them all by hand, you aren't.'"
HP

Submission + - HP To Build A 112 Million USD R&D Center In Ta (taipeitimes.com)

Submitted by Kilrah_il
Kilrah_il writes: According to Taipai News, HP is planning to build a global R&D center in Taiwan dubbed Cumputing Hub. The center will cost $112 million to build over the next 3 years, in addition to $30 billion in equipment per year. "Innovation will be the key to the Computing Hub. It won't carry out R&D for middle or low-end products. The center will also join hands with Taiwan's academia."
The Almighty Buck

SEC Blames Computer Algorithm For 'Flash Crash' 218

Posted by Soulskill from the steve-jobs-agrees dept.
Lucas123 writes "The US Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission today issued an 87-page report (PDF) on the results of a months-long investigation into the May 6 'flash crash' that sent the Dow tumbling almost 1,000 points in a half hour. The Commissions are holding a single trading firm's automated trade execution platform responsible for the crash, saying it dumped 75,000 sell orders into the Chicago Mercantile Exchange over a period of minutes causing an already volatile market to come crashing down. The SEC has already enacted some quick rules to pause trading if a stock price should rise or fall by 10% in a five minute period, but the regulators said they expect the results of the investigation to prompt additional rules limiting the functions of automated computer trading systems."

Slashdot Top Deals

The rule on staying alive as a program manager is to give 'em a number or give 'em a date, but never give 'em both at once.

Close