jadrian - Slashdot User

Terrorists Bomb Moscow Airport 640

Posted by Soulskill on Monday January 24, 2011 @02:49PM from the violence-is-the-last-refuge-of-the-incompetent dept.

jayme0227 writes "Terrorists detonated a bomb at Moscow's busiest airport on Monday, killing 35 people and wounding another 152, Russian authorities said. President Dmitry Medvedev, who called the bombing a terrorist attack, ordered additional security at Moscow's other airports and transportation hubs, and Moscow police went on high alert in case of additional bombs." According to the NY Times, "The airport remained open on Monday evening, and passengers continued to flow through the hall where the bomb had exploded."

Euler's Partition Function Theory Finished 117

Posted by Soulskill on Friday January 21, 2011 @05:29PM from the that-was-quick dept.

universegeek writes "Mathematician Ken Ono, from Emory, has solved a 250-year-old problem: how to exactly and explicitly generate partition numbers. Ono and colleagues were able to finally do this by realizing that the pattern of partition numbers is fractal (PDF). This pattern allowed them to find a finite, algebraic formula, which is like striking oil in mathematics."

Exoplanet Candidates Revealed 49

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday January 20, 2011 @01:57PM from the nice-place-to-visit dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Last summer, NASA announced that the Kepler space telescope had identified more than 700 exoplanet 'candidates' from the first few months of observations in 2009. Only 312 of the candidates were initially made public, while 400 others (click the green search button) were sequestered until February 2011. The team is soon expected to announce that a large number of these candidates have been confirmed as exoplanets. A non-profit organization in Boulder, Colorado supports scientific research on the Kepler data through $10 adopt-a-star donations. The price is $100 for confirmed exoplanets, so hurry while these 700+ stars are still 'candidates'!"

Bad Science Writer Talks About the Placebo Effect NSFW 131

Posted by samzenpus on Tuesday January 18, 2011 @02:15PM from the I-want-to-believe dept.

The Guardian newspaper's Bad Science columnist Dr. Ben Goldacre does a stand-up routine about medicine, the placebo effect, and the mysteries of the human body at Nerdstock. From a scientific standpoint, I can't accurately say how funny it is because I was told it was great before I saw it.

Comment Re:Yes, as I've said many times.... (Score 1) 456

by jadrian on Sunday January 16, 2011 @10:03PM (#34901206) Attached to: Why Linux Loses Out On Hardware Acceleration In Firefox

While it does seem to be a problem in the drivers, X11 is not crashing.

Comment Re:Yes, as I've said many times.... (Score 4, Interesting) 456

by jadrian on Sunday January 16, 2011 @11:19AM (#34896910) Attached to: Why Linux Loses Out On Hardware Acceleration In Firefox

Just fine? KDE 4.5 and 4.6 (upcoming) crash on log in with nvidias drivers ver 260.xx.xx (on openSUSE 11.3 32bit?). Many other applications and applets also crash, particularly on 4.6 where krunner, amarok and search and launch activity are amongst the affected ones. This is one of the currently most reported bugs at the moment with a current dup count of 58! As if all this wasn't enough in 4.6 the window manager also almost immediately freezes until desktop effects are automatically disabled.

So basically when you try KDE 4.6 on openSUSE 11.3 with updated nvidia drivers what happens is. You can't login due to desktop crash. If you fix that by removing the offending applets from the config files. On login Krunner crashes and keeps re-spawning and crashing. If you manage to kill it then desktop freezes and if all goes well effects are disabled. And if you get past then you can use it... without krunner, effects, and some of its best applications.

Ars Thinks Google Takes a Step Backwards For Openness 663

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday January 13, 2011 @10:28AM from the logic-has-many-letters dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Over at Ars Technica, Peter (not so) Bright gives a long-winded four pages of FUD about how Chrome dropping support for H.264 is a slight against openness. 'The promise of HTML5's video tag was a simple one: to allow web pages to contain embedded video without the need for plugins. With the decision to remove support for the widespread H.264 codec from future versions of Chrome, Google has undermined this widely-anticipated feature. The company is claiming that it wants to support "open codecs" instead, and so from now on will support only two formats: its own WebM codec, and Theora. ... The reason Google has given for this change is that WebM (which pairs VP8 video with Vorbis audio) and Theora are "open codecs" and H.264 apparently isn't. ... H.264 is unambiguously open.'"

US Twitter Spying May Have Broken EU Privacy Law 342

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday January 13, 2011 @01:35AM from the playing-nice-with-others dept.

Stoobalou writes "A group of European MPs will today push EU bosses to say if the US government breached European privacy laws by snooping on Twitter users with links to whistle-blowing site WikiLeaks. The Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE) will today pose an oral question to the European Commission, seeking clarification from the US on a subpoena demanding the micro-blogging site hand over users' account details."

Comment Re:Okular print support (Score 2) 116

by jadrian on Wednesday January 12, 2011 @07:25AM (#34846438) Attached to: Interview With KDE On Windows Release Manager Patrick Spendrin

I love okular. That said it doesn't even support pdf annotations.

You can annotate pdfs, but these are stored separately, so if you send it to someone else they're all gone. In all fairness the problem is actually in poppler and not directly in okular but in the end it does affect the later.

Google Goggles Solves Sudoku 206

Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday January 11, 2011 @12:02PM from the better-it-than-me dept.

mikejuk writes "Ever been frustrated when you can't solve a Sudoku? Well, now there's an app for that. It is just one more capability in the latest version of Google Goggles. All you have to do is point your phone's camera at a Sudoku puzzle, take a snapshot, and pattern recognition and a bit of game logic sorts out the answer. Have you ever had the feeling that AI is getting to be just a little too commonplace?"

Hubble Confirms Nature of Mysterious Green Blob 140

Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday January 11, 2011 @11:21AM from the send-in-kilowog dept.

An anonymous reader writes "In 2007, Dutch secondary school biology teacher Hanny van Arkel spotted something mysterious in the night sky. Combing through Galaxy Zoo, an online database set up to enlist the public's help in classifying galaxies, she came across a glowing green smudge of light approximately 650 million light-years away. The object, which became known as Hanny's Voorwerp (Dutch for 'object'), is one of the most mysterious in the universe. Now, detailed Hubble Space Telescope images and new x-ray observations presented here today at the 217th meeting of the American Astronomical Society may finally confirm what it is."

Comment Re:Or Ostrich (Score 4, Informative) 760

by jadrian on Monday January 10, 2011 @06:08AM (#34821116) Attached to: Scientists Advocate Replacing Cattle With Insects

Some say the same about kangaroos.

AMD Puts Out Radeon HD 6000 Open-Source Driver 138

Posted by Soulskill on Friday January 07, 2011 @12:26PM from the incremental-promise-fulfillment dept.

An anonymous reader writes "AMD has just released their open-source driver for the Radeon HD 6000 series graphics cards (sans the Cayman GPUs) with KMS, 2D, and 3D acceleration."

Microsoft Research Takes On Go 175

Posted by Soulskill on Sunday January 02, 2011 @04:28AM from the narrowing-the-possibilities dept.

mikejuk writes "Microsoft Research has used F# and AI to implement a consumer-quality game of Go — arguably the most difficult two-person game to implement. They have used an interesting approach to the problem of playing the game, which is a pragmatic cross between tree search with pruning and machine learning to spot moves with a 'good shape.' The whole lot has been packaged into an XNA-based game with a story."

Android Text Messages Intermittently Going Astray 325

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday January 01, 2011 @05:38PM from the digital-foot-in-mouth dept.

theodp writes "Reports from Engadget and others suggest that Tiger Woods and Brett Favre might want to avoid Android for the time being. It seems Android's default text messaging app still has horrible text messaging bugs that can that intermittently send texts to the wrong person. 'This is ticking me off like no other technology glitch that I experienced in recent years,' reads one unhappy camper's post on a lengthy Help Forum thread opened on March 16th. 'If a bank deposited my paycheck into another person's account I wouldn't stress so much cause I can always get the money back. How the hell do you take words back? "Oh sorry boss you had to find out that I think you're an idiot, can I still keep my job, please please please?"' Over at Google Code, Issue 9392 — SMS are intermittently sent to wrong and seemingly random contact — carries a priority of 'Medium,' even though it has 600+ comments and has been starred by 3,600+ people."

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