schweinhund - Slashdot User

Submission + - Bacteria to protect against quakes

Submitted by

Roland Piquepaille

on Sunday February 25, 2007 @12:41PM

Roland Piquepaille writes: "If you live near the sea, chances are high that your home is built over sandy soil. And if an earthquake strikes, deep and sandy soils can turn to liquid, with some disastrous consequences for the buildings sitting on them. But now, U.S. researchers have found a way to use bacteria to steady buildings against earthquakes by turning these sandy soils into rocks. Today, it is possible to inject chemicals in the ground to reinforce it, but this can have toxic effects on soil and water. On the contrary, this use of common bacteria to 'cement' sands has no harmful effects on the environment. But so far, this method is limited to labs and the researchers are working on scaling their technique. Here are more references and a picture showing how unstable ground can aggravate the consequences of an earthquake."

Submission + - Google aims for desktop plartform with Apps

Submitted by

InfoWorldMike

on Sunday February 25, 2007 @12:40PM

InfoWorldMike writes: "Ephraim Schwartz takes a bigger pic, day-after look at the Google Apps news this last week, with which it added key business applications — a word processor and spreadsheet — to Google Apps. The company is now offering the kind of support corporate IT would expect: IT management tools, technical support, and service level agreements for uptime. Even all that, however, does not tell the entire story or give the scope of Google's plans, Schwartz writes in his news analysis. In its press announcement and in an interview with a Google executive, Dave Giroud, vice president and general manager of the Enterprise Unit, Google made it clear that it will offer APIs forhttp://weblog.infoworld.com/daily/archives/2007 /02/interview_googl.html business integration, thus creating a business platform not unlike what Salesforce.com offers with AppExchange. An InfoWorld podcast interview with Google's Rajen Sheth, product manager for Apps, also makes it pretty clear. Is this a play on Google's part to go head to head against a player in its own backyard, Salesforce.com and its AppExchange? Despit some roadblocks, sources say Google is buying up a great deal of dark fiber all around the country and at the same time hiring telecommunications engineers and delivering during the past year or two thousands of server blades to what are called Peering Centers, datacenters where networks converge to optimize connectivity."

Submission + - Book: End of Dayz

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 25, 2007 @11:35AM

An anonymous reader writes: End Of Dayz is an eclectic collection of underground text files compiled from Soljo Publishing's full 1992 to 2006 run — a snapshot of creativity and opinion from the digital jilted generation, right from the ASCII edge and onto your bookshelf. Hacking, politics, science, fiction and humour from the group that brought you The Soljo, The Discordant Opposition Journal, SPACT and the RWM Collective. A must read for any self respecting old school geek, or indeed any geek interested in the history and traditions of underground geekdom. Internet counter culture at it's best. Available from lulu.com or read Cult Of The Dead Cows review of the book here

Submission + - Lightscape Makes First Release of TeleKast 1.0.0

Submitted by

Greg Marine

on Sunday February 25, 2007 @11:20AM

Greg Marine writes: "TeleKast has made its first release. It is a pre-alpha release of version 1.0.0. It has a functioning teleprompter and Web document editor. Feel free to give it a try and let Lightscape Software know what you think! The next release will include a Kiosk editor/display of the script items. So, look for it to come out soon."

Submission + - Frances Allen wins the Turing Award

Submitted by

ParticleGirl

on Sunday February 25, 2007 @11:18AM

ParticleGirl writes: "For the first time in its 40-year history, the $100,000 ACM Turing Award has been presented to a woman. Frances E. Allen, who worked for IBM from 1957 to 2002 and founded PTRAN in the 80s, won the Ada Lovelace award for women in computing in 2002. This week she was awarded the Turing for pioneering contributions to the theory and practice of optimizing compiler techniques that laid the foundation for modern optimizing compilers and automatic parallel execution. CNN is reporting. One small step for a woman, one giant leap for womankind!"

XP On 8-MHz Pentium With 20 MB RAM 410

Posted by kdawson on Sunday February 25, 2007 @01:55AM from the golden-hourglass dept.

swehack writes "The guys over at winhistory.de managed to get their Windows XP Professional running on a very minimal box: an Intel Pentium clocked down to 8 MHz with 20 MB of RAM. (The installer won't work with less than 64 MB, but after installing you can remove memory.) The link has plenty of pictures of their progress in achieving this dubious milestone. They deserve a Golden Hourglass award for 'extreme waste of time.' What obscure hardware configurations have you managed to get Windows running on?"

Submission + - DragonFly BSD to develop own filesystem

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 25, 2007 @01:40AM

An anonymous reader writes: Matt Dillon has decided to develop a new filesystem from scratch to support DragonFly's clustering, rather than port an existing one. From his post: "There are currently two rough spots in the design. First, how to handle segment overflows in a multi-master environment. Such overflows can occur when the individual masters or slaves have different historical data retention policies. Second, where to store the regeneratable indexes."

Submission + - Watch Big Brother, Watch you

Submitted by jedimaud on Sunday February 25, 2007 @01:30AM

jedimaud writes: This is the most have for our tin foil wearing friends out there. An expensive but pretty cool device that allow you to "tap" into the wireless signal of those cameras around the city. I wonder what else you can do with it? http://www.brickhousesecurity.com/dd9000.html

IRS May Ask eBay To Snitch On Sellers 418

Posted by kdawson on Saturday February 24, 2007 @10:34PM from the taxman-cometh dept.

Makarand writes "The IRS thinks that many sellers on online auction sites are unaware of their obligation to declare their profits and pay their taxes to the IRS. Tax experts are now asking the IRS to require online auction sites like eBay, Yahoo, and Ubid to report the gross sales numbers for their sellers. Such a requirement will surely send a shock wave across the online trading world because it could drastically reduce the profits a seller would make on these sites. The IRS thinks it can collect an extra $2 billion in taxes from this requirement that auctioneers report sellers who complete 100 or transactions a year worth at least $5,000."

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