narfspoon - Slashdot User

Comment Re:ten thousand years (Score 1) 398

by narfspoon on Friday July 03, 2009 @10:47PM (#28577179) Attached to: Hawking Says Humans Have Entered a New Stage of Evolution

Clearly you need to impair yourself physically to allow your brain to develop. See, blindness develops your ears, deafnes develops your eyes, and physical disability develops your brain.

Training to develop under-used muscles/skills is what I hope you meant. Disability by itself doesn't provide any such strengths.

Submission + - SPAM: Ray Kurzweil speaks, addresses "benign conspir

Submitted by

destinyland

on Tuesday June 30, 2009 @03:15PM

destinyland writes: "Ray Kurzweil answered questions at the NASA Ames Research Center for the first day of Singularity University, in an "intimate conversation" where he argued the existing IT tools for disruptive change could address the problems of humanity. (Example: using nanotechnology to harness solar power or build housing in the third world.) 1400 students applied for 40 spots, and founder Peter Diamandis explained their "benign conspiracy", saying they were chosen because they were 1) smart, 2) leaders, and 3) interested in solving big issues. Kurzweil agreed, saying "What we're trying to create here is a new community that will sustain itself after it's separated physically." Also speaking: the president of the International Space University, saying "it's these teams that make the world a better place, so that we can leave our cradle." And Kurzweil noted the wisdom of crowds harnesses inate emotional wisdom, saying the same decentralized communication that helped speed the break up of the Soviet Union is at work today in both China and Iran."
Link to Original Source

Submission + - SoftMaker Office 2008 vs. OpenOffice.org 3.1 (infoworld.com)

Submitted by

snydeq

on Tuesday June 30, 2009 @02:25PM

snydeq writes: "InfoWorld's Randall Kennedy examines would-be Microsoft Office competitors SoftMaker Office and OpenOffice.org and finds the results surprising. OpenOffice.org — frequently cited as the most viable Office competitor — has pushed for Office interoperability in version 3.1, adding import support for files in Office 2007's native Open XML format. But, as Kennedy found in Office-compatibility testing, that support remains mostly skin deep. 'Factor in OpenOffice's other well-documented warts — buggy Java implementation, CPU-hogging auto-update system, quirky font rendering — and it's easy to see why the vast majority of IT shops continue to reject this pretender to the Microsoft Office throne,' Kennedy writes. SoftMaker Office, however, 'shows that good things often still come in small packages.' Geared more toward mobile computing, the suite's 'compact footprint and low overhead make it ideal for underpowered systems, and its excellent compatibility with Office 2003 file formats means it's a safe choice for heterogeneous environments where external data access isn't a priority.'"

Submission + - The Incredible Shrinking Genome (bytesizebio.net) 2

Submitted by Shipud on Tuesday June 30, 2009 @01:41PM

Shipud writes: Mammalian genomes have been shrinking for about 65 million years, since the dinosaur extinction. Why? And why were mammalian genomes 3 times larger than they are today before the dinosaurs went extinct? A new article in Genome Biology and Evolution tries to explain this bizarre finding, and why the genomes of mammals (but not of other living groups) are still shrinking.

Submission + - AMD releases super-overclocker 'TWKR' CPUs

Submitted by

jdb2

on Tuesday June 30, 2009 @01:40PM

jdb2 writes: "As reported by Legit Reviews AMD has released a limited number of 'TWKR' edition CPUs, also known as AMD Phenom II '42' Black Edition, to a select ( and lucky ) few of the extreme overclocking community as a "Thank you" for their support. These CPUs are basically cherry-picked Phenom II X4 955 BE chips that can take significantly more voltage at the cost of high leakage current. Although these CPUs run hotter, AMD reports that they will at least overclock 100MHz higher on air and 200MHz on liquid-nitrogen/liquid-helium cooling at the same or lower voltage than that of the 955 BE. Confirming this, Tom's Hardware was able to get this chip past 6.4GHz at 1.75v using liquid nitrogen and Legit Reviews was able to reach 4.0GHz at 1.46v using air cooling and 6.6GHz at 1.8v using liquid nitrogen. More impressive results are expected with sophisticated liquid helium setups — official pictures of the CPU from AMD are available here as well as a new extreme overclocking video which is available here.

Unfortunately, only around 100 of these chips are available and are "not for sale" being given away "as is" with no warranty. According to AMD there are currently no plans to make these available for sale.

With that said, there is still a chance of getting one as Maingear and Tom's Hardware are both holding random drawings in which 2 chips will be given away."

Submission + - One Year Later, 'Dead XP' Still Going Strong (infoworld.com) 1

Submitted by

snydeq

on Tuesday June 30, 2009 @01:28PM

snydeq writes: "Microsoft pulled the plug on Windows XP a year ago today, no longer selling new copies in most venues. Yet according to a report from InfoWorld, various downgrade paths to XP are keeping the operating system very much alive, particularly among businesses. In fact, despite Microsoft trumping Vista as the most successful version of Windows ever sold, more than half of business PCs have subsequently downgraded Vista-based machines to XP, according to data provided by community-based performance-monitoring network of PCs. Microsoft recently planned to further limit the ability to downgrade to XP now that Windows 7 is in the pipeline, but backlash against the licensing scheme prompted the company to change course, extending downgrade rights on new PCs from April 2010 to April 2011."

Submission + - Ubuntu: Still Popular? (starryhope.com)

Submitted by

PoorOldFlick

on Tuesday June 30, 2009 @12:59PM

PoorOldFlick writes: "There's no way to say for sure which distro is the most popular and to know exactly how many people use Ubuntu. That being said, we thought it would be interesting to take a fresh look at Ubuntu's popularity. Is Ubuntu gaining in popularity? Is it being used by more people? Are more people searching and talking about Ubuntu?"

Submission + - The Real Difference Between Cheap and Free 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 30, 2009 @12:22PM

An anonymous reader writes: The Times is reporting on an interesting spat between Malcolm Gladwell, author of The "Tipping Point", "Blink" and "Outliers", and Chris Anderson, Wired contributor and author of The Long Tail: Why The Future of Business is Selling Less of More.

The source of conflict is a fascinating review of Anderson's book by Gladwell in the New Yorker, in which Gladwell addresses Anderson's argument that technology applies an inexorable downward pressure on the price of intellectual, property. Regardless of whose position you agree with, the debate is an interesting one, even though I've yet to see an answer to the question that if it really is a race to the bottom, what happens to society once we get there?

Submission + - US govt Launches Web Site to Track IT Spending

Submitted by andy1307 on Tuesday June 30, 2009 @11:51AM

andy1307 writes: According to this article in the Washington Post, Vivek Kundra, the federal chief information officer, on Tuesday announced a new Web site designed to track more than $70 billion in government information technology spending, showing all contracts held by major firms within every agency. The site shows detailed information about whether IT contracts are being monitored and budgets being met. The data also show which contracts were won through a competitive process or in a no-bid method, which has been criticized by good-government advocates for excluding firms from business opportunities. Each prime contractor is listed as well as the status of that project; sub-contractors are not yet shown on the site.

The website is http://usaspending.gov/. The view dashboard link has already been slashdoted.

Submission + - Nine-Ball Attacks Spread New Click Fraud Tactics (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 30, 2009 @11:27AM

An anonymous reader writes: From The Washington Post's Security Fix blog comes news of a new Trojan horse program that takes click fraud to the next level. The Trojan, dubbed FFsearcher by Atlanta-based SecureWorks, was among the pieces of malware installed by sites hacked with the Nine-Ball mass compromise that attacked some 40,000 Web sites this month. The Trojan takes advantage of Google's "Adsense for Search," application programming interface (API), which allows Web sites to embed Google search results alongside the usual Google AdSense ads. The story notes that while most search hijackers give themselves away on the victim's machine by redirecting the browser through some no-name search engine, FFsearcher 'converts every search a victim makes through Google.com, so that each query is invisibly redirected through the attackers' own Web sites, via Google's Custom Search API. Meanwhile, the Trojan manipulates the victim's PC and browser so that the victim never actually sees the attacker-controlled Web site that is hijacking the search, but instead sees the search results as though they were returned directly from Google.com (and with Google.com in the victim browser's address bar, not the address of the attacker controlled site). Adding to the stealth is the fact that search results themselves aren't altered by the attackers, who are merely going after the referral payments should victims click on any of the displayed ads. What's more, the attackers aren't diverting clicks or ad revenue away from advertisers or publishers, as in traditional click fraud: They are simply forcing Google to pay commissions that it wouldn't otherwise have to pay.

Comment One word. (Score 1) 1

by narfspoon on Monday June 22, 2009 @06:56PM (#28430715) Attached to: DNA suggests three basic human groups

One word:

StarCraft!

Submission + - Open Government Initiative Enters Phase Three

Submitted by

circletimessquare

on Monday June 22, 2009 @06:42PM

circletimessquare writes: "The Obama administration opened a discussion forum in January of this year which has become an electronic suggestion box. It is now entering stage three, following brainstorm and discussion phases: the draft phase, in which the top subject matter is codified into suggestions for the government. 'Ultimately, the visitors advanced more than 3,900 ideas, which in turn spawned 11,000 comments that received 210,000 thumb votes. The result? Three of the top 10 most popular ideas called for legalizing marijuana, and two featured conspiracy theories about Mr. Obama's true place of birth.'"

Submission + - DNA suggests three basic human groups (washingtonpost.com) 1

Submitted by

Death Metal

on Monday June 22, 2009 @06:40PM

Death Metal writes: "All of Earth's people, according to a new analysis of the genomes of 53 populations, fall into just three genetic groups. They are the products of the first and most important journey our species made — the walk out of Africa about 70,000 years ago by a small fraction of ancestral Homo sapiens."

Submission + - Diamond CPUs to follow silicon (pcauthority.com.au)

Submitted by Slatterz on Monday June 22, 2009 @06:31PM

Slatterz writes: Analysts at Gartner have got all excited about the fact that carbon chips are now ready for mass production. The company reported that carbon chips appear destined to supplant silicon as the material of choice for future semiconductors. Gartner's oracles foresee that carbon can surpass silicon's abilities in thermal performance, frequency range and perhaps even superconductivity. Dean Freeman, senior analyst at Gartner, said that diamonds will probably be the first carbon chip seen. Diamond offers 10 times the heat dissipation of silicon and has been used for 40nm to 15 diamond films on silicon wafers.

Submission + - Wind could provide 100% of world energy needs (mongabay.com)

Submitted by Damien1972 on Monday June 22, 2009 @06:28PM

Damien1972 writes: Wind power may be the key to a clean energy revolution: a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science finds that wind power could provide for the entire world's current and future energy needs.

To estimate the earth's capacity for wind power, the researchers first sectioned the globe into areas of approximately 3,300 square kilometers (2,050 square miles) and surveyed local wind speeds every six hours. They imagined 2.5 megawatt turbines crisscrossing the terrestrial globe, excluding "areas classified as forested, areas occupied by permanent snow or ice, areas covered by water, and areas identified as either developed or urban," according to the paper. They also included the possibility of 3.6 megawatt offshore wind turbines, but restricted them to 50 nautical miles off the coast and to oceans depths less than 200 meters.

Using this criteria the researchers found that wind energy could not only supply all of the world's energy requirements, but it could provide over forty times the world's current electrical consumption and over five times the global use of total energy needs.

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