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Software

Submission + - Crowdsourcing software development to the masses (computerworld.com)

Submitted by
Lucas123
Lucas123 writes: "Crowdsourcing, or taking a job traditionally performed by employees or a contracted company and outsourcing it to an undefined, large group of people in the form of an open call on the Web , is proving to be a viable way to develop cheap but innovative software, according to Mary Brandel at Computerworld. Sites like TopCoder and their coding competitions are becoming more popular with big name companies like Constellation Energy because programmers who take on the job are global, offering many different perspectives on any one job. "The creativity and innovation of how people are rationalizing these designs and building components enables us to interject a perspective and approach that normally we wouldn't have access to," Constellation's director of IT said."
NASA

Submission + - Solar Panel Rips on ISS (cnn.com)

Submitted by
bhmit1
bhmit1 writes: "Nasa's solar panel woes continue with today's discovery, a rip on one of the recently moved panels. From the article: "The astronauts abruptly stopped the unfurling of the second panel, however, as soon as they saw the rip on the edge of the panel. The panel was almost completely unfurled when the rip was spotted. The astronauts beamed down photos of the torn and crumpled section so NASA can analyze them and determine the extent of the damage.""
NASA

Submission + - Space station solar equipment showing damage (cnn.com)

Submitted by
bhmit1
bhmit1 writes: "The latest space walk has turned up some bad news for the problematic solar panels: metal shavings. From the article: "The rotary joint, 10 feet in diameter, has experienced intermittent vibrations and power spikes for nearly two months. Space station managers were hoping a thermal cover or bolt might be hanging up the mechanism. That would have been relatively easy to fix, so they were disheartened when Daniel Tani radioed down that metal shavings were everywhere. 'It's quite clear that it's metal-to-metal grating or something, and it's widespread,' Tani said.""
The Media

Submission + - US Spies Penetrate Al Qaeda's Intranet, Until.....

Submitted by ahess247
ahess247 writes: The New York Sun today has an interesting story detailing how U.S. intelligence agencies had penetrated a network of computers they called "The Obelisk" which served as the distribution channel for video messages from Osama Bin-Laden and Ayman Al-Zawahiri, but which was also used for routine communications and administrative messages to lower-level operatives around the world. But they lost this revealing look into the terrorist network's communications and operations after a Sept. 7 video message was leaked to ABC News. The leak revealed that the network used to distribute the video had been penetrated by US Spies, who watched helplessly in real time as the entire system was shut down. Said one anonymous officer: "We saw the whole thing shut down because of this leak," the official said. "We lost an important keyhole into the enemy."
Security

Submission + - SBC, Comcast, RoadRunner Top Phishing Hosts

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The United States by far the country with the largest number of phishing sites in the past year, accounting for slightly more than 30 percent of the verified sites, according to the past year of stats collected by Phishtank.com, a volunteer anti-phishing effort backed by OpenDNS.com. SBC's network hosted 53,666 scam sites, the most of all American ISPs. Comcast and Road Runner rounded out the No. 2 and No. 3 slots, with 28,000 and 25,000 phishing sites, respectively. The Washington Post focuses on one notable nugget: Of the 300,000 sites submitted last year, 8,760 legitimate sites and e-mails were misidentified as scammy — or vice versa. From the story: "The report seems to explain why phishing remains such a prevalent problem. In this case, you have a large group of self-selected 'experts' on phishing who, in about 4 percent of cases, can't tell a phishing site or e-mail from a legitimate one.
Biotech

Submission + - Human Therapeutic Cloning Screeches to a Halt (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by
eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: "Harvard had finally cut through all the political bullshit to start research using stem cells but after a $100k in advertising, they have not been able to entice any female egg donors. From the article, 'Eggan blames the dearth of donors on Massachusetts regulations that prohibit researchers from paying women for their eggs. The law is meant to prevent coercion of poor women who might undergo the procedure out of financial need. But women who undergo the same procedure to donate eggs for assisted reproductive technology (ART), in which infertile women use another woman's eggs to get pregnant, are paid anywhere from $3,000 to $10,000. "If we feel comfortable compensating women who donate eggs for ART — and infertility is a terrible disease — why aren't we comfortable compensating women for donations that could aid other serious diseases?" Eggan asks.' It is a painful and extensive process with small risk of kidney damage, should they allow women to be compensated for that? I know my friend donates plasma on a regular basis to pay for his weekend drinking, how is this different?"
Data Storage

Submission + - Nobel Awards Harddrive Technology (nobelprize.org)

Submitted by
bhmit1
bhmit1 writes: "The Nobel Prize in Physics this year is given for technology that makes compact harddrives possible. From the announcement: "In 1988 the Frenchman Albert Fert and the German Peter Grünberg each independently discovered a totally new physical effect — Giant Magnetoresistance or GMR. Very weak magnetic changes give rise to major differences in electrical resistance in a GMR system. A system of this kind is the perfect tool for reading data from hard disks when information registered magnetically has to be converted to electric current.""
Quickies

Submission + - Physics Nobel Prize 2007

Submitted by whizzter
whizzter writes: The prize was awarded for the discovery of the Giant Magnetoresistive Effect, Peter Grünberg of the Jülich Research Centre and Albert Fert of the University of Paris-Sud that lead the research will receive the prize. During the presentation the Nobel committe stressed how the research had helped decreasing harddrive sizes. The discovery was also the birth of the spintronics field. More information on the prize can be found at the Nobel site.
Supercomputing

Submission + - 41,000 PCs seek bird flu cure

Submitted by Stony Stevenson
Stony Stevenson writes: An international grid of more than 41,000 computers is offering new hope in the search for treatments for the deadly avian influenza virus. The Enabling Grids for E-science (EGEE) network links ordinary computers in 50 countries to form a single giant supercomputer with more than five million gigabytes of disk and tape storage.

Dr Ying-Ta Wu, a biologist at the Genomics Research Center of the Academia Sinica in Taiwan, explained that computing grids are the fastest and cheapest way to find promising new drugs that might be able to battle the virus. By rapidly sifting through a vast number of possible drug and virus interactions, the grid calculates the probability that a particular drug molecule will block key sites on the virus, thus inhibiting its action.
Biotech

Submission + - Cure for cancer may be ready in two years (newscientist.com)

Submitted by GnarlyDoug
GnarlyDoug writes: Dr Zheng Cui has, through a stroke of luck, found that the granulocytes from some mice are up to 50 times better at fighting cancer than others. He has cured mice with simple transfusions of granulocytes. These cells seem to recognize almost all cancer lines, are extremely effective even in advanced cases, and and the resistance seems to last for the life of the mouse. So not only does this treatment cure many cancers, but it also provides resistance to future cancers as well.

Evidence suggests that this should hold true for humans as well. Because this is based on blood transfusions, a technology already long established, this could be ready to so very soon. The go-ahead for a human trial has already been given, and if it pans out then this could be available in as little as two years time. Some simple tests to find people with the resistant strain of blood and then a system of transfusions is all that is needed to get this started.

If it pans out, we may be looking at a general cure for cancer within a few years time.
KDE

Submission + - Linux text editors: Do any make the grade? (computerworld.com)

Submitted by jcatcw
jcatcw writes: Computerworld's Sharon Machlis has been reviewing text editors on Linux. Nine of them to be exact. She wants something that can do prose and some coding, which turns out to a hard combination to find. Her thoughts on some of them:

Emacs: I'd characterize the UI as actively hostile
KVIM: This is an editor that's so nonintuitive that you'll need instructions before you can use it to type a single word.
Bluefish: This is an appealing piece of software if you're looking for a text editor to do Web coding.
Komodo Edit: has just about everything I look for in an editor except spell check.
NEdit: If NEdit were the only tool available to me, I think I could make it do many of the things I need.

I bet I'll be even happier once that planned UltraEdit version for Linux is released.
NASA

Submission + - Nasa: No Fix Needed for Endevavour's Tiles (cnn.com)

Submitted by
bhmit1
bhmit1 writes: "It looks like everyone but slashdot is reporting that no repairs are needed for Endeavour. From the article:

After meeting for five hours, mission managers opted Thursday night against any risky spacewalk repairs, after receiving the results of one final thermal test. The massive amount of data indicated Endeavour would suffer no serious structural damage during next week's re-entry.

Their worry was not that Endeavour might be destroyed and its seven astronauts killed in a replay of the Columbia disaster — the gouge is too small to be catastrophic. They were concerned that the heat of re-entry could weaken the shuttle's aluminum frame at the damaged spot and result in lengthy postflight repairs.
Godspeed Endeavour!"
AMD

Submission + - AMD Nearly Out Of Cash

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Following a horrible quarter and market share losses, AMD is within two quarters of running out of cash, according to EETimes. "AMD lost approximately $883 million in free cash flow in the last quarter, worse than expected, and putting the company within two quarters of running out of cash," EETimes quotes Wall Street analyst Chris Caso as saying. It gets even worse for AMD. After losing significant market share in 2006, Intel struck back in the first quarter of 2007, gaining 4.5 percentage points in the microprocessor market. Intel now holds 80.2 percent of the global chip market. Can AMD dig itself out of a hole? Maybe, maybe not. "AMD will look to lessen the capital needs of its models by outsourcing production and partnering up, though we believe this could take much longer than investors anticipate," analyst Doug Freedman of American Technology Research told EETimes.
Businesses

Submission + - Microsoft aims to double PC base

Submitted by squizzar
squizzar writes: From the BBC: 'Microsoft software will sell for just $3 (£1.50) in some parts of the world in an attempt to double the number of global PC users.'

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6571139.stm

I'd like to know why the rest of us have to pay so much, seeing as fta: "This is not a philanthropic effort, this is a business"

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