Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Large linux systems today have 3072 processors (Score 1) 462

(or more, probably)

http://lkml.org/lkml/2010/7/22/252 is a fun post on the Linux-Kernel list about missing caching of ACPI tables leading to 20 minute boot times. I get that problem every day! (I wish :P)

It is a pretty safe bet that you don't have to worry about Linux and more than 48 cores, as it is the OS of choice for a lot of the top supercomputers and OS research in general. Of course, applications which can take advantage of such systems is another problem, but that is hardly a Linux problem.

Image

Study Finds the Perfect Ratio of Attractiveness 176

Gksksla writes "Scientists in Australia and Hong Kong have conducted a comprehensive study to discover how different body measurements correspond with ratings of female attractiveness. The study, published in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology, found that across cultural divides young, tall and long armed women were considered the most attractive."
Image

Frustrated Reporter Quits After Slow News Day 178

Norwegian radio journalist Pia Beathe Pedersen quit on the air complaining that her bosses were making her read news on a day when "nothing important has happened." Pedersen claimed that broadcaster NRK put too much pressure on the staff and that she "wanted to be able to eat properly again and be able to breathe," during her nearly two-minute on-air resignation.
Image

The Push For Colbert's "Restoring Truthiness" Rally 703

jamie writes "A grassroots campaign has begun to get Stephen Colbert to hold a rally on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to counter Glenn Beck's recent 'Restoring Honor' event. The would-be rally has been dubbed 'Restoring Truthiness' and was inspired by a recent post on Reddit, where a young woman wondered if the only way to point out the absurdity of the Tea Party's rally would be if Colbert mirrored it with his own Colbert Nation.'"
Image

Woman Wins Libel Suit By Suing Wrong Website 323

An anonymous reader writes "It appears that Cincinnati Bengals cheerleader Sarah Jones and her lawyer were so upset by a comment on the site TheDirty.com that they missed the 'y' at the end of the name. Instead, they sued the owner of TheDirt.com, whose owner didn't respond to the lawsuit. The end result was a judge awarding $11 million, in part because of the failure to respond. Now, both the owners of TheDirty.com and TheDirt.com are complaining that they're being wrongfully written about in the press — one for not having had any content about Sarah Jones but being told it needs to pay $11 million, and the other for having the content and having the press say it lost a lawsuit, even though no lawsuit was ever actually filed against it."
Image

Open Sarcasm Fighting Copyrighted Punctuation 155

pinkushun writes "SarcMark is a copyrighted punctuation mark, that claims 'It's time that sarcasm is treated equally!' Pretty damn cheeky while they're charging for their software, which only inserts their punctuation through a hotkey. Open Sarcasm is destroying SarcMark by advocating a new punctuation mark (not displaying here properly — alt+U0161) as the new open and free sarcasm symbol. Either way, this will be one interesting turnout. With bad unicode support across the web, displaying the characters properly might be an issue. PS Left out sarcastic end sentence as Slashdot doesn't display the U0161 character."

Comment Here is a good test for the "obey the law" crowd (Score 1) 403

The F scale.

I've traveled in China several times, and as a "rich white guy" you won't have serious problems even if you make loud political statements that the party disagrees with. (E.g. here is a short list of forbidden words).

What you should be careful about is discussing politics with the locals. At worst you'll be asked to leave the country, but they can be thrown in jail or "disappeared" if they say, criticize party leaders.

In other words, using a ssh proxy is fine. There is probably even no law against it, except for the general "don't do things not in the interest of the Party".

Software

WordPress 3.0 Released 79

An anonymous reader writes "WordPress 3.0, the thirteenth major release of WordPress and the culmination of half a year of work by 218 contributors, is now available for download and comes with 1,217 bug fixes and feature enhancements. Major new features in this release include a new default theme called Twenty Ten. Theme developers have new APIs that allow them easily to implement custom backgrounds, headers, shortlinks, menus (no more file editing), post types, and taxonomies."
Crime

Geologists Might Be Charged For Not Predicting Quake 375

mmmscience writes "In 2009, a series of small earthquakes shook the region of L'Aquila, Italy. Seismologists investigated the tremors, but concluded that there was no direct indication of a big quake on the horizon. Less than a month later, a magnitude 6.3 earthquake killed more than 300 people. Now, the chief prosecutor of L'Aquila is looking to charge the scientists with gross negligent manslaughter for not predicting the quake."

Comment Re:One more thing... (Score 1) 1184

Mobile videoconferencing is great for deaf people, as they can use sign language. (This is the only use of videoconferencing I've observed after quite a few years of pretty common availability here in northern Europe)

Comment iPhone fragmentation (Score 4, Insightful) 315

I've got an 2G iPod touch, with iPhone OS 2.x. This means there is software that simply won't run because it is not an iPhone (such as Sleep Cycle), and software which won't run because it is not the 3.x version of the OS (games - at least the Street fighter demo and some others). With an iPod Touch you have to buy the OS upgrades, which I haven't bothered to do.

By this summer you'll have to support the 1G, 2G and 3G versions of the iPod touch, the 1G, 2G and 3G iPhones, the 3G iPhone with more RAM and a faster processor, and the 4G iPhone with both more RAM and a higher resolution. Oh, and the iPad of course.

The biggest new challenge with "iphone 4g" is the higher resolution - some say this will be 960x640 (i.e 2x the current resolution hor/ver), which is imho unlikely as this would be the first use of such a LCD resolution ever.

To me this doesn't sound simpler than the Android fragmentation, at least with Android the market lets you know which apps you can install, and the vast majority actually works with 1.5. With the Appstore you might only get "oh, don't install this on an iPod touch, it won't work".

Android is also more developer friendly, e.g. the new feature introduced just before the 2.2 release - at least my N1 got a "report this crash button" before I upgraded to 2.2. (I don't want to speculate on the developer friendlyness of Apple, but recent news haven't been very good.

Comment There is already fragmentation on the iPhone (Score 1) 208

I've got an 2G iPod touch, with iPhone OS 2.x. This means there is software that simply won't run because it is not an iPhone (such as Sleep Cycle), and software which won't run because it is not the 3.x version of the OS (games - at least the Street fighter demo). With an iPod Touch you have to buy the OS upgrades, which I haven't bothered to do.

By this summer you'll have to support the 1G, 2G and 3G versions of the iPod touch, the 1G, 2G and 3G iPhones, the 3G iPhone with more RAM and a faster processor, and the 4G iPhone with both more RAM and a higher resolution. Oh, and the iPad of course.

The biggest new challenge is the higher resolution - some say this will be 960x640 (i.e 2x the current resolution hor/ver), which is imho unlikely as this would be the first use of such a LCD resolution ever.

To me this doesn't sound simpler than the Android fragmentation, at least with Android the market lets you know which apps you can install, with the Appstore you might only get "oh, don't install this on an iPod touch, it won't work".

I would be more interested in articles comparing the wave of 100$/100euro Android tablets which will arrive this summer..

Slashdot Top Deals

New York... when civilization falls apart, remember, we were way ahead of you. - David Letterman

Working...