Yoda's Mum - Slashdot User

Submission + - Cosmic ray intensity reaches its highest levels in (popsci.com.au)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 30, 2009 @05:34PM

An anonymous reader writes: A NASA probe found that cosmic ray intensities in 2009 had increased by almost 20 percent beyond anything seen in the past 50 years. Such cosmic rays arise from distant supernova explosions and consist mostly of protons and heavier subatomic particles — just one cosmic ray could disable unlucky satellites or even put a mission to Mars in jeopardy. http://www.popsci.com.au/node/38966

Submission + - Nvidia discloses details on next-gen Fermi GPU (techreport.com)

Submitted by

EconolineCrush

on Wednesday September 30, 2009 @04:34PM

EconolineCrush writes: "The Tech Report has published the first details describing the architecture behind Nvidia's upcoming Fermi GPU. More than just a graphics processor, Fermi incorporates many enhancements targeted specifically at general-purpose computing, such as better support for double-precision math, improved internal scheduling and switching, and more robust tools for developers. Plus, you know, more cores. Some questions about the chip remain unanswered, but it's not expected to arrive until later this year or early next."

Submission + - NVidia Cripples PhysX "Open API" 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 30, 2009 @01:39PM

An anonymous reader writes: In a foot-meet-bullet type move, NVidia is going to disable PhysX engine if you are using a display adapter other than one that came from their company. This despite the fact that you may have an NVidia card on your system specifically to do this type of processing. "For a variety of reasons some development expense, some quality assurance and some business reasons Nvidia will not support GPU accelerated PhysX with Nvidia GPUs while GPU rendering is happening on non-Nvidia GPUs." Time to say hello to Microsoft dx physics or Intel's Havok engine.

Submission + - Oracle Fined for Benchmark Claims

Submitted by

pickens

on Wednesday September 30, 2009 @10:22AM

pickens writes: "Information Week reports that the Transaction Processing Council, which sets benchmarks for measuring database performance, has fined Oracle $10,000 for Oracle's ads published August 27 and September 3 on the front page of the Wall Street Journal which violate the "fair use" rules that govern TPC members by "comparing an existing TPC result to something that does not exist." The ads said to expect a product announcement on October 14 that would demonstrate that some sort of hybrid Oracle-Sun setup would offer two-digit performance on the TPC-C online transaction processing test compared to IBM's 6 million transaction per minute result on its Power 595 running AIX and DB2. The TPC Council serves as a neutral forum where benchmark results are aired and compared. "At the time of publication, they didn't have anything" submitted to the council says Michael Majdalany, administrator of the council adding that that Oracle is free to use TPC numbers once it submits an audited result for the Sun-Oracle system. Fines by the TPC are infrequent with the last action a $5,000 fine levied against Microsoft in 2005 for unsupported claims about SQL Server. "It takes a fairly serious violation to warrant a member being fined," says Majdalany. Oracle published the claims as the company faces steepening losses of Sun Sparc customers to IBM and HP, which have seen the period of uncertainty over the future of Sun's hardware as a time to poach Sun customers."

IE8 Beats Other Browsers In Laptop Battery Life 263

Posted by timothy on Sunday September 13, 2009 @05:44PM from the not-without-windows-it-doesn't dept.

WARM3CH writes "AnandTech tested a laptop with an AMD CPU, a laptop with an Intel CPU, and a netbook to compare battery life while running Internet Explorer 8, Opera 10, Firefox 3.5, Safari 4, and Chrome. They tested on simple web pages and flash-infested ones. IE8 had the best battery life on both laptops (followed by FF + AdBlock), and Safari had the worst battery life. On the netbook, Chrome was slightly ahead of IE8. The report concludes: 'Overall, Internet Explorer and Firefox + AdBlock consistently place near the top, with Chrome following closely behind. Opera 10 Beta 3 didn't do as well as Opera 9.6.4, and in a couple quick tests, it doesn't appear that the final release of Opera 10 changes the situation at all. Opera in general — version 9 or 10 — looks like it doesn't do as well as the other major browsers. Safari is at the back, by a large margin, on all three test notebooks. We suspect that Safari 4 does better under OS X, however, so the poor Windows result probably won't matter to most Safari users.'"

Father of Green Revolution, Norman Borlaug, Dies at 95 227

Posted by timothy on Sunday September 13, 2009 @03:04PM from the a-billion-here-a-billion-there dept.

countincognito writes "Norman Borlaug, a genuinely remarkable man and the father of the Green Revolution in agriculture, has died of cancer at his Dallas home aged 95. His life's work on developing high-yield, disease-resistant crops has been credited with having saved an estimated one billion people from famine, and one billion hectares of forest and rainforest from being cleared for agricultural production."

Comment Re:Just add to the EULA... (Score 1) 140

by Yoda's Mum on Monday August 17, 2009 @02:09AM (#29088831) Attached to: Facebook Faces the Canadian Privacy Commissioner

If they're expecting to do business in and derive an income from those nations, they absolutely should be understanding and complying with the laws of those nations. If that income is insufficient to sustain that cost, they're more than welcome to not do business there.

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