Feed For plants on alien worlds, it isn't easy being green (pheedo.com)
Depending on the planet's atmosphere and its host star's light, the foliage sprouting up on other Earths may look yellow, orange - or even black
Details of Next Gen Zune Surface 308
KMG writes "Zune Scene has got a scoop about the next generation Microsoft Zune. There will be two new models; a flash memory based and a hard drive based. Zune with HDD will be thinner and have larger storage capacity while the flash based will feature Wi-fi, video playback. So will we see another try from Microsoft to beat Apple's iPod or it will be another vain attempt from the Redmond guys."
Submission + - MAFIAA Wants The Right To Pretext
8127972 writes: According to The Inquirier, the RIAA and the movie industry are lobbying lawmakers in a bid to be excused from the tough laws on pretexting. The RIAA and the MPAA say the law should not apply to them as they need to use subterfuge to deal with pirates. Methinks they've officially gone too far.
Submission + - What's Your Worst Boss Story?
greysky writes: While reading The Crazy Boss Hall of Fame today I started thinking about all the strange bosses I've worked for over the years. None of them compared with this guy:
What's your worst boss horror story?Rickover grilled McGowan, a recent top graduate from Ole Miss, about how many dates he had a week. Five, McGowan guessed. "How long did the dates take?" Rickover asked. Three hours, he replied. That's 15 hours a week, Rickover barked. What a waste of time. Why don't you take three women out at once and spend only five hours a week on dates?
Submission + - Monitoring a Linux System with X11/Cmd/Web Tools
An anonymous reader writes: A description of tools for Linux that let you analyze the performance of your PC, by evaluating the way your PC uses hardware and system services, including RAM, CPU and hard drivers. With the information provided by these tools, you can uncover potential problems, fix performance bottlenecks and make sure your computer is running in tip-top shape.
Google to Hold Worldwide Developer Day 60
Incon writes "Google is holding a day for developers to meet and learn from Google staff at its various worldwide offices. Places at the event are sure to go quicker than hotcakes, so get in quickly. Locations that Developer Day will be held at are: Beijing, Hamburg, London, Madrid, Moscow, Paris, Sao Paulo, Sydney, Tokyo and of course at Google HQ in Mountain View."
Submission + - Intel reveals the future of the CPU-GPU war
Arun Demeure writes: Beyond3D's ninjas have once again obtained new information on Intel's plans to compete against NVIDIA and AMD's graphics processors, in what the Chief Architect of the project presents as a "battle for control of the computing platform". He describes a new computing architecture based on the many-core paradigm with super-wide execution units, and the reasoning behind some of the design choices. Looks like computer scientists and software programmers everywhere will have to adapt to these new concepts, as there will be no silver bullet to achieve high efficiency on new and exotic architectures.
Submission + - High Tech Civil Rights Lawyers?
CalibanCaliban writes: Do you have recommendations for Canadian High Tech Civil Rights resources and lawyers?
I am aquainted with a 17 year old youth who recorded a racially charged verbal conflict in a classroom and the subsequent physical fight during lunch on school property. This was done from his cell phone. He editted it, set it to music and posted it to YouTube. The school administration elected to suspend the youth for 10 days. This seemed disproportionate to me as it seemed much closer to art or journalism than creating a hostile learning environment.
Subsequently provincial police got involved and the youth recording and posting the conflict was charged with assault. Obviously a good lawyer is in order and I was hoping Slashdot readers might be able to identify similar cases, useful resources or legal counsel that they could recommend for this scenario.
I am aquainted with a 17 year old youth who recorded a racially charged verbal conflict in a classroom and the subsequent physical fight during lunch on school property. This was done from his cell phone. He editted it, set it to music and posted it to YouTube. The school administration elected to suspend the youth for 10 days. This seemed disproportionate to me as it seemed much closer to art or journalism than creating a hostile learning environment.
Subsequently provincial police got involved and the youth recording and posting the conflict was charged with assault. Obviously a good lawyer is in order and I was hoping Slashdot readers might be able to identify similar cases, useful resources or legal counsel that they could recommend for this scenario.
Oil Soaked Servers Coming Soon 321
grease_boy writes "A UK company will start selling server racks submerged in oil baths within a year. Very-PC is working on prototypes and says that because oil transfers heat more efficiently, power usage can be cut by fifty percent."
Submission + - DTWL - Best WordPress Plugins
r4rok writes: "One among the many other coolest things about WordPress is the support of powerful Plugin API, that let the developers write finest add-ons (GPL Compatible) across the world, to extend the basic functions of our blogs. Most plugins can be used simply by drag n drop into your plugins folder and activating them, some requires you to add function codes into your template files with detailed instructions. Read more at source."
Submission + - Q&A with Intel's vp of global marketing
Submission + - Nearly transparent, electrically conductive cement
zero_offset writes: The Tokyo Institute of Technology has announced a process for creating an inexpensive, nearly transparent, electrically conductive alumina cement, reports Pink Tentacle, a blog that focuses on a broad range of interesting news from Japan. Conductivity is comparable to metal, and the transparency should be adequate for use in display panels. The process relies upon commonplace and inexpensive metals compared to the rare metals such as iridium currently used in display panels. (This is probably useful in many other ways, but slashdot's section/topic choices for articles are somewhat arbitrary and limited.) The blog links to several Japanese-language articles which have defied all my attempts to translate them.
Gates to join Simonyi in Space? 208
gadgetopia writes "On Russian state television, cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin tells journalists in a live video interview from the ISS that "Charles said that Bill Gates is also preparing to visit space"." Gotta wonder what that insurance premium is going to look like.
China Slams US Piracy Complaint 346
bingoathome writes with a link to a BBC article on China's criticism of the US over its complaint to the WTO. The Bush administration is breaking its long-standing policy of backroom conversations with Beijing to condemn the country's continued 'failure to address copyright piracy and counterfeiting.' "The US says that China's failure to enforce copyright laws is costing software, music and book publishers billions of dollars in lost sales ... The US has been threatening a WTO complaint against China since 2005. It said on Tuesday that the two cases had been submitted to the WTO. One case claims that Beijing's poor enforcement of copyright and trademark protections violates WTO rules. The other contends that illegal barriers to hamper sales of US films, music and books. "
Submission + - Computer scientists develop P2P system that promis
Andreaskem writes: "A Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist says transferring large data files, such as movies and music, over the Internet could be sped up significantly if peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing services were configured to share not only identical files, but also similar files.
"SET speeds up data transfers by simultaneously downloading different chunks of a desired data file from multiple sources, rather than downloading an entire file from one slow source. Even then, downloads can be slow because these networks can't find enough sources to use all of a receiver's download bandwidth. That's why SET takes the additional step of identifying files that are similar to the desired file... No one knows the degree of similarity between data files stored in computers around the world, but analyses suggest the types of files most commonly shared are likely to contain a number of similar elements. Many music files, for instance, may differ only in the artist-and-title headers, but are otherwise 99 percent similar.""
"SET speeds up data transfers by simultaneously downloading different chunks of a desired data file from multiple sources, rather than downloading an entire file from one slow source. Even then, downloads can be slow because these networks can't find enough sources to use all of a receiver's download bandwidth. That's why SET takes the additional step of identifying files that are similar to the desired file... No one knows the degree of similarity between data files stored in computers around the world, but analyses suggest the types of files most commonly shared are likely to contain a number of similar elements. Many music files, for instance, may differ only in the artist-and-title headers, but are otherwise 99 percent similar.""
