Hello Slashdot community. Shobhan and Clay here to talk about parallel programming this week, a topic that is both interesting and familiar to us. As processors for server, desktop and mobile platforms move from dual to quad core and beyond, software must be parallelized to best benefit from the potential performance gains now possible. Software developers have successfully introduced parallelism to their software through multithreading using Intel resources such as software development tools

In the words of Nelson "Ha! Ha!", this article in Computerworld.uk brings us news that Microsoft is pushing out patch for all windows OSes for the animated cursor exploits that have been crossing the internets this weekend. The buried lede is Microsoft had been notified of this problem back in Decemeber 20006, so there goes the commitment to security meme.

According to this Washington Post article, the nation's craze with ethanol and corn-based bio-fuels is not based on a good analysis. It has recently been shown by a team at the University of Minnesota that prairie grasses would be a more efficient and sustainable source of bio-fuels. It appears that growers and politicians alike have jumped the gun by jumping on corn as a bio-fuel.

The U.S. Air Force is creating a new job specialty, UAV pilots. Starting later this year, the air force will recruit people for this job. The details are still being worked out, but it will be an officer position. The army uses NCOs to pilots its UAVs, which are generally smaller than those used by the air force. The new air force program expects to attract those who had applied to be regular pilots, but had been denie

The second test launch of the SpaceX Falcon 1 rocket took place today at 6:10 pm PST. After successfully having completed launch, first stage separation (2m 51s), second stage ignition (2m 55s), fairing separation (3m 16s), and reaching an altitude of 300 km, the vehicle was seen entering what is referred to as roll oscillations (4m 30s). Shortly thereafter, telemetry was lost. The second stage is assum

ACM Queue has a pretty interesting article up about Metronome, a realtime garbage collector for java developed at IBM. The article also goes into some of the finer points of realtime garbage collection and makes for an interesting read. The project also has it's own product

Via a detailed report from Digital Media Wire: The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has announced that it will revoke a patent on live concert recording technology owned by radio and concert promotion giant Clea

CNN is carrying an article about a "new" (or rather, newly disclosed) way to get your personal information.

Now, experts are warning that photocopiers could be a culprit as well.

That's because most digital copiers manufactured in the past five years have disk drives -- the same kind of data-storage mechanism found in computers -- to reproduce documents.

DefectiveByDesign.org, the Free Software Foundation's campaign against DRM, has written an open letter to Steve Jobs regarding his recent public statements about DRM. The campaign's organizers are asking for more signatures before the letter is delivered to Mr. Jobs on April Fool's Day. From the letter's introduction:

While I am perhaps not the best person to talk about this as I've only had one submission accepted, my recent time spent with the Firehose has demonstrated to me that most people have a hard time crafting an acceptable story submission, in spite of the numerous examples on the front page. The following is just a list of hints and tips that might help someone assemble a story submission that makes sense.

Wired reports on a glove developed by Stanford researchers Dennis Grahn and Craig Heller which combines a cooling system with a vacuum in order to chill blood vessels and drastically reduce fatigue. Besides the obvious military and athletics applications, the technology is also potentially useful for fi

The OpenBSD project has just issued an advisory (and updated its website to reflect the change) that it now has its second remote root vulnerability in more than ten years. The exploit itself is performed with a specially crafted IPv6 ICMP packet, and is caused by a bug in the mbuf chains in the operating system kernel. The OpenBSD team have released a patch. The bug affects all versions of OpenBSD. Since

It seems that UK's Channel 4 "Great Global Warming Swindle", which the anti-global warming crowd, including Janet Daley of the Telegraph (see http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2007/03/12/do1201.xml) has run into a bit of a problem; mainly that the only swindle going on was the program.

A number of oversight bills come before the U.S. House this week, including: H.R. 1309, the Freedom of Information Act Amendments of 2007,
H.R. 1255, the Presidential Records Act Amendments of 2007,
H.R. 985, the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act of 2007, and