Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Portables

Submission + - Hands On: The $100 Laptop

Submitted by
Paul Stamatiou
Paul Stamatiou writes: "I got my hands on the second release of the $100 One Laptop per Child laptop and wrote a review complete with pictures. It runs a custom version of Fedora Core 6 complete with an Xulrunner-based browser and an impressive 7.5-inch LCD sporting a resolution of 1200×900 with the ability to go monochromatic in sunlight. Other hardware features include a VGA webcam, 802.11b/g wireless, 512MB flash storage, 128MB DDR266 system RAM and a 366MHz AMD Geode CPU."
IBM

Submission + - IBM to help game devs grok Cell

Submitted by Piri W.
Piri W. writes: IBM is hooking up with Vivendi Universal to offer a 'developer jam session' aimed at teaching game developers how to take better advantage of the Cell CPU found in the PlayStation 3. During the jam sessions, IBM will try to answer two questions likely to be asked by developers:
  1. How much task-level parallelism can we wring out of this game?
  2. Once we've made the game as parallel as possible, how can we get the best per-task performance out of the SPEs?


'IBM can help a lot more with the second question than it can with the first, although the first one is by far the hardest. It's also the case that the Xbox 360 won't support the same degree of task-level parallelism that Cell will, so developers who design their games from the ground up for the PS3 will have their work cut out for them when porting to the more popular Xbox 360. It remains to be seen if the amount of work that it will take to really get the extra mileage out of Cell will pay off with such a relatively small installed base of PS3s.'
Censorship

Submission + - Wikipedia Blocked by Schools

Submitted by
Malkara
Malkara writes: "Apparently my school system, in Central Florida, has blocked Wikipedia access on all school computers. I had known wikipedia was blocked for the last week, but I was just recently informed that it had indeed been a conscious decision. Apparently they're worried about people quoting directly from Wikipedia, and decided to take the easy way out by simply completely blocking the website in all schools from Elementary to High School."
Wii

The Wii - Is the Magic Gone? 492

Posted by Zonk from the do-the-clowns-always-cry-when-you-pack-up-the-paper-sky dept.
Computer And Video Games asks the tough question: is the Wii's magic gone? After the flurry of excitement around the launch, lackluster ports and a persistent inability for Nintendo to keep units on the shelves has made it hard for gamers to sustain their enthusiasm for the system. It doesn't help that most of the good games slated for this year won't be out for months. In some cases, there's doubt they'll even make it out this year: Reggie Fils-Aime appears to be backpedaling on Metroid Prime 3 by Christmas, which would be a shame. GigaGamez has additional commentary. Are you still as excited about the Wii as you were when it launched?
Programming

Submission + - Did D-Wave really demonstrate a quantum computer?

Submitted by Qubert
Qubert writes: Was D-Wave's quantum computer demo last week the real thing? Ars Technica takes a look inside the cold, black box and concludes that whatever was in there, it probably wasn't a 'pure' quantum computer: 'Jumping off the fence, we will say that we think D-Wave demonstrated a real device; however, we think their device is going to set off a debate in the physics community over where the boundary between classical and quantum computation is. At present, quantum computers are "globally phase coherent," which means that every qubit's state is entangled (and therefore correlated) with every other qubit... The D-wave system, however, is certainly not globally phase coherent, which raises the question of whether it is a quantum computer.'

Slashdot Top Deals

Eureka! -- Archimedes

Close