kmckinlay - Slashdot User

Submission + - New Caprica trailers, websites and widget (sffmedia.com)

Submitted by

bowman9991

on Saturday April 11, 2009 @01:52AM

bowman9991 writes: "New material from the Battlestar Galactica prequel Caprica has been unveiled , including a website to promote the pilot's 21 April DVD release, a new trailer for the series, and an extended clip from the pilot (you can also embed a Caprica widget on your website with a countdown clock if you're really enthusiastic).I was a bit sceptical that they could follow Battlestar Galactica with a show with as much depth and impact, and although I'm still not 100% convinced, this material is more impressive than what has been previously released and gives me reason to believe they're on the right track."

D&D Co-Creator Dave Arneson Dies of Cancer 71

Posted by Soulskill on Friday April 10, 2009 @11:31PM from the rest-in-peace dept.

epee1221 was one of many readers to send word that Dave Arneson, co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, has died of cancer at the age of 61. "Arneson is often described as an 'unsung hero' in the history of gaming, having been largely eclipsed by his collaborator Gary Gygax. While Gygax was known for developing the rules for Dungeons & Dragons, Arneson's work focused more on the role-playing element. Although the two split up, Arneson continued developing fantasy role-playing content, and later taught game design at Full Sail University." We discussed Gary Gygax's passing just over a year ago.

Submission + - First Movie of Individual Carbon Atoms (lbl.gov) 2

Submitted by Bojangles on Thursday April 09, 2009 @12:15PM

Bojangles writes: Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), working with TEAM 0.5, the world's most powerful transmission electron microscope, have made a movie that shows in real-time carbon atoms repositioning themselves around the edge of a hole that was punched into a graphene sheet. Viewers can observe how chemical bonds break and form as the suddenly volatile atoms are driven to find a stable configuration. This is the first ever live recording of the dynamics of carbon atoms in graphene. In case the site gets slashdotted, there are direct links to the videos.

Submission + - CRIA Launching Grassroots Lobby for Canadian DMCA

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 09, 2009 @12:03PM

An anonymous reader writes: Michael Geist is reporting that the Canadian Recording Industry Association is planning a grassroots advocacy campaign for a Canadian DMCA. The effort includes personal letters from record executives urging recipients to write to their MP and a one-sided FAQ document that paints Canada as a piracy haven with lost jobs for truck drivers delivering CDs and DVDs.

Submission + - SPAM: Group urges NASA to embrace Colbert space toilet

Submitted by

coondoggie

on Thursday April 09, 2009 @11:21AM

coondoggie writes: "The Space Frontier Foundation advocacy group today urged NASA to respect the results of a nationwide contest to name a new space toilet for International Space Station (ISS). The Foundation proposed using either the first or second place winners of the contest: "The Colbert" (for the popular Comedy Central comedian Steve Colbert or "Serenity" (for the popular Firefly sci-fi television pilot and film) as the official name for the super toilet, whose purpose is to re-cycle human waste products and is the first of its kind to be flown in space. "If NASA rejects the popular winner of its contest, they'll be sending the wrong message: that space is just for humorless, undemocratic bureaucrats!" said Foundation co-Founder Rick Tumlinson"
Link to Original Source

MS Researchers Call Moving Server Storage To SSDs a Bad Idea 292

Posted by timothy on Wednesday April 08, 2009 @02:00PM from the professor-if-these-projections-are-accurate dept.

An anonymous reader writes "As an IT administrator did you ever think of replacing disks by SSDs? Or using SSDs as an intermediate caching layer? A recent paper by Microsoft researchers provides detailed cost/benefit analysis for several real workloads. The conclusion is that, for a range of typical enterprise workloads, using SSDs makes no sense in the short to medium future. Their price needs to decrease by 3-3000 times for them to make sense. Note that this paper has nothing to do with laptop workloads, for which SSDs probably make more sense (due to SSDs' ruggedness)."

Submission + - Recession Catches Up To Tech Jobs (cnn.com)

Submitted by

HangingChad

on Wednesday April 08, 2009 @01:08PM

HangingChad writes: "Once thought to be somewhat recession-proof, tech jobs have been getting slashed as companies look to trim budgets. From the CNNMoney article: "After three years of at least 2.5% employment growth in the United States, tech jobs are forecast to decline by 1.2% this year, according to Forrester Research. They have already fallen by nearly 1% since their November peak, according to the Labor Department. Year to date, 8,000 tech jobs have been slashed, including 4,100 just last month."

We're not anticipating any layoffs and I'm not seeing a lot of top flight programming talent on the bench. Not even certain how noticeable a 1.2% decline would be in our industry. Anyone else feeling the pinch?"

Star Trek Premiere Gets Standing Ovation, Surprise Showing In Austin 437

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday April 08, 2009 @11:05AM from the set-phasers-to-awesome dept.

MrKaos writes "Proving that science fiction can still be great entertainment, J.J. Abrams appears to have impressed Star Trek fans at the official world premiere of Star Trek, who gave the film a five-minute standing ovation at the Sydney Opera House in Australia today. Meanwhile, mere hours beforehand, flummoxed fans at the Alamo Drafthouse theater in Austin, TX, deceived into thinking they were seeing a special, extended version of Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, were pleasantly surprised when a disguised Leonard Nimoy greeted them and announced they would be seeing the new film in its entirety. ILM's influence on the film is reported as visually stunning, and lucky Australian fans are scheduled to see the movie first, as it opens a day before the American release."

New Discovery May End Transplant Rejection 201

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday April 08, 2009 @09:38AM from the time-to-get-that-extra-liver-you've-always-wanted dept.

mmmscience writes with this excerpt from the Examiner: "Big news in the medical world: scientists in Australia have found a way to stop the body from attacking organ transplants, greatly decreasing the possibility of organ rejection. ... When a new tissue is introduced, one's immune system kicks into overdrive, sending out cells known as killer T cells to attack and destroy the unknown tissue. ... Professor Jonathan Sprent and Dr. Kylie Webster from Sydney's Garvan Institute of Medical Research focused on a different type of T cells — known as regulatory T cells (Treg) — in this study. Tregs are capable of quieting the immune system, stopping the killer T cells from seeking out and attacking foreign objects."

Google CEO Warns Newspapers Not To Anger Readers 328

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday April 08, 2009 @08:54AM from the hand-that-feeds dept.

Barence writes "Google CEO Eric Schmidt has hit back at newspaper bosses, warning them that they risk alienating readers in their war against news aggregators such as Google News. 'I would encourage everybody to think in terms of what your reader wants,' Schmidt said at a conference for the Newspaper Association of America. 'These are ultimately consumer businesses and if you piss off enough of them, you will not have any more.' Schmidt's rebuke follows a sustained attack on Google by newspaper bosses such as Rupert Murdoch, who have accused the search giant of 'stealing' their content without payment." Schmidt also suggested that newspapers need to expand their distribution methods to make better use of mobile technology, and a NY Times piece argues that the Associated Press' struggle against aggregators is futile since they're largely trying to give news stories to consumers for free anyway.

Microsoft Ending Mainstream Support For XP 580

Posted by kdawson on Wednesday April 08, 2009 @08:12AM from the population-inversion dept.

Slatterz writes "Come next week, Microsoft will be in the unusual position of no longer offering mainstream support for its most widely used product. Windows XP will pass another milestone next week on the road to retirement when mainstream support ends on 14 April 2009, over seven years after the OS originally shipped. While the company said that it will continue to provide free security fixes for XP until 2014, any future bugs found in the platform will not be fixed unless customers pay. Windows XP accounts for about 63 percent of all Internet-connected computers, according to March 2009 statistics from Hitslink, while Windows Vista makes up about 24 percent."

Submission + - The Pitfalls of Corporate Social Networks (baselinemag.com)

Submitted by

Austerlitz28

on Friday December 21, 2007 @02:31PM

Austerlitz28 writes: "Just like e-mail and IM before it, bringing the consumer-like technology of social networking into the corporate sphere is threatening to those who don't know its value and an exercise in frustration for those who do."

Submission + - Casual gaming with serious undertones (chainfactor.com)

Submitted by SixSided on Sunday December 09, 2007 @11:07AM

SixSided writes: Addictive online puzzle game Chain Factor is going into it's endgame, with just under six hours left until it either destroys the stock market, or well, doesn't. The game itself appears to be your average web based puzzle game, albeit a very enjoyable and addicting one. But in playing and discovering 'error messages' that pop up at random on a game ending, players have uncovered an underlying sinister story behind the game. As the story played out, it revealed that the game data fed to the players is coming from stock market feeds and by playing the game the players are essentially acting as a human compiler. They are unwittingly working out large biding chains that with enough build up, are supposed to have a harmonic resonance like effect, sending the markets into chaos and destroying them. Sure, this isn't entirely plausible in all reality, but it's a nice idea.

Of course none of that is actually real, and the game is in fact a tie in to a Numb3rs episode that aired a month ago on the 9th of November. The episode in question involved Alternate Reality Games and this is just an ARG type tie in to it. As promotional tie ins go however, it has done very well in being a game of it's own and not just a promotional tool to shove advertising in your face. Bar a small reference in the 'Terms of Use' on the main site, there have been no real pointers to CBS, even with the Chain Factor ads, which ranged from billboards to TV spots, each with hidden puzzles to unlock more features of the online game. One of the people believed to be behind the game is Ian Bogost from Persuasive Games, who make 'electronic games for persuasion, instruction, and activism', as this game very much fits the types of games with underlying messages that they have created in the past.

The game is nearing the end with the accumulative points between 2 different modes, 'survival' and 'power', working as either the execute or abort of the final sequence, depending on which has a larger total when the countdown ends. If 'Survival' is greater it is stopped, if 'Power' is greater it goes ahead and the bad guy wins. As of writing this survival is trailing by just under 250 million points, so it'll take a serious last minute push on Survival Mode to save the day. All in all it is a rather interesting spin on the simple concept of the power of using the human brain to solve complex problems and the use of something such as an addictive online game to do so. Oh, and a great puzzle game to boot.

So go get playing Survival Mode and help save the world!

Submission + - Dyslexia is Rampant Among Entrepreneurs

Submitted by

Hugh Pickens

on Saturday December 08, 2007 @08:31PM

Hugh Pickens writes: "Five years ago Fortune magazine published a story about dyslexic business leaders including Craig McCaw, who pioneered the cellular industry; Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Atlantic Airways; Charles Schwab, founder of the discount brokerage firm; and Paul Orfalea, founder of the Kinko's copy chain. Now a study of entrepreneurs in the United States by Julie Logan, professor of entrepreneurship at the Cass Business School in London, has found that 35 percent of the entrepreneurs she surveyed identified themselves as dyslexic. "We found that dyslexics who succeed had overcome an awful lot in their lives by developing compensatory skills," Logan says. "If you tell your friends and acquaintances that you plan to start a business, you'll hear over and over, 'It won't work. It can't be done.' But dyslexics are extraordinarily creative about maneuvering their way around problems." Mr. Orfalea, who left Kinko's seven years ago, and who now dabbles in a hodgepodge of business undertakings, is almost proud of having dyslexia and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. "I get bored easily, and that is a great motivator," he said. "I think everybody should have dyslexia and A.D.D.""

Submission + - New antibiotics for pathogenic attacks of bacteria (heraldbiz.com)

Submitted by

allengineering

on Thursday August 02, 2007 @04:39PM

allengineering writes: "A team of research directed by the pr. KIM Kyung-Gyu of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Sungkyunkwan discovered the structure of the protein Rse B playing an essential part in the transmission of the signals of stresses resulting from the pathogenic attacks of bacteria. The article is been published in the edition of May of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the the USA (PNAS). This projection should make it possible to develop new antibiotics."

Slashdot Top Deals