Sagelinka - Slashdot User

China To Tap Combustible Ice As New Energy Source 185

Posted by timothy on Friday March 12, 2010 @06:00AM from the undra-the-tundra dept.

lilbridge writes "Huge reserves of "combustible ice" — frozen methane and water — have been discovered in the tundra of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau in China. Estimates show that there is enough combustible ice to provide 90 years worth of energy for China. Burning the combustible ice may be a far better alternative than letting it just melt, releasing tons of methane into the air."

A Sad Day For the New Zealand Internet 221

Posted by timothy on Friday March 12, 2010 @04:36AM from the if-you-can't-read-this-you-know-why dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Another one bites the dust, as New Zealand's Internet filter stealthily goes live with two smaller ISPs, and three of the largest already rumoured to have signed up to do the same. However, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is apparently 'committed to helping people to circumvent government internet filtering,' so perhaps the USA will launch an invasion to free the poor downtrodden Kiwis from their own evil government?" Clever of one of the acquiescing ISPs to have named itself "Watchdog."

OpenGL 4.0 Spec Released 166

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday March 11, 2010 @12:22PM from the bounce-them-spheres dept.

tbcpp writes "The Khronos Group has announced the release of the OpenGL 4.0 specification. Among the new features: two new shader stages that enable the GPU to offload geometry tessellation from the CPU; per-sample fragment shaders and programmable fragment shader input positions; drawing of data generated by OpenGL, or external APIs such as OpenCL, without CPU intervention; shader subroutines for significantly increased programming flexibility; 64-bit, double-precision, floating-point shader operations and inputs/outputs for increased rendering accuracy and quality. Khronos has also released an OpenGL 3.3 specification, together with a set of ARB extensions, to enable as much OpenGL 4.0 functionality as possible on previous-generation GPU hardware."

Disposable Toilet To Change the World 413

Posted by samzenpus on Monday March 08, 2010 @03:39PM from the sunshine-in-a-bag dept.

captn ecks writes "A biodegradable and self-sterilizing bag for people of the toilet-disenfranchised world (40% of humankind) to dispose of their bodily waste and turn it into safe fertilizer has been created by a Swedish entrepreneur. It's a dead simple and brilliant solution to a vexing problem. From the article: 'Once used, the bag can be knotted and buried, and a layer of urea crystals breaks down the waste into fertilizer, killing off disease-producing pathogens found in feces. The bag, called the Peepoo, is the brainchild of Anders Wilhelmson, an architect and professor in Stockholm. “Not only is it sanitary,” said Mr. Wilhelmson, who has patented the bag, “they can reuse this to grow crops.”'"

MIT Produces Electricity Using Thermopower Waves 157

Posted by Soulskill on Monday March 08, 2010 @02:55PM from the set-on-fire-to-begin-current-flow dept.

MikeChino writes "MIT scientists have discovered a never-before-known phenomenon wherein carbon nanotubes can be used to harness energy from 'thermopower waves.' To do this they coated the nanotubes with a reactive fuel and then lit one end, causing a fast-moving thermal wave to speed down the length of the tube. The heat from the fuel rises to a temperature of 3,000 kelvins, and can speed along the tube 10,000 times faster than the normal spread of this chemical reaction. The heat also pushes electrons down the tube, which creates a substantial electrical current. The system can output energy (in proportion to its weight) about 100x greater than an equivalent weight lithium-ion battery, and according to MIT the discovery 'opens up a new area of energy research, which is rare.'"

Game Devs Only Use PhysX For the Money, Says AMD 225

Posted by Soulskill on Monday March 08, 2010 @02:15PM from the dem's-fightin'-woids dept.

arcticstoat writes "AMD has just aimed a shot at Nvidia's PhysX technology, saying that most game developers only implement GPU-accelerated PhysX for the money. AMD's Richard Huddy explained that 'Nvidia creates a marketing deal with a title, and then as part of that marketing deal, they have the right to go in and implement PhysX in the game.' However, he adds that 'the problem with that is obviously that the game developer doesn't actually want it. They're not doing it because they want it; they're doing it because they're paid to do it. So we have a rather artificial situation at the moment where you see PhysX in games, but it isn't because the game developer wants it in there.' AMD is pushing open standards such as OpenCL and DirectCompute as alternatives to PhysX, as these APIs can run on both AMD and Nvidia GPUs. AMD also announced today that it will be giving away free versions of Pixelux's DMM2 physics engine, which now includes Bullet Physics, to some game developers."

Comment Things Change at a Rapid Rate (Score 1) 259

by Sagelinka on Monday March 08, 2010 @01:55PM (#31402756) Attached to: How the Internet Didn't Fail As Predicted

I remember the "internet" around that time. Windows 3.1 and AOL were the big shots. 14.4kbps modems and computers that had only 386MHZ. Good times. But only a narrow minded person would believe that the internet, or computers for that matter, would fail. All technology updates at a very rapid rate. From Tapes to Compact Discs to Flash Media.

Comment Re:Near Anagram for Duracell (Score 1) 260

by Sagelinka on Monday March 08, 2010 @01:19PM (#31402238) Attached to: Energizer USB Battery Charger Software Infects PCs

That's interesting, it might be a coincidence though. Ive never heard of "Battery Manufactures" having malicious software on there usb products or blaming it on others. But in this information age anything is possible if it has $$ next to it.

Energizer USB Battery Charger Software Infects PCs 260

Posted by Soulskill on Monday March 08, 2010 @12:49PM from the bad-bunny dept.

swandives writes "Researchers at US-CERT have warned that software accompanying the Energizer DUO USB battery charger contains a Trojan that gives hackers total access to a Windows PC. The product was sold in the US, Latin America, Europe and Asia starting in 2007. Upon installation, the software creates the file 'Arucer.dll,' a Trojan that listens for commands on TCP port 7777. Upon receiving instructions, the Trojan can download and execute files, transmit files stolen from the PC, or tweak the Windows registry. Uninstalling the software disables the automatic execution of the Trojan. Users can also remove Arucer.dll from Windows' system32 directory and reboot the machine to disable the backdoor component."

How the Internet Didn't Fail As Predicted 259

Posted by samzenpus on Monday March 08, 2010 @12:22PM from the series-of-popular-tubes dept.

Lord Byron Eee PC writes "Newsweek is carrying a navel-gazing piece on how wrong they were when in 1995 they published a story about how the Internet would fail. The original article states, 'Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.' The article continues to say that online shopping will never happen, that airline tickets won't be purchased over the web, and that newspapers have nothing to fear. It's an interesting look back at a time when the Internet was still a novelty and not yet a necessity."

When the Power Goes Out At Google 135

Posted by Soulskill on Monday March 08, 2010 @12:07PM from the larry-and-sergey-ghost-stories dept.

1sockchuck writes "What happens when the power goes out in one of Google's mighty data centers? The company has issued an incident report on a Feb. 24 outage for Google App Engine, which went offline when an entire data center lost power. The post-mortem outlines what went wrong and why, lessons learned and steps taken, which include additional training and documentation for staff and new datastore configurations for App Engine. Google is earning strong reviews for its openness, which is being hailed as an excellent model for industry outage reports. At the other end of the spectrum is Australian host Datacom, where executives are denying that a Melbourne data center experienced water damage during weekend flooding, forcing tech media to document the outage via photos, user stories and emails from the NOC."

Theoretical Breakthrough For Quantum Cryptography 116

Posted by Soulskill on Monday March 08, 2010 @11:23AM from the add-qutrits-to-your-super-scrabble-words dept.

KentuckyFC writes "Quantum cryptography uses the quantum properties of photons to guarantee perfect secrecy. But one of its lesser known limitations is that it only works if Alice and Bob are perfectly aligned so that they can carry out well-defined polarization measurements on the photons as they arrive. Physicists say that Alice and Bob must share the same reference frame. That's OK if Alice and Bob are in their own ground-based labs, but it's a problem in many other applications, such as ground-to-satellite communications or even in chip-to-chip communications, because it's hard to keep chips still over distances of the order of the wavelength of light. Now a group of UK physicists have developed a way of doing quantum cryptography without sharing a reference frame. The trick is to use entangled triplets of photons, so-called qutrits, rather than entangled pairs. This solves the problem by embedding it in an extra abstract dimension, which is independent of space. So, as long as both Alice and Bob know the way in which all these abstract dimensions are related, the third provides a reference against which measurements of the other two can be made. That allows Alice and Bob to make any measurements they need without having to agree ahead of time on a frame of reference. That could be an important advance enabling the widespread use of quantum cryptography."

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