Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Announcements

Submission + - Obama Sets End of Iraq Combat for August 31st (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: President Barack Obama has announced that On August 31st the United States will cease all combat operations in Iraq although 50,000 troops will remain until the end of 2011. It's been a long seven and a half years with no guarantee of this announcement actually signifying the end of violence. Pundits are already speculating on whether or not this withdrawal speech is "Mission Accomplished 2." Possibly the most significant confirmation of and commitment to a withdrawal the world will hear from the United States in Iraq.
Iphone

Submission + - Microsoft Can Deblur Images Automatically (microsoft.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: At the annual SIGGRAPH show. Microsoft Research showed new technology that can remove the blur from images on your camera or phone using on-board sensors — the same sensors currently added to iPhone 4. No more blurry low light photos!
Security

Submission + - The Canadian who holds the key to the Internet (thestar.com)

Submitted by drbutts
drbutts writes: The Toronto Star has an interesting story on how they are securing DNS: It's housed in two high-security facilities separated by the North American landmass. The one authenticated map of the Internet. Were it to be lost — either through a catastrophic physical or cyber attack — it could be recreated by seven individuals spread around the globe. One of them is Ottawa's Norm Ritchie. Ritchie was recently chosen to hold one of seven smartcards that can rebuild the root key that underpins this system" called DNSSEC (Domain Name System Security Extensions). In essence, these seven can rebuild the architecture that allows users to know for certain where they are and where they are going when navigating the Web.

Submission + - Slashdot is Dying, New York Times Confims It (nytimes.com) 12

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The New York Times is running a story about how Slashdot has dropped in popularity compared to other news sites in social web space. Quote: "Why is Slashdot almost irrelevant to the social media community? It used to be the biggest driver of traffic to tech web sites, but now it hardly delivers any traffic at all to them. We explore some of the reasons, including input from our own community."
Security

Submission + - US Ability to Identify Nuclear Terrorists Decays

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "In a story reminiscent of Tom Clancy's "The Sum of All Fears," the NY Times reports that according to a report released by the National Research Council, the ability of the US to identify the source of a nuclear weapon used in a terrorist attack is fragile and eroding. The goals of the highly specialized detective work, known as nuclear attribution, is to clarify options for retaliation and to deter terrorists by letting them know that nuclear devices have fingerprints that atomic specialists can find and trace. “Although US nuclear forensics capabilities are substantial and can be improved, right now they are fragile, underresourced and, in some respects, deteriorating,” the report warns. “Without strong leadership, careful planning and additional funds, these capabilities will decline.” The report calls on the federal government to take steps to strengthen its forensic capabilities and argues for the necessity of better planning, more robust budgets, clearer lines of authority and more realistic exercises. “Much work remains to be done.” says Albert Carnesale, a nuclear engineer who during the cold war represented the United States in atomic negotiations."
Microsoft

Submission + - BP throws new doubt on oil spill safety system (computerworlduk.com)

Submitted by DMandPenfold
DMandPenfold writes: BP has cast doubt on the ability of its key Microsoft-based safety system to stop future accidents. Three months after the explosion that caused the huge oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, BP said “there can be no assurance” that a major global deployment of its in-house Operating Management System would identify all risks or provide information on the right actions to take when things go wrong. The rollout will be complete this year.

Submission + - Air Bus Crashed Into Margalla Hills, Islamabad (thedeepsilence.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The morning today, 7/28/2010, brought great loss to many people in Pakistan, as an airbus of AirBlue crashed into the margalla hills. None of the 152 passengers on board could survive.
Nintendo

Submission + - UK Courts rule Nintendo DS SD Card readers illegal (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by CheShACat
CheShACat writes: The UK law court has today ruled that SD Card readers for Nintendo DS are illegal, finding 2 vendors guilty of selling "Game copiers". The ruling by Justice Floyd is quoted as saying "The economic effect on Nintendo of the trade in these devices is substantial as each accused device can store and play copies of many Nintendo DS games [...] The mere fact that the device can be used for a non-infringing purpose is not a defence."

No word in the article as to what law in particular they were found to have broken, nor of the penalty the vendors are facing, but this looks like bad news for all kinds of hardware mod, on any platform, that would enable homebrew users to bypass vendor locks.
NASA

Submission + - NASA identifies Top Ten space junk missions (networkworld.com)

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes: While the recent US National Space Policy has given NASA new impetus to help solve the space debris problem, the space agency has defined the top 10 reasons so much junk is out there in the first place.
Transportation

Submission + - If You Don't Want Your Car Stolen, Make It Pink (familyhomesecurity.com) 1

Submitted by pickens
pickens writes: A study in the Netherlands illustrates car thieves’ preferences. From 2004-2008, the most commonly colored vehicle stolen was black. This may be because black vehicles look more luxurious. Following close behind black were gray/silver automobiles. Of the 109 pink cars in the study, not one was stolen. A bright and uncommon color, like pink, may be as effective deterrent as an expensive security system. Ben Vollaard, who conducted the research, wrote, “If the aversion to driving a car in an offbeat color is not too high – or if someone actually enjoys it – then buying deterrence through an uncommon car color may be at least as good a deal as buying deterrence through an expensive car security device.”

Submission + - MLC vs. SLC flash for enterprise SSDs (infostor.com)

Submitted by InfoStor
InfoStor writes: Until recently, conventional wisdom dictated that single-level cell (SLC) technology was the only type of NAND flash that was suitable for enterprise-class solid-state disk (SSD) drives. That situation is changing as multi-level cell (MLC) flash is benefiting from technology advances by memory, controller and SSD vendors, while maintaining its cost advantages over SLC SSDs.
Science

Submission + - Data sorting world record: 1 terabyte, 1 minute (scienceblog.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Computer scientists from the University of California, San Diego have broken “the terabyte barrier” — and a world record — when they sorted more than one terabyte of data (1,000 gigabytes or 1 million megabytes) in 60 seconds. During this 2010 “Sort Benchmark” competition — a sort of “World Cup of data sorting” — the UCSD team also tied a world record for fastest data sorting rate, sifting through one trillion data records in 172 minutes — and did so using just a quarter of the computing resources of the other record holder.

Submission + - Possible room temperature superconductor achieved

Submitted by TechkNighT_1337
TechkNighT_1337 writes: Netx big future blog post an interesting article about the Indian university of Bengal,reporting (pdf) possible superconducting effect in ambient room temperatures. from the article:

We report the observation of an exceptionally large room-temperature electrical conductivity in silver and aluminum layers deposited on a lead zirconate titanate (PZT) substrate. The surface resistance of the silver-coated samples also shows a sharp change near 313 K. The results are strongly suggestive of a superconductive interfacial layer, and have been interpreted in the framework of Bose-Einstein condensation of bipolarons as the suggested mechanism for high-temperature superconductivity in cuprates.

Slashdot Top Deals

Why did the Roman Empire collapse? What is the Latin for office automation?

Close