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Windows

Performance Tests Show Early Windows 7 Build Beats Vista 534

Posted by timothy from the room-for-improvement dept.
The Other A.N. Other writes "How does the latest build of Windows 7 stack up against Windows Vista? The answer seems to be very well if the benchmarks run by ZDNet are anything to go by. If Microsoft keeps up the good then Windows 7 should be head and shoulders better than Vista. 'What we have here is one set of data points for one particular system, but I think that the results are very promising. The fact that Windows 7 comes out on top in three out of four of these tests at this early stage is very promising indeed. The boot time and PCMark Vantage results are particularly good.'"
Cellphones

Talk-Powered Cell Phones Won't Need Batteries 197

Posted by samzenpus from the talk-charging dept.
alphadogg writes "It's possible that in the future conversations on your cell phone could generate enough electrical power to run the phone, without batteries. That's one possible outcome of recent work by a team of Texas researchers, who appear to have discovered that by building a certain type of piezoelectric material to a specific thickness (about 21 nanometers, compared to a typical human hair of 100,000 nanometers), you can boost its energy production by 100 percent. And the technology could power not just phones, but a whole range of low-power mobile devices and sensors. The breakthrough is an example of 'energy harvesting' that can convert one kind of energy, such as vibrations or solar rays, into electricity."
Earth

Acorns Disappear Across the Country 474

Posted by kdawson from the curiouser-and-curiouser dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Botanist Rod Simmons thought he was going crazy when couldn't find any acorns near his home in Arlington County, Virginia. 'I'm used to seeing so many acorns around and out in the field, it's something I just didn't believe,' said Simmons. Then calls started coming in about crazy squirrels. Starving, skinny squirrels eating garbage, inhaling bird feed, greedily demolishing pumpkins. Squirrels boldly scampering into the road. And a lot more calls about squirrel roadkill. Simmons and Naturalist Greg Zell began to do some research and found Internet discussion groups, including one on Topix called 'No acorns this year,' reporting the same thing from as far away as the Midwest up through New England and Nova Scotia. 'We live in Glenwood Landing, N.Y., and don't have any acorns this year. Really weird,' wrote one. 'None in Kansas either! Curiouser and curiouser.' The absence of acorns could have something to do with the weather and Simmons has a theory about the wet and dry cycles. But many skeptics say oaks in other regions are producing plenty of acorns, and the acorn bust is nothing more than the extreme of a natural boom-and-bust cycle. But the bottom line is that no one really knows. 'It's sort of a mystery,' Zell said."

Comment Re:Is it that hard? (Score 2, Insightful) 223

by Nathanbp (#25684157) Attached to: The State of Electronic Voting In the 2008 US Elections

Am I the only one that is completely confused by how difficult it seems to be to make an electronic voting machine and have it actually work?

First, I'd like to point out that it is nearly impossible to make an electronic voting machine of any kind and prove to everyone that it works given the standard limitations on voting in the US. This limitation is that there is no way to prove to anyone how you voted. Given that limitation, and all the possibilities for sabotage (hardware and software), proving that your system works is nearly impossible. (I am aware that there exists cryptographic methods of doing this, but I sure wouldn't trust Diebold to set it up right.)

However, more importantly than that, and referenced in the article (sorry, I did read it), the voting system has to not only be provable to computer scientists, but Joe Average has to have faith that it counts accurately as well. This is pretty much impossible without voter verified paper ballots.
Software

(Useful) Stupid Vim Tricks? 702

Posted by timothy from the make-it-roll-over dept.
haroldag writes "I thoroughly enjoyed the recent post about Unix tricks, so I ask Slashdot vim users, what's out there? :Sex, :b#, marks, ctags. Any tricks worth sharing?"

Comment Re:Bah, subtlety: (Score 5, Interesting) 2362

by Nathanbp (#25652467) Attached to: (Useful) Stupid Unix Tricks?

:(){ :|:& };:

:() defines a function named : with no arguments. { :|:& } is what the function does. :|: calls itself twice (with a pipe between the two), and the & at the end runs it in the background as a new process. The ; finishes off that command, then the last : runs the function, starting the fork bomb (as each run starts 2 new processes, each of which starts 2 new processes...).
Google

Google Sheds Light On 'Dark Web' With PDF Search 78

Posted by Soulskill from the are-you-afraid-of-the-dark-web dept.
CWmike writes "Google this week took another step in its effort to shed light on the so-called Dark Web, announcing that its search engine can now search scanned documents in a PDF. In April, Google announced that it was looking for ways for its search engine to index HTML forms such as drop-down boxes or select menus that otherwise couldn't be found or indexed." An announcement is available at the official Google blog, and it contains some demonstration searches.
Google

Google Book Search Settlement Receiving Criticism 119

Posted by Soulskill from the not-everyone-is-on-the-same-page dept.
waderoush writes "While James Gleick, Lawrence Lessig, and other pundits have reacted positively to this week's proposed settlement of the publishing industry's lawsuit against Google over the Google Book Search project, a deeper study of the agreement turns up some worrisome provisions that could make online access to books much more costly and difficult than it needs to be. Harvard University's libraries, for example, declined to endorse the settlement over concerns that it provides no mechanism for keeping the cost of access to books reasonable. And while the parties to the settlement have made much of the clause providing public libraries with free full-text access to Google's database of over 7 million out-of-print books, Xconomy has a post pointing out that this access is restricted to exactly one Google terminal per library. So, you can read books for free — as long as you're the first person to get to your public library's computer room in the morning."
Government

Paper Ballots Will Return In MD and VA 420

Posted by timothy from the but-this-baby-is-soaked-in-bathwater dept.
cheezitmike writes "According to a story in the Washington Post, 'Maryland and Virginia are going old school after Tuesday's election. Maryland will scrap its $65 million electronic system and go back to paper ballots in time for the 2010 midterm elections. In Virginia, localities are moving to paper after the General Assembly voted last year to phase out electronic voting machines as they wear out. "The battle for the hearts and minds of voters on whether electronic systems are good or bad has been lost," Brace said. The academics and computer scientists who said they were unreliable "have won that battle."'"
Robotics

Robotic Surgery On a Beating Heart 54

Posted by kdawson from the got-a-good-beat-you-can-dance-to-it dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Serious heart surgery usually involves stopping the organ and keeping the patient alive with a cardiopulmonary bypass machine. But this risks brain damage and requires a long recuperation. Scientists at Harvard University and Children's Hospital Boston have now developed a device that lets surgeons operate on a beating heart with a steady hand. The 'robotic' device uses 3-D ultrasound images to predict and compensate for the motion of the heart so that the surgeon can work on a faulty valve as it moves. The approach should improve recovery times and give a surgeon instant feedback on the success of the procedure, the researchers say. Here's a (slightly gory) video of the device in action."
Microsoft

Microsoft Calls Today Global Anti-Piracy Day 500

Posted by timothy from the pirates-live-for-live-cd-distros dept.
arcticstoat points out an article at Custom PC, according to which: "Microsoft has announced that today is Global Anti-Piracy Day. Launching several global initiatives, the aim is to raise awareness of the damage to software innovation that Microsoft says is caused by piracy. ... As well as educating people about piracy, Microsoft has also initiated a huge list of legal proceedings that it's taking out against pirates. Microsoft isn't messing about when it says 'global' either. The list of 49 countries that Microsoft is targeting spans six continents, and ranges from the UK and the US all the way through to Chile, Egypt, Kuwait, Indonesia and China." Interestingly enough, unauthorized copies of Vista might not be harming the company all that much: reader twitter was among several to contribute links to a related story at Computer World which highlights Microsoft attorney Bonnie MacNaughton's acknowledgement that pirates prefer Windows XP over Vista and Office 2003 over 2007.
Cellphones

E17, Slimmed Down For Cell Phones 166

Posted by timothy from the durned-amazing-looking dept.
twitter writes "Want to run Enlightenment on your cell phone? The Rasterman's recent efforts bring E17 to Open Moko FreeRunner and Treo 650: 'According to the Rasterman, when used with his updated illume stack and new Elementary widget set, E17 can now run in just 32MB of RAM, on an ARM9 processor clocked at 317MHz. To prove it, he is distributing a Linux kernel and E17/Illume/Elementary stack for Palm's Treo650. The stack can be launched from PalmOS without touching the device's flash storage, he says.' While Microsoft fumbles with limited 'instant on,' GNU/Linux rules the embedded world and that's the only thing going in the IT market right now."
Security

World Bank Under Cybersiege In "Unprecedented Crisis" 377

Posted by kdawson from the wolf-really dept.
JagsLive sends in a Fox News report on large-scale and possibly ongoing security breaches at the World Bank. "The World Bank Group's computer network — one of the largest repositories of sensitive data about the economies of every nation — has been raided repeatedly by outsiders for more than a year, FOX News has learned. It is still not known how much information was stolen. But sources inside the bank confirm that servers in the institution's highly-restricted treasury unit were deeply penetrated with spy software last April. Invaders also had full access to the rest of the bank's network for nearly a month in June and July. In total, at least six major intrusions — two of them using the same group of IP addresses originating from China — have been detected at the World Bank since the summer of 2007, with the most recent breach occurring just last month. In a frantic midnight e-mail to colleagues, the bank's senior technology manager referred to the situation as an 'unprecedented crisis.' In fact, it may be the worst security breach ever at a global financial institution. And it has left bank officials scrambling to try to understand the nature of the year-long cyber-assault, while also trying to keep the news from leaking to the public." Update: 10/11 01:15 GMT by T : Massive spyware infestations might be good cause to reevaluate the TCO of non-Windows systems on the desktop.

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