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Movies

Majel Roddenberry Dies At 76 356

Posted by timothy from the her-voice-prints-will-live-on dept.
unassimilatible writes "If there was ever a sad day for nerds, it's today, as Majel Barrett-Rodenberry has passed away. The widow of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry is best remembered as the gorgeous Nurse Christine Chapel from the original series, the pesky and officious Lwaxana Troi from The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, and of course the ubiquitous voice of Star Trek computers in movies, TV, and animated films (who hasn't used her voice as a system sound on their PC?). Majel also attended Star Trek conventions yearly and was a producer of Andromeda. Fortunately, Majel just finished her voice over work for the computers in J.J. Abrams' latest Trek movie. I have to admit, this made me sad, just having caught up on the entire TNG and DS9 series on DVD."
Input Devices

Submission + - How to charge 50+ USB devices?

Submitted by Onyma
Onyma writes: A question for my fellow slashdotters. We have come into a situation where we are picking up ~200 mini barcode scanners. Like many devices today these little units charge off a USB port. I have been looking for suggestions on how to charge dozens of these units at the same time. I'm looking for suggestions on either A. Large cheap powered USB hubs that can be stacked (physically to conserve space) or B. does anyone out there make such a device with say 20 powered USB ports just for charging? Thanks!
Robotics

Scandinavian Scientists Designing Robotic Snakes 129

Posted by samzenpus from the on-a-robot-plane dept.
Cowards Anonymous writes "The Sintef Group, a research company based in Trondheim, Norway, announced that it's designing a robot based on snakes. The 1.5-meter long robots, which are made of aluminum, are being designed to inspect and clean complicated industrial pipe systems that are typically narrow and inaccessible to humans. The intelligent robots have multiple joints to enable them to twist vertically and climb up through pipe systems to locate leaks in water systems, inspect oil and gas pipelines and clean ventilation systems."
Science

The World's Nine Largest Science Projects 89

Posted by samzenpus from the my-science-is-bigger-than-yours dept.
JBG667 writes "Nice overview of the 9 largest science projects currently ongoing. Some of the usual suspects are on the list including CERN, Space Elevator, Space Station, etc. As well as some lesser known including a 3,000-foot-tall 'Solar tower,' the ANTARES underwater neutrino detecting array, and more. Nice read for science buffs."
Idle

The Bathroom Server 6

Posted by samzenpus
A company was told that when their lease was up they'd have to move to a new suite a floor below. A new business would be taking over their space. This wouldn't have been a problem, except that they had just built a server room in the back of their office — equipped with air conditioning units, ventilation, dedicated and backup power — which couldn't be relocated. The solution building management came up with was to wall off the old door to the server closet and allow access to the server room via the handicapped stall in the ladies restroom. The door in our handicapped bathroom just leads to Narnia.
Programming

Bjarne Stroustrup Reveals All On C++ 371

Posted by CmdrTaco from the still-secrets-after-all-these-years dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Bjarne Stroustrup, the creative force behind one of the most widely used and successful programming languages — C++ — is featured in an in-depth 8-page interview where he reveals everything programmers and software engineers should know about C++; its history, what it was intended to do, where it is at now, and of course what all good code-writers should think about when using the language he created."
Mozilla

Real-World Firefox 3 Memory Usage Leads the Field 406

Posted by kdawson from the free-what-you-alloc dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The author developed a program to snapshot memory usage per process every 3 seconds on Windows. Using this he recorded 3 hours of memory usage for five different browsers under real-world usage scenarios: Safari 3.1, Firefox 3, Flock 1.2 (a browser based on Firefox 2), Opera 9.5, and Internet Explorer 8. A million data points indicate that Firefox 3 has a surprising advantage over the other browsers tested. These are real-world tests and not contrived benchmarks."

Comment Works great because it's not "Web 2.0" (Score 5, Insightful) 240

by Animats (#23921009) Attached to: Huge Traffic On Wikipedia's Non-Profit Budget

Most of Wikipedia is a collection of static pages. Most users of Wikipedia are just reading the latest version of an article, to which they were taken by a non-Wikipedia search engine. So all Wikipedia has to do for them is serve a static page. No database work or page generation is required.

Older revisions of pages come from the database, as do the versions one sees during editing and previewing, the history information, and such. Those operations involve the MySQL databases. There are only about 10-20 updates per second taking place in the editing end of the system. When a page is updated, static copies are propagated out to the static page servers after a few tens of seconds.

Article editing is a check-out/check in system. When you start editing a page, you get a version token, and when you update the page, the token has to match the latest revision or you get an edit conflict. It's all standard form requests; there's no need for frantic XMLHttpRequest processing while you're working on a page.

Because there are no ads, there's no overhead associated with inserting variable ad info into the pages. No need for ad rotators, ad trackers, "beacons" or similar overhead.
NASA

Groundbreaking Solar Mission Faces Chilly Death 134

Posted by timothy from the hardly-knew-ye dept.
iamlucky13 writes "Over 17 years ago, the Ulysses spacecraft was launched aboard the space shuttle Discovery for a unique NASA/ESA mission. While nearly all other probes travel along our solar system's ecliptic plane, Ulysses used a Jupiter gravity assist to swing 80 degrees out of plane, carrying it over the sun's poles for an unprecedented view. During a mission that lasted four times longer than planned, it has flown through the tails of several comets, helped pinpoint distant gamma-ray bursts, and provided data on the sun and its heliosphere from the better part of two solar cycles. Unfortunately, the natural reduction of power from its radioisotope thermal generator means it is now unable to even keep its attitude control fuel from freezing, and NASA has decided to formally conclude the mission on July 1."

First Ethernet Switch In Space 141

Posted by CowboyNeal from the iss-lan-party-arrives dept.
Rebecca will you marry me? writes "The ESA's Columbus laboratory module was added to the International Space Station in February, but Hewlett-Packard has only now chosen to reveal that the LAN onboard Columbus uses a ProCurve 2524 switch." HP admits it was the "most unusual and demanding" project ProCurve has done yet.
Space

Genetic Building Blocks Found In Meteorite 165

Posted by Soulskill from the rock-garden-of-eden dept.
FiReaNGeL writes to tell us scientists have confirmed that the components of genetic material could have originated in a place other than Earth. A recently published report explains how uracil and xanthine, two basic biological compounds, were found within a meteorite that landed in Australia. From Imperial College London: "They tested the meteorite material to determine whether the molecules came from the solar system or were a result of contamination when the meteorite landed on Earth. The analysis shows that the nucleobases contain a heavy form of carbon which could only have been formed in space. Materials formed on Earth consist of a lighter variety of carbon."
Supercomputing

Supercomputer Simulates Human Visual System 244

Posted by Soulskill from the i-can-see-clearly-now dept.
An anonymous reader writes "What cool things can be done with the 100,000+ cores of the first petaflop supercomputer, the Roadrunner, that were impossible to do before? Because our brain is massively parallel, with a relatively small amount of communication over long distances, and is made of unreliable, imprecise components, it's quite easy to simulate large chunks of it on supercomputers. The Roadrunner has been up only for about a week, and researchers from Los Alamos National Lab are already reporting inaugural simulations of the human visual system, aiming to produce a machine that can see and interpret as well as a human. After examining the results, the researchers 'believe they can study in real time the entire human visual cortex.' How long until we can simulate the entire brain?"

Comment Cynical First Post (Score 4, Insightful) 580

by Lord Byron II (#23568901) Attached to: Windows 7 Won't Have Compact "MinWin" Kernel
Great, an article telling us what Windows 7 isn't. While they're at it, somebody should write a story about how it doesn't use the Linux or MacOS kernels either. From the start Microsoft has been telling us that MinWin is an experimental, non-production kernel and that it wouldn't be in Windows 7. Now CNet reports it and its like new news all over again. Yawn.

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