427356
submission
jschauma writes:
Yahoo! published a press
release, announcing that "it has become a platinum sponsor of The Apache
Software Foundation (ASF)." In their company
blog, Yahoo! points out their particular interest in Lucene as well as Hadoop and that they have hired Doug Cutting, creator of
both projects and VP at Apache. (Lucene powers the search on Wikipedia;
Yahoo! also provides
hosting capacity to Wikimedia.)
426632
submission
SoyChemist writes:
Just before completing his 90th orbit around the sun, Sir Arthur C. Clarke recorded what may be one of his last messages to the world.
"The golden age of space is only just beginning... Space travel and space tourism will one day become almost as commonplace as flying to exotic destinations on our own planet," said the legendary science fiction author.
He wished for proof of extraterrestiral life, freedom from our addiction to oil, and an end to the civil war in Sri Lanka — his adopted home. The wheelchair-bound legend concluded by saying that in spite of his many accomplishments, he would most like to be remembered as a writer that entertained many people.
420145
story
eldavojohn writes
"There exists a little-known problem of missing regular matter that has perhaps been overshadowed by the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy. Computer models show that there should be about 40% more regular matter than we see... so where is it? From the article: 'The study indicated a significant portion of the gas is in the filaments — which connect galaxy clusters — hidden from direct observation in enormous gas clouds in intergalactic space known as the Warm-Hot Intergalactic Medium, or WHIM, said CU-Boulder Professor Jack Burns... The team performed one of the largest cosmological supercomputer simulations ever, cramming 2.5 percent of the visible universe inside a computer to model a region more than 1.5 billion light-years across.' This hypothesis will be investigated and hopefully proved/disproved when telescopes are completed in Chile and the Antarctic. The paper will be up for review in this week's edition of the the Astrophysical Journal."
418955
submission
Stony Stevenson writes:
Iranian scientists claim to have used 216 microprocessors made by AMD to build the country's most powerful supercomputer, despite a ban on the export of U.S. computer equipment to the Middle Eastern nation. Scientists at the Iranian High Performance Computing Research Center at the country's Amirkabir University of Technology said they used a Linux-cluster architecture in building the system of Opteron processors. The supercomputer has a theoretical peak performance of 860 giga-flops, the posting said. The disclosure, made in an undated posting on Amirkabir's Web site, brought an immediate response Monday from AMD, which said it has never authorized shipments of products either directly or indirectly to Iran or any other embargoed country.
362333
submission
FreeMichael61 writes:
Is this the beginning of the end? None less than the Open Document Foundation (ODF) has condemned the open document format to irrelevance. The Foundation's VP, Sam Hiser told eWEEK that ODF is a "sideline drama, only useful insofar as it has provided a foil for [Microsoft's] OOXML [Office Open XML]."
Microsoft knows what to do with that kind of opening. Its format guru, Jason Matusow, responded that "when it comes down to the real world of meeting their needs, even the organization that has a charter to promote ODF decided that a different format was better for it."
ODF provided and ceremonial sword and knelt over it; Microsoft simply gave them a gentle shove. Adieu ODF?
356519
submission
ChristmasOnMars writes:
ExtremeTech's Joel Durahm points out that DirectX 10 is a dog, noting that Microsoft made a lot of promises that aren't coming true. "I haven't noticed much of a performance improvement, or the promised visual splendor, that Microsoft seems to think DirectX 10 provides. So far, in most games, engaging DirectX 10 mode cripples them on all but the most powerful computers."
