Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Space

Submission + - 30th Anniversary of the Wow! Signal

Submitted by Himring
Himring writes: Today marks the 30th anniversary of the single most significant event, to date, that points to possible evidence of ETI. On this day in 1977, Dr. Jerry R. Ehman circled data retrieved from the "Big Ear" radio telescope of the Ohio State University Radio Observatory. The telescope has since been destroyed, and although other, modern telescopes have tried (such as the VLA) none of have successfully reproduced the results of that day. By and large, all possibilities of an earth-based signal causing the event have been ruled out as well as any possible natural phenomenon. Still, Dr. Ehman has remained reserved and stated that he doesn't want to draw, "vast conclusions from half-vast data." Here is the link to Dr. Ehman's 30th Anniversary Report.
It's funny. Laugh.

Submission + - Girlfriend Stabs Boyfriend Over Game System (olgn.net)

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: As seen on OLGn

A Warren woman is in jail and the father of one of her children is in critical condition after a stabbing early Monday morning at a Buckeye Avenue N.W. home. Police say an argument that started over a missing video game system led to the arrest of 30-year-old Tara Wheatley and a flight to Cleveland MetroHealth Medical Center for her boyfriend, Andrew P. McMichael, who had stab wounds to his back, neck and left arm.
Education

Submission + - German Government Publication Promotes Pedophilia

Submitted by uthus
uthus writes: The German Government's Ministry for Family Affairs has released a publication extolling the virtues of clitoral and vaginal stimulation of daughters as young as one by their fathers.

"Fathers do not devote enough attention to the clitoris and vagina of their daughters. Their caresses too seldom pertain to these regions, while this is the only way the girls can develop a sense of pride in their sex," reads the booklet regarding 1-3 year olds. The authors rationalize, "The child touches all parts of their father's body, sometimes arousing him. The father should do the same."
Space

Submission + - The Weird and Wonderful Gadgets of the Phoenix (gizmodo.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Phoenix Mission is on its way to Mars and Gizmodo has a collection of the heavy-duty weird-looking gadgets aboard the spacecraft, like MARDI — the Mars Descent Imager. Its 1,024 x 1,024 pixels CCD and refractive optics will capture 66 wide-angle color images of the landing site — all while plummeting from 5 miles above the planet's surface.
Unix

Submission + - Open Sound System (OSS4) goes GPLv2 (opensound.com)

Submitted by
mrcgran
mrcgran writes: "The Open Sound System (OSS) is one of the first sound systems for Linux, predating ALSA, but in the last 10 years it's stalled in version 3.8 (the last public GPL version) and it's being replaced by ALSA as the sound system of choice in Linux. ALSA is a Linux-only solution, while OSS works in a range of Unixes as well, and both have advantages and disadvantages over the other. Now, OSS4 is out under a GPLv2 license, with a number of advanced features over ALSA, like its new dynamic VMIXing capabilities, low-latency kernel modules, simple API and many other features. This release seems to be important enough to shake the foundations of the current desktop sound systems, specially in Linux."
Graphics

Submission + - Ready for a virtual beer?

Submitted by
Roland Piquepaille
Roland Piquepaille writes: "If you're attending SIGGRAPH 2007 next week in San Diego, don't miss a demonstration done by Australian and South Korean researchers. They will pour virtual beer during the conference. They say that 'the physics of bubble creation in carbonated drinks like beer is complex,' but add that their fluid special effects software was able to capture this complexity. Moreover, through what they call smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH), their software 'uses less computer power and takes less time to get better results than other special effects software it has been benchmarked against.' Now the researchers want to sell their approach to Hollywood studios. But read more for many additional references and images showing a simulation of pouring of ale and stout into a beer mug."
Censorship

Submission + - Senate Committee Votes to Expand TV Ratings Techno (wired.com)

Submitted by
UltraAyla
UltraAyla writes: "WIRED is reporting that the Senate Commerce Committee voted on Thursday to advance the Child Safe Viewing Act to the Senate floor. From the article:

The Federal Communications Commission shall consider advanced blocking technologies that — 1. may be appropriate across a wide variety of distribution platforms, including wired, wireless, and Internet platforms; 2. may be appropriate across a wide variety of devices capable of transmitting or receiving video or audio programming


The article points out that "it's not clear how any filtering technology could work with the explosion of video-sharing sites like YouTube, the amount of content that isn't created by American companies.""
Data Storage

Submission + - What film genres really benefit from HD? 1

Submitted by
thegirlorthecar.com
thegirlorthecar.com writes: "I'm thinking your preference of either standard DVDs or HD formats really comes down to whether the kinds of video you like to watch benefit from being in HD. So I'm putting it to the test, and asking what genres of movies you watch, and whether you are, or would like to be buying HD?"
Supercomputing

Submission + - NASA to build largest Supercomputer ever (linuxworld.com.au) 1

Submitted by Onlyodin
Onlyodin writes: The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has given the green light to a project that will build the largest ever supercomputer based on Silicon Graphics' (SGI) 512-processor Altix computers.

Called Project Columbia and costing around $160-million, the 10,240-processor system will be used by researchers at the Advanced Supercomputing Facility at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.

What makes Project Columbia unique is the size of the multiprocessor Linux systems, or nodes, that it clusters together. It is common for supercomputers to be built of thousands of two-processor nodes, but the Ames system uses SGI's NUMAlink switching technology and ProPack Linux operating system enhancements to connect 512-processor nodes, each of which will have more than 1,000G bytes of memory.

Full Story at Linuxworld
Google

Submission + - Search Engine Spamming By Academic Publishers (blogsci.com)

Submitted by
ObsessiveMathsFreak
ObsessiveMathsFreak writes: "Pierre Far at BlogSci reports on how Academic Publishers are engaging search engine spamming, specifically cloaking. Search engines bots crawling the sites of Springer and Reed Elsevier are shown the entire academic articles, and excerpts are displayed to users. But when users click on the suggested link, they are shown a different page demanding payment for the opportunity to read the same article(~$40 per paper). Academics are beginning to gripe about this, and the theoretical physics community is debating the issue the N-Category Cafe Blog, where not a few academics are expressing their ire at the practice. With services like Live Search Academic and Google Scholar dependant on their cooperation, it seems unlikely that Academic Publishers will suffer the fate of BMW."

Slashdot Top Deals

Serving coffee on aircraft causes turbulence.

Close