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IBM

IBM's Plans For the Cell Processor 124

Posted by Soulskill from the breeding-a-better-hamster dept.
angry tapir writes "Development around the original Cell processor hasn't stalled, and IBM will continue to develop chips and supply hardware for future gaming consoles, a company executive said. IBM is working with gaming machine vendors including Nintendo and Sony, said Jai Menon, CTO of IBM's Systems and Technology Group, during an interview Thursday. 'We want to stay in the business, we intend to stay in the business,' he said. IBM confirmed in a statement that it continues to manufacture the Cell processor for use by Sony in its PlayStation 3. IBM also will continue to invest in Cell as part of its hybrid and multicore chip strategy, Menon said."

Comment Impact of FOSS bashing on developer hires? (Score 1) 231

by ogrisel (#33433658) Attached to: Why Microsoft Is Being Nicer To Open Source
Also don't you think that the FOSS bashing policy by MS was also turning off a large amount of very skilled developers who likes to work with opensource tools and contribute to open source projects? Is this unintended consequence negligible compared to other corporate strategic areas such as sales and competition vs Linux servers?
Security

ReCAPTCHA.net Now Vulnerable to Algorithmic Attack 251

Posted by timothy from the bless-you! dept.
n3ond4x writes "reCAPTCHA.net algorithms have been developed to solve the current CAPTCHA at an efficacy of 30%. The algorithms were disclosed at DEFCON 18 over the weekend and have since been made available online. Also available is a video demonstration of random reCAPTCHA.net CAPTCHAs being subjected to the algorithms." There's probably an excellent Firefox plugin to render this page's color scheme more bearable. Note: the PowerPoint presentation linked opens fine in OpenOffice, and the video speaks for itself.
Idle

iPhone 3G vs. Solar Death Ray 104

Posted by samzenpus from the burn-baby-burn dept.
You'll note that after its destruction, the phone still plays music.
GNU is Not Unix

New LLVM Debugger Subproject Already Faster Than GDB 174

Posted by timothy from the pop-will-eat-itself dept.
kthreadd writes "The LLVM project is now working on a debugger called LLDB that's already faster than GDB and could be a possible alternative in the future for C, C++, and Objective-C developers. With the ongoing success of Clang and other LLVM subprojects, are the days of GNU as the mainstream free and open development toolchain passé?" LLVM stands for Low Level Virtual Machine; Wikipedia as usual has a good explanation of the parent project.
Education

Gulf Oil Spill Disaster — Spawn of the Living Dead 228

Posted by timothy from the less-on-your-plate dept.
grrlscientist writes "A recently published study, intended to provide data to commercial fisheries in the Gulf of Mexico so they maximize their catch of Yellowfin Tuna, Thunnus albacares, whilst avoiding bycatch of critically endangered Atlantic (Northern) Bluefin Tuna, Thunnus thynnus, suggests that the Deepwater Horizon oil leak may devastate the endangered Atlantic bluefin population, causing it to completely collapse or possibly go extinct."
Databases

What Is New In PostgreSQL 9.0 213

Posted by CmdrTaco from the better-than-prestgresql dept.
Jamie noted a blog that says "PostgreSQL 9.0 beta 2 just got released this week. We may see another beta before 9.0 is finally released, but it looks like PostgreSQL 9.0 will be here probably sometime this month. Robert Treat has a great slide presentation showcasing all the new features."

Comment Re:Not really a good analogy (Score 2, Insightful) 128

by ogrisel (#32361930) Attached to: Berners-Lee Deconstructs a Bag of Chips
The point of Tim Berners-Lee is to say that the vocabulary used to provide the nutritional information was standardized by FDA and related laws. ("defined by *terms* generated by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)", emphasis mine). The valuation of those properties or terms on this specific packaging are produced by Utz. To speak the semantic web lingua, the nutrition info ontology has been authored by FDA while the instance data on the package was authored by Utz reusing the FDA ontology.
Space

Geomagnetic Storm In Progress 110

Posted by Soulskill from the sky-is-falling dept.
shogun writes "The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports a strong geomagnetic storm is in progress. The shuttle, ISS and GPS systems may be affected." They think this storm was caused by a weak solar flare on April 3rd. As you may expect, this has caused some unusually impressive northern lights since it started. What you may not expect is a photograph from Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi aboard the International Space Station showing the aurora from orbit. He apparently tweets a lot of pictures from space. He and his crewmates have taken over 100,000 pictures since coming aboard the ISS.
Businesses

Microsoft and Apple Rumble Into Middle Age 367

Posted by CmdrTaco from the lookit-those-pot-bellies dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Bill Briggs writes on MSNBC that the two tech titans are rumbling into middle age as Microsoft marked its 35th birthday on Sunday and Apple turned 34 late last week. But while Microsoft, to some, appears a tad flabby in the middle — a Chrysler Town & Country driver with a 9 pm bedtime — Apple, in some eyes, looks sleeker and younger — a hipster in a ragtop Beemer packed with chic friends sporting mobile toys. 'The difference between the two companies is that Apple has been fearless about transformational change while Microsoft has been reluctant to leave its past behind,' says Casey Ayers, president of MegatonApps. 'Microsoft has always been loath to change and risk alienating some of its customers, but its inability to leave the past behind has left their product line bloated and dysfunctional.' On current accounting ledgers, Microsoft overshadows Apple: Microsoft's market cap is $255.75 billion; Apple's is $213.98 billion. But Apple is getting awfully big — awfully fast — in Microsoft's rearview mirror. Consider that a decade ago Microsoft's market cap was almost $590 billion and Apple's was about $16 billion. So while Apple cheered its opening weekend of iPad sales, what wish should Microsoft have made when it blew out its birthday candles Sunday? 'More than anything, Microsoft's birthday wish should be for fearless leadership,' says Ayers. 'Without someone at the top who feels an urgency to constantly innovate in meaningful ways, Microsoft will shrink and become less relevant with each birthday to come.'"
The Military

Navy Wants Cyber Weapons That Shoot Data Beams 123

Posted by timothy from the all-your-base-all-your-base-all-your-base dept.
ectotherm writes "By 2018, the US Navy hopes to equip its fighter jets with the ability to shoot data streams containing 'specialized waveforms and algorithms,' useful in an electronic attack or cyber-invasion. A few non-classified details here."
Programming

Graph-View of Collaborative Development At GitHub 14

Posted by timothy from the better-art-than-most-coffee-shops dept.
VindictivePantz writes "In an interesting graphical view on collaborative development, FlowingData writes: 'GitHub is a large community where coders can collaborate on software development projects. People check code in and out, make edits, etc. Franck Cuny maps this community (with Gephi), based on information in thousands of user profiles.'"
Microsoft

Microsoft Sends Flowers To Internet Explorer 6 Funeral 151

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the sorry-about-your-loss dept.
Several readers have written with a fun followup to yesterday's IE6 funeral. Apparently Microsoft, in a rare moment of self-jest, took the time to send flowers, condolences, and a promise to meet at MIX. The card reads: "Thanks for the good times IE6, see you all @ MIX when we show a little piece of IE Heaven. The Internet Explorer Team @ Microsoft."
First Person Shooters (Games)

Quake 3 For Android 137

Posted by Soulskill from the can-i-get-a-hell-yeah dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Over the last two months I ported Quake 3 to Android as a hobby project. It only took a few days to get the game working. More time was spent on tweaking the game experience. Right now the game runs at 25fps on a Motorola Milestone/Droid. 'Normally when you compile C/C++ code using the Android NDK, the compiler targets a generic ARMv5 CPU which uses software floating-point. Without any optimizations and audio Quake 3 runs at 22fps. Since Quake 3 uses a lot of floating-point calculations, I tried a better C-compiler (GCC 4.4.0 from Android GIT) which supports modern CPUs and Neon SIMD instructions. Quake 3 optimized for Cortex-A8 with Neon is about 15% faster without audio and 35% with audio compared to the generic ARMv5 build. Most likely the performance improvement compared to the ARMv5 build is not that big because the system libraries of the Milestone have been compiled with FPU support, so sin/cos/log/.. take advantage of the FPU.''

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