mkaushik - Slashdot User

Personalized Search From Google Now Opt-Out 206

Posted by Soulskill on Sunday December 06, 2009 @10:36AM from the escort-on-the-road-to-enlightenment dept.

An anonymous reader writes "CNet reports that 'Google now intends to deliver customized search results even to those searching its site without having signed into a Google account.' This may be what finally drives me to seriously experiment with cookie-free browsing. I consider non-personalized search results to be of value. They quasi-subconsciously give me a better perspective of the full range of information and ideas on the net. That, and I'm also a bit paranoid about a coming world with push-button infrastructure for personalized mis/disinformation."

Infinity Ward Fights Against Modern Warfare 2 Cheaters 203

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday December 01, 2009 @07:56AM from the be-careful-they-cheat dept.

Faithbleed writes "IW's Robert Bowling reports on his twitter account that Infinity Ward is giving 2,500 Modern Warfare 2 cheaters the boot. The news comes as the war between IW and MW2's fans rages over the decision to go with IWnet hosting instead of dedicated servers. Unhappy players were quick to come up with hacks that would allow their own servers and various other changes." Despite the dedicated-server complaints, Modern Warfare 2 has sold ridiculously well.

KDE Rebrands, Introduces KDE Plasma Desktop 364

Posted by timothy on Wednesday November 25, 2009 @05:59PM from the postitioning-for-clarity dept.

Jiilik Oiolosse writes "The KDE community has killed the term K Desktop Environment (previously the Kool Desktop Environment). 'KDE' had previously ambiguously referred to both the community, and the complete set of programs and tools produced by the KDE community which together formed a desktop user interface. This set of tools, including the window manager, panels and configuration utilities, which KDE terms a 'workspace,' will now be shipped under the term 'KDE Plasma Desktop.' This allows KDE to ship a separate workspace called 'Plasma Netbook,' and independently market the various KDE applications as usable in any workspace, whether it be the Plasma Desktop, Windows, or XFCE."

US Air Force Buying Another 2,200 PS3s 144

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday November 25, 2009 @05:02AM from the quick-who-knows-a-good-ps3-flight-sim dept.

bleedingpegasus sends word that the US Air Force will be grabbing up 2,200 new PlayStation 3 consoles for research into supercomputing. They already have a cluster made from 336 of the old-style (non-Slim) consoles, which they've used for a variety of purposes, including "processing multiple radar images into higher resolution composite images (known as synthetic aperture radar image formation), high-def video processing, and 'neuromorphic computing.'" According to the Justification Review Document (DOC), "Once the hardware configuration is implemented, software code will be developed in-house for cluster implementation utilizing a Linux-based operating software."

Comment Re:And the problem with this is??? (Score 1) 570

by mkaushik on Wednesday November 18, 2009 @07:23PM (#30150496) Attached to: US Government Using PS3s To Break Encryption

Really what is the problem with this

The problem is that a tool is being used weirdly. Is a PS3 really a more powerful parallel computer per dollar than the various cards from Nvidia and ATI? Maybe it is, but if it is, then I have a gripe against Nvidia and ATI.

It is not. Plus with CUDA, there is much more scope for expandability with new GPUs coming to the market every so often. Why did they use PS3s?

Comment Re:But how can you trust the results? (Score 5, Informative) 260

by mkaushik on Tuesday October 27, 2009 @03:10AM (#29881327) Attached to: Asus Releases Desktop-Sized Supercomputer

Then you would be happy to know that Nvidia's new Fermi chip supports ECC throughout the architecture.

Comment Re:Why not the PS3? (Score 4, Interesting) 101

by mkaushik on Saturday September 12, 2009 @04:44PM (#29400787) Attached to: Parallel Processing For Cardiac Simulations Using an Xbox 360

He should've used something like CUDA instead, for long term gains. This would have shown far better performance than the Xbox's GPU (which is quite dated now), and easy scalability as better GPUs keep coming to the market. His familiarity with Xbox programming might have enabled him to come up to speed with CUDA quickly.

India's First Stealth Fighter To Fly In 4 Months 611

Posted by timothy on Sunday August 30, 2009 @10:36PM from the but-now-everyone-knows-about-it dept.

xmpcray writes "Less than four months from now, India's first stealth fighter will fly for the first time. It is called the Fifth Generation Fighter Aircraft, or FGFA, and is being developed in Russia by Sukhoi. Several of the technologies being developed for the stealth fighter have evolved from those used in the Sukhoi 30 MKI. Considered the most maneuverable fighter in the world, the Sukhoi 30 MKI uses thrust vectored engines, which deflect the exhaust from its engines to extreme angles, enabling the jet to pull off violent maneuvers like a flat spin — where the jet literally spins around on its axis."

NVIDIA Predicts 570x GPU Performance Boost 295

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Friday August 28, 2009 @05:17PM from the lets-talk-about-diminishing-returns dept.

Gianna Borgnine writes "NVIDIA is predicting that GPU performance is going to increase a whopping 570-fold in the next six years. According to TG Daily, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang made the prediction at this year's Hot Chips symposium. Huang claimed that while the performance of GPU silicon is heading for a monumental increase in the next six years — making it 570 times faster than the products available today — CPU technology will find itself lagging behind, increasing to a mere 3 times current performance levels. 'Huang also discussed a number of "real-world" GPU applications, including energy exploration, interactive ray tracing and CGI simulations.'"

Comment Re:kanji input (Score 2, Informative) 647

by mkaushik on Monday August 24, 2009 @03:32PM (#29176753) Attached to: Apple To Ship Mac OS X Snow Leopard On August 28

Isn't this the OS X version which has OpenCL integrated into it? If yes, is that not considered a big enough improvement?

US Navy Tries To Turn Seawater Into Jet Fuel 402

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday August 20, 2009 @01:52AM from the ocean-in-the-tank dept.

Hugh Pickens writes "New Scientist reports that, faced with global warming and potential oil shortages, the US Navy is experimenting with making jet fuel from seawater by processing seawater into unsaturated short-chain hydrocarbons that with further refining could be made into kerosene-based jet fuel. The process involves extracting carbon dioxide dissolved in the water and combining it with hydrogen — obtained by splitting water molecules using electricity — to make a hydrocarbon fuel, a variant of a chemical reaction called the Fischer-Tropsch process, which is used commercially to produce a gasoline-like hydrocarbon fuel from syngas, a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen often derived from coal. The Navy team have been experimenting to find out how to steer the CO2-producing process away from producing unwanted methane by finding a different catalyst than the usual one based on cobalt. 'The idea of using CO2 as a carbon source is appealing,' says Philip Jessop, a chemist at Queen's University adding that to make a jet fuel that is properly 'green,' the energy-intensive electrolysis that produces the hydrogen will need to use a carbon-neutral energy source; and the complex multi-step process will always consume significantly more energy than the fuel it produces could yield. 'It's a lot more complicated than it at first looks.'"

Xbox Gaming Platform To Span Web, Console, Mobile 33

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday August 11, 2009 @11:02PM from the triple-threat dept.

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Ars Technica: "According to a job posting from August 10, 2009, Microsoft is looking for a LIVE Community Director in the Entertainment & Devices Division. The job posting seems to suggest that Microsoft is looking to bring the Xbox Live, Windows Mobile, and other similar properties closer together. More specifically, there's talk of a 'casual and social gaming platform' that would be available via more than just one device: 'The LIVE Engagement Team is looking for a LIVE Community Director to manage its LIVE community strategy and execution across a range of properties, from Xbox LIVE to Windows Mobile. This senior position will play a vital role in the community space as the LIVE Engagement team builds and program's Microsoft's next-generation, LIVE-enabled casual and social gaming platform across the Web, the console, mobile and beyond.' The first key responsibility listed in the job posting is to '[d]evelop a community strategy that leverages all parts of the LIVE Services team to deliver scenarios and engagement across three screens.'"

Comment Re:It works really well (Score 1) 539

by mkaushik on Thursday August 06, 2009 @05:25PM (#28979123) Attached to: Apple Working On Tech To Detect Purchasers' "Abuse"

Similar experience here. My Compaq Presario R4000 laptop stopped working abruptly while I was sitting in the university lab. It wasn't even plugged in, was running off the battery, and the display just went blank. The LCD had probably conked off, for I could run an external DFP off it. Anyway, since it was still under warranty, I shipped it off. I got a call from the service center, saying that I had dropped liquid on it, and the hard drive, motherboard, CPU and LCD were all shot and had to be replaced, and gave me a bill of around $700 (original cost of the laptop was $1200). I was livid, but no amount of reasoning/cussing changed anything. "We'll ship it back if you don't want to fix it". Fucking turds, those Compaq folks. Will never buy anything from them every again, and anyone who's heard this story has refused to touch HP/Compaq again.
Oh and the best part? I had purchased a $99 user-damage covering on-year warranty from them when I bought the laptop. So they had to replace everything or me, essentially handing me a new laptop. I got lucky.

Cheap, Cross-Platform Electronic Circuit Simulation Software? 211

Posted by timothy on Saturday August 01, 2009 @06:40PM from the what-we-all-want-when-we-wake-up-in-the-morning dept.

dv82 writes "I teach circuits and electronics at the undergraduate level, and have been using the free student demo version of OrCad for schematic capture and simulation because (a) it comes with the textbook and (b) it's powerful enough for the job. Unfortunately OrCad runs only under Windows, and students increasingly are switching to Mac (and some Linux netbooks). Wine and its variants will not run OrCad, and I don't wish to require students to purchase Windows and run with a VM. The only production-quality cross-platform CAD tool I have found so far is McCad, but its demo version is so limited in total allowed nets that it can't even run a basic opamp circuit with a realistic 741 opamp model. gEDA is friendly to everything BUT Windows, and is nowhere near as refined as OrCad. I would like students to be able to run the software on their laptops without a network connection, which eliminates more options. Any suggestions?"

Are Console Developers Neglecting Their Standard-Def Players? 200

Posted by Soulskill on Sunday July 26, 2009 @02:27AM from the give-me-hd-or-give-me-death dept.

The Digital Foundry blog takes a look at how the focus on high-quality graphics in console game development may be lost on more gamers than people realize. According to Mark Rein of Epic Games, more than half of Gears of War 2 users played the game on a standard-definition television. While you might expect that dropping the graphics quality would correspond to a boost in frame rates, that turns out not to be the case, and running at standard definition can actually be a detriment in some cases. Quoting: "PAL50 is mandatory for SD gameplay on all games on all European PS3s. You can't avoid running at a sub-optimal 50Hz unless you splash out on a high-def screen. The Euro release of Killzone 2 works at SD resolution on any PS3, even if it can only run at PAL50 on a Euro machine. In short, if you're a Euro PS3 owner playing Killzone 2 on a standard-definition display, you're losing around 17 per cent of the frame-rate owing to the lack of PAL60 support in the PS3 hardware. The game itself isn't slower as such (as was often the case in the Mega Drive/SNES era), and you'll note that it's effectively a sustained 25FPS while the 60Hz versions can be somewhat more variable. But Killzone 2 is already somewhat laggy in its control system and this impacts the feel of the game still further. While there is a 17 per cent increase in resolution, this is far less noticeable than the additional numbness in the controls."

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