Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
It's funny. Laugh.

Submission + - Secret HQ of the New World Order discovered! (google.com)

Submitted by Island Admin
Island Admin writes: While aimlessly scrolling around, Google Maps ... just killing time, I stumbled across the secret head quarters of the New World Order. This explains everything ... our current overlords are actually from Atlantis, and have infiltrated our search engines, government and everyday lives. It is a perfect location ... international waters, and I am sure there is not a lot of traffic past it. To see for yourself, just search for "new world order" in Google Maps ... and then don your tin foil hat!
(I am now off to an undisclosed location ....)
The Internet

Submission + - Wikipedia Refutes Editor Mass Exodus Claims (wikimedia.org)

Submitted by eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: The Wikimedia blog has a response from Erik Moeller, Deputy Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, to last week's story on editors leaving Wikipedia. He offers these three points that they know, "1. The number of people reading Wikipedia continues to grow. In October, we had 344 million unique visitors from around the world, according to comScore Media Metrix, up 6% from September. 2. Wikipedia is the fifth most popular web property in the world. The number of articles in Wikipedia keeps growing. There are about 14.4 million articles in Wikipedia, with thousands of new ones added every day. 3. The number of people writing Wikipedia peaked about two and a half years ago, declined slightly for a brief period, and has remained stable since then. Every month, some people stop writing, and every month, they are replaced by new people." It's also noted that it's impossible to tell whether someone has left and will never return as their account still remains there.

Comment Re:Lowering the bar (Score 1) 578

by Island Admin (#30241130) Attached to: Dumbing Down Programming?
Actually, robust memory handling is not that difficult to achieve, as long as you write concise modular code. It is really not that difficult to think to yourself, what is the scope of the memory or object you are allocating. But in the hands of the in-experienced or sloppy coder ... they can unleash the most horrendous leak riddled code possible.

Submission + - Wikipedia loses 49,000 editors (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by Island Admin
Island Admin writes: BBC News reports that Wikipedia lost 49,000 editors since the beginning of 2009. Over the same period in 2008, only 4,900 editors were lost. According to the article, this does not pose any current problems to Wikipedia, however if the down trend continues
"for too much time, say one or two years, eventually the project could enter a problematic phase".
Space

Astronomers Invent "Galaxy Game" 55

Posted by timothy from the like-a-visit-to-the-optometrist dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "BBC reports that astronomers have invented a game to help uncover the basis of galactic collisions, showing players images of colliding galaxies and asking them to match those to simulations. These galactic mergers could be the key to why the Universe contains a mixture of different galaxies — some with trailing spiral arms, others more like compact balls of stars. Astronomers say that humans are 'much better than computers' at spotting the patterns and similarities. 'The strength of the game is that it takes results from many people,' says Dr Chris Lintott from Oxford University, one of the members of the Galaxy Zoo team. The developers describe the game as a 'cosmic fruit machine' (i.e., slot machine). The game shows players one real galaxy image and, on command, eight randomly selected simulations pop into the 'slot'" surrounding that image. The aim is for players to choose the simulations that look most similar to the real galaxy and take those through to the next round to examine them further. The simulated images show the different aspects of galaxy formation, so as people play, they will generate data that will help astronomers understand these collisions. 'These collisions take millions of years to unfold,' says Anthony Holincheck, a graduate student at George Mason University and another member of the team. 'All we get from the Universe is a single snapshot of each one. [With] simulations, we will be able to watch each cosmic car crash unfold in the computer.'"
Google

Submission + - Google Apologizes for 'Michelle Obama' Results 1

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: CNN reports that for most of the past week, when someone did a Google image search for 'Michelle Obama,' one of the first images that came up was a picture of the First Lady altered to resemble a monkey. After being hit with a firestorm of criticism over the episode, Google first banned the site that posted the photo, saying it could spread malware. Then, when the image appeared on another site, Google displayed the photo in its search results, but displayed an apologetic Google ad above it. On Wednesday morning, the racially offensive image appeared to have been removed from any Google Image searches for 'Michelle Obama'. Google officials could not immediately be reached for comment.

Comment Re:One Thing I Miss (Score 1) 219

by Island Admin (#30207144) Attached to: Modern Tech Versus the Past
I agree ... I am a complete dinosaur(31). I sometimes feel that tech has distanced us from our communities(not the online version). When last did you take the time to go round to your neighbour and have a drink, or invite them round. And being contactable always ... well that just sucks. My cellphone, only gets charged now, when I really need it ... Now if I could only break my /. and stumble addictions, I might actually get a life :)

Submission + - Depressed Facebook user gets insurance cancelled (www.cbc.ca)

Submitted by No. 24601
No. 24601 writes: A Quebec woman on long-term sick leave, due to a diagnosis of depression, lost her health benefits after her insurance provider found photos of her on Facebook smiling and looking cheerful at parties and out on the beach. Besides all the obvious questions, how did the insurance company access her locked Facebook profile?
Linux

Submission + - Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Lucid may include a backup tool b (unixmen.com)

Submitted by donadony
donadony writes: As everybody knows ubuntu 10.04LTS Lycid is planned for the month of 29 april 2010, the developers actually are working on softwares that will be included by default in the future ubuntu10.04 Lucid , one of the news is that a backup tool will be included by default to the next release. For the moment there are these 2 backup tools are proposed to be as default : Déjà Dup and backintime , which one of these 2 will be included ?

Slashdot Top Deals

Old programmers never die, they just hit account block limit.

Close