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Google

Submission + - Google vows to develop cheap renewable electricity (ecommercetimes.com)

Submitted by adminstring
adminstring writes: Google cofounder Larry Page announces that the company aims to generate "renewable electricity at globally significant scale, and produce it cheaper than from coal." To achieve their stated goal of generating a gigawatt of power at 2 cents per kilowatt hour, they are partnering with eSolar on solar thermal technology and Makani Power on high-altitude wind power. The name of this new venture will be "REC" (Renewable Energy Cheaper Than Coal.)
Portables

Submission + - Asus corrects Eee PC source code issue. (blue-gnu.biz)

Submitted by
ozmanjusri
ozmanjusri writes: "Asus has corrected the availability of source code for its Eee PC, and reaffirmed its commitment to meeting the requirements of open source licenses, including the GPL.

They also announced the upcoming release of a new SDK to assist the Open Source community development on the Eee PC."
Power

Submission + - Are we ever going to see solar powered laptops?

Submitted by Tom Pippington
Tom Pippington writes: I was recently reading about Nokia trying to develop alternative energy sources for cell phones and how complex the issue is. I've dug around a bit and at present it seems that all the possible solutions are too chunky, too dangerous or simply not effective enough. Are alternative energy sources, such as solar power, ever going to be good enough to power portable devices?
Portables

Submission + - Asus Eee PC 701 reviewed 1

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: CNET has a review up of the Asus Eee PC 701 and it looks like they like it a lot, "There's no two ways about it — the Asus Eee PC 701 is a great laptop. It's affordable, sexy and highly portable. If you're looking for a cheap second PC that can fit into a small bag, then there are few better options".
Portables

Submission + - Asus' Linux-based Eee PC 701 reviewed 3

Submitted by Bongo Bob
Bongo Bob writes: CNET.co.uk has a review up of the Asus Eee PC 701 that runs Linux and according to the reviewer "It's hard to fault the Eee PC, mainly because of its price. It can be difficult to use because of the cramped keyboard, but it's better than similar-sized laptops like the Toshiba Libretto. If you're in the market for a second PC, or looking for something you can take with you almost anywhere, the Eee PC is definitely worth buying."
Programming

Submission + - Indian AI unmasked using second order turing test (daz.com)

Submitted by
jacquesm
jacquesm writes: "Indian IT experts have been testing a new generation of highly intelligent bots in IRC channels. One such bot was unmasked in an irc room after failing to pass a second order Turing Test. The bot had to be tricked into accepting the challenge and tried every trick in the book to avoid detection.

The full transcript of the interaction with the bot (called 'asterix') is here : http://ww.com/asterixbot.html , the really interesting breakthrough I think is the fact that the bot uses 'broken english' to masquerade its lack of genuine understanding, but we have become so accustomed to that because of the outsourcing of jobs that it is no longer politically correct to accept nothing less than passable english. This psychological loophole has been used to great profit by the team involved.

It's only a matter of time before you'll have to administer Turing Tests to your chat room friends to see if they are not too tired of communicating with you face to face and have replaced their online identities with bots to keep up appearances."
Patents

Submission + - Redhat sued for Patent Infringement

Submitted by
tqft
tqft writes: "http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20071011205044141
"The first ever patent infringement litigation regarding Linux. Here's the patent, for those who can look at it without risk. If in doubt, don't. "
For those who can without fear read a patent:
http://www.google.com/patents?id=3tUkAAAAEBAJ&dq=5,072,412

http://www.setexasrecord.com/news/202417-recent-copyrightpatent-infringement-cases-filed-in-u.s.-district-courts

"Plaintiffs IP Innovation and Technology Licensing Corp. claim to have the rights to U.S. Patent No. 5,072,412 for a User Interface with Multiple Workspaces for Sharing Display System Objects issued Dec. 10, 1991 along with two other similar patents.
"

Get your game faces on. Party Time."
Operating Systems

Submission + - Is Video RAM a good swap device?

Submitted by sean4u
sean4u writes: I use a 'lucky' (inexplicably still working) headless desktop PC to serve pages for a low-volume e-commerce site. I came across a gentoo-wiki.com page and this linuxnews.pl page that suggested the interesting possibility of using the Video RAM of the built-in video adapter as a swap device or RAM disk. The instructions worked a treat, but I'm curious as to how good a substitute this can be for swap space on disk. In my (amateurish) test, hdparm -t tells me the Video RAM block device is 3 times slower than the aging disk I currently use.
What performance do other slashdotters get? Is the poor performance report from hdparm a feature of the hardware, or the Memory Technology Device driver? What do slashdotters use to measure swap performance?
Toys

Submission + - James Randi $1Million Award on Speaker Cables 2

Submitted by elrond amandil
elrond amandil writes: James Randi offered $1 million USD to anyone who can prove that a pair of $7,250 Pear Anjou speaker cables is any better than ordinary (and also overpriced) Monster Cables. Pointing out the absurd review by audiophile Dave Clark, who called the cables "danceable," Randi called it "hilarious and preposterous." He added that if the cables could do what their makers claimed, "they would be paranormal."
Quickies

Submission + - Happy Birthday Slashdot!!!!!

Submitted by
CliffH
CliffH writes: "This isn't a story per say. Just wanted to congratulate the editors, and all of the members whom have kept this site going for 10 years. Thanks for a lot of tips, and lot of arguments, more hot grits and petrification then anyone can stand, and, most of all, thanks for all of the fun and thought that the members and editors of this site has given me and I'm sure an awful lot of other people."
Programming

Submission + - Is HTML Validity Overrated

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Hi all, in the office today coding away on some random website, checking my my XHTML coding was valid, in my boredom decided to check a number of popular sites thinking that they would would intern be valid, though to my surprise i struggled to find a single site that was 100% valid in it's coding. www.google.com — 30 errors, www.microsoft.com — 28 errors, www.apple.com — 4 errors, and i wont even mention how many eBay had. Hell even our beloved Slashdot didn't have a clean slate. My question is "Is HTML Validity Overrated?" or is there a reason for all the big sites not caring about there code? Now i'm a very (I must stress very) small time programmer, and my skills are pretty poor, but am i just waisting my time checking my code, is it wrong of me to believe in standards?
Math

Submission + - Do you know how to use a slide rule? (engcom.net) 5

Submitted by
high_rolla
high_rolla writes: "How many of you know what a slide rule it? Better yet, how many of you have actually used one? The slide rule was a simple yet powerful and important tool for engineers and scientists before the days of calculators. In fact, several people I know still prefer to use them. In the interest of preserving this icon we have created a virtual slide rule for you to play with."
Operating Systems

Submission + - Intel Chief Evangelist comments on Linux scheduler

Submitted by
ByeByeWintel
ByeByeWintel writes: "James Reinders is Intel's Chief Evangelist for Intel's Software Development Products. In a recent interview on Devx.com he stated: "If I could get ONE wish fulfilled would be for OS scheduling to focus on processes, and not threads, for scheduling. And demand that processes manage their scheduling of threads. Why? Because an effective parallel program is going to assume, in general, that all threads are either running or stopped. It is messy to write a parallel program when the OS may be scheduling and unscheduling individual threads which are trying to cooperate. [...] There is a lot of opportunity for operating systems to offer these types of control in the "running of applications" interfaces. I'd like an OS to let me specify the 'world' my application runs in (which processors, how many, etc.) These interfaces are available in Windows at run time (the task manager will let you adjust where a running task can go). I'd like to have more global tools to specify and adjust policies (8-core machinerun "only Outlook" here, run applications on these 4 cores, OS only here, explorer here, etc.)""

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