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

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Yeah, but... (Score 1) 205

Patenting something like the GIF encoding algorithm nowadays would be extremely difficult.

Seeing as GIF (and the LZW compression which was the patented part of it) could be claimed as prior art, I would certainly hope so. Unfortunately, what I've seen of the current patent system still makes me somewhat skeptic about how that would work out.

Comment Re:ActiveX revisited? (Score 2) 332

Have you ever heard of caching? In theory, if the binary code hasn't changed, then if the NaCl module is cached properly, you'd only have to download it the first time. Of course, you'd have to redownload it anytime it changes on the server, but look at it this way - you get instant access to updates.

And if you read the article, Google's purpose in this is not to create huge, full applications in native code and then run them through the browser, but combine this native calculations with the cloud. In Photoshop, that might mean your computer's GPU handles all the image processing, but all the data to save and export to different formats is sent to the cloud for processing. Or, Google Docs' spreadsheets could offload all the cell formula calculations in native code, rather than sending a request back to the server. The point of this native code is to speed up lots of little actions, not build entire applications.

Chrome

Submission + - Google Goes After Content Farms (ibtimes.com)

RedEaredSlider writes: Aimed at stripping search results of pages from "low-quality" sites, a new Google Chrome extension allows users to block specified websites from appearing in search results. The names of these sites are then sent to Google, which will study the collected results and use them to determine future page ranking systems.

Google principal engineer Matt Cutts wrote in a post on the Google blog that the company hopes the extension will improve the quality of search results. The company has been the target of criticism in recent months, much of which centered around the effect that content farms were having on searches.

Hardware

Submission + - Harvard Professor Creates Paper Accelerometer (ieee.org)

SuperSlacker64 writes: In an age where just about everything starts going digital, its refreshing to see someone going back to our roots: paper. Well, sort of. Researchers at Harvard have created a cheap, dime sized, paper based accelerometer that they believe could be used in various applications, specifically cheap medical testing. The device works because a carbon bridge stretches and changes resistivity as the device is accelerated.

Comment Re:P=NP (Score 1) 700

Nope, and that's why NP-complete problems are currently not calculable (at least not in the true, best case scenario, unless you get really lucky and your algorithm succeeds on an early attempt). The concept of a nondeterministic Turing machine is basically that you have a machine that as it goes along to solve the problem, can instantaneously split itself into multiple copies to try to calculate different paths along the algorithm.

If it helps, picture it like a hypothetical infinite core processor. Every time the algorithm hits a branch (if, switch, that kind of idea), rather than simply choose one of them to follow, it creates a copy of itself on another core and each copy starts going through one of the paths. On our limited and finite machines, this gets impossibly large very quickly (think lots of recursion). So if they really did prove P=NP, that's a major leap for Computer Science. But it's still hard to believe, seeing how many other people have spent so long trying.

Slashdot Top Deals

"Look! There! Evil!.. pure and simple, total evil from the Eighth Dimension!" -- Buckaroo Banzai

Working...