hobbes75 - Slashdot User

Submission + - The Proton Just got smaller (nature.com) 1

Submitted by inflame on Thursday July 08, 2010 @03:27AM

inflame writes: A new paper published in Nature has said that the proton may be smaller than we previously thought. The article states 'The difference is so infinitesimal that it might defy belief that anyone, even physicists, would care. But the new measurements could mean that there is a gap in existing theories of quantum mechanics. "It's a very serious discrepancy," says Ingo Sick, a physicist at the University of Basel in Switzerland, who has tried to reconcile the finding with four decades of previous measurements. "There is really something seriously wrong someplace."'

Would this indicate new physics if proven?

Comment Too expensive to not be evil (Score 5, Insightful) 103

by hobbes75 on Sunday February 14, 2010 @12:26PM (#31134994) Attached to: Google.cn Still Remains In China

Obviously not being evil is too expensive... maybe that explains the amount of evil in the world in general.

Swiss Firm Claims Boost In Android App Performance 132

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday February 09, 2010 @06:53PM from the sixty-fps-here-we-come dept.

Precision writes to inform us about the Swiss firm Myriad, which claims a 3x boost in Android app performance and longer battery life with a new virtual machine. Myriad says that its technology is 100% compatible with existing Android apps. "The tool is a replacement for the Dalvik virtual machine, which ships as part of the Android platform, and retains full compatibility with existing software. Dalvik Turbo also supports a range of processors including those based on ARM, Intel Atom, and MIPS Architectures."

An Open Source Compiler From CUDA To X86-Multicore 71

Posted by timothy on Wednesday December 23, 2009 @03:06PM from the abstraction-gains-a-layer dept.

Gregory Diamos writes "An open source project, Ocelot, has recently released a just-in-time compiler for CUDA, allowing the same programs to be run on NVIDIA GPUs or x86 CPUs and providing an alternative to OpenCL. A description of the compiler was recently posted on the NVIDIA forums. The compiler works by translating GPU instructions to LLVM and then generating native code for any LLVM target. It has been validated against over 100 CUDA applications. All of the code is available under the New BSD license."

Comment Re:But weren't they on anyway? (Score 1) 621

by hobbes75 on Wednesday December 02, 2009 @05:22PM (#30302814) Attached to: SETI@Home Install Leads To School Tech Supervisor's Resignation

Even if they were on anyways, the background process will have prevented power saving modes. The only time when the additional processing is almost free is when the additional power used can be saved in heating. When it is too hot anyways it costs double because of additional cooling requirements. For the same reasons, a java-script and ad-blocker an reduce the energy bill a bit.

Misadventures In Online Journalism 133

Posted by Soulskill on Sunday October 11, 2009 @10:44AM from the dewey-defeats-obama dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Paul Carr, writing for TechCrunch, has posted his take on some of the flaws inherent to today's fast-paced news ecosystem, where bloggers often get little or no editorial feedback and interesting headlines are passed around faster than ever. His article was inspired by a recent story on ZDNet that accused Yahoo of sharing the names and emails of 200,000 users with the Iranian government; a report that turned out to be false, yet generated a great deal of outrage before it was disproved. Carr writes, 'Trusting the common sense of your writers is all well and good — but when it comes to breaking news, where journalistic adrenaline is at its highest and everyone is paranoid about being scooped by a competitor, that common sense can too easily become the first casualty. Journalists get caught up in the moment; we get excited and we post stupid crap from a foreign language student blog and call it news. And then within half a minute — bloggers being what they are — the news gets repeated and repeated until it becomes fact. Fact that can affect share prices or ruin lives. This is the reality of the blogosphere, where Churchill's remark: that "a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on" is more true, and more potentially damaging, than at any time in history.'"

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