chill - Slashdot User

Submission + - Britannica Mangles Entry on Irish Civil War (foxnews.com)

Submitted by chill on Thursday February 04, 2010 @11:50AM

chill writes: Back in 2005 Robert McHenry, former Editor in Chief of Encyclopedia Britannica, published a critique of Wikipedia. One of his main points was the lack of reliability and citing the article on the birth of American Founding Father, Alexander Hamilton, as an example. McHenry went on to extol the virtues of professional editors and subject-matter experts and the overall superiority of the Britannica method. It makes you wonder how they then got their article on the Irish Civil War so wrong and it survived for so long.

Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc. apologized Wednesday for mangling the history of the Irish Civil War, a longtime screw-up detected only this year when an Internet version of the reference book was supplied to Ireland's 4,000 schools.

The original Slashdot discussion and a follow-up rebuttal article are provided for reference.

Submission + - Laser Fusion Passes Major Hurdle (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by chill on Thursday January 28, 2010 @06:39PM

chill writes: The National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has performed their first controlled fusion experiments using all 192 lasers. While still not ramped up to full power, the first experiments proved very fruitful. The lasers create a lot of plasma in the target container and it was worried that the plasma would interfere with the ability of the target to absorb enough energy to ignite. These experiments show that not only does enough energy make it through, the plasma can be manipulated to increase the uniformity of compression. Ramping up of power is due to start in May.

Submission + - Skype's Legal Situation Clears (pcworld.com)

Submitted by chill on Friday November 06, 2009 @10:32PM

chill writes: Skype's cofounders, Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, have agreed to transfer ownership of the remaining Skype technology that eBay didn't own, paving the way for eBay to complete its sale of a majority stake in Skype to an investor consortium.

In exchange, Friis and Zennstrom will join the investor consortium and obtain a 14 percent stake in Skype. The other consortium partners, led by Silver Lake, will own a 56 percent stake in Skype, and eBay will hold on to 30 percent, eBay said Friday.

Submission + - Melting memory chips in mass production (nature.com)

Submitted by

chill

on Monday September 28, 2009 @02:01PM

chill writes: "The journal Nature is reporting that South Korean manufacturer Samsung Electronics announced this week that it has begun mass production of a new kind of memory chip that stores information by melting and freezing tiny crystals. Known as phase-change memory (PCM), the idea was first proposed by physicists in the 1960s. With transistor-equivalent cells only 20 nm wide, switching time is around 16 ns. The first target market is cell phones, but the companies behind the technology see applications in PCs, servers and other devices as well."

Submission + - The First Rocky Extrasolar Planet Confirmed (google.com)

Submitted by chill on Wednesday September 16, 2009 @10:17AM

chill writes: As scientists search the skies for life elsewhere, they have found more than 300 planets outside our solar system. But they all have been gas balls or can't be proven to be solid. Now a team of European astronomers has confirmed the first rocky extrasolar planet. Scientists have long figured that if life begins on a planet, it needs a solid surface to rest on, so finding one elsewhere is a big deal.

Submission + - Intel Agrees to Purchase Wind River Systems

Submitted by

chill

on Thursday June 04, 2009 @10:05AM

chill writes: "Intel agreed to purchase software company Wind River Systems Inc. for about $884 million, part of an effort to move beyond personal computers. Wind River's primary product is VxWorks, the real-time operating system popular with mission-critical, embedded systems."

chill

on Thursday September 28, 2006 @02:14PM

chill writes: "While he wasn't talking about the Linux distro, former U.S. President Bill Clinton told the U.K. Labour Party conference "Society is important because of Ubuntu." In the tradition of free press is good press, this could help raise awareness of the distribution. The BBC Story has a nice photo of some Ubuntu (distro) merchandise — a logoed pair of thong panties. It is a good story if you want to get an idea of just what "ubuntu" really means."

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