crt - Slashdot User

Top Scientific Breakthroughs of 2009 57

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Friday January 01, 2010 @12:17PM from the still-can't-cure-stupid dept.

Wired has posted their favorite scientific breakthroughs of the past year. The feats include things like the confirmation of element 114, a cancer-detecting breathalyzer, the power of jellyfish and more. What other discoveries should have made the list and what might we look forward to in 2010? "Also this year, researchers at the University of Washington cured two adult monkeys of colorblindness by giving them injections of a gene that produces pigments necessary for color vision. After the treatment, the animals scored higher on a computerized color blindness test. In the coming years, gene therapy will be tested as a remedy for all sorts of inherited diseases, cancer, viral infections and even high cholesterol."

Comment Jungle Disk now has Sync in version 3.0 (Score 1) 305

by crt on Thursday November 19, 2009 @10:32PM (#30167464) Attached to: Synchronize Data Between Linux, OS X, and Windows?

You're in luck! Jungle Disk 3.0 was released this week, with Sync support (for Windows, Mac, and Linux).

http://blog.jungledisk.com/2009/11/17/jungle-disk-launches-an-all-new-product-lineup/

Since you're already a Jungle Disk customer, the upgrade is free. Jungle Disk 3.0 also has a new backup engine that does block-level de-duplication and compression, making it by far the most efficient method for doing online backup.

Comment Re:Just turn off image loading (Score 1) 406

by crt on Thursday November 12, 2009 @11:19PM (#30083060) Attached to: HTTP Intermediary Layer From Google Could Dramatically Speed Up the Web

Seems like most gopher sites are just lists of... other gopher sites. Kind like the web in 1993 (when there were 100 web sites and all the content was in Gopher). Guess they finally swapped places.

Comment Wrong article link (Score 5, Informative) 403

by crt on Thursday June 18, 2009 @10:02AM (#28373419) Attached to: Why a Hard Disk Is a Better Bargain Than an SSD

Should have been this article.
That said, I don't think anyone claims SSD is better than HDD if your bottleneck is capacity or sequential read speed. However if you do lots of random reads/writes, this line from the comparison says it all:
OCZ's drive had a random access time of .2 milliseconds; Seagate's 16.9 milliseconds.
That's an 84X difference.

Comment This is really simple to prevent... (Score 4, Insightful) 513

by crt on Wednesday February 11, 2009 @09:25AM (#26811329) Attached to: False Fact On Wikipedia Proves Itself

All they needed to do to prevent this was to ensure that the cited references pre-dated the original edit. If you can't find a reference that pre-dates the edit, then you have to assume it's possible that the reference came from Wikipedia itself.

Comment Helping power the Great Firewall of China! (Score 5, Funny) 294

by crt on Wednesday November 19, 2008 @06:09PM (#25824603) Attached to: Windows Breaks Into Supercomputer Top 10

From the Dawning site:

Arming the "Golden Shield" project with comprehensive IT technology
With the rapid development of the Internet, the public security information construction has become an important component of national information construction. Dawning made contributions in improving information technology level within all of the public security departments, arming the "Golden Shield" project with information technology, equipping the "police" force with digitalization, intensifying the police by technology and comprehensively raising China public security's law enforcement and administrative capacity.

I like how they quote "police" force.

Comment My guess as to how it's done... (Score 5, Insightful) 326

by crt on Thursday November 13, 2008 @01:03AM (#25740323) Attached to: Boot Windows Vista In Four Seconds

They never show the shutdown process - my guess is that when you shutdown, it actually reboots, then right after Windows boots it puts it to sleep or hibernate (S3/S4). When you turn it back on, it wakes it and looks like you "just" booted up.
Not really a bad idea I suppose - moves the boot time from boot to shutdown, when you are less likely to care.
Of course you can get the same effect yourself by rebooting then just putting your machine to sleep when you want to shutdown. Someone could probably even write a simple software solution for this rather than requiring a whole new motherboard.

Alternatives to Daylight Saving Time? 755

Posted by timothy on Thursday October 23, 2008 @04:21PM from the even-ben-franklin-made-some-whoppers dept.

Wellington Grey writes "Daylight saving time almost upon us. The arguments about its possible benefits and drawbacks come up twice every year. Does it save energy or lives? Possibly, but it does definitely cause a great deal of inconvenience. My question is this: what do you think would be the best possible system to replace DST with? What is the best way for humans to deal with the inconsistent amount of light over the year and still foster coordination over disparate time zones?"

Submission + - 24h Open Source Coding Marathon Hackontest started (hackontest.org) 1

Submitted by

maemst

on Friday April 18, 2008 @04:31AM

maemst writes: "Can you code 24 hours non-stop? Hackontest is a new Google-sponsored 24-hour programming competition between different open source projects. Its goals are to enhance Free Software projects according to user needs and to make visible how enthusiastically open source software is being developed. During the current online selection process users and developers of open source software may submit feature requests and rate and comment them. On Swiss national holiday August 1st, 2008 the Hackontest jury will pick the three most promising teams. They receive a free trip to Switzerland on September 24/25, 2008 to participate in the competition located at OpenExpo 2008 Zurich. Hacking 24 hours inside an etoy.CONTAINER, the teams and their virtually present communities will implement certain features based on the online ratings and jury selection. In the end, the Hackontest jury evaluates the code and awards the winners with a total of USD 8500. The jury is made up of 10 renowned open source contributors: Jeremy Alison (Samba), Jono Bacon (Ubuntu), Brian W. Fitzpatrick (Subversion), Martin F. Krafft (Debian), Alexander Limi (Plone), Federico Mena-Quintero (GNOME), Bram Moolenaar (vim), Bruce Perens (OSI founder), Lukas K. Smith (PHP) and Harald Welte (gpl-violations.org)."

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