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Windows

Vista Named Year's Most Disappointing Product 842

Posted by kdawson from the foregone-conclusion dept.
Shadow7789 writes "No surprise here, but to complete its humiliation, PC World has declared that Windows Vista is the most disappointing product of 2007. Quoting: 'Five years in the making and this is the best Microsoft could do?... No wonder so many users are clinging to XP like shipwrecked sailors to a life raft, while others who made the upgrade are switching back. And when the fastest Vista notebook PC World has ever tested is an Apple MacBook Pro, there's something deeply wrong with the universe.'"
Music

EMI Caught Offering Illegal Downloads 182

Posted by Zonk from the dirty-dealings dept.
Hypocricy, LLC writes "While the RIAA is swift to punish any person caught offering illegal downloads, they're not very swift with outrage when a member company like EMI offers illegal downloads. Not only did the band King Crimson's contract never allow digital distribution to begin with, but band member Robert Fripp claims that EMI offered their music for sale even after their contract ended entirely."
Math

Optical Solution For an NP-Complete Problem? 232

Posted by kdawson from the too-bad-about-the-noise dept.
6 writes to let us know that two optical researchers have proposed, as a thought experiment, a novel idea for solving the traveling salesman problem. From the abstract: We introduce an optical method based on white light interferometry in order to solve the well-known NP-complete traveling salesman problem. To our knowledge it is the first time that a method for the reduction of non-polynomial time to quadratic time has been proposed. We will show that this achievement is limited by the number of available photons for solving the problem. It will turn out that this number of photons is proportional to NN for a traveling salesman problem with N cities and that for large numbers of cities the method in practice therefore is limited by the signal-to-noise ratio. The proposed method is meant purely as a gedankenexperiment."
Biotech

Submission + - Technique to turn all blood into type 0

Submitted by davidwr
davidwr writes: Is this the end of type-O blood shortages? In an article published in the journal Nature Biotechnology, researchers figured out how to make bacterial enzymes turn type-A, -B, and -AB blood into type O blood, or "universal red blood cells." From the abstract:

The enzymatic conversion processes we describe hold promise for achieving the goal of producing universal RBCs, which would improve the blood supply while enhancing the safety of clinical transfusions.
Related story.
User Journal

Journal Journal: April Fool's Submissions Overboard and Underfunny 2

Journal by evought

I agree with some of the comments and submissions I have seen today that the yearly stupidity on Slashdot is just plain dumb. Unfortunately, these comments are drowned out. One or two good hoaxes would have made my day. ("Google Paper" was actually quite good). A score of idiotic and unbelievable posts just ruins the site and real news is buried. Having looked through the Firehose at several points today, there have been several serious submissions that have been voted up but have never made
Google

Submission + - Google releases Google Apps

Submitted by Nefarious Wheel
Nefarious Wheel writes: Google releases enterprise-ready Google Apps http://www.google.com/a/ including spreadsheets and portals — bottom line? Most of your basic office applications for $50/account/year. Is this the beginning of the end for Microsoft Office? I can hear the chairs breaking from here...
It's funny. Laugh.

SETI Finally Finds Something 416

Posted by samzenpus from the laptop-phone-home dept.
QuatumCrypto writes "SETI@home is a distributed processing client from UC Berkeley that installs on the volunteers' home computers and harnesses their processing power in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. So far nothing noteworthy has comeout of this massive project... that is until today! One of the volunteers was able to track down his wife's stolen laptop using the IP address that SETI@home client reports back to the server. After getting back the laptop his wife said, 'I always knew that a geek would make a great husband.'"
Patents

Submission + - USPTO issued 40,964 software patents in 2006

Submitted by PatPending
PatPending writes: The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) awarded 40,964 software patents in 2006, according to data compiled by the Public Patent Foundation. Software patents filed in 2006 grew by 36 per cent year-over-year, and have been on a gradual increase since the USPTO first started awarding them in 1982.

http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2172017/2006-sof tware-patent
Spam

Submission + - Dispose of your spam properly!

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes: "My domain name is periodically being stolen by spammers; they forge outgoing mail using my poor innocent domain name. First, I'd like to plead with mail server administrators out there: please REJECT spam and undeliverable mail. If you reject instead of bouncing then legitimate mail senders will still know there is a problem. Second, do you have any tips for dealing with a flood of spam bounces? Exim is pitching the bounces pretty quickly, but my server is still getting overwhelmed."
Networking

Submission + - BitTorrent vs. Usenet Rivalry

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: There's a lot going on in the file-sharing world, and P2P news site Slyck.com has an interesting comparison of two methods of online distribution: Usenet (the newsgroups) and BitTorrent. Slyck concludes that because of its fast speed, large selection and relatively anonymity, Usenet beats out BitTorrent.
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - Researchers Find Bias in Nutrition Studies

Submitted by Optic7
Optic7 writes: NPR reports that a new study by Harvard and the Center for Science in the Public Interest found that nutrition studies funded by food companies are almost eight times more likely to reach a conclusion beneficial to the food companies than similar, independently funded studies. New Scientist has also done a story on this, if you prefer to read instead of listen to the NPR story.
Quickies

Submission + - analysis of warmest year ever

Submitted by kpw10
kpw10 writes: Dr. Jeff Masters from Wunderground has a great summary of this year's rather abnormal weather (his blog is the best source on the net for in-depth weather analysis). The post discusses some of the cyclical climate forces at work this year as well as compares this year's record temperatures to records from the past — there are some interesting differences particularly in the extent of northern hemisphere seeing record highs this year. From the article: "December's weather in the Northeast U.S. may have been a case of the weather dice coming up thirteen — weather not seen on the planet since before the Ice Age began, 118,000 years ago. The weather dice will start rolling an increasing number of thirteens in coming years, and an ice-free Arctic Ocean in summertime by 2040 is a very real possibility..."
Security

Submission + - What does your dead man's switch do?

Submitted by
LqdEngineer
LqdEngineer writes: "How many of the Slashdot crowd use or have used a Dead Man's Switch designed to perform some action if you don't check in for a certain amount of time? Recently, I decided to put one together using MySQL and some Cron jobs, but I wanted to see what others have their Switches set up to do in the event you fail to check in. E-mails to loved ones? Send encryption keys to friends/family? Hate mail to your boss? Has anyone ever been on the receiving end of a Dead Man's e-mail? I can't even imagine how creepy that would feel."

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