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Google

Submission + - Google Researching Alternative Energy, RE<C (nytimes.com) 1

Submitted by
dhardisty
dhardisty writes: "I know slashdot is overrun with Google news, but this is good news nonetheless. Google plans to get into the business of finding limitless sources of energy, announcing Tuesday that it 'intends to develop and help stimulate the creation of renewable energy technologies that are cheaper than coal-generated power... The initiative, which Google is calling REC, using mathematical symbols to denote "renewable energy cheaper than coal," will be based in Google's research and development group.'"
Enlightenment

Submission + - New Scanner Takes Stunning Images of Your Insides (inventorspot.com)

Submitted by Michelle
Michelle writes: Philips Medical Systems has recently unveiled a new medical scanner that can take images of the inside of the body with stunning precision. Called the Brilliance Computerized Tomography (CT) scanner, the machine takes images of slices of the human body and combines them to create realistic images of organs, blood vessels, and other body parts. The images produced are nothing short of AMAZING.
Google

Submission + - Google Summer of Code extends to highschoolers (google.com)

Submitted by
phobonetik
phobonetik writes: "Building on three successful years of engaging University students with over one hundred open source projects, the Google Summer of Code program is being complemented with the Google Highly Open Participation Contest, launched today. Running initially as a pilot involving 10 open source projects, the contest is open to any student enrolled in highschool education. Students choose from a list of several hundred predetermined tasks that improve the open source project, and get paid small sums for their successful completion. At the end of the contest (4th Feb 2008), each of the ten open source projects nominate their best contributor, who wins a grand prize."
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - The Taxman Barely Cometh

Submitted by
theodp
theodp writes: "While Congress is considering lowering the 35% federal tax rate, a lot of companies don't need help from Washington. They've been finding legal ways to shrink their tax bill for years, with 'cross-border tax arbitrage' — getting profits out of the U.S. if taxes are lower offshore — emerging as one of the hottest tax-avoidance strategies. A list compiled by BusinessWeek of the S&P 500 companies sending in the smallest checks sports a number of high-tech household names, including Amazon and Yahoo, who respectively sent Uncle Sam 2.8% and 2.9% of their earnings before income taxes over the past five years, and Apple, which paid a whopping $0 in cash taxes last year."
Books

Submission + - The Future of Reading

Submitted by
theodp
theodp writes: "With a seven-page cover story on The Future of Reading, Newsweek confirms all those rumors of Amazon's imminent introduction of the Kindle, a $399 e-book reader that aims to change the way we read. Kindle, which is named to evoke the crackling ignition of knowledge, has the dimensions of a paperback, weighs 10.3 oz., and uses E Ink technology on a 6-inch screen powered by a battery that gets up to 30 hours from a 2-hour charge. Kindle's real breakthrough is its EVDO-like wireless connectivity, which allows it to work anywhere, not just at Wi-Fi hotspots. More than 88,000 titles will be on sale at the Kindle store at launch, with NYT best sellers priced at $9.99. Subscribe to newspapers, magazines and even blogs, and content will be beamed automatically into your Kindle. Web access, including Wikipedia, Google search and PDF e-mail attachments, will also be available."
Biotech

Submission + - Did Volcanic Gas Kill Dinosaurs, Not Chicxulub?

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "Volcanic eruptions from the Deccan Flood Basalts in India that released huge amounts of sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere may have had more to do with wiping out dinosaurs 65 million years ago than the meteorite strike at Chicxulub on Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula. Marine sediments drilled from the Chicxulub crater itself reveal that that the mass extinctions occurred 300,000 years after Chicxulub hit Earth. The Deccan volcanism began over a million years before the mass extinctions but it was a long cumulative process that continued releasing vast amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere right up to the mass extinctions. "On land it must have been 7-8 degrees warmer," says Princeton University paleontologist Gerta Keller. "The Chicxulub impact alone could not have caused the mass extinction, because this impact predates the mass extinction." Keller also postulates a second larger and still unidentified meteor strike after Chicxulub, that left the famous extraterrestrial layer of iridium found in rocks worldwide and pushed earth's ecosystem over the brink. But where's the crater? "I wish I knew," says Keller."
Windows

Submission + - Vista not as ready for modern desktop as Linux? 1

Submitted by
Pr0xY
Pr0xY writes: "Recently I purchased my new "gaming rig." So I decided to just go for and loaded up a new Dell XPS 720 with the works. Among other things, I got 4GB of RAM. To my (and many others according to google) surprise, x86 Vista only reports 3 and change GB of RAM.
I do some systems programming, so I had a clue as to what was going on, my first reaction was "PAE must not be enabled." Here's what's going on. With traditional paging, there is 4GB of physical address space available to a 32-bit x86 processor. This includes memory mapped devices, for example, your shiny new video card with 768 Megs of RAM takes up that much space of physical RAM your system can use. The solution is to use either PAE or PSE36, both provide up to 64GB of physical memory to a 32-bit x86 system. The limit of what you can map into memory at a time is still 4GB, but this allows motherboards to relocate the RAM that got displaced by hardware above the 4GB and still be usable.
However, it turns out that first of all, Vista automatically enables PAE if you want DEP since it is necessary for the NX bit. And in addition to that, Microsoft deliberately doesn't use RAM above the 4GB mark even with PAE for "compatibility reasons." The main issue being that DMA can't touch RAM higher than 4GB on x86. Microsoft could have easily had a special pool for this "high memory" in order to make some use of it when you know it's safe. This isn't impractical as the server editions of Windows are in fact able to use upwards of 4GB on 32-bit systems as well.
Linux has no issue using all 4GB of my RAM once I build my kernel with PAE support. Microsoft also claims that they support 4GB of RAM in their documentation. All in all, I find this whole thing to be a bit deceptive on Microsoft's part. Microsoft's solution: "Get Vista x86-64""
Announcements

Submission + - Fossil of New Whale Specis Rescued by Amateurs (theworldlink.com)

Submitted by
Kreigh
Kreigh writes: "A team of amateur fossil hunters and rockhounds discovered a fossil whale in the tidal zone of Coos Bay, OR. Preliminary study indicates a new genus and species of whale in this probably eight million year old fossil. They rescued the eight foot long fossil from the rock in the Bay and plan on preparing it for exhibit at a Museum. You can find additional pictures here if you scroll down the page to the 'NARG Fossil Point Whale Skull Search & Rescue' link."
Quickies

Submission + - MIT's mini tractor beam

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: MIT scientists have developed a way to use light to grab and move minuscule particles on a microchip. The research could lead to fine-grained biological sensors and other precisely built nanoscale devices. Optical tweezers have been used on transparent media — like a microscope slide — that let the light shine through and hold objects in a tractor beam-like embrace. (This is possible because light's individual photons transfer minuscule amounts of force to particles they hit.) What's new in the optical tweezer from MIT's Matt Lang and David Appleyard is the use of infrared light. Unlike visible light, the infrared does not bounce off the silicon used as the basis for microchips. That means that MIT's optical tweezer can be used not just for study but to build structures on the surface of chips. Lang and Appleyard proved their technique by getting 16 live E. coli cells to spell out "MIT" on a chip.
NASA

Submission + - Solar Panel Rips on ISS (cnn.com)

Submitted by
bhmit1
bhmit1 writes: "Nasa's solar panel woes continue with today's discovery, a rip on one of the recently moved panels. From the article: "The astronauts abruptly stopped the unfurling of the second panel, however, as soon as they saw the rip on the edge of the panel. The panel was almost completely unfurled when the rip was spotted. The astronauts beamed down photos of the torn and crumpled section so NASA can analyze them and determine the extent of the damage.""
The Internet

Submission + - Internet Tax Bill approved by U.S. House (thinkngc.com)

Submitted by
Noah Garrett at NGC Communications
Noah Garrett at NGC Communications writes: "By a vote of 402-0, the House of Representatives cleared a seven-year extension of the Internet tax moratorium. The President is expected to sign the bill on October 31, just hours before the current Internet Tax Moratorium expires November 1. The seven year agreement is a compromise between the House that had approved a four year bill and the Administration and the Industry that had advocated for a permanent extension. http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gFIKjS4XyxT0XE8_hEJ1aIXGnZkAD8SJLQ282"
Spam

Submission + - ISP's over the top AV/SPAM filtering

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I generally it like when my email service uses effective AV/SPAM filtering. What I don't like is when messages to me are dumped (without notifying me or the sender) or rejected as "undeliverable" when the account in question exists.

I want all SPAM in my "bulk mail" folder and some notification of "infected email" messages sent to me. Dumping this stuff to /dev/null is NOT an acceptable option.

I've tried signing up for several web sites (including youtube) using an account hosted on Godaddy.com only to find out they are rejecting "confirmation" messages from almost every site I try and sign up for. I've also found that they dump email with links to certain web sites in them.

I complained to their support personel who said it was their AV filter eating these messages. They did not see this as a problem that needed correcting.

I know other providers are losing/trashing millions of messages daily (EX: Earthlink). Who can I host my email with that will not reject/dump email I'm expecting???
It's funny. Laugh.

Submission + - Do tech-guys end-up happier than arts-types? 1

Submitted by
Bruce G Charlton
Bruce G Charlton writes: "Blogger Michael Blowhard attends a 35 year high school reunion and finds that the men who went into technical careers seem (so far) happier than those who chose the arts. http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/2007/09/reunions_2_guyh_1.html#004452 " Now that we're in our early 50s, the calmest and least-troubled guys are the ones who are working in technical fields. Without exception, these old classmates are now mellow and happy souls. They have the contentedness of people leading comprehensible, satisfying lives, lives characterized by finite obligations and dependable rewards. At the other end of the mood-spectrum are the angst-ridden bunch: namely, guys who long ago fell in love with the arts. (...) The guys in this group are jumpier and more tormented. They may perhaps have known giddier highs, but they've also experienced darker and more frequent lows, as well as far fewer steady, count-upon-able stretches. Where the tech guys keep on a dependable plane — they have routines, and they enjoy them — the arts guys are still living like post-grads, moment to moment. Most are still caught up in the "doing my art" vs. "keeping up a day job" plight. (...) Perhaps, despite all its ravished-by-aesthetic-bliss moments, the love affair with art has finally been more like a bad and humiliating marriage, wrecking one's chances at what might have been straightforward happiness. A small discovery: By one's early 50s, emotional rollercoastering will have taken a toll not just on the nerves but on the body. Many of our artsguys these days seem exhausted, strung out, even physically twisted.""

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