ckswift - Slashdot User

Submission + - CD turns 25 today

Submitted by

mchrew

on Friday August 17, 2007 @11:24AM

mchrew writes: "The AP (via Yahoo) says that the compact disc is now a full quarter of a century old. Richard Strauss' "Alpine Symphony" started coming off the assembly line on Aug. 17, 1982.

I read somewhere that the standard CD's 72 minute length was determined by the project's head, he being a Beethooven fan and insisting the Beethooven's 9th symphony fit on the new medium, but I can't find the article I'd read or verification of this anywhere. Perhaps a reader can give a link (or change the Wikipedia entry)?"

Submission + - Storm Subsides: Mars Rovers Now Battle Fallout (space.com)

Submitted by

Raver32

on Friday August 17, 2007 @08:08AM

Raver32 writes: "Mars' globe-engulfing dust storm has died down during the past several weeks, but the two robotic rovers on its surface now face the fallout of dust from the thin atmosphere. Conditions were so bad in early August that just before the launch of the Mars-bound Phoenix spacecraft, rover scientist Mark Lemmon feared the demise of the Opportunity rover. "There was one sol [Martian day] when there was real uncertainty we'd hear from Opportunity," said Lemmon, a planetary scientist at Texas A&M University. He added that the plucky robotic explorer almost entered a power-saving mode that would have been dangerous "uncharted territory" for the rover team. Still, Lemmon thinks the Mars rovers will persevere through the dusty conditions. "Mars could throw worse storms at us, but for this season I think we have seen the worst," he told SPACE.com in an e-mail. "We got a good demonstration that Mars could kill them.""

Submission + - SCO Letter to Partners: It's just a flesh wound! (groklaw.net)

Submitted by The SCO Saga, Chapter 7 - Bankruptcy on Tuesday August 14, 2007 @11:38PM

The SCO Saga, Chapter 7 - Bankruptcy writes: Darl McBride of SCO has finally come out of hiding for long enough to comment on the recent ruling in SCO v. Novell, saying that they are "disappointed," but intend to continue. In spite of the Court having painstakingly explaining in its 102 page ruling that SCO does not and knew or should have known that it never owned the UNIX and UnixWare copyrights, Darl claims to still believe that SCO bought them. He even goes so far as to quote the Asset Purchase Agreement, while very carefully ignoring the APA's section on excluded assets that explicitly excludes those copyrights. Even so, Darl goes on to claim that "SCO's primary business is not to litigate" and that they expect to stay in business. How they intend to do that is less than clear.

Submission + - A replacement for the good old stethoscope?

Submitted by

Roland Piquepaille

on Wednesday August 08, 2007 @12:41PM

Roland Piquepaille writes: "According to BusinessWeek, an Israeli startup, aptly named Deep Breeze, has developed a high-tech replacement for the 200-year-old stethoscope. This noninvasive device can draw in seconds an image of your lungs by listening to its vibrations. The Vibration Response Imaging (VRI) system could already be used in Israel, in Europe and in South Korea. Last month, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved its introduction in the U.S. But don't expect to see one of these systems used by your local physician anytime soon. This VRI system will carry a price tag of over $40K. But read more for additional details and several pictures of what might one day replace the stethoscope."

Submission + - Replacing atime With relatime in the Kernel (kerneltrap.org)

Submitted by

eldavojohn

on Wednesday August 08, 2007 @09:35AM

eldavojohn writes: "Our friend Jeremy at the Kernal Trap has has dug up some interesting criticism of atime from god himself, Linus Torvalds. As Linus submitted patches to improve relatime he noted: "I cannot over-emphasize how much of a deal it is in practice. Atime updates are by far the biggest IO performance deficiency that Linux has today. Getting rid of atime updates would give us more everyday Linux performance than all the pagecache speedups of the past 10 years, _combined_." And later severely beat atime about the head with a pointed stick: "It's also perhaps the most stupid Unix design idea of all times. Unix is really nice and well done, but think about this a bit: 'For every file that is read from the disk, lets do a ... write to the disk! And, for every file that is already cached and which we read from the cache ... do a write to the disk!" Well, I guess I can expect my Linux machine to become a little bit faster!"

Submission + - Schedules Direct to support XMLTV and MythTV

Submitted by MitchInOmaha on Tuesday August 07, 2007 @10:08PM

MitchInOmaha writes: From an email from a Tribune Media source announcing an agreement with Schedules Direct to continue providing schedule data to users of XMLTV and MythTV. From the email, "Today we are pleased to announce an agreement that will allow for many of you to continue to have access to your personal television listings data." And goes on to say that although it will be a paid service, it will be for non-commercial use only, and will not be available for use with commercially supplied devices. "As of September 1, 2007, there WILL BE an alternative television listings source for certain Zap2it Labs users who become members of Schedules Direct, which includes a membership fee." More available on the Schedules Direct website.

Submission + - First Survey of iPhone Owners (pcworld.com)

Submitted by

Ealbro

on Tuesday August 07, 2007 @11:31AM

Ealbro writes: "I thought you might be interested in this story launching at PC World this morning. We surveyed 500 iPhone owners about their new toy and got some pretty interesting results. Nine out of 10 were very happy with their iPhone, but a pretty substantial 13 percent reported having at least one significant problem (about a third said the problem was related to the battery). And despite their overall satisfaction, they had lots of gripes and suggestions — speed up the network, add voice dialing, allow for copy and paste and build some native games so they don't have to connect to the web to have some fun, among others. It's the first substantial survey I've seen of iPhone owners."

Submission + - New Tool Automates Webmail Account Hijacks (washingtonpost.com) 1

Submitted by

andrewd18

on Friday August 03, 2007 @09:23AM

andrewd18 writes: "According to the Washington Post's Security Fix blog, a tool was debuted at the Black Hat conference that makes it simple to hijack webmail services over a wireless network. While the dangers of unencrypted data transfer on a public wireless network have been around for some time, this tool presents the first example of an automated webmail hijack. Since the tool uses a cookie based attack, it works whether or not the user changes his or her password. This tool could potentially automate the attack of any user on a wireless network, so long as the website the user logs into does not encrypt its login information."

Submission + - New FingerprintingTechnique to Reveal Race and Sex (telegraph.co.uk) 1

Submitted by

Tech.Luver

on Friday August 03, 2007 @05:07AM

Tech.Luver writes: "Telegraph reports, " A new fingerprinting technique that can identify the race and sex, and possibly the diet of suspects has been developed. Scientists have shown that using a gelatine-based gel and high-tech chemical analysis can provide significant clues to a person?s identity even if police do not hold existing fingerprint records. ""

Submission + - Ruling by Secret US Court Allegedly Reduces Spying

Submitted by conspirator57 on Friday August 03, 2007 @01:20AM

conspirator57 writes: TFA http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la- na-spying2aug02,0,5813563.story?coll=la-home-cente r states that the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (a court that no citizen can establish standing to appear before) has ruled against Executive requests for so-called "basket warrants" as violating the 4th amendment to the Constitution, namely that such warrants do not meet the clearly expressed criteria in the second half of the amendment. To accomplish this they must have looked startlingly like British general warrants which were the original motivation for the 4th amendment. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_(law) for more.

TFA is very sympathetic to the Executive branch, going on to depict ways in which we're all less safe because of this ruling. Personally, I feel safer with more rulings like this one. Just wish the process were a bit more transparent.

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

Submission + - Multiformat Listening Test at 64kbps 1

Submitted by

prospective_user

on Thursday August 02, 2007 @08:09PM

prospective_user writes: "Do you think you have good ears? Think again.

The community at Hydrogenaudio has prepared a Public Listening Test for comparison of the most popular audio codecs (AAC, Vorbis, and Microsoft's WMA included) in a battle to see how they stand at compressing audio at 64kbps.

Many of the participants right now have expressed their surprise at being unable to determine which is the original and which is the compressed version of 18 samples covering a vast amount of musical styles.

The results of this test (and other that are conducted at Hydrogenaudio) will be used by the developers of the codecs to further improve the "transparency" and let this kind of test be even harder.

Everyone is invited to participate and show how good your listening is!"

Feed Editors' Notes: Final Cut comes back to town (macworld.com)

From feed by macworldfeed on Sunday April 15, 2007 @08:12PM

Apple unveils a new version of its Final Cut video-production suite, and Jonathan Seff delivers some of the details from Las Vegas.

Submission + - LED forty years older than thought

Submitted by LED lover on Wednesday April 11, 2007 @01:23PM

LED lover writes: The discovery of the LED is usually credited to four US groups in 1962, but an unrecognised Russian genius got there forty years before. Oleg Losev even filed a patent on using his device to long range communications, and wrote to Einstein to ask for help with the theory — but got no reply.

New Nanoparticle Cancer Therapy 81

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday January 09, 2007 @05:43PM from the targeted-clots dept.

quixote9 tips us to a BBC story on a promising new cancer therapy using targeted nanoparticles. From the article: "The researchers used the nanoparticles to zero in on the network of blood vessels that supply the tumors in mice with nutrients and oxygen... [They] developed a technique for amplifying [the nanoparticles'] homing ability by designing a multifunctional nanoparticle that binds to a protein structure found only in tumors and associated blood vessels... The tests showed that within hours of the injection, the artificial platelets began blocking the supply without harming normal tissues. The scientists believe the nanoparticles could also be used to carry drugs to the tumor."

Submission + - Google Earth has left beta.... again

Submitted by dickeya on Tuesday January 09, 2007 @03:39PM

dickeya writes: Approximately one year after the Google Earth version 3 client moved out of beta, the version 4 beta has done the same. The official announcement hasn't posted, but from the Google Earth Blog:

Google Earth 4 is officially released! The beta program began 6 months ago, and now almost exactly 1 year after GE 3 was released, GE 4 is no longer in beta (latest version is 4.0.2722). See the Google Earth home page for details, or just go download GE 4 now. GE 4 has many new features not available in the earlier version. Many of the features have been described in this blog over the past few months. Here are some highlights and why you should definitely consider upgrading.

If you haven't checked it out lately, now's a good time.

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