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2858499 story

Using Lasers To Generate Random Numbers Faster 149

Posted by timothy on Sunday December 28, 2008 @04:22PM from the just-think-what-a-faster-laser-could-do dept.

Pranav writes "Using semiconductor lasers, scientists from Takushoku University, Saitama University, and NTT Corporation achieved random number rates of up to 1.7 gigabits per second, which is about 10 times higher than the second-best rate, produced using a physical phenomenon. Future work may center on devising laser schemes that can achieving rates as high as 10 Gbps."

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Comment Functional programming language first (Score 1) 452

by TheCoop1984 on Saturday October 11, 2008 @07:38PM (#25342397) Attached to: How Should I Teach a Basic Programming Course?

At my university, we started off on ML (the functional programming language). This very quickly introduced the concept of a function as a repeatable series of instructions that could be called several times - for a functional programming language, it is almost essential to call the same function several times. This also introduced recursion and types (as part of the compiler type inference) very quickly, something which is probably quite hard for people to grasp.

The only other courses in the first term was digital electronics and pure mathmatics courses. Only in the second term was Java introduced as the perennial OOP/procedural language. I think we've got one of the lowest dropout rates in the country (but don't quote me on that).

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MediaDefender's Parent Company Joins P2P Market 40

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday October 04, 2008 @08:19AM from the playing-both-sides dept.

An anonymous reader writes with news that ArtistDirect, the company who acquired MediaDefender, has launched another company called PiCast for the purpose of P2P video distribution. The reader says: "This is a strange twist for a company which last year set up a video-sharing site called Miivi in an attempt to entrap users uploading copyrighted content, and was caught launching a DoS attack against Revision3, which we discussed earlier this year."

107781 story

Intel Viiv vs. AMD LIVE! 115

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday March 12, 2007 @01:52PM from the boxing-match dept.

Searching4Sasquatch writes "Hot Hardware has tested two nearly identical HP systems in an effort to determine the best solution between Intel's Viiv and AMD's LIVE! campaigns. Priced around $999, these general purpose systems are tested straight out of the box with no tweaking or refinement to illustrate how "Joe Consumer" would fare in using one of these platforms."

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Why Email is a Bad Collaboration Tool 245

Posted by Hemos on Tuesday May 02, 2006 @10:10AM from the the-best-tool-to-use dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Isaac Garcia follows up his popular "The Good in Email" article with "The Bad in Email or (Why Steve Ballmer is the CTO of Microsoft)": "In spite of email's universal success (as a collaboration tool), and in spite of its many good traits, email contains deep, inherent flaws that force users and markets to seek alternatives to collaborating via email."

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