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Man Takes Up Internal Farming 136

Posted by samzenpus from the cardiovascular-farming dept.
RockDoctor writes "'A Massachusetts man who was rushed to hospital with a collapsed lung came home with an unusual diagnosis: a pea plant was growing in his lung.' Just that summary should tell you enough to work out most of the rest of the details, but it does raise a number of questions unaddressed by the article: How did the pea roots deal with the patient's immune system? What would have happened if the situation had continued un-treated? I bet the guy has a career awaiting him in PR for a pea-growing company."
Programming

Simpler "Hello World" Demonstrated In C 582

Posted by kdawson from the non-obfuscated dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Wondering where all that bloat comes from, causing even the classic 'Hello world' to weigh in at 11 KB? An MIT programmer decided to make a Linux C program so simple, she could explain every byte of the assembly. She found that gcc was including libc even when you don't ask for it. The blog shows how to compile a much simpler 'Hello world,' using no libraries at all. This takes me back to the days of programming bare-metal on DOS!"
Image

Man Swallows USB Flash Drive Evidence 199

Posted by samzenpus from the chew-it-up dept.
SlideRuleGuy writes "In a bold and bizarre attempt to destroy evidence seized during a federal raid, a New York City man grabbed a flash drive and swallowed the data storage device while in the custody of Secret Service agents. Records show Florin Necula ingested the Kingston flash drive shortly after his January 21 arrest outside a bank in Queens. A Kingston executive said it was unclear if stomach acid could damage one of their drives. 'As you might imagine, we have no actual experience with someone swallowing a USB.' I imagine that would be rather painful. But did he follow his mother's advice and chew thoroughly, first? Apparently not, as the drive was surgically recovered."
Government

Secret Service Runs At "Six Sixes" Availability 248

Posted by timothy from the only-need-half-as-many dept.
PCM2 writes "ABC News is reporting that the US Secret Service is in dire need of server upgrades. 'Currently, 42 mission-oriented applications run on a 1980s IBM mainframe with a 68 percent performance reliability rating,' says one leaked memo. That finding was the result of an NSA study commissioned by the Secret Service to evaluate the severity of their computer problems. Curiously, upgrades to the Service's computers are being championed by Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, who says he's had 'concern for a while' about the issue."
Java

After Learning Java Syntax, What Next? 293

Posted by timothy from the nice-hot-bath dept.
Niris writes "I'm currently taking a course called Advanced Java Programming, which is using the text book Absolute Java, 4th edition, by Walter Savitch. As I work at night as a security guard in the middle of nowhere, I've had enough time to read through the entire course part of the book, finish all eleven chapter quizzes, and do all of the assignments within a month, so all that's left is a group assignment that won't be ready until late April. I'm trying to figure out what else to read that's Java related aside from the usual 'This is how to create a tree. This is recursion. This is how to implement an interface and make an anonymous object,' and wanted to see what Slashdotters have to suggest. So far I'm looking at reading Beginning Algorithms, by Simon Harris and James Ross."
Programming

An Open Source Compiler From CUDA To X86-Multicore 71

Posted by timothy from the abstraction-gains-a-layer dept.
Gregory Diamos writes "An open source project, Ocelot, has recently released a just-in-time compiler for CUDA, allowing the same programs to be run on NVIDIA GPUs or x86 CPUs and providing an alternative to OpenCL. A description of the compiler was recently posted on the NVIDIA forums. The compiler works by translating GPU instructions to LLVM and then generating native code for any LLVM target. It has been validated against over 100 CUDA applications. All of the code is available under the New BSD license."

Submission + - Netflix Prize Winners Announced (cnn.com)

Submitted by
karlnyberg
karlnyberg writes: "And the million dollars goes to... Lots of people. Not surprisingly, teams of former winners.

Stay tuned for the sequel! Netflix Prize II. Different rules. Different format. Another $1M!"
Programming

Submission + - NetflixPrize enters 2007 Progress Prize Phase (netflixprize.com)

Submitted by
karlnyberg
karlnyberg writes: "In accordance with the competition rules, team leaders for the NetflixPrize competition received the following email yesterday:

As of September 2, 2007 00:00:00 UTC, the Netflix Prize competition entered the "last call" period for the 2007 Progress Prize. In accord with the Rules, your team has thirty (30) days, until October 2, 2007 00:00:00 UTC, to make submissions that will be considered for this Prize. Good luck and thank you for participating!

This is ONLY for the $50,000 prize for the first year of operation of the competition, not for the $1,000,000 prize."

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