Comment Griffin? (Score 1) 60
Griffin? Is that you?
Building a Homemade Nuclear Reactor In NYC 219
yukk writes "Mark Suppes, a web developer for Gucci, is working on his own personal fusion reactor. His work in a NYC warehouse using $35,000 of his own money and $4,000 raised on a website has made him the 38th independent researcher recognized as creating a working fusion reactor. How's that for a hobby?"
Comment Re:obligatory (Score 1) 515
Sorry to be picky on that one, but this is not a alt attribute. This is a title attribute and this is precisely why you should indeed see it with a proper browser, while you should not see the content of "alt" (which happens to be "Purity" in this example) if the image is rendered.
Ubuntu Desktop In the Cloud 83
jimjimovich writes "One new feature in Ubuntu 10.04 that caught my attention is the Desktop in the Cloud project. Ubuntu already has great EC2 support, and it's getting even better. Now you can launch Ubuntu Desktop instances on EC2 and connect to them with an NX client."
Colliding Particles Can Make Black Holes After All 269
cremeglace writes with this excerpt from ScienceNOW:
"You've heard the controversy. Particle physicists predict the world's new highest-energy atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland, might create tiny black holes, which they say would be a fantastic discovery. Some doomsayers fear those black holes might gobble up the Earth — physicists say that's impossible — and have petitioned the United Nations to stop the $5.5 billion LHC. Curiously, though, nobody had ever shown that the prevailing theory of gravity, Einstein's theory of general relativity, actually predicts that a black hole can be made this way. Now a computer model shows conclusively for the first time that a particle collision really can make a black hole."
That said, they estimate the required energy for creating a black hole this way to be roughly "a quintillion times higher than the LHC's maximum"; though if one of the theories requiring compact extra dimensions is true, the energy could be lower.
Comment Re:Almost... (Score 1) 135
Hey! I think there's also a joke somewhere about the bag being perforated, bringing a new sense to a "system overflow" but I can't quite work it out either...
Maybe we could create a group on Facebook and have fun with our not-quite-working-slashdot-jokes?
Maybe we could create a group on Facebook and have fun with our not-quite-working-slashdot-jokes?
Comment Bandwidth Stress Test - How To (Score 5, Funny) 162
Comment Re:projection (Score 1) 596
While this is an interesting example, I don't have any doubt that there are plenty of other things that you would like to store than just video. And many of them may require *much* more storage capacity.
Let's take just one example: chess. As far as I know, most endgame databases currently in use are up to 5 or maybe 6 pieces remaining on the board. A 6-men endgame database is about 1TB. And as you increase the number of pieces, the size of the database grows very fast.
I don't event talk about storing all possible chess positions ... But here's a quote from this article, including some new numbers for you to play with:
"Allis also estimated the game-tree complexity to be at least 10^123, "based on an average branching factor of 35 and an average game length of 80". As a comparison, the number of atoms in the Universe, to which it is often compared, is estimated to be between 4x10^79 and 10^81."
Let's take just one example: chess. As far as I know, most endgame databases currently in use are up to 5 or maybe 6 pieces remaining on the board. A 6-men endgame database is about 1TB. And as you increase the number of pieces, the size of the database grows very fast.
I don't event talk about storing all possible chess positions
"Allis also estimated the game-tree complexity to be at least 10^123, "based on an average branching factor of 35 and an average game length of 80". As a comparison, the number of atoms in the Universe, to which it is often compared, is estimated to be between 4x10^79 and 10^81."
