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Technology

Why LEDs Don't Beat CFLs Even Though They Should 685

Posted by samzenpus from the light-it-up dept.
TaeKwonDood writes "LEDs don't beat CFLs in the home yet, but it's not simply because PG&E is getting rich making people feel like they are helping the environment buying CFLs made in China that are shipped to the US using a lot more fossil fuels than they save. It's a problem of indication versus illumination. However, some new discoveries are going to change all that."
Earth

Scientist Patents New Method To Fight Global Warming 492

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the and-we-will-need-an-additional-10,000-coal-plants-to-power-this dept.
SUNSTOP writes to tell us that a relatively unknown Maryland scientist has proposed a public patent that he claims could combat global warming. The proposed plan would require massive amounts of water to be sprayed into the air in an effort to bolster the earth's existing air conditioning system. "First, the sprayed droplets would transform to water vapor, a change that absorbs thermal energy near ground level; then the rising vapor would condense into sunlight-reflecting clouds and cooling rain, releasing much of the stored energy into space in the form of infrared radiation. Kenneth Caldeira, a climate scientist for the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University whose computer simulation of Ace's invention suggests it would significantly cool the planet. The simulated evaporation of about one-half inch of additional water everywhere in the world produced immediate planetary cooling effects that were projected to reach nearly 1 degree Fahrenheit within 20 or 30 years, Caldeira said."
Power

Google Demands Higher Chip Temps From Intel 287

Posted by CmdrTaco from the because-they-can dept.
JagsLive writes "When purchasing server processors directly from Intel, Google has insisted on a guarantee that the chips can operate at temperatures five degrees centigrade higher than their standard qualification, according to a former Google employee. This allowed the search giant to maintain higher temperatures within its data centers, the ex-employee says, and save millions of dollars each year in cooling costs."
IBM

Submission + - Solectron Torpedoes Lenovo/ThinkPad's Repuation

Submitted by ntesla
ntesla writes: It appears that support for Lenovo products (e.g. ThinkPad laptops) has imploded in recent months. This once venerable product's reputation has been tarnished, at least in part, by outsourced support services managed by Solectron. Customers now routinely experience multi-week waits for machines to be returned from depot service. The Lenovo forums are littered with complaints from customers, including gems like this where after weeks of delays Lenovo had to intervene to take the machine back from the Solectron depot and have a Lenovo field-technician service it instead. In another case, a "database error" caused the service records on a machine to be switched such that the problem request and return shipping information was exchanged with another customer. Phone support reps are unable to address problems, or even track status, and customers are now seeking help on Lenovo forums by sending private messages to Lenovo staff — meanwhile it appears other Lenovo employees are anonymously posting messages to clarify the distinction between Lenovo issues and problems with services outsourced to Solectron.
The Internet

6% of Web Users Generate 50% of Ad Clicks 341

Posted by kdawson from the born-to-click dept.
pcause writes "A recent study finds that 6% of Web users generate 50% of the click-throughs. Worse news for advertisers: these clickers are not representative of the population as a whole, most have incomes under $40K, and their clicks are not related to any offline buying. (They are mostly males between 25 and 44 years of age.) The number of clicks on an ad campaign is also not strongly correlated with brand awareness for the ads' subject, according to the study. This is bad news for ad-supported Web sites and businesses, as rates should drop if the Net economy begins to take these findings seriously."

Netcraft Says IIS Gaining on Apache 666

Posted by CmdrTaco from the trolls-rejoice-in-netcraft-story dept.
benjymouse quotes this month's netcraft survey "In the August 2007 survey we received responses from 127,961,479 sites, an increase of 2.3 million sites from last month. Microsoft continues to increase its web server market share, adding 2.6 million sites this month as Apache loses 991K hostnames. As a result, Windows improves its market share by 1.4% to 34.2%, while Apache slips by 1.7% to 48.4%. Microsoft's recent gains raise the prospect that Windows may soon challenge Apache's leadership position."

US Government Checking Up On Vista Users? 291

Posted by Zonk from the security-theatre-in-your-home dept.
Paris The Pirate writes "This article at Whitedust displays some very interesting logs from Vista showing connections to the DoD Information Networking Center, United Nations Development program and the Halliburton Company; for no reason other than the machine was running Vista. From the article 'After running Vista for only a few days — with a complete love for the new platform the first sign of trouble erupted. I began noticing latency on my home network connection — so I booted my port sniffing software and networking tools to see what was happening. What I found was foundation shaking. The two images below show graphical depictions of what has and IS trying to connect to my computer even in an idle state'."
Wireless Networking

Duke Wireless Problem Caused by Cisco, not iPhone 195

Posted by CmdrTaco from the egg-on-someone's-face dept.
jpallas writes "Following up to a previous Slashdot story, it now turns out that the widely reported problems with Duke University's wireless network were not caused by Apple's iPhone. The problem was actually with their Cisco network. Duke's Chief Information Officer praises the work of their technical staff. Does that include the assistant director for communications infrastructure who was quoted as saying, "I don't believe it's a Cisco problem in any way, shape, or form?""
The Internet

New Web Metric Likely To Hurt Google 226

Posted by kdawson from the bye-bye-page-views dept.
StonyandCher write(s) with news that one of the largest Net measurement companies, Nielsen/NetRatings, is about to abandon page views as its primary metric for comparing sites. Instead the company will use total time spent on a site. The article notes, "This is likely to affect Google's ranking because while users visit the site often, they don't usually spend much time there. 'It is not that page views are irrelevant now, but they are a less accurate gauge of total site traffic and engagement,' said Scott Ross, director of product marketing at Nielsen/NetRatings. 'Total minutes is the most accurate gauge to compare between two sites. If [Web] 1.0 is full page refreshes for content, Web 2.0 is, "How do I minimize page views and deliver content more seamlessly?"'"
Biotech

Submission + - Potential cure for antibiotic resistant infections (newsobserver.com)

Submitted by kpw10
kpw10 writes: "Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have discovered that two drugs used to treat bone loss in old folks can both kill and short-circuit the 'sex life' of antibiotic-resistant bacteria blamed for nearly 100,000 hospital deaths across the country each year."
Databases

First "Real" Benchmark for PostgreSQL 275

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the waiting-for-the-opportune-moment dept.
anticlimate writes "A new benchmark published on SPEC shows PostgreSQL's performance approaching that of Oracle's and surpassing or on par with MySQL (however the test-hardwares of the other DB systems are somewhat different). The test was put together by PostgreSQL's core developers working at Sun. They certainly are not unbiased, but this is the first 'real' benchmark with PostgreSQL — according to Josh Berkus's blog. The main difference compared to earlier benchmarks (and anecdotes) seems to be the tuning of PostgreSQL."
Education

FBI Seeks To Restrict University Student Freedoms 593

Posted by Zonk from the damned-liberal-freethinking-commie-pinkos dept.
amigoro writes with a link to the Press Escape blog, which is discussing new guidelines suggest by the FBI for university administrations. The Federal Bureau, worried about the possibility of international espionage via our centers of learning, now sees the need to restrict the freedoms of university students for national security. "FBI is offering to brief faculty, students and staff on what it calls 'espionage indicators' aimed at identifying foreign agents. Unexplained affluence, failing to report overseas travel, showing unusual interest in information outside the job scope, keeping unusual work hours, unreported contacts with foreign nationals, unreported contact with foreign government, military, or intelligence officials, attempting to gain new accesses without the need to know, and unexplained absences are all considered potential espionage indicators."
Patents

Supreme Court Weakens Patents 331

Posted by CmdrTaco from the any-lawyers-on-the-plane dept.
ajakk writes "The U.S. Supreme Court, in a unanimous opinion, overturned the decades old test for determine whether a patent is obvious. The Court ruled that the Court had looked at obviousness in a "narrow, rigid manner." This should allow patents to be more easily invalidated because they are obvious."

Community Patent Review Project Announced 62

Posted by CowboyNeal from the coming-together dept.
PatPending writes "American companies General Electric, IBM, Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard have joined with the New York Law School and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to inaugarate a new system of peer review for software patents. The four companies, plus Red Hat, the world's biggest listed open source software business, are the lead sponsors behind the Community Patent Review project. The one-year pilot program will begin in early 2007 and focus on published but not-yet-granted patent applications relating to computer software. Scientists and engineers will be able to submit prior art to patent examiners at the USPTO using an online system. All Community Patent review project documents will be available on the internet for public comment. 'High-quality patents increase certainty around intellectual property rights, reducing contention and freeing resources to focus on innovation,' said David Kappos, vice president of IP law at IBM."

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