Duc de Montebello - Slashdot User

Submission + - Herschel space telescope finishes mission (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by AmiMoJo on Tuesday April 30, 2013 @03:31AM

AmiMoJo writes: The billion-euro Herschel observatory has run out of the liquid helium needed to keep its instruments and detectors at their ultra-low functioning temperature. This equipment has now warmed, meaning the telescope cannot see the sky. Its 3.5m mirror and three state-of-the-art instruments made it the most powerful observatory of its kind ever put in space, but astronomers always knew the helium store onboard would be a time-limiting factor.

Submission + - AMD details next-gen Kaveri APU's shared memory architecture (techreport.com)

Submitted by crookedvulture on Tuesday April 30, 2013 @12:45AM

crookedvulture writes: AMD has revealed more details about the unified memory architecture of its next-generation Kaveri APU. The chip's CPU and GPU components will have a shared address space and will also share both physical and virtual memory. GPU compute applications should be able to share data between the processor's CPU cores and graphics ALUs, and the caches on those components will be fully coherent. This so-called heterogeneous uniform memory access, or hUMA, supports configurations with either DDR3 or GDDR5 memory. It's also based entirely in hardware and should work with any operating system. Kaveri is due later this year and will also have updated Steamroller CPU cores and a GPU based on the current Graphics Core Next architecture.

Submission + - DragonFly BSD 3.4 Released, with new packaging system

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 30, 2013 @12:37AM

An anonymous reader writes: DragonFly BSD has released version 3.4. This version is the first BSD to support GCC 4.7, and contains a new experimental Aptitude-like binary package installed called DPorts, which uses the FreeBSD ports collection as a base.

Submission + - Release of Raring melts Ubuntu servers (ubuntu.com)

Submitted by Provocateur on Monday April 29, 2013 @11:58PM

Provocateur writes: The release of Raring Ringtail has brought a decent sized slashdotting to Ubuntu, even their home page Ubuntu.com connection times out. And having a data center experience technical difficulties at the same time, all add up to a really bad Monday night.

Submission + - Four Things Nintendo is Doing Right (and wrong) With the Wii U (goozernation.com)

Submitted by RyanDJ on Monday April 29, 2013 @11:19PM

RyanDJ writes: Ryan Johnson | GoozerNation

Nintendo's newest update has got to be one of the most sought-after updates in recent history. The update itself does little more than speed up some menus and a few other performance issues, but the next-day release of the Virtual Console is something many think Nintendo should have had ready Day 1. Even though 90% of Nintendo fanboys will agree with you that the Wii U has had a rocky start, Nintendo is pushing back strong. Here are four things Nintendo is doing right, and some issues they still need to pay attention to.

Submission + - Grocery delivery is greener than driving to the store (washington.edu)

Submitted by vinces99 on Monday April 29, 2013 @11:31AM

vinces99 writes: Those trips to the store can take a chunk out of your day and put more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. But now University of Washington engineers have found that using a grocery delivery service can cut carbon dioxide emissions by at least half when compared with individual household trips to the store. Trucks filled to capacity that deliver to customers clustered in neighborhoods produced the most savings in carbon dioxide emissions, but there are even benefits with delivery to rural areas.

Submission + - Senators To Apple: Pull iPhone DUI Check Alerts (computerworld.com)

Submitted by

CWmike

on Tuesday March 22, 2011 @08:37PM

CWmike writes: "Four U.S. senators on Tuesday called on Apple to yank iPhone and iPad apps that help drunken drivers evade police, saying the programs are 'harmful to public safety.' The CEO of the company that makes one such app said the senators' demand was 'a knee-jerk reaction.'"

Submission + - Senators Want DUI Checkpoint Apps Pulled

Submitted by

Hugh Pickens writes

on Tuesday March 22, 2011 @08:21PM

Hugh Pickens writes writes: "PC Magazine reports that four US senators have written a letter urging Apple, Google, and RIM to remove apps that provide users with information about DUI checkpoints. "With more than 10,000 Americans dying in drunk-driving crashes every year, providing access to applications that alert users to DUI checkpoints is harmful to public safety," says the letter signed by Senators Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer, Frank Lautenberg, and Mark Udall. A search in the Android Market pulled up four apps: Checkpoint Wingman and Checkpoint Wingman Lit which posts user-uploaded DUI checkpoints and sends alerts to your phone when you're close to a checkpoint; PhantomALERT which provides data on speed traps, red light cameras, speed cameras, school zones, DUI checkpoints, and dangerous intersections; and Mr. DUI which posts information about DUI checkpoints, speed traps, and red light cameras, and also supports user submissions and alerts. Similar apps are available for the iPhone and RIM. Apple released a set of App Store guidelines in September that spells out what apps are and are not allowed to do. Included on that list of "don'ts" are "apps that encourage excessive consumption of alcohol or illegal substances, or encourage minors to consume alcohol or smoke cigarettes.""

Submission + - NetFlix outage

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 22, 2011 @07:52PM

An anonymous reader writes: As of a bit after 7 pm EDT, the NetFlix site started to experience problems, going from being completely unreachable to intermittent responses, and back down to being unreachable. Given the outage pattern, it is likely that an outage on a limited number of servers caused a cascading outage when the remainder of the servers could not handle the combined load. No information seems to be available at this point concerning the expected duration of the outage.

Submission + - Slashdot Poll 6

Submitted by kramer2718 on Tuesday March 22, 2011 @07:50PM

kramer2718 writes: The Most Evil Technology Company
* Microsoft
* Apple
* Google
* Oracle
* Adobe
* Intel
* I, for one, welcome our new corporate overlords

Submission + - Internet Explorer will survive and Firefox won't (zdnet.com) 1

Submitted by rudy_wayne on Tuesday March 22, 2011 @06:43PM

rudy_wayne writes: There is an interesting (and probably controversial) piece on on Why Internet Explorer will survive and Firefox won't

"It’s tempting to look at Microsoft’s history with Internet Explorer and assume that they are just incapable of working at the speed of the Internet. But take a closer look at the development process for IE 9 and there’s a different story to tell. Microsoft is playing the same game as Google. Mozilla is stuck in 2005. And that’s why the core of Internet Explorer will still be around in five years when Firefox will have, at best, a loyal cult following."

"At last year’s MIX conference, Microsoft talked about its new app platform: write code once, target for multiple platforms. That’s the same space that Google is playing in. Google has an entire family of apps that are designed to work exclusively in a browser."

"So where does that leave Firefox? It doesn’t have an app ecosystem or a loyal core of developers. Extensions? Those were worth bragging about in 2005, but in 2012 the story is apps. Businesses and consumers will want to use the same browser that powers their installed apps. In the PC space, that means Google or Microsoft. It doesn’t leave room for a third player."

Submission + - Federal Judge Rejects Google Books Deal (nytimes.com)

Submitted by

14erCleaner

on Tuesday March 22, 2011 @04:33PM

14erCleaner writes: "US Circuit Judge Denny Chin has rejected a $125 million settlement between Google Books and the author's guild, that would have allowed Google to publish all out-of-work fiction online. Chin has previously ruled more favorably on this case."

Submission + - BatteryTech Eases Mobile Game Porting Efforts (batterypoweredgames.com)

Submitted by rbgrn on Tuesday March 22, 2011 @03:50PM

rbgrn writes: A new product on the market by popular Android game development group, Battery Powered Games, provides analternative for porting existing games to the iPhone and Android mobile platforms. BatteryTech is a mobile platform abstraction framework. In layman's terms — it handles all of the details of Windows, Mac, Android and iPhone so that developers can port just once — using BatteryTech — and build out to all other platforms from there. BatteryTech isn't just for porting. Several new games are currently in development and the first few should be hitting the markets soon. Special "indie" licensing is also available, offering up a low-cost alternative to integrating with the larger game engines.

Submission + - Firefox 4: 3 Hours, 1M Downloads (computerworld.com)

Submitted by

CWmike

on Tuesday March 22, 2011 @03:18PM

CWmike writes: "Firefox 4 got off to a strong start today, with 1 million copies of the new browser downloaded in the first three hours. If it keeps up the early pace, Firefox 4 will easily beat Microsoft's claim that users downloaded 2.4 million copies of its Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) in the first 24 hours of availability last week. Mozilla has posted a real-time download calculator on its site. Although Firefox 4's out-of-the-gate download tally was impressive, Mozilla executive Mike Beltzner said that it was behind the launch numbers of Firefox 3.6, which shipped in January 2010. During the first three hours, downloads averaged between 5,000 and 6,000 copies per minute, less than half the 12,000-per-minute pace of the previous version."

Submission + - GLOBE at Night Aims to Map Global Light Pollution (globeatnight.org) 1

Submitted by Kilrah_il on Tuesday March 22, 2011 @03:10PM

Kilrah_il writes: Light pollution is a big problem this days, affecting not only astronomers and wild life, but also everyone else because of wasted energy. GLOBE at Night aims to raise awareness by urging people to go outside and find out how much light pollution there is in their area. "The campaign is easy and fun to do. First, you match the appearance of the constellation Orion in the first campaign (and Leo or Crux in the second campaign) with simple star maps of progressively fainter stars found. Then you submit your measurements, including the date, time, and location of your comparison. After all the campaign’s observations are submitted, the project’s organizers release a map of light-pollution levels worldwide."

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