el_monkeyo - Slashdot User

Submission + - First Evidence of Another Universe? 2

Submitted by blamanj on Sunday November 25, 2007 @10:37PM

blamanj writes: Three months ago, astronomers announced the discovery of a large hole at the edge of our universe. Now, Dr. Laura Mersini-Houghton thinks she knows what that means. (Subscription req'd at New Scientist site, there's also an overview here.) According to string theory, there are many universes besides our own. Her team says that smaller universes are positioned at the edge of our universe, and because of gravitational interactions, they can be observed, and they're willing to make a prediction. The recently discovered void is in the northern hemisphere. They contend another one will be found in the southern hemisphere.

Submission + - Vista DVD cover: Who Are Those People? (blogspot.com)

Submitted by Pete on Tuesday June 12, 2007 @06:00AM

Pete writes: A picture of three guys have been discovered on the Windows Vista DVD cover. Who are they? There are three more holographic pictures, but it hasn't been possible to reveal more details about them yet. Do you have a Vista DVD and a microscope?

Submission + - Bush wristwatch gets stolen

Submitted by

Ddalex

on Tuesday June 12, 2007 @05:55AM

Ddalex writes: "If you had any doubts why Albanians welcomed Bush so warmly, here is definitive proof they are actually seeing him as a target. In this video, if you look closely between 0:54 and 0:58 time marks, you'll see how someone from the crowd actually stoles Bush's wristwatch :)"

Submission + - Who gets the unfinished software?

Submitted by zaunuz on Tuesday June 12, 2007 @02:13AM

zaunuz writes: What happends to unfinished software, mainly consisting of bits and pieces of perl-code, if the company you wrote it for goes bankrupt? This might be the case where i currently work. For the past year i have been in charge of a fairly big project, but due to poor economical planning higher up in the system, it is quite possible that the company will die before me and my team are finished. If this happends, we would like to continue the project on our own, since it is fairly close to completion, and it would suck to just scrap what we've invested so many hours and cups of coffee into. The creditors are most likely to be the new owners of the code, however, do the creditors care about unfinished code? Afterall, first they'd have to understand what it does. After they've done that, they'd have to finish it themselves. Has anyone else experienced a similar situation?

Submission + - An insight into AMD's new linux driver development (phoronix.com)

Submitted by

Cowards Anonymous

on Monday June 04, 2007 @09:23AM

Cowards Anonymous writes: "It's no secret that ATI Technologies has had a rough time in the past delivering display drivers that met the expectations of their customers. When ATI started out producing a FireGL and Radeon Linux driver they for some time were greatly behind NVIDIA's feature-rich driver.

The early ATI Linux driver had lacked essential functionality such as PCI Express and x86_64 architecture support and was also affected by stability and performance problems — not to mention a great deal of bugs.

Things are looking better though, as the article explains."

Submission + - No Climate Change Consensus Among Top Scientists (canada.com)

Submitted by

Lawrence Person

on Monday June 04, 2007 @08:56AM

Lawrence Person writes: "When Financial Post reporter Lawrence Solomon started interviewing top scientists who dissented from the global warming orthodoxy, he "accepted the prevailing view that scientists overwhelmingly believe that climate change threatens the planet. I doubted only claims that the dissenters were either kooks on the margins of science or sell-outs in the pockets of the oil companies...Now, after profiling more than 20 deniers, I do not know when I will stop — the list of distinguished scientists who question the IPCC grows daily, as does the number of emails I receive, many from scientists who express gratitude for my series. Somewhere along the way, I stopped believing that a scientific consensus exists on climate change. Certainly there is no consensus at the very top echelons of scientists — the ranks from which I have been drawing my subjects — and certainly there is no consensus among astrophysicists and other solar scientists, several of whom I have profiled. If anything, the majority view among these subsets of the scientific community may run in the opposite direction. Not only do most of my interviewees either discount or disparage the conventional wisdom as represented by the IPCC, many say their peers generally consider it to have little or no credibility. In one case, a top scientist told me that, to his knowledge, no respected scientist in his field accepts the IPCC position.""

Submission + - Blind radio ham fears his world will soon be quiet

Submitted by on Monday June 04, 2007 @08:17AM

An anonymous reader writes: UK radio ham, Robin Wood (G4UDK) has been BLIND for 16 years and now fears that he will soon 'live in a very quiet world' after being threatened with an ASBO (anti-social behaviour order) by Redditch Bourough Council following alleged compliants from neighbours of interfance to WLAN, mobiles, freeview boxes and even telephone landlines! This is despite the fact that as Robin himself clearly stated in this ITV news report that he MOSTLY just uses his ariels to LISTEN and only transmits with them between 04:30am and 07:30am!

News via Southgate ARS

Submission + - Russia tests "penetrating" ICBM

Submitted by Adambomb on Tuesday May 29, 2007 @05:12PM

Adambomb writes: The International Herald and others have reported that Russia has tested a new ICBM specifically designed to trump anti-missile systems. Perspectives may vary depending on individual political experience, but definitely food for thought.

Submission + - The Power of Lightning

Submitted by

Anonymous Coward

on Thursday May 10, 2007 @09:15AM

Anonymous Coward writes: "In the mid 1990's I worked with a friend at a laboratory in Philadelphia. He was head of IT and I was a tech writer. On a stormy July night we were cruising down the main highway into the city and saw the sky lit up with spectacular lightning bolts everywhere. We looked at each other and said "Wow" or something like that. The next morning we saw the power of lightning. It all started when we tried to open the lab's door with our card swipe — it was dead. So we pulled out a key and opened the door — the lights were out and the security system was dead. Moving further into the building we found the computer driven phone system was dead too — if fact there were some melted circuits in the closet. But what literally blew us away was the UNISYS server in the office — both side metal doors were blown off and lying three feet away. The circuit boards resembled melted plastic (did I forget to mention the smell?) — there was no fire so we were lucky there. The tape that had been in the tape drive looked like melted goo pouring out the front. It was truly spectacular to look at. So we inspected the rest of the building and suspected lightning had a hand in this but it could have been a surge (we did have surge protection but that has its limits). We ended up on the roof and noticed the roof was covered with tiny bits of white plastic like snow. Then my friend said "Where's the alarm company antenna?" It turned out that it had shattered in a lightning hit and the alarm company had neglected to ground the antenna. Anyone else experience the power of lightning in the IT world?"

Submission + - The search for dark matter and dark energy

Submitted by mlimber on Monday March 12, 2007 @10:42AM

mlimber writes: The New York Times Magazine has a lengthy, popular article on dark matter and dark energy, discussing the past, present, and future: 'Astronomers now realize that dark matter probably involves matter that is nonbaryonic ["meaning that it doesn't consist of the protons and neutrons of 'normal' matter"]. And whatever it is that dark energy involves, we know it's not "normal," either. In that case, maybe this next round of evidence will have to be not only beyond anything we know but also beyond anything we know how to know.'

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