Blahbooboo3 - Slashdot User

Submission + - replace a freeway bridge in one night (canada.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 11, 2007 @11:46PM

An anonymous reader writes: In Ottawa tonight a freeway bridge is being ripped out and replaced in one night. A replacement section of the bridge was built in a nearby park, and will be hauled in place with heavy lift equipment, with a projected downtime for the major freeway of less than 24 hours. There is a webcam to watch the progress.

Space Hotel to Open in 2012 137

Posted by Zonk on Saturday August 11, 2007 @03:27AM from the l5-or-l4 dept.

blackdefiance writes "The New York Times is reporting that firm plans for the first hotel in space are now in the works. Slated for a 2012 opening, 'Galactic Suite' will cost about $4 million for a three-day stay. 'They may have solved the issue of how to take a shower in weightlessness -- the guests will enter a spa room in which bubbles of water will float around. When guests are not admiring the view from their portholes they will take part in scientific experiments on space travel. Galactic Suite began as a hobby for former aerospace engineer Claramunt, until a space enthusiast decided to make the science fiction fantasy a reality by fronting most of the $3 billion needed to build the hotel. An American company intent on colonizing Mars, which sees Galaxy Suite as a first step, has since come on board, and private investors from Japan, the United States and the United Arab Emirates are in talks.'"

Submission + - AT&T Censors Anti-Bush Pearl Jam Lyrics (rollingstone.com)

Submitted by feed_me_cereal on Friday August 10, 2007 @12:33PM

feed_me_cereal writes: While performing at Lollapalooza in Chicago, Pearl Jam front man Eddie Vetter inserted the lyrics "George Bush, leave this world alone" and "George Bush, find yourself another home" into a rendition of "Daughter" sang to the tune of Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall". Those lyrics were censored out of the Lollapalooza webcast from AT&T's "Blue Room". AT&T denies willful culpability, citing this incident as a "mistake". One wonders what implications this will have in the net neutrality debate.

Humanity's Genetic Diversity on the Decline 285

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday August 08, 2007 @10:06AM from the meanwhile-my-beer-gut-it-on-the-incline dept.

jd writes "In a study covering five different periods of history, from 300 AD to the present day, and geographically spread across much of Europe, scientists have extracted the mitochondrial DNA from a sizable number of individuals in an effort to examine changes in diversity. The results, published in the Royal Society journal is intriguing to say the least. 1700 years ago, three out of every four individuals belonged to a different haplotype. In modern Europe, the number is only one in three. The researchers blame a combination of plague, selection of dominant lineages and culturally-inflicted distortions. The researchers say more work needs to be done, but are unclear if this involves archaeology or experiments involving skewing the data in the local female population."

Submission + - Pirate Bay earns 20,000 Euros a day (rixstep.com) 2

Submitted by on Thursday August 02, 2007 @03:57PM

An anonymous reader writes: controverisal pro-piracy website the piratebay likes to portray itself as an innocent hobby site that provides a free index without censorship, but recent facts show that the site is earning up to 20,000 Euros per day from its advertising. Taking in money on this scale puts a different slant on the motives behind the Swedish filesharing site, and could open up the runners of the site to prosecution for profiting from copyright infringement.

Submission + - Intel open sources multicore programming tool (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by

Tech.Luver

on Wednesday July 25, 2007 @12:47AM

Tech.Luver writes: "From:: Tech Luver :: Jon Stokes at ARSTechnica writes: ( http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070724-inte l-open-sources-multicore-programming-tool.html ) " Intel announced today that they're open-sourcing their cross-platform Thread Building Blocks 2.0 (TBB) template library. While the company contributes code to open-source project like the Linux kernel and drivers, the opening of TBB marks the first time that Intel has taken a commercial tool and open-sourced it, making it Intel's largest open-source commitment to date. The aim of TBB, is to make it easier for coders in C++ to express task-level parallelism. TBB works by abstracting parallelism above the level that most programmers are currently used to, especially those coders who use POSIX or Windows threads. ""

Submission + - Firefox remote execution (xs-sniper.com)

Submitted by on Wednesday July 25, 2007 @12:32AM

An anonymous reader writes: From the article — "Once again, a flaw in the URI handling behavior allows for remote command execution. UNREGISTER ALL UNNECESSARY URIs NOW! This example shows flaws in Firefox, Netscape, and Mozilla browsers... other browsers are affected by related vulnerabilities."

cbf adding more, gogo editor!

Submission + - Google Apps Buggy Lately?

Submitted by on Tuesday July 24, 2007 @11:27PM

An anonymous reader writes: I administer two unrelated domains that use Google Apps for e-mail (thats where you basically use G-mail but with your own domain name) and over the last week I've received an alarming number of reports from users that the service appears to be broken. Upon going to their Start page, the users get the message "Information is temporarily unavailable" under E-mail and when they try click on the E-mail link they get taken to a vanilla G-mail login page (which doesn't support logging in with a Google Apps accounts). Did Google upgrade the Apps with broken software or something? Either way, I've seen the problem myself and it doesn't appear to be going away.

Submission + - ThinkPad X61 Tablet - Japan Release (wordpress.com)

Submitted by

buelldm

on Tuesday July 24, 2007 @11:13PM

buelldm writes: "The ThinkPad X61 laptop computer is a sleek, powerful, practical and cheap machine. Earlier in the year, a similar model was released, but this new model is a much improved version of an already great computer. This laptop has Intel Centrino Pro technology, CPU Core 2 Duo L7500 (1.6GHz). It comes loaded with 1GB RAM, Wireless LAN function and a 160GB HDD (twice the size as the previous) This also comes preinstalled with Windows Vista, Home Premium Edition. This nice little Laptop also comes with a built in fingertip sensor, to ensure the protection of your important files. It has an average battery of 3-7 hours, and dimensions of 274× depth 244× height 33mm, and a weight of only 1.85kg (just over 4lbs). One of the biggest features is the improved screen technology. The FFS SXGA+ TFT liquid crystal panel is easy to see even under the direct sunlight, has a wide field of vision angle, and anti-reflection to ensure correct viewing in any condition. Now this little beauty packs one hell of a punch, is sleek and light, and for around $2,300, isn't that expensive. So whats the downside? It doesn't have an optical drive. There are currently no dates on the release outside of Japan, but there is one on the way. http://whizbyte.wordpress.com/2007/07/25/thinkpad- x61-tablet-japan-release/"

Submission + - Computer waste fuels toxic trade (itmanagersjournal.com)

Submitted by

nanday

on Tuesday July 24, 2007 @10:24PM

nanday writes: "Do you know what happens to your used computer equipment after it has been discarded? The answer may surprise you. Even if you have tried to recycle it, your old hardware often gets shipped to a developing nation in direct violation of international law. Useful components are then extracted — without safety precautions — by locals earning pennies a day and who are exposed to a range of hazardous toxins that include lead, beryllium, mercury, cadmium, and brominated flame retardants. Though slated to be banned over a decade ago, the practice continues and seems to be growing. North America, Japan, and South Korea are among the worst offenders. Solutions exist, and free software is a small part of them, but implementing them remains a painfully slow process."

Submission + - Intel open-sources parallelization Framework

Submitted by CajunArson on Tuesday July 24, 2007 @10:21PM

CajunArson writes: An interesting article over at Ars Technica discussing Intel's recent release of its http://osstbb.intel.com/">Thread Building Blocks 2.0 templating library for C++. This library provides a higher level of abstraction for writing parallel code than normal POSIX or Windows threads provide. It has been pushed by Intel in the past as a similar concept to OpenMP, although its template nature means it is much more focused on C++.

Some interesting notes on Intel's earnestness in open-sourcing the project: Released under GPL version 2, it runs on non-Intel CPUs (even non-x86 as in the G5), and it is already ported to Linux and Solaris as well as Windows.

Submission + - Microsoft releases source for IronRuby (sort of)

Submitted by mbuckingham on Tuesday July 24, 2007 @09:54PM

mbuckingham writes: According to The Register, Microsoft has released the source code to an early version of IronRuby, which is Ruby for .net. There is suppport for a Dynamic Language Runtime which runs on top of the CLR. Microsoft is also accepting code back for the libraries, but not the compiler itself.

Submission + - Mozilla admits Firefox is flawed just like IE (computerworld.com) 1

Submitted by jdelator on Tuesday July 24, 2007 @09:09PM

jdelator writes: In a public mea culpa, Mozilla Corp.'s chief security officer acknowledged today that Firefox includes the same flaw that the company called a "critical vulnerability" in Internet Explorer during a two-week ruckus over responsibility for a Windows zero-day bug.

"Over the weekend, we learned about a new scenario that identifies ways that Firefox could also be used as the entry point," said Window Snyder of Mozilla. "While browsing with Firefox, a specially crafted URL could potentially be used to send bad data to another application.

"We thought this was just a problem with IE," Snyder continued. "It turns out, it is a problem with Firefox as well."

Submission + - $500 million dollar piracy ring busted in China

Submitted by Blahbooboo3 on Tuesday July 24, 2007 @06:50PM

Blahbooboo3 writes: Reported by several news organizations, pirated software worth more than $500 million has been seized by authorities in China as part of a joint operation run by Chinese police and the FBI. Microsoft estimates that the software piracy of an international counterfeiting syndicate, over the past six years, cost the company at least $2 billion in lost software revenue. Microsoft said that key information in the investigation came from its Windows Genuine Advantage program, an antipiracy system that can check whether an OS is legit. It's generally accepted that Microsoft has done well out of software piracy: it helps products become widely used, and as the market matures, people start to pay for their software. And this has been a major factor in Windows beating Linux in China, as Bill Gates admits.

Submission + - China breaks up $500 million piracy ring

Submitted by Blahbooboo3 on Tuesday July 24, 2007 @06:43PM

Blahbooboo3 writes: Reported by several news organizations , pirated software worth more than $500 million has been seized by authorities in China as part of a joint operation run by Chinese police and the FBI. Microsoft estimates that the software piracy of an international counterfeiting syndicate, over the past six years, cost the company at least $2 billion in lost software revenue. Microsoft said that key information in the investigation came from its Windows Genuine Advantage program, an antipiracy system that can check whether an OS is legit. It's generally accepted that Microsoft has done well out of software piracy: it helps products become widely used, and as the market matures, people start to pay for their software. And this has been a major factor in Windows beating Linux in China, as Bill Gates admits.

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