Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:DIAMONDS DO NOT WORK THAT WAY (Score 1) 112

by ygslash (#47323943) Attached to: Astronomers Discover Earth-Sized Diamond

Warning: ACTUAL PHYSICS, not typical Slashdot half-assed speculation...

Calling this a diamond is simply wrong. Perhaps at some point in the distant future one of these will cool and part of it will become a form of crystal carbon, but considering that the cooling time without mantle carbon crystallization is on the order of 10 Gigayears, it is not likely this has happened yet considering that the universe is around 13.6 gigayears old...

OP here. Not claiming to know much about this; I just pointed out the NRAO announcement. But I assume that NRAO does have people that know something about the physics here.

They are not saying that the white dwarf is 3000 K - they would have detected it directly then. They are saying that it must be cooler than that, perhaps much cooler. Thus, they are speculating that this is an extremely old object, and that it may indeed have cooled enough to reach temperatures at which there would be carbon crystallization.

Submission + - True Tales Of Invisible Employees Who Make IT Work (itworld.com)

Submitted by jfruh
jfruh writes: Not everyone in the tech world is a flashy app-builder or a hip kid with a pile of VC money. I talked to a group of IT workers who agreed with the self-description of being "invisible" to bring stories to light of what their work lives are like — the joys and frustrations that are ultimately much more representative of what a career is like in this field than whatever Mark Zuckerberg is up to.

Submission + - Why Software Builds Fail (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: A group of researchers from Google, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and the University of Nebraska undertook a study of over 26 million builds by 18,000 Google engineers from November 2012 through July 2013 to better understand what causes software builds to fail and, by extension, to improve developer productivity. And, while Google isn't representative of every developer everywhere, there are a few findings that stand out: Build frequency and developer (in)experience don't affect failure rates, most build errors are dependency-related, and C++ generates more build errors than Java (but they’re easier to fix).

Submission + - How governments devise custom "implants" to bug smartphones (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by mpicpp
mpicpp writes: On Twitter, it was billed as Qatif Today, a legitimate Android app that provides news and information in Arabic with a focus on the Qatif governorate of Saudi Arabia. But in fact, the shortened link came with a hidden extra—an advanced trojan wealthy nation states use to spy on criminal suspects and political dissidents.

Citizen Lab, the University of Toronto group that monitors government surveillance in the digital age, analyzed the recently discovered instance of the fake Qatif Today app in a blog post headlined Police Story: Hacking Team’s Government Surveillance Malware. The account provides a rare glimpse into malware developed by "Hacking Team," a highly secretive outfit based in Italy that charges governments top dollar for extremely stealthy spyware that's often referred to as a "lawful intercept" program.

Submission + - Google partner declares "death of hardware" (crn.com.au)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A Google partner has declared the "death" of server hardware in the enterprise, as it attempts to mount a charge on Microsoft's heartland by selling a package combining Google Apps with Chromebooks and Citrix. The AU$5,000 package includes up to five loan Chromebooks, access to a "cloud-based demonstration environment" for three weeks and a number of tools, including Google Chromebook Management Console, Google Apps for Business, Citrix's HTML5 Receiver, XenApp, NetScaler and StoreFront. Customers get access to Amazon's EC2, Cloud Formation and AutoScale products while customers' legacy application workloads, such as Microsoft or SAP, are hosted on AWS's public cloud infrastructure. The launch also follows news Google has partnered with Twilio and LiveOps to deliver a Chromebook bundle for call centers.

Submission + - The rise and fall of the cheat code (redbull.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A new feature published this week takes a deep-dive look at the history of the cheat code and its various manifestations over the years, from manual 'pokes' on cassettes to pass phrases with their own dedicated menus — as well as their rise from simple debug tool in the early days of bedroom development to a marketing tactic when game magazines dominated in the 1990s, followed by dedicated strategy guides.

Today's era of online play has all but done away with them, but the need for a level playing field isn't the only reason for their decline: as one veteran coder points out, why give away cheats for free when you can charge for them as in-app purchases? "Bigger publishers have now realised you can actually sell these things to players as DLC. Want that special gun? Think you can unlock it with a cheat code? Nope! You've got to give us some money first!"

Submission + - Octogenarian locksmith wins 2014 Technobrain Space Elevator competition

Submitted by ygslash
ygslash writes: Ishai Zimmerman, a locksmith in his 80's, won first prize in the 2014 Technobrain Space Elevator competition at the Technion in Haifa. The final round of the competition was attended by Russian engineer Yuri Artsutanov, who first published the idea of a space elevator in 1960 based on a concept of 19th century rocket science founder Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. In this year's competition, participants were required to build a climber that could ascend a 25 meter vertical rope at high speed and then lift a capsule attached to the bottom of the rope, without using any combustion energy. Zimmerman's winning entry was based on an electric screw motor used in the manufacture of plastic pipes.

Submission + - Astronomers discover Earth-sized diamond

Submitted by ygslash
ygslash writes: Astronomers at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory announced that they have discovered what appears to be the coolest white dwarf ever detected. The white dwarf is formerly a star similar to our own sun which, after expending all of its fuel, has cooled to less than a chilly 3000 degrees Kelvin and contracted to a size approximately the same as Earth. A white dwarf is composed mostly of carbon and oxygen, and the astronomers believe that at that temperature it would be mostly crystallized, forming something like a huge diamond.

Submission + - Workaholism in America Is Hurting the Economy (newrepublic.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Work/life balance is a constant problem in the tech industry. Even though experienced and mature engineers have been vocal in fighting it, every new generation buys into the American cultural identity of excessive work being a virtue. Each generation suffers for it, and the economy does, too. This article backs up that wisdom with hard numbers: "The 40-hour workweek is mostly a thing of the past. Ninety-four percent of professional workers put in 50 or more hours, and nearly half work 65 or above. All workers have managed to cut down on our time on the job by 112 hours over the last 40 years, but we’re far behind other countries: The French cut down by 491 hours, the Dutch by 425, and Canadians by 215 in the same time period. ... This overwork shows up in our sleep. Out of five developed peers, four other countries sleep more than us. That has again worsened over the years. In 1942, more than 80 percent of Americans slept seven hours a night or more. Today, 40 percent sleep six hours or less. A lack of sleep makes us poorer workers: People who sleep less than seven hours a night have a much harder time concentrating and getting work done."

Slashdot Top Deals

"Protozoa are small, and bacteria are small, but viruses are smaller than the both put together."

Close