Fried-Psitalon - Slashdot User

Fran Allen Wins Turing Award 79

Posted by kdawson on Thursday February 22, 2007 @10:12AM from the one-small-step-for-a-woman dept.

shoemortgage writes "The Association for Computing Machinery has named Frances E. Allen the recipient of the 2006 A.M. Turing Award for contributions that fundamentally improved the performance of computer programs in solving problems, and accelerated the use of high performance computing. Allen,74, is the first woman to receive the Turing Award in the 41 years of its history. She retired from IBM in 2002."

Submission + - the largest non-commercial rocket launch in Europe

Submitted by jaweekes on Thursday February 22, 2007 @09:34AM

jaweekes writes: The TV program "Top Gear" recently launched the "largest non-commercial rocket launch in European history" in the form of a rocket-propelled Reliant Robin. From the article http://www.bbc.co.uk/topgear/show/production_notes /shuttle.shtml "What could possibly be so difficult about building a space shuttle? Quite a lot, as it turns out. This was easily Top Gear's most ambitious film and, while everything didn't go quite according to plan, we're still very proud of the results. Here are just a few of the things that happened when we tried to put an ageing three-wheeler into space."

Submission + - 67 Kilowatt Laser Unveiled

Submitted by

s31523

on Thursday February 22, 2007 @08:21AM

s31523 writes: "We all remember the scene from the movie Real Genius where the nerdy guys get a laser to fire which burns a hole through everything for miles. The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California has announced they have a Solid State Heat Capacity Laser (SSHCL) that averages 67kW working in their lab. Developed for the military, Dr. Yamamoto claims this to be a record and is quoted as saying, "I know of no other solid state laser that has achieved 67kW of average output power". The potential uses for this bad boy go well beyond turning a professor's house into Jiffy Pop. Here is what a 40w laser can do, now imagine 67000 watts. Although many lasers have peaked at higher capacities, getting the average sustained power to remain high seems to be the tricky part."

Submission + - New Software Stops Mars Rover Confusion

Submitted by

MattSparkes

on Thursday February 22, 2007 @07:28AM

MattSparkes writes: "The Mars rover Spirit used to get quite confused when it came upon a rock. Because it could only plan routes of a metre or two it couldn't understand how to navigate around large objects, and frequently used to rock back and forth for hours trying to figure it out. NASA have written new software called D* for the rover Opportunity, which should allow it to autonomously plan routes up to 50 metres long. The new software still won't be able to avoid sand-traps though."

Submission + - Google to charge for web apps

Submitted by

zakkie

on Thursday February 22, 2007 @07:25AM

zakkie writes: "According to BBC News, Google is to start charging businesses for guaranteed availability and more features in the web apps like Gmail. The article suggests the timing is bad for Microsoft and their release of Office 2007, and is a "shot across their bows"."

Ex-judge Gets 27 Months on Evidence From Hacked PC 610

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday February 22, 2007 @04:09AM from the lesser-of-two-evils dept.

netbsd_fan writes "A former California judge has been sentenced to 27 months in prison for possession of illegal pornography, based entirely on evidence gathered by an anonymous vigilante script kiddie in Canada. At any given time he was monitoring over 3,000 innocent people. The anonymous hacker says, "I would stay up late at night to see what I could drag out of their computers, which turned out to be more than I expected. I could read all of their e-mails without them knowing. As far as they were concerned, they didn't know their e-mails had even been opened. I could see who they were chatting with and read what they were saying as they typed."

Submission + - Largest Ever Colossal Squid Caught

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 22, 2007 @03:44AM

An anonymous reader writes: The largest squid ever caught has been landed in the Ross Sea, estimated to weigh in at 450kg, it's a male colossal squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni).

Submission + - World's First Extradition for Warez Complete

Submitted by Glad I'm Not Down Under on Thursday February 22, 2007 @02:42AM

Glad I'm Not Down Under writes: In a move sure to frighten most of those with piles of old cracked PC games and a hastily copied list of serial numbers, the world's first warez extradition — dating back to a series of raids dubbed "Operation Buccaneer" in 2001 — has finally come to an end. Hew Rayond Griffiths, alleged to also have gone by the screen name Bandido, has been delivered into American custody and faces up to 10 years in prison despite never having profited from his alleged crimes or having set foot on American soil committing them. Victim companies impacted by the group Bandido is said to have run, Drink or Die, are situated globally. Griffiths spent three years prior to extradition in an Australian prison, equal in length to some of the longest warez sentences handed out to date. It is unclear as to how he will be represented as his case proceeds, as he was the recipient of provided counsel while fighting against the extradition in Australia. Justice served, or the export of American intellectual property ideals on a foreign nation?

Submission + - Building the Interplanetary Internet

Submitted by

sighted

on Thursday February 22, 2007 @02:36AM

sighted writes: "Internet pioneer Vint Cerf is leading a NASA effort to create a permanent network link to Mars within the next two years. As Cerf outlined in a recent talk, the "InterPlaNet" protocol is designed to handle the delay caused by interplanetary distances. For example, it can take a signal up to 20 minutes to travel between the Earth and Mars, depending on the distance between the two planets."

Scientists Make Quantum Encryption Breakthrough 156

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday February 22, 2007 @02:04AM from the completely-secure-for-at-least-a-few-days dept.

Madas writes "Scientists working in Cambridge have managed to make quantum encryption completely secure (registration required) by putting decoy pulses in the key transmission stream. According to the story this paves the way for safe, encrypted high-speed data links. Could this allow completely private transmission of data away from snooping eyes and ears? Or will it mean film studios can stop movies from being copied when traveling on the internet?"

Submission + - $10 wok keeps TV station on air

Submitted by

Bevan Weir

on Thursday February 22, 2007 @12:14AM

Bevan Weir writes: "Why pay $20,000 for a commercial link to run your television station when a $10 kitchen wok is just as effective?. 45 South volunteer Ken Jones designed the wok transmitter in his spare time last year when he wanted to provide wireless broadband to his Ardgowan home."

Submission + - First Woman Wins Turing Award

Submitted by

bc90021

on Wednesday February 21, 2007 @11:39PM

bc90021 writes: "Frances E. Allen, 75, was honored for her work at IBM Corp. on techniques for optimizing the performance of compilers. It's well deserved, and she's the first woman to receive it in the 40 years of the award's history."

Submission + - New Go Algorithm May Help Beat Human Players

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 21, 2007 @11:38PM

An anonymous reader writes: The Birmingham Post reports that two Hungarian scientists have now come up with an algorithm that helps computers pick the right move in Go (an ancient Chinese board game that is still popular in Asia). Though computers have beat top players in chess, even the most powerful computer failed to beat top players in Go. The new method uses two processors instead of one. Though 19x19 board is still tough for computers, "On a nine by nine board we are not far from reaching the level of a professional Go player," said Levente Kocsis at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences' computing lab SZTAKI.

SETI Finally Finds Something 416

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday February 21, 2007 @10:21PM from the laptop-phone-home dept.

QuatumCrypto writes "SETI@home is a distributed processing client from UC Berkeley that installs on the volunteers' home computers and harnesses their processing power in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. So far nothing noteworthy has comeout of this massive project... that is until today! One of the volunteers was able to track down his wife's stolen laptop using the IP address that SETI@home client reports back to the server. After getting back the laptop his wife said, 'I always knew that a geek would make a great husband.'"

Submission + - Building an energy efficient always-on PC?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 21, 2007 @09:24PM

An anonymous reader writes: Like many Slashdotters, I find it necessary to leave my home PC running 24/7, for things like web or ftp servers, bittorrent, or simply to make sure I don't miss any messages on IRC or my instant messaging client. It has been about 3 years since I built my current PC, and keeping it running all the time uses a lot of juice. With my next PC I would like to do what I can to keep the power-consumption to a minimum, without sacrificing processing power or other features. What should I look for when choosing components for my PC, and what other ways are there to keep the power consumption down?

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