447074
submission
SoyChemist writes
"Wired Science has asked their readers to complain about the biggest problems with federal research funding. Some of the comments are quite revealing: Lead scientists must rush to buy supplies before their grants expire, they sometimes get stuck when equipment breaks and they did not anticipate replacement parts in their budget, and there are only token incentives for alternative energy research. Worst of all, the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which could exceed $1.2 trillion, are particularly appalling when compared to the measly $6.43 billion requested by the National Science Foundation and $28.6 billion requested by the National Institutes of Health for supporting science in 2008."
427356
submission
jschauma writes
"Yahoo! published a press
release, announcing that "it has become a platinum sponsor of The Apache
Software Foundation (ASF)." In their company
blog, Yahoo! points out their particular interest in Lucene as well as Hadoop and that they have hired Doug Cutting, creator of
both projects and VP at Apache. (Lucene powers the search on Wikipedia;
Yahoo! also provides
hosting capacity to Wikimedia.)"Link to Original Source
426632
submission
SoyChemist writes
"Just before completing his 90th orbit around the sun, Sir Arthur C. Clarke recorded what may be one of his last messages to the world.
"The golden age of space is only just beginning... Space travel and space tourism will one day become almost as commonplace as flying to exotic destinations on our own planet," said the legendary science fiction author.
He wished for proof of extraterrestiral life, freedom from our addiction to oil, and an end to the civil war in Sri Lanka — his adopted home. The wheelchair-bound legend concluded by saying that in spite of his many accomplishments, he would most like to be remembered as a writer that entertained many people."
418955
submission
Stony Stevenson writes
"Iranian scientists claim to have used 216 microprocessors made by AMD to build the country's most powerful supercomputer, despite a ban on the export of U.S. computer equipment to the Middle Eastern nation. Scientists at the Iranian High Performance Computing Research Center at the country's Amirkabir University of Technology said they used a Linux-cluster architecture in building the system of Opteron processors. The supercomputer has a theoretical peak performance of 860 giga-flops, the posting said. The disclosure, made in an undated posting on Amirkabir's Web site, brought an immediate response Monday from AMD, which said it has never authorized shipments of products either directly or indirectly to Iran or any other embargoed country."
