Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
Science

The Proton Just Got Smaller 289

inflame writes "A new paper published in Nature has said that the proton may be smaller than we previously thought. The article states 'The difference is so infinitesimal that it might defy belief that anyone, even physicists, would care. But the new measurements could mean that there is a gap in existing theories of quantum mechanics. "It's a very serious discrepancy," says Ingo Sick, a physicist at the University of Basel in Switzerland, who has tried to reconcile the finding with four decades of previous measurements. "There is really something seriously wrong someplace."' Would this indicate new physics if proven?"
Programming

Simpler "Hello World" Demonstrated In C 582

An anonymous reader writes "Wondering where all that bloat comes from, causing even the classic 'Hello world' to weigh in at 11 KB? An MIT programmer decided to make a Linux C program so simple, she could explain every byte of the assembly. She found that gcc was including libc even when you don't ask for it. The blog shows how to compile a much simpler 'Hello world,' using no libraries at all. This takes me back to the days of programming bare-metal on DOS!"
Image

Facebook Master Password Was "Chuck Norris" 319

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "A Facebook employee has given a tell-all interview with some very interesting things about Facebook's internals. Especially interesting are all the things relating to Facebook privacy. Basically, you don't have any. Nearly everything you've ever done on the site is recorded into a database. While they fire employees for snooping, more than a few have done it. There's an internal system to let them log into anyone's profile, though they have to be able to defend their reason for doing so. And they used to have a master password that could log into any Facebook profile: 'Chuck Norris.' Bruce Schneier might be jealous of that one."
Graphics

DX11 Tested Against DX9 With Dirt 2 Demo 201

MojoKid writes "The PC demo for Codemasters' upcoming DirectX 11 racing title, Dirt 2, has just hit the web and is available for download. Dirt 2 is a highly-anticipated racing sim that also happens to feature leading-edge graphic effects. In addition to a DirectX 9 code path, Dirt 2 also utilizes a number of DirectX 11 features, like hardware-tessellated dynamic water, an animated crowd and dynamic cloth effects, in addition to DirectCompute 11-accelerated high-definition ambient occlusion (HADO), full floating-point high dynamic range (HDR) lighting, and full-screen resolution post processing. Performance-wise, DX11 didn't take its toll as much as you'd expect this early on in its adoption cycle." Bit-tech also took a look at the graphical differences, arriving at this conclusion: "You'd need a seriously keen eye and brown paper envelope full of cash from one of the creators of Dirt 2 to notice any real difference between textures in the two versions of DirectX."

Comment Re:The real mystery (Score 1) 232

I'm currently working on something like that. Sure its hard work, but with some unmanaged code you can turn a c# app into a localserver. You can host an usercontrol in a ATL ActiveX Control and expose the object model to COM in managed code (calls must be manually switched to the ui-thread but thats easy using lambda expressions). Most of the code stays in c#.

Comment Re:The real mystery (Score 3, Informative) 232

The reason was not performance. It was an compability issue.
Currently there can only one version of the CLR be loaded into a process. The CLR version of the first .NET DLL is used in the process.

This is also the reason why you should not make shell extensions in .NET. The Windows Explorer would load the shell extension dll in unknown order. If the first one is a .NET 1.0 Dll all .NET 2.0 Dlls would not load.
If a Programm delay loads the CLR a simple call to the Open File Dialog would cause the .NET 1.0 CLR to be loaded into the process.

This problem will finally be solved in .NET 4.0. I think we will see the use of .NET in Windows 8...

Comment Re:Distributed File Solution. (Score 1) 611

Sorry, I meant DPM. And shure it might be overkill for home use ;-)

DFS Replication was originally designed for some kind of load balancing if I recall correctly.
We had some issues, especialy when restarting servers, where replication did not start correctly. We had also issues with locked files and DFS Replication is no solution for backing up database and exchange servers...

Comment Re:Distributed File Solution. (Score 1) 611

We previusly had a solution using DFS-Replication, but DFS-Replication is not realy build for this kind of use.
We switched to a Microsoft DMP Server 2007 which uses agents on each server and provides a nearly realtime replica with daily snapshots of Files, Exchange, Databases,... Users can restore files on their own and there is virtually no admin work for daily use.
We make monthly manual off-site backups of the DMP-Store with Windows Backup on separate Harddisks.

For this solution you need a seperate server with about as twise as much harddisk space as your normal backup size. The daily snapshots lasts about two or three months.

Slashdot Top Deals

If you aren't rich you should always look useful. -- Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Working...