predder - Slashdot User

Comment: A great idea but.. (Score 1) 755

by predder on Saturday August 30, 2008 @03:00AM (#24807489) Attached to: Any Suggestions For a Meaningful Geeky Wedding Band?

I really dig the idea (and as such, will claim it as my own to my non-geeky friends) however, how feasible is it to get a ring made of *pure* Iridium? Its properties make it fairly difficult to work with so even if you manage to purchase a chunk of it I can't see you just showing up to a jeweler and asking them to make you a ring.. How did you plan on actually procuring/creating said ring?

Data Retention Proven to Change Citizen Behavior 261

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday June 04, 2008 @10:04PM
from the I-always-feel-like-somebody's-watching-me dept.

G'Quann writes "A new survey shows that data retention laws indeed do influence the behavior of citizens (at least in Germany). 11% had already abstained from using phone, cell phone or e-mail in certain occasions and 52% would not use phone or e-mail for confidential contacts. This is the perfect argument against the standard 'I have nothing to hide' argumentation. Surveillance is not only bad because someone might discover some embarrassment. It changes people. 11% at least."

Scalable Nonblocking Data Structures 216

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday May 27, 2008 @04:10PM
from the don't-fear-the-multi-core dept.

An anonymous reader writes "InfoQ has an interesting writeup of Dr. Cliff Click's work on developing highly concurrent data structures for use on the Azul hardware (which is in production with 768 cores), supporting 700+ hardware threads in Java. The basic idea is to use a new coding style that involves a large array to hold the data (allowing scalable parallel access), atomic update on those array words, and a finite-state machine built from the atomic update and logically replicated per array word. The end result is a coding style that has allowed Click to build 2.5 lock-free data structures that also scale remarkably well."