Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Data Storage

Submission + - Why are tape drives not scaling with hard disks? 4

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Every 3-6 months, we see an announcement about something adding to hard disk storage. However, tape drives don't seem to be improving on anywhere near the scale of hard disks.

Why is this? Both are magnetic media, and with a tape drive, a manufacturer has far more space to put data on than the platters of a hard disk, and still leave plenty of space for error correction data. Tape drives also don't spin nearly as fast as hard disks, so tolerances involved can be less.
Sci-Fi

Submission + - 2007 Hugo Award Winners Announced (thehugoawards.org)

Submitted by
jX
jX writes: "This year's Hugo Award Winners have been announced at the recently launched Hugo Award official website. Some winners that should be familiar to any well read/watched geek are Vernor Vinge for Best Novel, Doctor Who for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form), and last years hit movie Pan's Labyrinth for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form. Of course, a complete list of this year's nominees and winners is also available."
Power

Submission + - New legislation for nuclear safety (reformer.com)

Submitted by
mdsolar
mdsolar writes: "Recent problems at the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant have spurred Congresspeople from Vermont, Massachusetts and New Hampshire to introduce legislation that would allow State governors to request independent safety reviews of nuclear power plants that exclude NRC employees that usually work on that plant and include non-NRC employees. The review model is based on one that found problems at Maine Yankee before it closed. Problems at Vermont Yankee have included a cooling tower collapse, a SCRAM caused by an ungreased valve and failure of a safety system during the SCRAM. The plant is coming off of heightened review after shipping nuclear material with insufficient shielding. The plant's application for a 20 year license extention is also currently under review."
KDE

KDE 4.0 Beta 1 Released 249

Posted by Zonk from the and-they-are-just-giving-it-away-this-time dept.
dbhost writes "Along with this morning's cup of coffee and log reviews, I discovered that the KDE team is moving forward with a long awaited beta release of KDE 4.0 beta release of KDE 4.0. The most interesting item I found in the notes is that the file manager in KDE is being separated from Konqueror into a component called Dolphin. Also, according to the announcement, konsole has been treated to a number of improvements such as split view, and history highlighting."
The Internet

Submission + - Pirate Bay earns 20,000 Euros a day (rixstep.com) 2

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: controverisal pro-piracy website the piratebay likes to portray itself as an innocent hobby site that provides a free index without censorship, but recent facts show that the site is earning up to 20,000 Euros per day from its advertising. Taking in money on this scale puts a different slant on the motives behind the Swedish filesharing site, and could open up the runners of the site to prosecution for profiting from copyright infringement.
Announcements

Submission + - Automotive X-Prize Reveals First 31 Teams

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Automotive XPRIZE announced yesterday the first 31 teams to have signed on for the competition to build 100 mpge (mile-per-gallon equivalent) automobiles. The list contains obvious contenders like electric bike vendor ZAP, electric truck peddler Phoenix Motorcars, Munich's überefficient Loremmo AG, and Elon Musk-backed Tesla Motors as well as Cornell University and a laundry list of other less well known names. There's even a team commited to an Open Source-like license. Notable is the total absence of any established manufacturer. Contrary to expectations of a Big Auto win, could the AXP be up for grabs?
Education

Submission + - Linux as a Short-Lived Project

Submitted by LinuxNut
LinuxNut writes: Continuing their historical series looking at the early Linux kernels, KernelTrap is discussing the 0.02 and 0.03 kernels released in late 1991. Though the actual source code has been lost to time, the article offers an interesting collection of emails by Linux creator Linus Torvalds about his new operating system, 'for hackers by a hacker.' Version 0.02 was the first usable release, gaining the ability to run programs such as gcc if compiled on Minix. Version 0.03 fixed buffer-cache issues that made it possible to compile gcc from Linux. Interestingly enough, at this point Linus thought of Linux as a short-lived project saying, 'wait for Hurd if you want something real. It's fun hacking it, though (but I'm biased).' Though not short-lived, Linux has continued to prove to be fun to hack.
Power

Submission + - Ohio's 2004 Presidential Election Records Lost

Submitted by ScrappyLaptop
ScrappyLaptop writes: In 56 of Ohio's 88 counties, ballots and election records from 2004 have been "accidentally" destroyed, despite a federal order to preserve them — it was crucial evidence which would have revealed whether the election was stolen. From http://www.alternet.org/story/58328/ :

Under federal and Ohio law, all ballots and election records from federal races must be preserved for 22 months after Election Day, which fell on Sept. 2, 2006. While election integrity activists and reporters from a Columbus website, FreePress.org, had sought the ballots and other election records soon after the presidential election, Blackwell would not allow county boards to release the ballots, citing court challenges to the 2004 results and a 2005 suit from the League of Women Voters alleging the state was not following the newest federal election law, the Help America Vote Act.

On Sept. 11, 2006, U.S. District Judge Algenon Marbley ordered the election boards "to preserve all ballots from the 2004 Presidential election, on paper and in any other format, including electronic data, unless and until such time otherwise instructed by this Court."

Somehow, the counties never got the message:

"Our staff unintentionally discarded boxes containing Ballot Pages as requested in (Brunner's) Directive 2007-07 due to unclear and misinterpreted instructions," wrote Butler County Board of Election Director Betty McGary and Deputy Director Lynn Kinkaid in a May 9 memo. "Several boxes containing all the wire-bound ballot pages were discarded into a Rumpke dumpster. The dumpster would have been emptied into the local landfill."

"The Hamilton County (Cincinnati) Board of Elections was unable to transfer the unvoted precinct ballots and soiled precinct ballots," wrote John Williams, Hamilton County Director of Elections on May 16, 2007. "To the best if my knowledge, the above ballots were inadvertently shredded between January 19th and 26th of '06 in an effort to make room for the new Hart voting system."

"No one could remember the disposition of said ballots," wrote Mike Keeley, of Clermont County's Board of Elections on May 10, 2007, referring to the "unvoted" or unused ballots from the 2004 presidential election.

In Warren County, where county election officials said on Election Day that the FBI had declared a homeland security alert — which they later retracted — ballots were diverted to a warehouse before counting. The local media was not allowed to observe the vote count. According to a letter from the Warren County Board of Election to Brunner's office, the election board cannot find 22,000 unused ballots from the election.

"The extent of the destruction of records is consistent with the covering up of the fraud that we believe occurred in the presidential election," said Cliff Arnebeck, a Columbus attorney representing the King Lincoln Bronzeville Neighborhood Association, which filed voter suppression suit. "We're in the process of addressing where to go from here with the Ohio Attorney General's office."

"On the one hand, people will now say you can't prove the fraud," he said, "but the rule of law says that when evidence is destroyed it creates a presumption that the people who destroyed evidence did so because it would have proved the contention of the other side."

Slashdot Top Deals

BLISS is ignorance.

Close