Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Science

New Type of Particle May Have Been Found 281

Posted by kdawson from the outside-the-pipe dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The LHC is out of commission, but the Tevatron collider at Fermilab is still chugging along, and may have just discovered a new type of particle that would signal new physics. New Scientist reports that the Tevatron's CDF detector has found muons that seem to have been created outside of the beam pipe that confines the protons and anti-protons being smashed together. The standard model can't explain the muons, and some speculate that 'an unknown particle with a lifetime of about 20 picoseconds was produced in the collision, traveled about 1 centimeter, through the side of the beam pipe, and then decayed into muons.' The hypothetical particle even seems to have the right mass to account for one theory of dark matter."
PlayStation (Games)

Submission + - Sony cuts prices on PS3

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Sony has announced price cuts on the high-end model, and also is introducing a new low-end model in the US($399). The new model has lost the ability to play PlayStation 2 games, a decision based on the "extensive" lineup of PlayStation 3 games. The 80GB model, which retains backward compatibility, will now retail for $499.
Portables (Apple)

Submission + - Unlocked iPhones to go on sale in France

Submitted by Lugor
Lugor writes: Macworld has a short blip that along with the deal with Orange, unlocked iPhones will be sold at a premium as "...French law that forbids bundling the sale of a mobile phone and a mobile operator."
Music

Submission + - Radiohead offers "pay what you want" digit

Submitted by SilentChris
SilentChris writes: Radiohead has announced that in 9 days they will be releasing their latest album through their website. The interesting part: you'll pay what you want. A physical version will be released in December for $82. No word yet on DRM, but given Radiohead's recent penchant for selling on MP3 sites, there's a good chance there won't be any. The best part: the record labels are completely uninvolved with this new venture.
Security

Submission + - VM-based rootkits proved easily detectable (stanford.edu)

Submitted by paleshadows
paleshadows writes: A year and a half has passed since SubVirt, the first VMM (virtual machine monitor) based rootkit, was introduced. The idea spawned two lively slashdot discussions: the first, which followed the initial report about SubVirt, and the second, which was conducted after Joanna Rutkowska has recycled the idea (apparently without giving credit to the initial authors). Conversely, in this year's HotOS workshop, researchers from Stanford, CMU, VMware, and XenSource have published a paper titled " Compatibility Is Not Transparency: VMM Detection Myths and Realities" which shows that VMM-based rootkits are actually easily detectable. The introduction of the paper explains that

"While commodity VMMs conform to the PC architecture, virtual implementations of this architecture differ substantially from physical implementations. These differences are not incidental: performance demands and practical engineering limitations necessitate divergences (sometimes radical ones) from native hardware, both in semantics and performance. Consequently, we believe the potential for preventing VMM detection under close scrutiny is illusory — and fundamentally in conflict with the technical limitations of virtualized platforms."

The paper concludes by saying that

"Perhaps the most concise argument against the utility of VMBRs (VM-based rootkits) is: "Why bother?" VMBRs change the malware defender's problem from a very difficult one (discovering whether the trusted computing base of a system has been compromised), to the much easier problem of detecting a VMM."
Music

Submission + - Radiohead allows fans to decide on price 2

Submitted by
radicalskeptic
radicalskeptic writes: "Radiohead, a band known to be unhappy with other music download services, has decided to release their next album, "In Rainbows", in two formats: a £40 boxed set and a digital download. What's the catch? Customers who purchase the digital download are able to name their own price for the album. This is the first Radiohead release since their contract with EMI expired. As "The Majors" continue to lose relevance, can we expect more of this type of experimentation and flexibility from independent artists?"
Space

Submission + - Clocks, Kids, and General Relativity on Mt Rainier (leapsecond.com)

Submitted by Umbe
Umbe writes: Time-Nut and amateur time researcher Tom Van Baak (www.leapsecond.com) just took his family hiking, and verified Einstein's general theory of relativity along the way. "3 kids, 3 cesium clocks, a family road trip to measure relativistic time dilation".
The Internet

Submission + - Should You Raise Your Data Center's Temperature? (datacenterknowledge.com)

Submitted by
miller60
miller60 writes: "With many U.S. corporations trying to lower their data center power bill, some vendors are recommending they raise the temperature in their data centers.. At the recent Data Center World conference, a Sun Microsystems executive recommended a set point of 78 degrees. Nudging the thermostat higher can save money, but some warn that it leaves facilities more susceptible to "hot spots" and may leave less time to recover from a cooling failure. Left to choose between paying a higher power bill or a server meltdown, many data center operators seem inclined to err on the side of applying too much cooling, rather than too little. What's the temperature in your data center?"
Sci-Fi

Submission + - 100 times faster hard drives use laser

Submitted by
Gary
Gary writes: "In the race to make computers more powerful, magnets may be out and lasers may be in. Ultra-rapid pulses of polarized light fired from lasers, new tests show, can outperform conventional magnetic data writers by as much as two orders of magnitude. The researchers managed to transfer data at intervals of about 40 femtoseconds, or quadrillionths of a second, about 100 times faster than conventional magnetic transfers,"
Power

Submission + - Dell to sell advanced cooling systems for servers

Submitted by Mitechsi
Mitechsi writes: Dell has struck a deal with Emerson to sell advanced cooling systems and services to data center owners. One type of supplemental cooling technology is called the Liebert XD. The XD consists of refrigerant-filled pipes that snake around the server racks in a data center. When the liquid refrigerant is in the pipes near the servers, it absorbs the heat coming off the computers, turns into a gas, and then gets pumped back to a cooling unit. The cooling unit then turns it back into a liquid for another. The liquid system cuts the cooling power load by about 30 percent to 50 percent as compared with other types of cooling systems.
Media

Submission + - China Zaps Cutting-Edge Magazine

Submitted by
newsblaze
newsblaze writes: "Beijing continues to issue regular edicts and daily guidelines limiting news coverage in traditional media and invests billions of yuan in a nationwide Internet surveillance system to block Web sites it considers sensitive. The Propaganda Department is becoming stronger and better at oppressing the media. China Neutralizes Cutting-Edge Magazine. Surprisingly, the outspoken editor is being moved to another publication, not jailed."

Slashdot Top Deals

UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things. -- Doug Gwyn

Close