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Google

Submission + - Google Patents MapReduce

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Two years ago, David DeWitt and Michael Stonebraker deemed MapReduce a major step backwards (original paper, defense of paper) that 'represents a specific implementation of well known techniques developed nearly 25 years ago.' A year later, the pair teamed up with other academics and eBay to slam MapReduce again. But the very public complaints didn't stop Google from demanding a patent for MapReduce. Nor did it stop the USPTO from granting Google's request (after four rejections). On Tuesday, the USPTO issued U.S. Patent No. 7,650,331 to Google for inventing Efficient Large-Scale Data Processing.
Apple

Submission + - Apple Tablet To Be Alan Kay's 1968 Dynabook?

Submitted by macs4all
macs4all writes: Alan Kay was a researcher with Xerox PARC, and later one of the conceptual contributors to Steve Jobs on the first Mac design. In 1968, he envisioned a precursor to the laptop and tablet computers (in one). Called the Dynabook.

The Dynabook was quite an interesting concept, and some of the capabilites, such as the learning capabilities, still have not been adequately addressed in any existing product.

It is worth noting that Kay and Jobs originally conceived of the Macintosh as a tablet, and in fact, the Dynabook made, er, flesh.

So, is the upcoming tablet to be the final realization of what the Mac was truly intended to be? I think so, and so does this blogger

Discuss..

Submission + - Open-Source Javascript Flash Player (HTML5/SVG) (paulirish.com) 1

Submitted by gbutler69
gbutler69 writes: Wow! Someone has gone and done it. Created a Flash Player written in Javascript targetting SVG/HTML5 capable browsers. It's not a complete implementation yet, but, it shows some real promise. Of course, there is the ever-famous vector "Hello World!" called Tiger. This really has promise. How long before HTML5/SVG next-generation browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari, Epiphany, and other Web-Kit based browsers completely supplant Flash and Silverlight/Moonlight?
Image

ATMs In Antarctica 26

Posted by samzenpus from the penguin-bankers dept.
Widgett writes "After hearing about the ATMs in Antarctica, I got curious. So I pinged Wells Fargo and got an interview with one of their VPs. The end result is a story about how one services machines at the end of the world, plus — and most importantly — what are the service fees like?"
Sci-Fi

Submission + - 'Spider-Man 4' Scrapped, Franchise Reboot Planned (imdb.com) 3

Submitted by derGoldstein
derGoldstein writes: Yesterday it was asked What SciFi Should Get the Reboot Treatment Next?. If you consider SpiderMan as "proper SciFi", then it would appear that's the answer. According to IMDB, "Sony Pictures decided today to reboot the Spider-Man franchise after Sam Raimi pulled out of Spider-Man 4 because he felt he couldn't make its summer release date and keep the film's creative integrity. This means that Raimi and the cast including star Tobey Maguire are out. There will be no Spider-Man 4. Instead, the studio will focus on a reboot script by Jamie Vanderbilt with a new director and a new cast."

Submission + - EVE Online Battle Breaks Records (And Servers) (kugutsumen.com) 2

Submitted by
captainktainer
captainktainer writes: "In one of the largest tests of Eve Online's new player sovereignty system in the Dominion expansion pack, a fleet of ships attempting to retake a lost star system was effectively annihilated amidst controversy. Defenders IT Alliance, a coalition succeeding the infamous Band of Brothers alliance (whose disbanding was covered in a previous story), effectively annihilated the enemy fleet, destroying thousands of dollars' worth of in-game assets. A representative of the alliance claimed to have destroyed a minimum of four, possibly five or more of the game's most expensive and powerful ship class, known as Titans. Both official and unofficial forums are filled with debate about whether the one-sided battle was due to difference in player skill or the well-known network failures after the release of the expansion. One of the attackers, a member of the GoonSwarm alliance, claims that because of bad coding, "Only 5% of [the attackers] loaded," meaning that lag prevented the attackers from using their ships, even as the defenders were able to destroy those ships unopposed. Even members of the victorious IT Alliance disappointment at the outcome of the battle. CCP, Eve Online's publisher, has recently acknowledged poor network performance, especially in the advertised "large fleet battles" that Dominion was supposed to encourage, and has asked players to help them stress test their code on Tuesday. Despite the admitted network failure, leaders of the attacking force do not expect CCP to replace lost ships, claiming that it was their own fault for not accounting for server failures. The incident raises questions about CCP's ability to cope with the increased network use associated with their rapid growth in subscriptions"
Networking

Submission + - When Is enough bandwidth at home enough? 1

Submitted by Dubbel
Dubbel writes: In 1993, I was in College and took advantage of a dial up \ SLIP account for internet access from home which my university made available to all students with shell accounts. It was a blazing 14.4Kbps connection. As internet usage increased and I began to get busy signals more often that not, I took advantage of a student discount at a local ISP and got a dial up 33.6 Kbps "Unlimited" PPP service for the princely sum of $40 a month...a significant portion of my net worth at the time. At that point in internet history, online services such as Prodigy and Compuserve were charging by the minute for World Wide Web access which was outside of the content they hosted and this still didn't give you access to the full breadth and depth of what the internet had to offer. I had 1 friend whom I considered to be filthy rich who had a dual channel 128Kbps ISDN line. As soon as broadband became available, I was the first person I new to get it. First it was 1 MBps, then 1.5, then 3 and currently I subscribe to a 6 Mbps DSL service all the while never really exceeding the $40 a month price barrier (now after service bundle discounts and prior to the addition of taxes). Now my ISP is offering their new VDSL internet, TV, & IP telephony service in my area which tops out at a staggering 18 Mbps for around $65 a month which is separate from the bandwidth available for telephony & TV. For the first time ever, I find myself asking....do I really need more bandwidth? Am I ludicrous for asking this question? How many others in the Slashdot community have found their personal broadband saturation point to be beneath fastest service available separate from personal financial constraints?

Comment Re:Oh rats (Score 0) 166

by this great guy (#30333696) Attached to: Intel Kills Consumer Larrabee Plans

ATI are about to become the leader? They are already the leader in all categories: perf/$, perf/W, absolute perf, and at all price points. See list below. For gaming performance, the GFLOPS rating are a roughly (+/- 30%) good enough approximation to compare ATI vs. Nvidia. For GPGPU performance, the GFLOPS rating is actually unfair to ATI because Nvidia's GT200 microarchitecture causes it to be artificially inflated (they assume a MUL+MAD pair executing 3 floating-point op per cycle, whereas ATI assumes a regular fused MAD executing 2 floatting-point ops per cycle). Meaning that an ATI GPU rated 200 GFLOPS actually executes ALU-bound workloads as fast as an Nvidia GPU rated 300 GFLOPS. ATI's lead is such that it's not even funny anymore. There are rumors of Nvidia killing the high-end (GTX 285, 295) to focus only on the extreme entry-level segment (sub-$100). And GT300 (Fermi) will not enter mass production before the end of Q1 2010. I am concerned by the lack of competition... ATI is free to impose whatever price structure they want.

  • If you have $500+ to spend: ATI HD 5970 (4640 GFLOPS, 294 Watt, ~$600) vs. Nvidia GTX 295 (1843 GFLOPS, 289 Watt, ~$500).
  • If you have ~$400 to spend: ATI HD 5870 (2720 GFLOPS, 188 Watt, ~$410) vs. Nvidia GTX 285 (1063 GFLOPS, 204 Watt, ~$400).
  • If you have ~$300 to spend: ATI HD 5850 (2088 GFLOPS, 151 Watt, ~$310) vs. Nvidia GTX 275 (1011 GFLOPS, 219 Watt, ~$300).
  • If you have ~$200 to spend: ATI HD 5770 (1360 GFLOPS, 108 Watt, ~$170) vs. Nvidia GTX 260 Core 216 (805 GFLOPS, 182 Watt, ~$200).
  • If you have ~$150 to spend: ATI HD 5750 (1088 GFLOPS, 86 Watt, ~$155) vs. Nvidia GTX 260 (715 GFLOPS, 182 Watt, ~$170).
  • If you have ~$100 to spend: ATI HD 4770 (960 GFLOPS, 80 Watt, ~$110) vs. Nvidia GTS 250 (470 GFLOPS, 145 Watt, ~$110).

Comment Re:Don't use bootcamp, but I use Fusion (Score 1) 396

by Alystair (#28975637) Attached to: Windows Drains MacBook's Battery; Who's To Blame?
I recently bought and a 15" Macbook Pro. I then sold it 3 months later because because I didn't enjoy OSX and it seemed like there were many things done by Apple to prevent Windows from being a proper alternative on the otherwise nice piece of hardware: - iSight is limited to 160x120 pixels. Yes, the size of a postage stamp. This can't be changed anywhere. - Cannot switch between the two video cards available in the system (nvidia 9400M and 9600M GT), so you're stuck with the higher end graphics and loose another hour of battery life - Cannot turn keyboard backlight off, only to lowest brightness setting, unlike in OSX. That's more battery life gone. - Bootcamp application/drivers consumes 2-4% of processor when idle. What the hell. It's necessary to keep it running if you want to utilize the function keys on the keyboard amongst other things. - Optical output couldn't upmix stereo input to 5.1 surround no matter what drivers were used. This was also a "feature" when in OSX. I couldn't stand having
PlayStation (Games)

Submission + - PS3 Cell Faster than Core i7 965 XE

Submitted by
billdar
billdar writes: "PS3News is reported on transcoding tool that allows for the conversion of video material on the Full HD format, with the help of a PlayStation 3 with faster than real-time performance. Connected to a PC via a gigabit ethernet, the PS3 performs as an external, dedicated video encoder. All encoding is handled by the PS3 which runs an embedded version of Yellow Dog Linux entirely from ROM, thus shifting the CPU-intensive processing away from the workstation. According to the article, the PS3 "Cell processor clocked a performance of 29 FPS, that is 1.2 times real-time conversion — the cell has a similar performance as the CUDA Badaboom encoder in combination with an Nvidia Geforce GTX-285. By comparison, Intel's current top-CPU, the Core i7 965 XE, does it still at 18 FPS — normal desktop CPUs even create only about 5 FPS.""

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I tell them to turn to the study of mathematics, for it is only there that they might escape the lusts of the flesh. -- Thomas Mann, "The Magic Mountain"

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