Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Movies

Submission + - Del Toro quits "The Hobbit" due to continuing dela (stuff.co.nz)

Submitted by jamesrt
jamesrt writes: Guillermo Del Toro has quit as director of the two The Hobbit movies, but will still help write the screenplays for the Lord of the Rings prequels. 'In light of ongoing delays in the setting of a start date for filming The Hobbit I am faced with the hardest decision of my life. After nearly two years of living, breathing and designing a world as rich as Tolkien's Middle Earth, I must, with great regret, take leave from helming these wonderful pictures.'
Hardware

Submission + - When mistakes improve performance (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by
jd
jd writes: "Professor Rakesh Kumar at the University of Illinois has produced research showing that allowing communication errors between microprocessor components and then making the software more robust will actually result in chips that are faster and yet require less power. His argument is that at the current scale errors in transmission occur anyway and that the efforts of chip manufacturers to hide these to create the illusion of perfect reliability simply introduces a lot of unnecessary expense, demands excessive power and deoptimises the design. He favors a new architecture, which he calls the "stochastic processor" which is designed to gracefully handle data corruption and error recovery. He believes he has shown such a design would work and that it will permit Moore's Law to continue to operate into the foreseeable future. However, this is not the first time someone has tried to fundamentally revolutionize the CPU. The Transputer, the AMULET, the FM8501, the iWARP and the Crusoe were all supposed to be game-changers but died a cold, lonely death instead — and those were far closer to design philosophies programmers are currently familiar with. Modern software simply isn't written with the level of reliability the Stochastic Processor requires in mind (and many software packages are too big and too complex to port), and the volume of available software frequently makes or breaks new designs. Will this be "interesting but dead-end" research, or will the Professor pull off a CPU architectural revolution really not seen since the microprocessor was designed?"
Iphone

Submission + - Tenth Suicide At iPhone Factory (reuters.com)

Submitted by carre4
carre4 writes: Another employee has jumped to his death at Taiwanese iPhone and iPad manufacturer Foxconn. Police are not saying yet whether this was a suicide attempt, a suspicious death or an accident. It happened just one day after Foxconn started playing music to workers on the assembly line to try to ease the pressure on them; the company's founder had denied he works his staff too hard.

Submission + - Hubble Spots Hungry Star Eating One of its Planets

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: What do hungry stars eat? Planets of course! NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, with its newly installed Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, has captured data about a planet 600 light years away which may "soon" be consumed by its parent star. While the artists rendering gives a nice idea of what may happen over the next 10 million years, the planet has already been warped into an enlongated shape by the sun's strong gravitational forces. The planet in question, WASP-12b, has a mass 40 percent greater that Jupiter and has the highest known surface temperature of any known planet at around 1500C. One reason why it has begun to warp and will be consumed by the star is that it is so incredibly close to the star. So close, in fact, that it orbits the star in only 24 hours. These observations confirm theoretical predictions by Astronomer Shu-lin Li of Peking University, in which he states the core of the planet would become so hot that it would greatly expand the atmosphere of the planet. This matches the observations made by researchers in which they "see a huge cloud of material around the planet, which is escaping and will be captured by the star."
Apple

Submission + - Extensions for Safari to be announced at the WWDC? (daringfireball.net)

Submitted by gyrogeerloose
gyrogeerloose writes: John Gruber of Daring Fireball has suggested the possibility that Apple will announce a new extension archtecture for it's Web browser. In his latest blog, Gruber made this sly comment: '[one] big thing that's missing is a proper extension API. If only Apple had an imminent developer conference where they could unveil such a thing.' If this is true, it will be a great boon to Mac users who like Safari's page rendering performance and compliance with Web standards but would like to be able to take advantage of the types of plug-ins available for Chrome and Firefox.
Games

Submission + - Game Nation: gamer theme park to be built (gamepron.com) 1

Submitted by UgLyPuNk
UgLyPuNk writes: Ever wanted to go and hang out with Lara Croft, or a human sized Ratchet or Clank, well you might have your chance. Game Nation have just announced they will be building a Experiential Video Game Theme Park and Resort.
Google

Submission + - Google Releases Add-On to Disable Google Analytics (blogspot.com) 1

Submitted by Kilrah_il
Kilrah_il writes: Many sites use Google Analytics to analyze their users' behaviors. Now Google is offering an add-on that disables tracking, effectively allowing a user to opt-out of being tracked by Analytics. "Those that are concerned about their privacy can install an add-on and permanently disable the script. After installing the add-on, you'll notice that the browser still sends a request for this file: http://www.google-analytics.com/ga.js when visiting a page that uses Google Analytics, but it no longer sends information to Google Analytics." The plug-in is available for Internet Explorer 7+, Firefox 3.5+ and Chrome 4+.

Submission + - George W. Bush embraces alternative energy (star-telegram.com) 1

Submitted by Geoffrey.landis
Geoffrey.landis writes: It's hard to believe, but former Texas oilman George W. Bush just came out in favor of alternate energy sources. At the American Wind Energy Association conference in Dallas, Bush said: "It's in our economic interests that we diversify away from oil. It's in our environmental interest. And, finally, it's in our national security interest." More details are on the green blog:

He had said in a State of the Union address that America was addicted to oil. "If you’re a guy from Texas and you say America is addicted to oil, it's a surprising moment," Mr. Bush said... These days, the former president said, "The overall trend in my judgment is that new technologies will find new ways to power our lives. I fully believe that hybrid plug-ins will be a transition to electric cars," he said, and that new ways to generate electricity will be needed.

In a time when climate-warming-deniers are screaming that shifting to alternate energy sources is going to destroy America's economy, it's amazing to see the former number-one Republican actually say that moving to alternate energy is in our economic interest, and new ways to generate electricity are needed Now if we could only get the ones who are still in power to understand this...
Desktops (Apple)

Submission + - Google releases Chrome 5.0 for Win/Mac/Linux (h-online.com)

Submitted by ddfall
ddfall writes: Four months after the release of version 4.0 for Windows, Google has announced the availability of Chrome 5.0 for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux — the first stable release to be available on all three major platforms
NASA

Submission + - NASA satellites see comet death dive into the Sun (networkworld.com)

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes: The collision of a comet with the Sun has been captured by instruments onboard NASA's twin Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory) satellites. Solar physicists at the University of California, Berkeley said the comet was probably one from what's known as the Kreutz family of comets, a swarm of comets ejected from their orbit in 2004 by Jupiter, that typically orbit close to the Sun. Astronomers said this one was making its first and only loop by the Sun.
Television

Drifting Satellite Could Knock Out Cable TV 217

Posted by kdawson from the chance-of-heavy-snow dept.
A few days back we discussed some of the problems caused by the demise of Intelsat's Galaxy 15, including possible degradation of GPS and its WAAS refinement. Now reader crimeandpunishment writes in with another damage scenario, one which could affect vastly more people — interference with cable TV programming across the US. "A TV communications satellite is drifting out of control thousands of miles above the Earth, threatening to wander into another satellite's orbit... Galaxy 15 continues to receive and transmit satellite signals, and they will probably interfere with the second satellite, known as AMC 11, if Galaxy 15 drifts into its orbit as expected around May 23... [A spokesman] said one option would be using AMC 11's propulsion system to shift that satellite about 60 miles (100 kilometers) away to an orbit that's still within its carefully prescribed 'orbital box' but as far away as possible from Galaxy 15."
Businesses

The Humble Indie Bundle 290

Posted by kdawson from the now-how-much-would-you-pay dept.
supersloshy writes "Last year, 2D Boy, the developers of the popular independent game World of Goo, had a pay-what-you-want birthday sale with curious results. For the next seven days, Wolfire Games is attempting the same kind of sale, but with some new twists. Wolfire Games' Humble Indie Bundle contains five independent games (World of Goo, Aquaria, Gish, Lugaru HD, and Penumbra) with no DRM and they are all cross-platform. In addition to directly supporting the developers of these five games, part of the money also goes to the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Child's Play Charity. No matter how much you spend, you also get to choose who your money goes to (charity only, developers only, evenly, or custom)."
Image

The Virtual Choir Project 58

Posted by samzenpus from the is-it-real-or-is-it-youtube dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Conductor and composer Eric Whitacre has successfully created a virtual choir using the voices of 185 people who posted their performance on YouTube. The piece that's performed is called 'Sleep,' composed by the conductor himself in 2000. Anyone can join in — all you need is a webcam and a microphone."

Slashdot Top Deals

This restaurant was advertising breakfast any time. So I ordered french toast in the renaissance. - Steven Wright, comedian

Close