ellbee - Slashdot User

Submission + - Millenium Prize awarded - Poincaré conjecture (claymath.org)

Submitted by epee1221 on Thursday March 18, 2010 @10:59PM

epee1221 writes: The Clay Mathematics institute has announced its acceptance of Dr. Grigoriy Perelman's proof of the Poincaré conjecture and awarded the first Millenium Prize. Poincaré questioned whether there exists a method for determining whether a three-dimensional manifold is a spherical: is there a 3-manifold not homologous to the 3-sphere in which any loop can be grdually shrunk to a single point? The Poincaré conjecture is that there is no such 3-manifold, i.e. any boundless 3-manifold in which the condition holds is homeomorphic to the 3-sphere. A sketch of the proof using language intended for the lay reader is available at Wikipedia.

Submission + - Madoff's programmers indicted (gothamist.com)

Submitted by jason8 on Thursday March 18, 2010 @09:34PM

jason8 writes: Two programmers who helped Ponzi-schemer (and now prison punching bag) Bernard Madoff program an old computer to produce false records have been indicted, according to the Post. Jerome O'Hara and George Perez were accused of conspiracy, falsifying records of a broker dealer and falsifying records of an investment adviser. They are each free on $1 million bail, and their lawyers say they will both plead not guilty.

Submission + - School spying on student webcams

Submitted by jargon82 on Thursday February 18, 2010 @12:18PM

jargon82 writes: A Pennsylvania high school is using laptops they issued to students to spy on them in homes and outside of school. According to a class action filling the webcams and microphones in these laptops could be remotely activated by school officials, and have been used in this role. One student was accused of "improper behavior in his home" and the school provided a photo taken via his laptop as proof.

Submission + - EMC's Atmos Cloud Goes Down, No One Notices (crn.com)

Submitted by FrankPoole on Thursday February 18, 2010 @12:16PM

FrankPoole writes: In another black eye for the cloud computing movement, CRN is reporting EMC's Atmos Online platform went down Wednesday, just one day after the storage technology company announced a host of updates for the storage-focused cloud platform. EMC told CRN Atmos went offline for maintenance issues, but the company didn't specify what kind of maintenance issues were involved or if the outage was planned. But since the Atmos Web site is still offline today and giving visitors the same "routine maintenance" line, it brings up two questions: if routine maintenance causes your cloud infrastructure being inaccessible for more than a day, then why would users go with cloud computing? And if the problem isn't in fact "routine maintenance" and something more serious, then how safe is your data in the cloud?

Comment Re:Partially correct, he is (Score 1) 410

by ellbee on Sunday December 06, 2009 @08:14AM (#30342548) Attached to: Multiple-Display Power Tools For Linux?

Previous editions were somewhat challenged, but Windows7 is way better than any previous version wrt multiscreen. I run multiscreen with one framebuffer on my desktop and laptop and multi-framebuffer on my laptop with a DisplayLink USB frame buffer. It Just Works, including easily changing orientations, laptop disconnect/reconnect, changing to display cloning for presentations, etc. Windows-P is your new keyboard shortcut friend.

What pisses me off is that I hate Windows; But it does show that if you concentrate on fixing bugs, over time code can improve.

Submission + - Servers from dense arrays of low-power processors

Submitted by derGoldstein on Sunday December 06, 2009 @08:05AM

derGoldstein writes: Slashdot has previously followed attempts to create server architectures from netbook processors, specifically the FAWN project. Now that Cortex-A8 based systems are available on SODIMM modules, will new attempts be made at creating very dense arrays of systems for application where fast, concurrent data retrieval is important — primarily web servers?

Submission + - "Lawful spying" price lists leaked (cryptome.org) 1

Submitted by ogaraf on Sunday December 06, 2009 @07:50AM

ogaraf writes: Wired has a story about how the site Cryptome leaked the price lists for "lawful spying" activities of Yahoo and other companies, and subsequently received a DMCA takedown notice from Yahoo. The documents are however still online and in them you can learn for instance that IP logs last for one year, but the original IPs used to create accounts are kept since 1999. The contents of your Yahoo account are bought for $30 to $40 by law enforcement agencies.

Submission + - Internet down in Iran ahead of planned protests (telegraph.co.uk) 1

Submitted by

Ceriel Nosforit

on Sunday December 06, 2009 @05:58AM

Ceriel Nosforit writes: "Internet access in Tehran was almost completely unavailable on Saturday, two days ahead of planned demonstrations in the Iranian capital by opponents of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad."

Submission + - Potential MS (multiple sclerosis) breakthrough

Submitted by dr-suess-fan on Monday November 23, 2009 @02:02PM

dr-suess-fan writes: CTV reports on doctor's discovery. From the Article:
"A group of doctors in Italy is investigating a fascinating new treatment for multiple sclerosis, based on a theory that, if proven true, could radically alter the lives of patients. An investigation by CTV's W5 reveals that this treatment appears to stop the disease from progressing. Patients seen in the documentary relate how, after the simple procedure, their MS symptoms suddenly stopped and, in some cases, they were able to resume normal lives."

Submission + - HYDRA platform-independent GPU scaling performance (pcper.com)

Submitted by Vigile on Monday November 23, 2009 @01:40PM

Vigile writes: Lucid is a small company that seemed to promise the impossible: truly open GPU scaling performance across platforms and GPU vendors. Lucid has been talking about and showing off its HYDRA Engine technology that combines a hardware and software layer to facilitate DirectX performance scaling based on individual objects and task division rather than alternate frame rendering. This method allows HYDRA to use different GPUs of varying performance levels and scale accordingly. PC Perspective was able to get some time with a reference system and benchmark a few games and different GPU combinations including identical NVIDIA cards, NVIDIA cards of different GPU generations and even a configuration using an ATI and NVIDIA graphics card simultaneously, all improving game performance to some degree. Though there were some inconsistencies in compatibility the overall impressions were favorable and point to a successful launch later this winter.

Submission + - Microsoft targets 2012 for Windows 8

Submitted by Jake on Monday November 23, 2009 @01:03PM

Jake writes: Ars Technica reports:

According to a Microsoft roadmap, Windows 7's and Windows Server 2008 R2's successors are slated for somewhere around 2012. In terms of final names, we're like to see "Windows 8" and "Windows Server 2012," again assuming no major delays and assuming Microsoft is going to stick to the same naming scheme.

Submission + - GE Says Open Source Is A Huge Risk (eweekeurope.co.uk)

Submitted by judgecorp on Monday November 23, 2009 @12:36PM

judgecorp writes: Engineering giant General Electric (GE) has warned that open source is risky. A European CIO for the company told a conference today that open source is only useful for internal "playground" uses, despite other parts of GE having deployed Linux for healthcare platforms. The comment follows an equally equivocal comment from the European Commission. While announcing a plan to make a level playing field for open source, EC vice president Siim Kallas warned that open source software might have security risks.

Submission + - NSA says 80% of Cyberattacks are Preventable

Submitted by

Ponca City, We love you

on Monday November 23, 2009 @11:59AM

Ponca City, We love you writes: "GCN reports that in testimony before the the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Terrorism and Homeland Security Subcommittee, the National Security Agency's Information Assurance Director, Richard Schaeffer Jr., told the committee that computer systems with proper security and network controls should be able to withstand about 80 percent of known cyberattacks and identified three measures in particular as being especially effective: implementing best security practices, proper network configurations, and strong network monitoring. “We believe that if one institutes best practices, proper configurations [and] good network monitoring that a system ought to be able to withstand about 80 percent of the commonly known attack mechanisms against systems today,” Schaeffer said in his testimony. “You can actually harden your network environment to raise the bar such that the adversary has to resort to much, much more sophisticated means (PDF), thereby raising the risk of detection." Schaeffer added that there are no "silver bullets" when it comes to cybersecurity, but over time, increased awareness of cybersecurity issues, new standards, better education, and expanded information sharing, more uniform practices, and improved technology can make a meaningful differece."

Submission + - IBM kills off Cell processor development (fudzilla.com)

Submitted by chriswaco on Monday November 23, 2009 @11:16AM

chriswaco writes: Add the Cell processor to the long list of the "next big things that weren't":

"The Cell processor which IBM once flogged as revolutionary is now officially dead in the water."

http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/16530/38/ via Gizmodo.

Submission + - Microsoft Office 2010 goes public (pcmag.com)

Submitted by adeelarshad82 on Wednesday November 18, 2009 @02:50PM

adeelarshad82 writes: The next incarnation of Microsoft Office, Office 2010, has now gone public in a freely downloadable beta version, meaning anyone can try out time-limited versions of the next generation of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and the rest of the growing Office family. It's impressive how Microsoft has improved on the solid foundation of Office 2007. The now-familiar Ribbon interface gets a few tweaks in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, and is now visible throughout Outlook. Instead of an Office 2007 style major overhaul, Microsoft offers refinements and enhancements. The new release is terrific but it's not essential for anyone already running Office 2007. Some of the most technically impressive changes in Office 2010 involve online collaboration through SharePoint services for corporate use or a free Windows Live account for personal use.

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