Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Businesses

Open Source-Friendly Smartphones For the Small Office? 222

Posted by timothy from the ethics-schmethics dept.
Thunderstruck writes "I work in a small office with just two computers. Both machines run long-term-service releases of Ubuntu, with Gnome, and Evolution for scheduling, contact management and electronic mail. We plan to stick with Linux long-term. For telephone service, we're using smartphones. In order to keep everything straight, we need phones that can synchronize easily with the calendars and contact data on each owner's desktop machine. We cannot use cloud based services for this function due to ethics rules, and for security reasons. Right now, we do all of this with older Palm phones, but these are a dying breed. What options are out there right now for phones that will sync with Evolution (or another good Linux PIM suite) which do not require data to go through the cloud first?"

Comment not less humans, less poverty (Score 0) 738

by chanio (#33934066) Attached to: Humans Will Need Two Earths By 2030
The solution is never going to be less humans (wars & genocide). That story never ends...

The solution is to really end poverty as soon as possible.
Then, everybody should expect a better way of living. Thus, simplify their own lives.
Then, even non violent cultures tend to birth control authomatically.

End wars and poverty, now!
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft Releases Its Biggest-Ever Security Fix (foxnews.com)

Submitted by Velcroman1
Velcroman1 writes: Microsoft issued its biggest-ever security fix on Tuesday, including repairs to its ubiquitous Windows operating system and Internet browser for flaws that could let hackers take control of a PC. The new patches aim to fix a number of vulnerabilities including the notorious Stuxnet virus that attacked an Iranian nuclear power plant and other industrial control systems around the world.
Moon

Countries Considering Circumlunar Flight From ISS 170

Posted by CmdrTaco from the because-they-can dept.
FleaPlus writes "The BBC reports that the space agencies of Europe, Russia, and the US are in (very) preliminary discussions about a potential collaborative mission where astronauts would assemble a small spacecraft at the ISS, then fly it around the Moon and back. This is somewhat similar to previously-proposed commercial missions, with many elements adapted from spacecraft systems already in existence. This would also be a testbed for eventual asteroid and Mars missions, which would likely require modules to be launched on multiple rockets and assembled in space."
Biotech

Gambling On Bacteria 128

Posted by CmdrTaco from the double-down-on-anthrax dept.
An anonymous reader writes "When it comes to gambling, many people rely on game theory, a branch of applied mathematics that attempts to measure the choices of others to inform their own decisions. It's used in economics, politics, medicine — and, of course, Las Vegas. But recent findings from a Tel Aviv University researcher suggest that we may put ourselves on the winning side if we look to bacteria instead. According to Prof. Eshel Ben-Jacob of Tel Aviv University's School of Physics and Astronomy, current game theory can't account for bacteria's natural decision-making abilities — it's just too simplistic. Understanding bacteria's reactions to stressful and hazardous conditions may improve decision-making processes in any human arena from everyday life to political elections."
Hardware

Electromechanical Switches Could Reduce Future Computers' Cooling Needs 95

Posted by timothy from the dude-that's-so-uncool dept.
Earthquake Retrofit writes "Science Daily is reporting that researchers at Case Western Reserve University have taken the first step to building a computer capable of operating in extreme heat. Te-Hao Lee, Swarup Bhunia and Mehran Mehregany have made electromechanical switches — building blocks of circuits — that can take twice the heat that would render electronic transistors useless. 'The group used electron beam lithography and sulfur hexafluoride gas to etch the switches, just a few hundred nanometers in size, out of silicon carbide. The result is a switch that has no discernable leakage and no loss of power in testing at 500 degrees Celsius. A pair of switches were used to make an inverter, which was able to switch on and off 500,000 times per second, performing computation each cycle. The switches, however, began to break down after 2 billion cycles and in a manner the researchers do not yet fully understand. ... Whether they can reach the point of competing with faster transistors for office and home and even supercomputing, remains to be seen. The researchers point out that with the ability to handle much higher heat, the need for costly and space-consuming cooling systems would be eliminated.'"
The Internet

Bittorrent To Replace Standard Downloads? 591

Posted by samzenpus from the sharing-the-load dept.
Max Sayre writes "Have you ever tried to download an operating system update only to have it fail and have to start all over? What about patches for your favorite games? World of Warcraft already uses Bittorrent technology as a way to distribute large amounts of content at a lower cost to the company and faster speeds to all of their clients. So why haven't they replaced the standard downloading options built into any major OS? Companies like Opera are including the downloading of torrents in their products already and extensions have been written for Firefox to download torrents in-browser. Every day Bittorrent traffic is growing. Sites like OpenBittorrent already exist and DHT doesn't even require a tracker. So why isn't everyone doing it? Is it finally time to see all downloads replaced with Bittorrent?"
Google

Google Releases New Image Format Called WebP 378

Posted by Soulskill from the pixelating-the-web dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Google has released WebP, a lossy image format based on the image encoding used by VP8 (the video codec used in Google's WebM video format) to compress keyframes. According to the FAQ, WebP achieves an average 39% more compression than JPEG and JPEG 2000 while maintaining image quality. A gallery on the WebP homepage has a selection of images which compare the original JPEG image with the WebP encoded image shown as a PNG. There's no information available yet on which browsers will support the WebP image format, but I imagine it will be all the browsers which currently have native WebM support — Firefox, Chrome, and Opera." Independent analysis of WebP is available from a few different sources.
Image

Autotools 148

Posted by samzenpus from the read-all-about-it dept.
Muad writes "John Calcote is a senior software engineer in Novell's Linux business, who after slogging up the steep learning curve the Autotools triad poses to those packaging software according to the portable GNU conventions for the first time, very kindly decided to make the experience easier to newcomers by sharing his years of experience and carefully crafted bag of tricks. His book is a welcome update to a field that has not seen entries now for a full ten years, so long has been the time since GNU Autoconf, Automake, and Libtool by Gary V. Vaughn, Ben Ellison, Tom Tromey, and Ian Lance Taylor hit the shelves. Unfortunately, the publishing industry is driven by the need to turn a profit to fund its endeavors, and specialist items like this book are not obvious candidates for volume selling - which is a credit to No Starch Press' willingness to venture down this path." Keep reading for the rest of Federico's review.
The Courts

Man Gets 10 Years For VoIP Hacking 149

Posted by timothy from the just-think-what-that-is-in-minutes dept.
angry tapir writes "A US court has sentenced a Venezuelan man to 10 years in prison for stealing and then reselling more than 10 million minutes of Internet phone service. Edwin Pena, 27, was convicted in February of masterminding a scheme to hack into more than 15 telecommunications companies and then reroute calls to their networks at no charge. He must also pay more than US$1 million in restitution, and will be deported once his sentence is served."
Input Devices

Apple Patents Directional Flash Tech For Cameras 145

Posted by timothy from the hey-you-in-the-corner dept.
tekgoblin writes "A patent application has surfaced that shows Apple's attempts at creating a new way for a flash to work on a camera. The way the new flash works is very intriguing: a user can select a dimly lit area of the photo and the camera will try to illuminate just that area with the flash. The way Apple is attempting to accomplish this is similar to the way the autofocus works on the iPhone 4 where you can touch the screen in certain areas to focus on that area. Instead you will be able to light up that area with the flash. This is accomplished by the camera flash passing through a 'redirector' so the flash can be placed other than directly centered when a photo is taken."
Science

New Zealand Scientists Make Atom-Trapping Breakthrough 101

Posted by timothy from the gotta-keep-'em-separated dept.
Mogster writes with this news from New Zealand: "'University of Otago scientists have made a 'major physics breakthrough' with the development of a technique to consistently isolate and capture a fast-moving single atom. A team of four researchers from the university's physics department are believed to be the first to isolate and photograph the Rubidium 85 atom.' Good to see Kiwis following in Rutherford's footsteps."
NASA

NASA Creates an Alien's Eye View of Solar System 53

Posted by timothy from the buncha-showoffs dept.
Flash Modin writes "Using the Discover supercomputer — which is capable of 67 trillion calculations per second — astronomers at NASA Goddard have created a series of images of what our solar system would look like to an alien astronomer at various points in time. Their simulations track the interactions of 75,000 dust grains in the Kuiper Belt, and show that while the planets would be too dim to detect directly, aliens could deduce the presence of Neptune from its effects on the icy region. Strikingly, the images resemble one taken by Hubble of the star Fomalhaut. NASA has put out a cute video to go with the announcement as well."
Science

Scientists Confirm Nuclear Decay Rate Constancy 95

Posted by timothy from the was-just-the-one-time-I-swear dept.
As_I_Please writes "Scientists at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology and Purdue University have ruled out neutrino flux as a cause of previously observed fluctuations in nuclear decay rates. From the article: 'Researchers ... tested this by comparing radioactive gold-198 in two shapes, spheres and thin foils, with the same mass and activity. Gold-198 releases neutrinos as it decays. The team reasoned that if neutrinos are affecting the decay rate, the atoms in the spheres should decay more slowly than the atoms in the foil because the neutrinos emitted by the atoms in the spheres would have a greater chance of interacting with their neighboring atoms. The maximum neutrino flux in the sample in their experiments was several times greater than the flux of neutrinos from the sun. The researchers followed the gamma-ray emission rate of each source for several weeks and found no difference between the decay rate of the spheres and the corresponding foils.' The paper can be found here on arXiv. Slashdot has previously covered the original announcement and followed up with the skepticism of other scientists."

Slashdot Top Deals

"If you want to know what happens to you when you die, go look at some dead stuff." -- Dave Enyeart

Close