Reorax - Slashdot User

Submission + - Weapon found in Whale blubber from the 1800's (cnn.com)

Submitted by LABarr on Thursday June 14, 2007 @03:51AM

LABarr writes: AP and CNN are carrying this story. "A 50-ton bowhead whale caught off the Alaskan coast last month had a weapon fragment embedded in its neck that showed it survived a similar hunt — more than a century ago. Embedded deep under its blubber was a 3½-inch arrow-shaped projectile that has given researchers insight into the whale's age, estimated between 115 and 130 years old. The bomb lance fragment, lodged in a bone between the whale's neck and shoulder blade, was likely manufactured in New Bedford, on the southeast coast of Massachusetts, a major whaling center at that time. It was probably shot at the whale from a heavy shoulder gun around 1890." One tough whale...

Submission + - Computer vision for people with regular computers?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 14, 2007 @12:09AM

An anonymous reader writes: So I finally got myself a nifty little webcamera, and naturally, the first thing I did was to look around the wide internets for cool computer vision things to do with it. I know the computer vision field has come pretty far, and I found what looks to be an excellent open source computer vision library (http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?grou p_id=22870) but for the life of me I cannot seem to find nifty apps, hacks and tricks to do with my web camera. So I Ask Slashdot — where are my face recognizing,
gesture interpreting, image vectorizing applications?

Submission + - How the Facebook platform is changing the world

Submitted by

malbrech

on Wednesday June 13, 2007 @02:06PM

malbrech writes: "An article in the Guardian technology blog points us to how the Facebook platform makes web applications explode virally. There is also an excellent analysis of Facebook by Marc Andreesen (remember? the guy who did Mosaic and Netscape). In a nutshell: the carefully designed instant awareness of your friends of the application you just started using, makes them use it too. That cascades onto their friends, and so on. The result: your servers get blown apart in very short time. You might be famous, but flat out beaten by traffic."

Submission + - PC's are only 50% energy efficient

Submitted by

Matt

on Wednesday June 13, 2007 @05:20AM

Matt writes: "An awful 50 percent of the power delivered from a wall socket to a PC simply gets wasted says Urs Hölzle, Google fellow and senior vice president of operations. Half the energy gets converted to heat or is dissipated in some other manner in the AC-to-DC conversion. Around 30 percent of the power delivered to the average server gets lost, he added. The power in both cases is lost before any work is accomplished by a computer: later, even more energy is lost by PCs sitting idle, or as heat dissipated by other components."

Submission + - LOLCODE: proof programmers can has humor

Submitted by lisah on Friday June 08, 2007 @11:46AM

lisah writes: In the old days (about six months ago), lolcat junkies had to console themselves with adding their own captions to the comments at I Can Has Cheezburger? but these days its possible to program your computer using LOLCODE. A tutorial at Linux.com shows you how.

Submission + - Is Microsoft getting paid for patents in Linux?

Submitted by

kripkenstein

on Sunday February 11, 2007 @08:08AM

kripkenstein writes: "In an interview, Jeremy Allison (of the Samba project) implies that Microsoft is secretly getting paid for patent licenses on Linux-related products:

[Interviewer:] One of the persistent rumors that's going around is that certain large IT customers have already been paying Microsoft for patent licensing to cover their use of Linux, Samba and other free software projects.[...]

Allison: Yes, that's true, actually. I mean I have had people come up to me and essentially off the record admit that they had been threatened by Microsoft and had got patent cross license and had essentially taken out a license for Microsoft patents on the free software that they were using [...] But they're not telling anyone about it. They're completely doing it off the record.
If true, is this slowing down Linux adoption? Or are these just rumors — which may accomplish much the same effect?"

Submission + - DirectX10 drops Hardware Acceleration for Audio.

Submitted by

shrewd

on Sunday February 11, 2007 @06:42AM

shrewd writes: ""Imagine your surprise when you fire up one of your favourite games in Vista — say World of Warcraft or Prey — only to find your fancy EAX-endowed soundcard and 5.1 surround speakers are dribbling out flat, unenhanced stereo sound. Then, in a vain attempt to spruce up the audio by enabling EAX, you get a nice taut error message saying EAX is not detected on your hardware. What's going on? Welcome to the world of Vista audio. And a brave new world it is.""

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