whizbang77045 - Slashdot User

Submission + - First AMD 16-core Opteron chips arrive (techworld.com.au)

Submitted by

angry tapir

on Monday November 14, 2011 @01:43AM

angry tapir writes: "After a brief delay and more than a year of chatter, Advanced Micro Devices has announced the availability of its first 16-core Opteron server chips, which pack the largest number of cores available on x86 chips today. The new Opteron 6200 chips, code-named Interlagos, are 25 per cent to 30 per cent faster than their predecessors, the 12-core Opteron 6100 chips, according to AMD."

Submission + - Icelandic MP to challenge US Court Ruling on Twitt (guardian.co.uk)

Submitted by JabrTheHut on Saturday November 12, 2011 @06:49AM

JabrTheHut writes: The Guardian has a story of how Icelandic MP Birgitta Jonsdottir, a former Wikileaks volunteer, is challenging the US' acquisition of Twitter account information, IP addresses, mailing addresses and even bank information. The US says it wanted these details to help with it's investigation into Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.

Submission + - Linux Mint passes Ubuntu on DistroWatch.com (muktware.com)

Submitted by leifbork on Thursday November 10, 2011 @09:54AM

leifbork writes: Linux Mint has replaced Ubuntu as the most popular distribution for the past 6 months on DistroWatch.com.

You may choose to answer this question:
- Why?
or this one:
- Another question that you would like me to have asked instead, resembling questions that often conclude stories here and that is relating to the subject in the same way.

Thank you, and God bless our soft, neardy guts.

Submission + - Why tech resumes are awful (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by absolovon on Thursday November 10, 2011 @09:08AM

absolovon writes: A tech recruiter lets rip about the many stupid things that people put in their resumes (or CVs as he chooses to call them).
He is brutal about spelling, crazy font usage but quite funny at the same time.

Submission + - Next Generation Emergency Broadcast to Use Interne (cbsnews.com)

Submitted by

billlava

on Wednesday November 09, 2011 @05:29PM

billlava writes: "It looks like tech savvy citizens will finally be able to get notified when disaster strikes just lke their tv-watching, radio-listening peers. Forget twitter, 24-hour news sites, SMS and IM. FEMA will tell you when something important is going on.

FEMA and the Dept of Homeland Security are working on a more contemporary system to augment the EAS[Emergency Alert System.] The Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS) will, it's hoped, be able to send emergency messages to mobile devices and to Web sites.

I have a hard time they'll beat the effectiveness of what is already out there, but if this gives the feds a chance to take over facebook 'for emergencies' then I'm all for it."

Submission + - Vatican: Banning Tintin from children's shelves is (telegraph.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 09, 2011 @12:25PM

An anonymous reader writes: 'Tintin in the Congo', the comic banned from the children's shelves of British book shops, is an example of "politically correct lunacy", according to the Vatican's official newspaper.

Submission + - Help Rename the Department of Homeland Security 2

Submitted by

Hugh Pickens writes

on Sunday November 06, 2011 @11:21AM

Hugh Pickens writes writes: "James Fallows writes tongue in cheek that U.S. Department of Fear, led by Secretary of Fear Malcolm P. Stag III, is running a poll. What should we re-name the Department of Homeland Security? "Possibilities include Department of ScaredyCatLand Security, reflecting the prevailing mentality of an era, and Department of Fatherland Security, to make us sound strong," writes Fallows. "There are many more to choose from, plus you can write in your own nominees. But act now, because the polls close in two days.""

Submission + - Why Do So Many College Science Majors Drop Out?

Submitted by

Hugh Pickens writes

on Sunday November 06, 2011 @03:05AM

Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Christopher Drew writes that President Obama and industry groups have called on colleges to graduate 10,000 more engineers a year and 100,000 new teachers with majors in science, technology, engineering and math but studies find that roughly 40 percent of students planning engineering and science majors end up switching to other subjects or failing to get any degree — 60 percent when pre-medical students are included. Middle and high school students are having most of the fun, building their erector sets and dropping eggs into water to test the first law of motion but the excitement quickly fades as students brush up against the reality of what David E. Goldberg calls “the math-science death march" as freshmen in college wade through a blizzard of calculus, physics and chemistry in lecture halls with hundreds of other students where many wash out. “Treating the freshman year as a ‘sink or swim’ experience and accepting attrition as inevitable,” says a report by the National Academy of Engineering, “is both unfair to students and wasteful of resources and faculty time.” But help is on the way. In September, the Association of American Universities announced a five-year initiative to encourage faculty members in the STEM fields to use more interactive teaching techniques (PDF). “There is a long way to go,” says Hunter R. Rawlings, the association’s president, “and there is an urgent need to accelerate the process of reform.”"

Submission + - Ubuntu 12.04 LTS won't fit in a CD (phoronix.com) 1

Submitted by

gbl08ma

on Friday November 04, 2011 @12:07PM

gbl08ma writes: "According to various sources, the ISO image size for the upcoming, Long-Term supported Ubuntu version "Precise Pangolin" will not fit in a regular CD, since the image size is expected to weight around 750MB instead of the usual ~700MB.
The idea is that users should either flash the image to a USB flash drive or burn it to a DVD.
The extra room on the disc image could allow for integration of more GNOME3 components and Canonical applications.
There was also a proposal to use a 1.5GB DVD image as the default download for Ubuntu 12.04."

Submission + - The CIA's Social Mining Department (yahoo.com)

Submitted by bsquizzato on Friday November 04, 2011 @09:33AM

bsquizzato writes: The Associated Press is running a story about the CIA's Open Source Center: "a team known affectionately as the 'vengeful librarians'" who work out of "an anonymous industrial park in Virginia, in an unassuming brick building" scouring social networks and other online media to keep up with the world's current events and opinions on American actions. This should come as no surprise, but it is quite interesting that President Obama is briefed daily on the latest hot topic tweets and Facebook posts.

Submission + - City lights could reveal alien civilizations (extremetech.com) 1

Submitted by

MrSeb

on Tuesday November 01, 2011 @10:51AM

MrSeb writes: "New research conducted by Abraham Loeb from Harvard University and Edwin Turner from Princeton University shows that electric, artificial lights on remote planets could be detected using next-generation ground and space telescopes. The basic approach is simple: planets that are exclusively illuminated by a local sun will have one "light signature," while a planet with artificial lights will have another. Loeb and Turner say that this technique, with our current telescopes, would be able to pick out a major terrestrial city on the edge of the Solar System, in the Kuiper belt (50 AU) — but future telescopes, or the telescopes belonging to advanced, alien races, could see farther. More interesting than the how is the why. Why are Loeb and Turner interested in weak, visible-light spectra rather than the megawatts of easily-detectable radio waves that are pumped into space every second? Because the amount of radio waves being produced by humanity — mostly thanks to fiber optic networks — is on the decline. In turn, this infers that other, advanced civilizations might have moved beyond radio communications too. In this case, radio astronomy won't help us (or alien civilizations) the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) — but looking for artificial light would."

Submission + - Researchers Successfully Create Artificial Blood (inhabitat.com)

Submitted by

Diggester

on Monday October 31, 2011 @10:07AM

Diggester writes: "Researchers at the University of Edinburgh have successfully created artificial, oxygen-carrying red blood cells that they believe could go into human medical trials in as little as two years. The cells aren’t synthetic, they are created using human stem cells, but they can be manufactured, and the researchers are currently working out a way to mass-produce them safely. If successful their findings would eliminate the need for the current mass amounts of energy and electricicity that are needed to gather, transport and store blood for transfusions. Plus, now we have something more than garlic to throw at vampires when they come knocking on Monday evening!"

Submission + - Authorities Seize Duqu's C&C Servers in Mumbai (securityweek.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey on Monday October 31, 2011 @09:08AM

wiredmikey writes: In Mumbai, Indian authorities seized components from servers in a data center after Symantec informed them that they were communicating with the command and control (C&C) infrastructure used by Duqu, the Trojan that is touted as the precursor to the next Stuxnet.

According to a report from Reuters, officials the Department of Information Technology in India seized hard drives and other components from a server hosted in a Mumbai data center.

Security vendors and government labs are are worried that malware such as Duqu and Stuxnet are the building blocks needed in order for attackers to target critical infrastructure. Based on the initial analysis of Duqu, many researchers warned that it was the second generation development of Stuxnet, but this is still the subject of much debate, with some experts now saying that the connection between the two malicious programs is questionable.

Submission + - New LibreOffice Extension Website Live (ostatic.com)

Submitted by Thinkcloud on Monday October 31, 2011 @05:36AM

Thinkcloud writes: Have you heard about those great LibreOffice extensions but have had a problem locating them? Well, those extensions (and templates) are going to be easier to find now thanks to The Document Foundation's new online repository.

Submission + - Major copyright breach undetected on Youtube! (google.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 30, 2011 @04:53PM

An anonymous reader writes: If you thought copyright breaches were reserved to file sharing, file servers and uploads to streaming servers, get ready for this... Youtube is now plagued with full-length copyright-violation movies! Here's a sneak peek:

1. Casino (1995): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_9BBlc6zqA
2. The Bourne Identity (1988): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEfdYc-18k0
3. 12 Angry Men (1997): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQ_PoCLJp08
4. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owj84ejzh2Y
5. Pirates of the Caribbean (2003): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0zhH7rFz4c
6. Thor (2011) [ES]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLyIQ-mKEKI
7. Pretty Woman (1990) [Director's Cut]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gw38lZTOBdE
8. Hocus Pocus (1993): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieGFxNMFYRY
9. Mean Girls 2 (2011): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElOjLTVfxyc
10. Apocalypto (2006): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkxW7dX1fpM
11. Déjà Vu (2006): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTC3KYAYRwA
12. Being John Malkovich (1999): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HFkJC0ETQ4
13. Saving Private Ryan (1998): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toipOBs5oos
14. Get Carter (1971): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_ouozC9KCU
15. From Mexico with Love (2009): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbbafJiVv3M
16. Gamer (2009): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEpQRQHygjg
17. Prime (2005): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJHWEsY5_ms
18. Transporter 3 (2008): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaLjLzBLxKM ...

List is incomplete and all movies were uploaded by different users. No action taken by Youtube as yet.

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