ma_luen - Slashdot User

Submission + - Climate change cover-up? You better believe it (scientificamerican.com) 1

Submitted by

jamie

on Sunday November 29, 2009 @08:10AM

jamie writes: "Was Sen. James Inhofe right when he declared 2009 the year of the climate contrarian? A slew of emails stolen from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit highlight definite character flaws among some climate scientists, [but] sadly for the potential fate of human civilization, rumors of the demise of climate change have been much exaggerated. ...the opposition here is not grounded in any robust scientific theory or alternative hypotheses (all of those, in their time, have been shot down and nothing new has been offered in years)... There is, in fact, a climate conspiracy. It just happens to be one launched by the fossil fuel industry to obscure the truth about climate change and delay any action."

Haskell 2010 Announced 173

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday November 24, 2009 @06:05PM from the eddie-and-the-beav dept.

paltemalte writes "Simon Marlow has posted an announcement of Haskell 2010, a new revision of the Haskell purely functional programming language. Good news for everyone interested in SMP and concurrency programming."

Submission + - Bozeman, MT speaks up, city at a loss (montanasnewsstation.com)

Submitted by

indrora

on Friday June 19, 2009 @03:28PM

indrora writes: "Yesterday, the city of Bozeman, Montana decided to put into effect the ridiculous bill that made applicants for city jobs to pony up their usernames and passwords on what equivocates to be any website or system they use. The residents baulked at it and began to deluge the city officials building with emails and phone calls in protest. This morning, they held a closed-door hearing to determine what to do. They have not however said anything about what the result was (granted, they will have to soon, because of the Open Meetings Act). The local news station held a vote; the results? Astonishingly un-astonishing:
As of 10 a.m. 6,454 people had voted in a poll on www.kbzk.com asking "What do you think of the City of Bozeman requiring job applicants to provide social network site login and password information?" So 6,347 people have voted "I'm against it — It's an invasion of privacy," 62 people have voted "I'm for it — It's important for the City to judge the applicant's character," and 45 people have said they don't care either way.

The same local news station has a consistent stream of updates that those interested can take a look at."

Submission + - Minn Jury Awards $1.92 Mil to RIAA in Jammie Case (msn.com) 1

Submitted by suraj.sun on Thursday June 18, 2009 @06:19PM

suraj.sun writes: MINNEAPOLIS — A federal jury in Minneapolis has ruled a Minnesota woman violated several music copyrights in the nation's only file-sharing case to go to trial.

The jury found that Jammie Thomas-Rasset "committed willful violation" of the copyrights on 24 songs. The jury awarded the recording companies $1.92 million, or $80,000 per song.

It was a retrial for Thomas-Rasset, who was also found in 2007 to have illegally shared music files. The new trial was ordered after the judge in the case decided he had erred in jury instructions.
Story continues below advertisement | your ad here

The second outcome was worse for Thomas-Rasset. In the first trial, the jury awarded recording companies just $222,000.

An attorney for the recording industry, Tim Reynolds, said the "greater weight of the evidence" showed that Jammie Thomas-Rasset was responsible for the illegal file-sharing that took place on her computer. He asked the jury to hold her accountable to deter others from a practice he said has significantly harmed the people who bring music to everyone.

Defense attorney Joe Sibley said the music companies failed to prove allegations that Thomas-Rasset gave away songs by Gloria Estefan, Sheryl Crow, Green Day, Journey and others.

MSNBC : http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31432024/ns/business-local_business/

Submission + - Classpath hell just froze over (sellmic.com)

Submitted by on Thursday June 11, 2009 @06:05PM

An anonymous reader writes: At last week's JavaOne, Mark Reinhold declared "the classpath is dead". The blog post "Classpath hell just froze over" summarizes some of the presentations and discussions at JavaOne regarding project Jigsaw which aims to modularize the now very large JDK in the next release of Java (version 7 due in 2010). It also highlights some of the controversies and unanswered questions, mainly around native module distribution (you can install java modules as rpm packages) and issues with the OSGi alliance.

Finding a Personal Coding Trifecta 188

Posted by timothy on Sunday May 17, 2009 @04:30PM from the benadryl-cocoa-and-a-down-comforter dept.

jammag writes "For Seinfeld's George Constanza, his dream of the ideal moment was having sex while watching TV and eating a pastrami sandwich. He called this Nirvana state 'The Trifecta.' Developer Eric Spiegel adapts this concept of Nirvana to the act of writing your best possible code. He examines all (or most) of the possible things that might contribute to the 'The Trifecta' for developers — food, beverages, time of day. Spiegel also describes his personal Trifecta."

Submission + - Mars Rovers Seriously Threatened by Dust Storms (space.com)

Submitted by

mrcgran

on Sunday July 08, 2007 @09:34AM

mrcgran writes: "Space.com is reporting a new potentially deadly weather condition threatening the Mars rovers: 'The first and largest dusty squall has reduced direct sunlight to Mars' surface by nearly 99 percent, an unprecedented threat for the solar-powered rovers. If the storm keeps up and thickens with even more dust, officials fear the rovers' batteries may empty and silence the robotic explorers forever. "This thing has been breaking records the past few days. The sun is 100 times fainter than normal. We're hoping for a big break in the storm soon, but that's just a hope." '"

Comment Re:Wake up, Bill (Score 2, Informative) 464

by ma_luen on Tuesday November 15, 2005 @06:26PM (#14038789) Attached to: Microsoft Competes In Supercomputer Market

Yes but the issue is all the performance doesn't matter if your researchers aren't using it to solve problems. See http://www.darpa.mil/ipto/programs/hpcs/ for more info on this. This is the big HPC push that IBM, Cray, and SUN are participating in. Also a company that I think is kinda cool http://www.orionmulti.com/ is working on a very common use of HPC tools by non-computer people. They are very focused on providing easy to use ultra low maintainance computational tools primarially for the bio-informatics community. One of the founders of the company worked an LANL on green-desitiny (or something like that) which was designed to be a low power low maintainance super computing resource at LANL. After all that, the short answer is yes performance is important but there is a lot of work and interest in making sure that this performance can actually be used by the people that are actually solving problems. Mark

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