mbc2000 - 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 + - World's Largest Digging Machine Goes to Work (singularityhub.com) 1

Submitted by

kkleiner

on Thursday June 30, 2011 @06:43AM

kkleiner writes: "Meet the bagger 288, the worlds largest digging machine. It’s 311 feet (95 meters) tall, 705 feet (215 meters) long. That’s almost two football fields (American). It weighs in at 45,500 tons (the Titanic weighed 46,328 tons). Completed in 1978, it took the German steelmaking company Krupp–now ThyssenKrupp–five years to build and carried a manufacturing cost of $100 million."

Submission + - Keys Can Be Copied From Pictures Taken 200ft Away (singularityhub.com) 1

Submitted by

kkleiner

on Wednesday June 29, 2011 @05:41AM

kkleiner writes: "A group of computer scientists at UC San Diego have developed software, called Sneakey, that can copy keys using digital images taken from large distances, and from almost any angle. In one demonstration they duplicated a key using an image captured on a cell phone camera. In another demonstration, with the help of a telephoto lens they were able to duplicate keys sitting on a café table almost 200 feet away. Incredibly, all of the copies worked when tested out on the relevant locks."

Submission + - ISS nearly clobbered by space debris (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by erice on Tuesday June 28, 2011 @11:12PM

erice writes: A chuck of space debris came within 334 meters of the space station, forcing the crews to their escape capsules and prepare for emergency evacuation to Earth.

Submission + - 2011 MacBook Pros Confirmed To Crash Under Load (apple.com) 5

Submitted by sammcj on Sunday March 20, 2011 @12:49AM

sammcj writes: 2011 Macbook crashing under heavy load?... you are not alone. While trying to figure out what was wrong with my fancy new Macbook I soon realised that the issue is very wide spread.

Submission + - Kaku's Dark Prediction for the End of Moore's Law (salon.com)

Submitted by

nightcats

on Saturday March 19, 2011 @11:37PM

nightcats writes: "An excerpt from Michio Kaku's new book appears at salon.com, in which he sees a dark economic future within the next 20 yrs. as Moore's law is brought to an end when single-atom transistors give way to quantum states. Kaku predicts: "Since chips are placed in a wide variety of products, this could have disastrous effects on the entire economy. As entire industries grind to a halt, millions could lose their jobs, and the economy could be thrown into turmoil.""

Submission + - The Challenge In Delivering Open-Source GPU Driver (phoronix.com)

Submitted by yuhong on Monday January 03, 2011 @09:51PM

yuhong writes: After the recent Intel Sandy Bridge launch leaving Linux users at launch day having to build the latest source from Git repositories in order to have full support for the integrated graphics, Phoronix looks at the problems involved in delivering new graphics drivers for Linux.

Submission + - What does Windows 7 track, exactly? (windowsteamblog.com) 1

Submitted by techmuse on Monday January 03, 2011 @09:26PM

techmuse writes: A posting on the Windows Team Blog states that "In the last month, Windows 7 users have used Jump Lists 339,129,958 times!" How does Microsoft know this? Microsoft gathers telemetry for some products, especially those in development. Does it also gather it for products on the market? What exactly does it track? Are most users aware of this (beyond a screen that says "Help make Windows better"?)

Submission + - Interactive, emotion-detecting robot developed (gizmag.com)

Submitted by cylonlover on Monday January 03, 2011 @08:31PM

cylonlover writes: A team of Cambridge University researchers have now developed a system that can not only detect a user's emotional state, but can also make expressive responses of its own. Using a robotic likeness of the godfather of the programmable computer, Charles Babbage, the team has hooked the system up to a driving simulator and created a computerized driving companion and navigator that reacts to the driver in much the same way as a human passenger.

Submission + - Method history for Subversion released (blogspot.com)

Submitted by rocket22 on Monday January 03, 2011 @06:14PM

rocket22 writes: 99% of the times you search through the history of a file in Subversion you're probably looking for what happened to a specific method. But, following a method is not easy since most likely it has been moved around the file, heavily refactored and modified over time. The "method history for Subversion" Visual Studio plugin tries to come up with a solution: it is able to find what happened to a given method exploring the different revisions in the history of the file and locating the given method on each of them. It is available for Visual Studio and C# and the Eclipse plugin will follow shortly.

Submission + - Honeycomb to Require Dual-core Processor

Submitted by adeelarshad82 on Monday January 03, 2011 @05:08PM

adeelarshad82 writes: According to managing director of Korean consumer electronics firm Enspert, Google's new Android Honeycomb tablet OS will require a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor to run properly. That means that many existing Android tablets will not be upgradeable to Honeycomb, as they lack the processor necessary to meet the spec. Currently, Nvidia's Tegra 2 platform is the only chipset in products on the market to include a Cortex-A9, although other manufacturers have said they're moving to the new processor architecture for 2011 products.

Submission + - Postal Trucks to Become Sensor Platforms? (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 18, 2010 @06:30PM

An anonymous reader writes: The U.S. Postal Service may face insolvency by 2011 (it lost $8.5 billion last year). An op-ed piece in today's New York Times proposes an interesting business idea for the Postal Service: use postal trucks as a giant fleet of mobile sensor platforms. (Think Google Streetview on steroids.) The trucks could be outfitted with a variety of sensors (security, environmental, RF ...) and paid for by businesses. The article's author addresses some of the obvious privacy concerns that arise.

Submission + - Delicious Will Not Get Axed... Sort Of (delicious.com)

Submitted by geegel on Saturday December 18, 2010 @08:50AM

geegel writes: In a statement on their Delicious official blog, Yahoo now claims that: "No, we are not shutting down Delicious. While we have determined that there is not a strategic fit at Yahoo!, we believe there is a ideal home for Delicious outside of the company where it can be resourced to the level where it can be competitive".

What that means can be everyone's guess, but at least for now, your delicious accounts are safe.

Submission + - Backscatter X-Ray Machines Easily Fooled (springerlink.com)

Submitted by Pinckney on Saturday December 11, 2010 @12:37AM

Pinckney writes: A paper by Leon Kaufman and Joseph W. Carlson in the Journal of Transportation Security asserts that x-ray backscatter machines are not very effective even in their intended role. While carelessly placed contraband will be detected, the machines have glaring blind-spots and have difficulty distinguishing explosives from human tissue. As they write, "It is very likely that a large (15–20 cm in diameter), irregularly-shaped, cm-thick pancake [of with beveled edges, taped to the abdomen, would be invisible to this technology... It is also easy to see that an object such as a wire or a boxcutter blade, taped to the side of the body, or even a small gun in the same location, will be invisible."

Submission + - Firefox 4 startup twice as slow as Firefox 3.6 1

Submitted by latif on Friday December 10, 2010 @11:41PM

latif writes: Firefox users have complained for ages about Firefox startup speed. Many have even
moved on to Google Chrome because of the issue. Unfortunately, the problem is not registering with the folks at Mozilla. Instead of taking serious steps to resolve the issue, someone at Mozilla brushed off the issue as a perception problem that needs to be resolved via user-interface tweaks.

The Firefox startup performance issue has finally blown up. In browser performance benchmarks conducted by Gizmodo,
Firefox 4 Beta 7 came dead last in browser startup speed. It was taking upwards of 20 seconds on cold startups which is nearly twice as slow as Firefox 3.6. Is this the end of Firefox?

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