Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Submission + - Microsoft Rolls Out Windows 8.1 Enterprise Preview (wind8apps.com)

Submitted by SmartAboutThings
SmartAboutThings writes: A little over a month ago, Microsoft released the first update to Windows 8, the preview version of Windows 8.1. Now, Microsoft has announced that Windows 8.1 Enterprise Preview has been made available for download. Of course, as always, you need to test the operating system with precautions, as this is not yet its final form and you might encounter some errors. The Windows 8.1 Enterprise Preview actually builds on the Window 8.1 Preview with some extra, premium features meant for business users, involved around security, mobility, management and virtualization. IT professionals should hurry up and download the Windows 8.1 Enterprise Preview to get to play around with the OS.

Submission + - Google Drops XMPP Support (blogspot.com)

Submitted by Cbs228
Cbs228 writes: During last week's Google I/O conference, the company announced a replacement for its aging Talk instant messenger: Google Hangouts. Hangouts, which is only available for Android, iOS, and Chrome, offers closer integration with Google+. Unfortunately, the new product drops support for the XMPP instant messaging protocol, which has been an integral part of Talk for over ten years. XMPP delivers instant messages to desktop clients, like Pidgin, and enables communication between users on different instant messaging networks. Hangouts users attempting to communicate with contacts on non-Google servers, such as jabber.org, have found that all communications have been suddenly and inexplicably severed. A Google account is now required to communicate with Hangouts users.

Google Hangouts joins the ranks of an already-crowded ecosystem of closed, incompatible chat products like Skype.

Submission + - Climate Scientist/Evangelical Christian Katharine Hayhoe Preaches to Unbelievers (sagepub.com)

Submitted by Lasrick
Lasrick writes: Rush Limbaugh dismissed her as a "climate babe," but Katharine Hayhoe has degrees in physics, astronomy, and atmospheric science, and has made it her life's work to convince the Religious Right to believe in and do something about climate change. A great interview with Hayhoe at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Submission + - The Atlantic: What if we never run out of oil? (theatlantic.com)

Submitted by symbolset
symbolset writes: The Atlantic is running an indepth article on energy. The premise is that there remain incalculable and little-understood carbon fuel assets that far outweigh all the fossil fuels ever discovered, lists them and discusses their potentials and consequences fiscal and environmental.

On a related note, today the US Geological Survey more than doubled their estimate of Bakken shale oil reserve in North Dakota and Montana to 7.4-11 billion barrels.

Submission + - Do 'time crystals' exhibit perpetual motion? (wired.com)

Submitted by ceview
ceview writes: So this story on Wired seems to have got lots of people a bit confused. The experimental set up is incredibly delicate (Bose Einstein Condensate) so it implies this perpetual motion effect can't really be used to extract energy. What is your take on it? It can't really upend anything because at a quantum level things behave weirdly at the best of times.

The heavy details are here
http://arxiv.org/abs/1202.2539v2
http://arxiv.org/abs/1202.2537v2

Submission + - DMCA Safe Harbor May Not Apply To Old Copyrighted Works

Submitted by tlhIngan
tlhIngan writes: On Tuesday, the New York appellate court denied Grooveshark the DMCA safe harbor protection on songs like Johnny B. Goode. What happened was due to an oddity in the law, the DMCA does not apply to state-licensed copyrighted works (those copyrighted before February 15, 1972). What happened was Congress overhauled copyright law to make it a Federal matter, but all works prior to that date still come under common-law and state statutes. The end result is that Grooveshark does not have DMCA safe harbor protection for older works and may be sued for copyright infringement (barring other agreements, e.g., UMG and YouTube), even though they fully comply with the DMCA otherwise, taking down copyrighted materials. Grooveshark is a "music locker" service allowing users to upload music for others to listen to.

Submission + - Cray-1 vs. AMD 7990, Then vs. Now (edn.com)

Submitted by EmagGeek
EmagGeek writes: In 1976, a Cray-1 supercomputer cost $36M (in 2013 dollars) and could execute floating point math at 160 MFLOP. The supercomputer had a 5.2V power supply that delivered almost 800 amps to the circuitry. The machine was the size of a small Volkswagen and required a refrigeration system to dissipate the 4000 watts of electricity it took to run.

The fastest PC video card on the market today costs $1000 and can execute floating point math at 8,200,000 MFLOP, consumes energy at a rate of just less than 400 watts, and is about the size of a paperback book.

50,000 times faster, 1/36,000 the price, 1/10th the energy, and about 1/5,000 the volume. It's interesting how they had to solve the enormous power requirements of supercomputers at the time, and how they have continued to solve them over the years as power densities have increased.

Comment Correct (Score 2) 630

by Gazzonyx (#43485265) Attached to: Most Projects On GitHub Aren't Open Source Licensed
I agree.

I have three projects on GitHub. One of them is practice code I was writing for when I interviewed with Google (don't worry, they didn't ask me a single question that was on the study sheet - but I did have fun writing a splay tree). It was just a bunch of functions with a description of "nothing to see here".

Another project is eventually going to be a GPL project that runs a football pool. Currently it's just a parser that scrapes nfl.com and puts info into data structs. I haven't bothered putting the license file in it yet. It uses another GPL library, so it's already implied that it will be GPL code when it matures past being a bunch of functions sewn together just enough to test them. Why would I put a license on that? So I can be sure that I get changes back for incomplete interfaces? The interfaces aren't even defined yet.

The last project, I can't even recall what it is. I'm not maintaining it and I don't care if anyone swipes the code. It's probably code that scratched an itch that I had that was unique to me.

Submission + - Blame austerity on Excel .. (motherjones.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: From Mike Konczal, summarizing a new study that says Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff made a coding error in a famous paper claiming that economic growth slows down in countries with debt levels above 90 percent of GDP:

Submission + - OpenShot Video Editor Achieves $35k on Kickstarter, Final Goal in Reach! (kickstarter.com) 5

Submitted by JonOomph
JonOomph writes: The popular open source video editor, OpenShot, has less than 39 hours remaining on popular crowd-funding site, Kickstarter.com. The lead developer, Jonathan Thomas, has proposed a revolutionary new feature, which would allow users to offload CPU, memory, and disk cache to a local server (or multiple local servers), dramatically increasing the speed of previewing and rendering. The more servers added to the pool, the faster the video editing engine becomes (with the primary limitation being network bandwidth). If the final goal of $40k is reached in the remaining hours, this feature will be added to the next version of OpenShot.

Comment Let them decide (Score 1) 122

by Gazzonyx (#43436169) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: What Should Happen To Your Data After You Die?

Let your family decide what they want to do with your data. Write down all of your passwords (if you're like me, you've got about a dozen) along with your usual accounts on a piece of paper and put them in a safety deposit box. When you pass and they go through your deposit box, they'll come across your credentials and decide what they'd like to do with your digital data. Some people would like to read it, others would prefer not to.

This strategy has an added bonus; if they ever come across a site that you belonged to, they've got a login that'll probably work.

Slashdot Top Deals

There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.

Close