Churam - Slashdot User

Submission + - Tsahal operation canceled because of Facebook (lemonde.fr)

Submitted by Churam on Wednesday March 03, 2010 @09:27AM

Churam writes: Read in a french paper. the Tsahal (Israelian military) had to cancel a military operation because one of the soldier has given some operation details (date, location) on Facebook ... (link in french sorry).

Comment Code Reviews ... (Score 1) 345

by Churam on Monday June 15, 2009 @02:49AM (#28332489) Attached to: Are Code Reviews Worth It?

The importance of code reviews depends of where you work and about how serious people making it are.

As I see from where I am, code reviews at least tends to bring the code to be easily readable by anybody as it is made to enforce the programmer follow the rules set by the company.
As for the cost of code reviews, you can manage them. Some part of it can be made with some script (parsing through files, check for unused variable, compute comment / code ratio by function, ...) to gives some hints to the reviewer to speed up is process and perhaps find something.

As for now, you are working on non critical PC software but when you are on some low memory, old crap machines, you like to check if there is any memory leak, or at least memory fragmentation. those can be found with a code review before being found by a user (but yeah, the programmer should find it and fix it before he commits his code).

First Acoustic Black Hole Created 165

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday June 10, 2009 @12:30PM from the for-music-that-really-sucks dept.

KentuckyFC writes "One of the many curious properties of Bose Einstein Condensates (BECs) is that the flow of sound through them is governed by the same equations that describe how light is bent by a gravitational field. Now, a group of Israeli physicists have exploited this idea to create an acoustic black hole in a BEC. The team created a supersonic flow of atoms within the BEC, a flow that prevents any phonon caught in it from making headway. The region where the flow changes from subsonic to supersonic is an event horizon, because any phonon unlucky enough to stray into the supersonic region can never escape. The real prize is not the acoustic black hole itself but what it makes possible: the first observation of Hawking radiation. Quantum mechanics predicts that pairs of phonons with opposite momentum ought to be constantly springing in and out of existence in a BEC. Were one of the pair to stray across the event horizon into the supersonic region, it could never escape. However, the other would be free to go on its way. This stream of phononic radiation away from an acoustic black hole would be the first observation of Hawking radiation. The team hasn't gotten that far yet, but it can't be long now before either they or their numerous competitors make this leap."

Frank Herbert's Moisture Traps May Be a Reality 226

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday June 09, 2009 @07:08PM from the it's-a-dry-heat dept.

Omomyid writes "In the seminal science fiction book 'Dune,' Frank Herbert envisioned the Fremen collecting water from the air via moisture traps and dew collectors. Science Daily reprints a press release from the Fraunhofer Institute in Stuttgart, where scientists working with colleagues from Logos Innovationen have developed a closed-loop and self-sustaining method, no external power required, for teasing the humidity out of desert air and into potable water."

Slashdot Top Deals