DJ Haruko - Slashdot User

Laughing Gas Is Major Threat To Ozone Layer 306

Posted by timothy on Sunday August 30, 2009 @02:06PM from the damn-you-street-racers-damn-you dept.

Hugh Pickens writes "The Christian Science Monitor reports that according to new research, nitrous oxide, the colorless, sweet-smelling gas with a long history as a medical and dental anesthetic is the next big threat to Earth's protective ozone layer. Its role in destroying ozone has long been recognized, as well as its role as a heat-trapping greenhouse gas but the new study puts nitrous oxide's ability to deplete ozone into numbers comparable to those used for other ozone-depleting gases covered by the 1987 Montreal Protocol. The researchers note that the health of the ozone layer has been improving since the adoption of the protocol and that nitrous oxide looms large today as an artificial destroyer of the ozone layer, in part because the emissions of other harmful chemicals have been so sharply reduced." (Continues.)

Are Women Getting More Beautiful? 834

Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday July 27, 2009 @11:00AM from the or-are-you-just-less-picky dept.

FelxH writes "Scientists have found that evolution is driving women to become ever more beautiful, while men remain as aesthetically unappealing as their caveman ancestors. The researchers have found beautiful women have more children than their plainer counterparts and that a higher proportion of those children are female. Those daughters, once adult, also tend to be attractive and so repeat the pattern." I just thought my standards were changing as I got older, but it turns out it's just science!

Japanese Creating "Super Tuna" 280

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Thursday July 02, 2009 @01:41PM from the delicious-engineering dept.

motherpusbucket writes "The Telegraph reports that Japanese scientists hope to be breeding a so-called 'Super Tuna' within the next decade or so. They have about 60% of the genome mapped and expect to finish it in the next couple months. The new breed will grow faster, taste good, have resistance to disease and will totally kick your ass if you cross them."

Scientists Create RNA From Primordial Soup 369

Posted by timothy on Wednesday May 13, 2009 @05:21PM from the that's-notional-primordial-soup-to-you dept.

Kristina at Science News writes "The RNA world hypothesis proposed 40 years ago suggested that life on Earth started not with DNA but with RNA. Now a team of scientists bolsters this hypothesis, having assembled RNA in the lab from a mixture that resembles what was likely the primordial soup. 'Until now,' Science News reports, 'scientists couldn't figure out the chemical reactions that created the earliest RNA molecules.' The new work started the RNA assembly chemistry from a different angle than what earlier work had tried."

Time To Cut the Ethernet Cable? 496

Posted by kdawson on Friday May 01, 2009 @10:44AM from the restructuring-the-edge dept.

coondoggie writes in with a Network World piece that begins "A range of companies with wireless LANs are discovering that 50% to 90% or more of Ethernet ports now go unused, because Wi-Fi has become so prevalent. They look at racks of unused switches, ports, Ethernet wall jacks, the cabling that connects them all, the yearly maintenance charges for unused switches, electrical charges, and cooling costs. So why not formally drop what many end users have already discarded — the Ethernet cable? 'There's definitely a right-sizing going on,' says Michael King, research director, mobile and wireless, for Gartner. 'By 2011, 70% of all net new ports will be wireless. People are saying, "we don't need to be spending so much on a wired infrastructure if no one is using it."' ... There is debate over whether WLANs, including the high-throughput 802.11n networks, will be able to deliver enough bandwidth." Cisco, which makes both wireless and wired gear, has a spokesman quoted calling this idea of right-sizing a "shortsighted message from a wireless-only provider. It's penny-wise and pound-foolish."

Atari Emulation of CRT Effects On LCDs 226

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday April 30, 2009 @08:50PM from the you're-living-in-the-past dept.

An anonymous reader writes "A group at Georgia Institute of Technology has developed a fun little open source program to emulate the CRT effects to make old Atari games look like they originally did when played on modern LCD's and digital displays. Things like color bleed, ghosting, noise, etc. are reproduced to give a more realistic appearance."

Quantum Mechanics Involved In Photosynthesis 137

Posted by samzenpus on Monday April 27, 2009 @05:04PM from the spooky-cycle dept.

Kristina at Science News writes "We all learn about photosynthesis in school: sunlight in, plant food out. Not well understood is how this process achieves its initial and uniquely high efficiency in capturing the energy of a photon. Quantum mechanics may be at work in the electron transfer process inside chloroplast, giving electrons the chance to consider many paths at once before choosing the best one."

What To Do With Old USB Keys, Low-Capacity Hard Drives? 546

Posted by timothy on Tuesday March 10, 2009 @11:35AM from the send-it-to-timothy-no-really dept.

MessedRocker writes "I have at least a few USB flash drives around that I haven't needed since I got my 16GB flash drive, a 40GB external hard drive which I haven't needed since I upgraded to 500GB, and a couple of SATA hard drives I have pulled out of laptops which are either as large or smaller than the one I have in my laptop now. Furthermore, I don't really know anyone who needs any hard drives or flash drives. What should I do with my small, obsolete storage devices?"

Comment Slackware (Score 1) 466

by DJ Haruko on Tuesday February 24, 2009 @12:49PM (#26971141) Attached to: Which Distro For an Eee PC?

I've been using Slackware 12.1 on my 900A Eee PC for a while now. Before that, I was using it on a 701. In both cases, it worked really well and was very responsive (I chose to use Xfce as my desktop environment since I wasn't that familiar with Fluxbox at the time). I've even done some Common Lisp programming on them with a locally compiled SBCL. One thing I noticed in particular was that I got more free space out of my 4gb SSD than with Ubuntu-Eee or the default Xandros-based distro. Slackware 12.2 should actually work out of the box. 12.1 required a modified kernel and a few other things (packages at http://slackeee.strangled.net/). The only thing to keep in mind is that I do a lot of things by hand on my boxen, such as set up wifi connections on the command line, so Slackware may not be the best choice for you if you're not used to this sort of thing. I did a short writeup on installing onto my 701 on my blog, as well: http://blog.partition36.com/2008/07/04/eee-pc-meet-slackware/

Obama Anti-Trust Chief on Google the Monopoly Threat 364

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday February 19, 2009 @06:33PM from the it-has-to-be-said dept.

CWmike writes "The blogosphere regularly excoriates Microsoft for being a monopoly, but Google may be in the cross-hairs of the nation's next anti-trust chief for monopolistic behavior, writes Preston Gralla. Last June, Christine A. Varney, President Obama's nominee to be the next antitrust chief, warned that Google already had a monopoly in online advertising. 'For me, Microsoft is so last century. They are not the problem,' Varney said at a June 19 panel discussion sponsored by the American Antitrust Institute, according to a Bloomberg report. The US economy will 'continually see a problem — potentially with Google' because it already 'has acquired a monopoly in Internet online advertising.' Varney has yet to be confirmed as antitrust chief, and she said all this before she was nominated. Still, it spells potentially bad news for Google. It may be time for the company to start adding to its legal staff."

Comment Mirror of article (Score 1) 136

by DJ Haruko on Wednesday February 11, 2009 @11:19AM (#26812843) Attached to: First <em>Doom 4</em> Production Shots Revealed

This forum appears to have the entire article with the shots in it: http://www.amio.cn/forum/showthread.php?p=17759 Not that they aren't SCREENshots, they're PRODUCTION shots.

First Doom 4 Production Shots Revealed 136

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday February 11, 2009 @04:49AM from the bring-a-flashlight dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Actor Brad Hawkins has been tapped to do motion-capture work for Doom 4, and revealed that the game features the military and civilians fighting side by side. Does this mean the game is set on Earth for sure? GGL Wire has an interview with Hawkins and a selection of production shots. '[Filmmaker Mark Bristol] was very specific on the civilians having a certain personality and the military characters having a separate one as well. The body language of the civilians is less, well, "trained." They carry their guns in a looser fashion and are a little sloppier when they run, a little more freestyle. The military characters are sharp as razors, with very swift moves, exact hand positioning and can turn on a dime.'" This follows news from last month that British novelist Graham Joyce was brought in to develop the story for the game.

MS Silverlight To Stream Obama Inauguration Events 589

Posted by kdawson on Saturday January 17, 2009 @05:30PM from the open-to-most dept.

Ilgaz writes in to let us know that we will have to install MS Silverlight 2 to watch the US President's inauguration online. Everyone running Mac PPC, Linux, and FreeBSD has been left out, as there are no working Silverlight 2-capable alternatives on these systems. Here is Microsoft's press release announcing the selection of Silverlight yesterday. Streaming of various events around the inauguration begins today at the Presidential Inaugural Committee site, which touts its "inclusive and accessible" coverage.

Woman Claims Ubuntu Kept Her From Online Classes 1654

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday January 15, 2009 @11:54AM from the learning-is-hard dept.

stonedcat writes "A Wisconsin woman has claimed that Dell computers and Ubuntu have kept her from going back to school via online classes. She says she has called Dell to request Windows instead however was talked out of it. Her current claim is that she was unaware that she couldn't install her Verizon online disk to access the Internet, nor could she use Microsoft Word to type up her papers."

Wine Goes 64-Bit With Wine64 385

Posted by timothy on Sunday December 14, 2008 @06:50PM from the leathery-but-not-presumptuous dept.

G3ckoG33k writes "Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator) is a popular way to run Windows programs on Linux, and it has an impressive compatibility list. After 15 years of development it reached version 1.0 a few months ago. Now, Wine developer Maarten Lankhorst has succeeded in running 'Hello World' in 64-bit, natively! The 64-bit variety is unexpectedly named Wine64."

Slashdot Top Deals