DarkNebula - Slashdot User

Watermelon Juice Makes Great Biofuel 160

Posted by timothy on Thursday August 27, 2009 @04:28PM from the just-can't-buy-a-decent-watermelon dept.

Mike writes "Watermelons are more than just a tasty summer snack — researchers at the USDA have determined that the fruit constitutes a promising and economically viable source of biofuel. It turns out that the relatively high concentration of directly fermentable sugars in watermelon juice can be easily converted into ethanol. Rather than grow fields of the fruit for the purpose, the report suggests that farmers capitalize on the 20% of each annual watermelon crop that is left in the field because of surface blemishes or because they are misshapen."

Submission + - Students' Scheduling Errors May Last Days 2

Submitted by

Hugh Pickens

on Thursday August 27, 2009 @02:34PM

Hugh Pickens writes: "The Washington Post reports that thousands of high school students in Prince George's County missed a third day of classes Wednesday, and school officials said it could take more than a week to sort out the chaos caused by a computerized class-scheduling system as students were placed in gyms, auditoriums, cafeterias, libraries and classes they didn't want or need at high schools across the county and their parents' fury over the logistical nightmare rose. "The school year comes up the same time every year," said Carolyn Oliver, the mother of a 16-year-old senior who spent Wednesday in the senior lounge at Bowie High School. "When I heard they didn't have schedules, I was like, 'What have they been doing all summer?' " When school opened Monday, about 8,000 high school students had no class schedules and were sent to wait in holding spaces while administrators tried to sort things out. By Tuesday evening, that number was down to 4,000. As of noon Wednesday, 3,400 of the school district's 41,000 high school students had no class schedules, officials said. Superintendent William R. Hite Jr. said that some schools didn't realize there was a problem with schedules until school started and that the trouble was exacerbated by difficulties with SchoolMax, a $4.1 million computer system introduced last school year. SchoolMax went online in Prince George's a year ago to help the county track students' grades, attendance and discipline data. Last year, the program crashed at least four times and was plagued by errors that led to botched schedules, an overcount of students and mistakes on report cards. Jessica Pinkney, a junior, said she was moved to the cafeteria Wednesday morning after two days in the gymnasium because the cafeteria had air conditioning. "We just sit and do nothing," says Pinkney. "But I'm meeting new people, so it's getting more interesting.""

Submission + - Wi-Fi encryption cracked in 60 seconds (networkworld.com)

Submitted by

carusoj

on Thursday August 27, 2009 @01:08PM

carusoj writes: "Computer scientists in Japan say they've developed a way to break the WPA encryption system used in wireless routers in about one minute. Last November, security researchers first showed how WPA could be broken, but the Japanese researchers have taken the attack to a new level. The earlier attack worked on a smaller range of WPA devices and took between 12 and 15 minutes to work. Both attacks work only on WPA systems that use the Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) algorithm. They do not work on newer WPA 2 devices or on WPA systems that use the stronger Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm."

Comment Re:First time Bush has posted something sane. (Score 0) 527

by DarkNebula on Monday May 26, 2008 @10:15PM (#23550875) Attached to: President Bush Signs Genetic Nondiscrimination Act

I haven't heard of any of that. Where do you get your news from, I would love to know...

Greenpeace Complains Game Consoles Aren't Green Enough 450

Posted by timothy on Tuesday May 20, 2008 @10:45AM from the shocked-simply-shocked dept.

jasoncart writes "None of the major games consoles are 'green enough', says environmental group Greenpeace in a report released today. Zeina Al-Hajj, Greenpeace's International Toxic Campaign co-ordinator, said: "We were shocked with Nintendo; it was our biggest surprise." The company is described by the group as the least 'green' tech firm."

A Virtualized Linux System For Windows 280

Posted by kdawson on Monday May 19, 2008 @07:01PM from the bill-in-the-middle dept.

getupstandup1 writes "Ulteo today unveiled their Virtual Desktop (screenshots, download) which is a free, full Linux desktop that runs seamlessly on Windows. It's interesting because it's not running under Xen or VMWare, but instead uses the coLinux patch, which they claim allows the system to achieve 'great performance, close to a native installation on the PC.' No need to reboot the system anymore to switch from Windows to Linux." We discussed Ulteo when the Ubuntu-derived distro was announced a year back.

AMD Wants to Standardize PC Gaming 277

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday May 19, 2008 @04:07PM from the long-road-ahead dept.

Vigile writes "Even though PC gaming has a very devout fan-base, it is impossible to not see the many benefits that console gaming offers: faster loads, better compatibility and more games that fully utilize the hardware to name a few. AMD just launched a new initiative called AMD GAME! that attempts to bring some of these benefits to PC games as well. AMD will be certifying hardware for two different levels of PC gaming standards, testing compatibility with a host of current and future PC titles as well as offering up AMD GAME! ready components or pre-built systems from partners."

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