Scotteh - Slashdot User

Comment Building materials far from the sun (Score 1) 418

by Scotteh on Friday August 29, 2008 @09:13AM (#24793247) Attached to: Nuclear Decay May Vary With Earth-Sun Distance

I wonder what kind of new building materials would be available if we colonized a planet such as Mars or perhaps Pluto or something far from a star. Perhaps the perfect building material is no good on earth because of nuclear decay?

Toshiba Launches First Cell-based Laptop 172

Posted by timothy on Wednesday July 16, 2008 @02:47PM from the my-laptop-has-been-cell-based-forever dept.

MojoKid writes "On Tuesday, Toshiba launched the Qosmio G55-802, the first laptop available with the Cell CPU. Yes, think PS3 technology, developed jointly by Toshiba, Sony, and IBM. However, in particular, the Cell CPU is not about gaming, but about the multimedia experience. Taking the load away from the Intel CPU, the Cell processor performs gesture control, face navigation, transcoding and upscaling to HD. Interestingly (and necessary, with 4 GB of RAM), the system comes with 64-bit Vista installed by default, but 32-bit Vista ships as an option as well." However, semi-relatedly, if you'd prefer your Cells run open-source code, 1i1' blu3 writes "IBM's put up an open source project downloads page for the Cell processor — APIs, toolkits, IDEs, libraries, algorithms, etc. Most of the stuff on it right now is from SourceForge, but they are asking for user contributions to add to it." (Terra Soft's also been providing a Cell-compatible Linux distro for a while now, and according to Wikipedia the kernel's supported it since version 2.6.16.)

Spore Creatures Now Outnumber Known Earth Species 128

Posted by timothy on Wednesday July 16, 2008 @02:21PM from the does-not-count-the-hollow-earth-creatures dept.

GBC writes "AFP is reporting that, as of a week ago, the number of creatures in the "Spore" database exceeded the number of known species on Earth. They are created using 'Creature Creator,' which is available in a free (with limited parts) or paid download at the Spore website. Will Wright seems extremely happy with the progress so far: 'We hit 100K in 22 hours and a million by the end of the first week. The numbers are just blowing us away.'"

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