Zirus - Slashdot User

Google Caffeine Drops MapReduce, Adds "Colossus" 65

Posted by samzenpus on Saturday September 11, 2010 @11:43PM from the time-to-upgrade dept.

An anonymous reader writes "With its new Caffeine search indexing system, Google has moved away from its MapReduce distributed number crunching platform in favor of a setup that mirrors database programming. The index is stored in Google's BigTable distributed database, and Caffeine allows for incremental changes to the database itself. The system also uses an update to the Google File System codenamed 'Colossus.'"

Apple, RIM, Google All Bid On Palm 117

Posted by timothy on Thursday July 15, 2010 @07:00PM from the face-palm-apple dept.

imamac writes "It seems HP was only one of many bidders for the struggling Palm. The others included Apple, RIM and even Google. You may now commence speculation on why the various companies wanted Palm."

Astronomers Discover 33 Pairs of Waltzing Black Holes 101

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday January 04, 2010 @04:59PM from the teach-them-to-foxtrot dept.

Astronomers from UC Berkeley have identified 33 pairs of waltzing black holes, closing the gap somewhat between the observed population of super-massive black hole pairs and what had been predicted by theory. "Astronomical observations have shown that 1) nearly every galaxy has a central super-massive black hole (with a mass of a million to a billion times the mass of the Sun), and 2) galaxies commonly collide and merge to form new, more massive galaxies. As a consequence of these two observations, a merger between two galaxies should bring two super-massive black holes to the new, more massive galaxy formed from the merger. The two black holes gradually in-spiral toward the center of this galaxy, engaging in a gravitational tug-of-war with the surrounding stars. The result is a black hole dance, choreographed by Newton himself. Such a dance is expected to occur in our own Milky Way Galaxy in about 3 billion years, when it collides with the Andromeda Galaxy."

Comment Re:Bide your time (Score 1) 1006

by Zirus on Friday November 13, 2009 @05:51PM (#30092310) Attached to: Software Piracy At the Workplace?

Blackmail does not require the demand or exchange of money. It can also refer to demanding specific services or actions be performed, as well. As long as you're demanding that somebody do something they might not otherwise do, and the demand is backed by a threat of some sort, it's blackmail.

Wouldn't this mean that work is black mail?

Boss: if you don't work your fired, and heres some money....

Wayland, a New X Server For Linux 487

Posted by kdawson on Monday November 03, 2008 @06:47PM from the at-least-it's-not-called-Y dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Phoronix has a new article out on Wayland: A New X Server For Linux. One of Red Hat's engineers has started writing a new X11 server around today's needs and to eliminate the cruft that has been in this critical piece of free software for more than a decade. This new server is called Wayland and it is designed with newer hardware features like kernel mode-setting and a kernel memory manager for graphics. Wayland is also dramatically simpler to target for in development. A compositing manager is embedded into the Wayland server and ensures 'every frame is perfect' according to the project's leader."

Farewell, 11111010001 223

Posted by timothy on Monday December 31, 2001 @07:59PM from the listen-to-my-biological-clock-yammer dept.

As you might know, Slashdot runs on Greenwich Mean Time. That means that you're reading the last story posted in 2001, in which we've gathered some more year-end submissions. Happy New Year to all, no matter what time zone you're in! Zargo writes: "Infosync.no has a great collection of articles named Rewind 2001 looking back at the best stories of 2001. Lots of cool gadgets in there. Samsung 3G prototypes, a car designed by Bella and Nokia, soft hardware by IDEO, Siemens wristphone, Compaq's project Mercury, the Agende VR3 Linux based PDA, the Pogo, Psion's über gadgets, Handspring's Treo, Fathammer's X-Forge, Samsungs YOPY (Linux PDA), Sharp's Zaurus SL-5500 including screenshots. Lots and lots of cool stuff to read."

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