artakka - Slashdot User

Submission + - US Missile Defense Staff Told To Stop Watching Porn

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 03, 2012 @12:01PM

An anonymous reader writes: John James Jr., director of the U.S. Missile Defense Agency (MDA) and is responsible for the nation's missile defense system, recently sent out a one-page memo warning employees and contractors to stop using agency computers to visit pornographic Web sites. That's right; apparently they were watching the wrong type of bombshells.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: best way to take notes in the modern classroom? 3

Submitted by Krau Ming on Friday August 03, 2012 @10:50AM

Krau Ming writes: After about 8 years spent in research, I've made the decision to go back to school... medical school. When I last spent the bulk of my days sitting in lectures, I took notes with paper, and if the professor wasn't technologically impaired, he/she would have posted powerpoint slides as a pdf online for us to print and make our notes on. Since it has been so long, I am looking for some options other than the ol' pen and paper. Is there an effective way of taking notes with a laptop? What about tablet options? Are there note-taking programs that can handle a variety of file types (eg: electronic textbooks, powerpoint slides, pdfs)? Or should I just sleep in and get the lectures posted online and delay learning the course material until the exam (kidding)? Thanks Slashdot!

Quake 3 For Android 137

Posted by Soulskill on Thursday February 25, 2010 @03:53AM from the can-i-get-a-hell-yeah dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Over the last two months I ported Quake 3 to Android as a hobby project. It only took a few days to get the game working. More time was spent on tweaking the game experience. Right now the game runs at 25fps on a Motorola Milestone/Droid. 'Normally when you compile C/C++ code using the Android NDK, the compiler targets a generic ARMv5 CPU which uses software floating-point. Without any optimizations and audio Quake 3 runs at 22fps. Since Quake 3 uses a lot of floating-point calculations, I tried a better C-compiler (GCC 4.4.0 from Android GIT) which supports modern CPUs and Neon SIMD instructions. Quake 3 optimized for Cortex-A8 with Neon is about 15% faster without audio and 35% with audio compared to the generic ARMv5 build. Most likely the performance improvement compared to the ARMv5 build is not that big because the system libraries of the Milestone have been compiled with FPU support, so sin/cos/log/.. take advantage of the FPU.''

Bill Gates Puts Classic Feynman Lectures Online 338

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday July 15, 2009 @01:16PM from the surely-you're-joking dept.

theodp writes "Okay Tux fans, let's see how badly you want to see Feynman's Messenger Lectures on Physics. Bill Gates has the goods over at Microsoft Research's Project Tuva site. Also, CNET's Ina Fried has an interesting interview with Gates. He goes into why he spent his own money to make a series of classic physics lectures available free on the Web, talks about the possibility of Project Natal bringing gesture recognition to Windows, gives his thoughts on Google's Chrome OS, and discusses plans to patent 'cows that don't fart.' The last is a joke. I think."

Kurzweil on the Future 300

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday June 04, 2008 @09:42AM from the brain-upgrades-now-please dept.

dwrugh writes "With these new tools, [Kurzweil] says, by the 2020s we'll be adding computers to our brains and building machines as smart as ourselves. This serene confidence is not shared by neuroscientists like Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, who discussed future brains with Dr. Kurzweil at the festival. It might be possible to create a thinking, empathetic machine, Dr. Ramachandran said, but it might prove too difficult to reverse-engineer the brain's circuitry because it evolved so haphazardly. 'My colleague Francis Crick used to say that God is a hacker, not an engineer,' Dr. Ramachandran said. 'You can do reverse engineering, but you can't do reverse hacking.'"

Microsoft Free, One Year Later 539

Posted by kdawson on Wednesday June 04, 2008 @01:28AM from the year-of-linux-on-the-desktop dept.

madgreek writes "Last year I wrote of my switch from XP to Ubuntu at work. Now a year later, I am back to reflect on one year of being extremely productive at work using (almost) nothing but open source software in a Microsoft world."

Bill Gates's Last Speech 389

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday June 03, 2008 @07:39PM from the complete-with-ballmer-bot dept.

Ian Lamont writes "Bill Gates, in an address to the TechEd Developers conference, talked about Microsoft's plans for hosted services, and revealed that the company is planning data centers on 'a scale that we haven't thought of before' that will apparently enable the company to offer all of its server-based products over the Internet. The talk did not include details in terms of capacity or scale. This was Gates's final publicly scheduled speech as a full-time Microsoft employee, and he acknowledged that Microsoft's success is 'due to our relationship with developers.' On July 1, he will start spending most of his time at The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation." After that date he will be devoting his "20% time" to Microsoft.

Windows 7 Multitouch Demonstration 329

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday May 28, 2008 @12:26PM from the touch-me-there-oh-and-also-there dept.

Starturtle writes "Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer have shown a small snippet of the upcoming Windows 7 at Walt Mossberg's D: All Things Digital conference. It seems like the Windows team have switched their focus for inspiration from Mac OS X to the iPhone OS. Multitouch is the biggest addition, and will appear system-wide, usable anywhere. The most interesting part of the touch UI is not the eye candy, it's the Task Bar, which seems to have morphed into a pie menu."

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