cameronjdunn - Slashdot User

New Data Center Will Heat Homes In London 204

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday April 16, 2009 @12:03AM from the one-click-heating dept.

1sockchuck writes "The heat generated by thousands of servers at the new Telehouse West data center in London will soon be used to heat nearby houses and businesses. The Greater London Authority has approved a plan in which waste heat from the colocation facility will be used in a district heat network for the local Docklands community. The project is expected to produce up to nine megawatts of power for the local community."

Comment Mmmmmm achievements (Score 1) 346

by cameronjdunn on Thursday April 02, 2009 @03:45AM (#27427595) Attached to: Microsoft Asks Fed For Bailout

This story looks sufficiently april-foolsy...

To get the "April Fool" achievement. But is that a good achievement? But achievement points are numbers... and this will increase my overall number... so that's good, right? Even though it sounds a bit dumb to be forever marked as an "april fool"...

Hang on, Microsoft are getting a bailout? That's crazy, why do I pay my taxes if the crypto-fascists are just going to give them all to Bill Gates and that lady who isn't cool enough to be a mac person? This is an outrage!

The Guardian Shifts To Twitter After 188 Years of Ink 211

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday April 01, 2009 @10:53AM from the save-the-trees dept.

teflon_king writes with news that renowned British newspaper The Guardian will be abandoning its paper-and-ink distribution scheme and publishing all articles and news as Tweets. Quoting: "A mammoth project is also under way to rewrite the whole of the newspaper's archive, stretching back to 1821, in the form of tweets. Major stories already completed include '1832 Reform Act gives voting rights to one in five adult males yay!!!;' 'OMG Hitler invades Poland, allies declare war see tinyurl.com/b5x6e for more;' and 'JFK assassin8d @ Dallas, def. heard second gunshot from grassy knoll WTF?' Sceptics have expressed concerns that 140 characters may be insufficient to capture the full breadth of meaningful human activity, but social media experts say the spread of Twitter encourages brevity, and that it ought to be possible to convey the gist of any message in a tweet. For example, Martin Luther King's legendary 1963 speech on the steps of the Lincoln memorial appears in the Guardian's Twitterised archive as 'I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by,' eliminating the waffle and bluster of the original."

Comment Re:Paying $500 for an OS that works, however... (Score 1) 1147

by cameronjdunn on Sunday March 22, 2009 @12:00AM (#27285313) Attached to: Ballmer Scorns Apple As a $500 Logo

I just had a humorous moment. I read this wikipedia article, which states that launchd uses "plist" configuration files. The article for this file format then further clarifies that they can be XML or binary. I then found myself wishing there was some way I could find out whether the plist files which are used by launchd specifically are in XML or binary format. Sadly it took some time to dawn on me that I am currently using a Mac, and could just look at the files. Long story short, launchd uses text (XML) based config files.

One Billionth Halo 3 Game Played 50

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday March 04, 2009 @01:09AM from the master-chief-is-a-busy-man dept.

adeelarshad82 writes "Bungie recently announced that Halo 3 has served its 1 billionth game. It's an important milestone which Halo 2 failed to reach. The billionth game was played at 6:36 PM PST last Saturday and lasted three minutes and 19 seconds. The total amount of active match time exceeds 64,000 years." Frank O'Connor, director of the Halo franchise, also made comments recently teasing future Halo games.

Scientists Teleport Information Between Ions a Meter Apart 220

Posted by Soulskill on Friday January 23, 2009 @09:05PM from the perfecting-those-heisenberg-compensators dept.

erickhill writes with word that scientists from the University of Maryland have successfully transferred information from one charged atom to another without having it cross the intervening space of about one meter. The academic paper is available in the journal Science, though it requires a subscription to see more than the abstract. Scientists have previously teleported unmolested qubits between photons of light, and between photons and clouds of atoms. But researchers have long sought to teleport qubits between distant atoms. Light's high speed of travel makes photons good transporters of information, but for storing quantum information, atoms are a much better choice because they're easier to hold on to. 'This is a big deal,' comments Myungshik Kim, a quantum physicist at Queen's University Belfast in the United Kingdom. 'To store information as it is in quantum form, you have to have a teleportation scheme available between two stationary qubits. Then you can store them and manipulate them later on.'"

Soyuz 4/5 Made History 40 Years Ago Today 166

Posted by kdawson on Saturday January 17, 2009 @06:33PM from the probably-wearing-dockers dept.

dj writes in with a reminder that forty years ago, on January 16, 1969, the two Russian spacecraft Soyuz 4 and Soyuz 5 carried out the first docking between two manned spacecraft and transfer of crew between the craft. Wired's piece gives a gripping account of "one of the roughest re-entries in the history of space flight": "Soyuz 5's service module failed to detach at retrofire, causing the vehicle to assume an aerodynamic position that left the heat shield pointed the wrong way as it re-entered the atmosphere. The only thing standing between Volynov and a fiery death was the command module's thin hatch cover. The interior of Volynov's capsule filled with noxious fumes as the gaskets sealing the hatch started to burn, and it got very hot in there (which, a short time later was something he probably missed). ... But wait. There's more."

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