coldcite - Slashdot User

Magnetic Portals Connect Sun and Earth 235

Posted by Soulskill on Friday October 31, 2008 @08:17PM from the no-cake-jokes-allowed dept.

MaxwellEdison writes "Scientists have discovered evidence of magnetic portals connecting the Earth and the Sun every 8 minutes. 'Several speakers at the Workshop have outlined how FTEs form: On the dayside of Earth (the side closest to the sun), Earth's magnetic field presses against the sun's magnetic field. Approximately every eight minutes, the two fields briefly merge or "reconnect," forming a portal through which particles can flow. The portal takes the form of a magnetic cylinder about as wide as Earth. The European Space Agency's fleet of four Cluster spacecraft and NASA's five THEMIS probes have flown through and surrounded these cylinders, measuring their dimensions and sensing the particles that shoot through.'"

The Internet Is 'Built Wrong' 452

Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday October 28, 2008 @04:11PM from the because-he-said-so dept.

An anonymous reader writes "API Lead at Twitter, Alex Payne, writes today that the Internet was 'built wrong,' and continues to be accepted as an inferior system, due to a software engineering philosophy called Worse Is Better. 'We now know, for example, that IPv4 won't scale to the projected size of the future Internet. We know too that near-universal deployment of technologies with inadequate security and trust models, like SMTP, can mean millions if not billions lost to electronic crime, defensive measures, and reduced productivity,' says Payne, who calls for a 'content-centric approach to networking.' Payne doesn't mention, however, that his own system, Twitter, was built wrong and is consistently down."

Bioware MMOG Likely Slated for 2009 56

Posted by Zonk on Wednesday June 13, 2007 @12:20PM from the be-nice-to-know-what-it-is-before-then dept.

InformationWeek is running an article looking at a piece of technology Canadian developer Bioware will be including into their in-development Massively Multiplayer Online Game. The still un-announced project, the article also lets on, is likely to launch sometime in 2009. The technology, called StreamBase, is a form of complex event processing. Bioware plans to use the ability to change the codebase on the fly, while the game is live. "One of StreamBase's functions is to analyze events and make sure no intruder is trying to disrupt the game's logic, make malicious movements against the activity of other players, or activate the hidden Easter eggs that are sometimes known to lurk in the game's logic. An Easter egg might make a sound that was not consistent with the game's design, show a message, or cause a character to move out of the logic of his role, Dalton explained."

Safari 3 vs. Firefox 2 and IE7 559

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday June 13, 2007 @10:37AM from the not-worth-it dept.

Bobcat writes "Ars Technica has a 'first look' at Safari for Windows, which is interesting because it's written from the perspective of someone new to Safari. It was tested against Firefox 2 and IE7 and aside from the slightly faster page loading, Ars didn't find much to recommend it to Windows users. 'The modest increase in rendering performance is hardly worth the deficiencies, and Safari's user interface simply doesn't provide the usability or flexibility of competing products. If the folks at Apple think that providing Windows users with a taste of Mac OS X through Safari is going to entice them to buy a Mac, it's going to take a better effort than the Safari 3 beta. Even if the final release is more polished and completely bug-free, it still won't be as powerful or feature-loaded as Opera or Firefox.'"

Comment Re:One argument I've heard (Score 1) 284

by coldcite on Thursday July 28, 2005 @02:44PM (#13188453) Attached to: Can Open Source and Commercial Software Coexist?

people will feel that software is a commodity rather than a specialized product that requires a lot of hard work and brainpower to properly develop Even considering myself a OS defender, I kinda have to agree with your friend, no some time ago, before european patent directive were rejected I was talking about them with some of my friends about how software like vlc or filezilla _could_ dissapear because of them. Their response was "bah, I don't mind, some other program will eventually appear" ... I felt a little frustated, most people think developing software is think about it, nap your fingers and it's done, be it freely available or commercial or whatever. I guess it's some kind of "educational" fault, education the average Joe lacks.

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