Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Image

4G iPhone Misplacer Invited To Germany For Beer 164

Posted by samzenpus from the beer-makes-things-better dept.
eldavojohn writes "You may recall the hapless engineer who left a fairly sensitive iPhone at a bar recently. Well, in a PR stunt, Lufthansa has invited him to visit Germany on their dime after citing his latest Facebook status, 'I underestimated how good German beer is' as well as his obvious passion for German beer and culture. It's not clear if Gray Powell has decided to 'pick up where he last left off' (as the letter puts it). I know what my decision would be."
Software

Submission + - Skype blames Microsoft Patch Tuesday for Outage (skype.com)

Submitted by
brajesh
brajesh writes: "Skype has blamed its outage over the last week on Microsoft's Patch Tuesday. FTA — "The abnormally high number of restarts affected Skype's network resources. This caused a flood of log-in requests, which, combined with the lack of peer-to-peer network resources, prompted a chain reaction that had a critical impact." Previsously, it was speculated that Skype outage may have been caused by a Russian hack attempt. Further FTA- "The issue has now been identified explicitly within Skype. We can confirm categorically that no malicious activities were attributed or that our users' security was not, at any point, at risk." Butterfly effect?"
Power

Submission + - Benchmarking power efficient servers

Submitted by
modapi
modapi writes: "According to the EPA data centers — not including Google et. al, — are on track to double power consumption in the next five years. Forget about global warming, that is a lot of expensive power. Can we cut the power requirement? We could, if we had a way to reliably benchmark power consumption across architectures. Which is what JouleSort: A Balanced Energy-Efficiency Benchmark (PDF) by Suzanne Rivoire, Mehul A. Shah, Parthasarathy Ranganathan and Christos Kozyrakis tries to do. StorageMojo summarizes the key findings of the paper and contrasts it with the recent Google paper "Powering a warehouse-sized computer". The authors use the benchmark to design a power-efficient server and to consider the role of software, RAM and power supplies in power use."
Education

Submission + - Wikipedia corrects Enciclopaedia Britannica (wikipedia.org)

Submitted by
javipas
javipas writes: "Despite all the controversy about Wikipedia's work model, no one can argue the potential of a project that has demonstrated the usefulness of the "wisdom of crowds" concept. And that wisdom has been able to detect several mistakes on one of the most relevant references on human knowledge: the Enciclopaedia Britannica. All kind of data has been spotted as wrong, such as the birthdate of Bill Clinton or the definition of NP problems in Mathematics."
Businesses

Submission + - CEO used pseudonym to post on stock bboard (wsj.com)

Submitted by jpallas
jpallas writes: The Wall Street Journal reports that court filings by the FTC about Whole Foods' plan to acquire Wild Oats reveal an unusual detail: The CEO of Whole Foods regularly posted to a Yahoo! stock bulletin board under a pseudonym. His alter ego was feisty, to say the least, and regularly disparaged the company that he later decided to acquire. A former SEC chairman called the behavior "bizarre and ill-advised, even if it isn't illegal." This certainly raises questions about online rights to free speech and anonymity, especially when the line between free speech and regulated speech depends on who is speaking as much as what they are saying.
Privacy

Submission + - Credit industry opposes anti-ID theft method (yahoo.com)

Submitted by
athloi
athloi writes: "Lawmakers across the country — pushed by consumer advocacy groups — are mounting a counterattack. They have passed laws that allow consumers to freeze their credit, a surefire way to prevent thieves from opening new accounts or obtaining a mortgage in a consumer's name. Under a freeze, a consumer cuts off all access to his credit report and score, even his own. All lenders require that information, so no one can borrow money in the consumer's name until he or she lifts the freeze. It's simple, and it works. So, of course, it's under threat from the Consumer Data Industry Association, which represents the Big Three credit bureaus. They make millions gathering and selling consumer data. Freezes cut into that business.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/usatoday/20070703/cm_usato day/aweaponagainstidentitytheft"
Republicans

Submission + - Integrity of Science: White House Misuse of Data (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by
Science data nerds
Science data nerds writes: "The White House is consistently and persistently claiming that the US is doing better than Europe in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. This turns out to be false — their claim is purely based on carefully selecting the only subset of data that shows this. When all the data are used, Europe emissions have declined substantially; the US emissions have grown substantially. This story, and the linked analysis, debunk the White House claims."
Programming

Submission + - Five AJAX frameworks reviewed

Submitted by
prostoalex
prostoalex writes: "Dr. Dobb's Journal reviews 5 AJAX frameworks: Dojo 0.3.1, Prototype and Scriptaculous 1.4, Direct Web Reporting 1.0, Yahoo! User Interface Library 0.11.1 and Google Web Toolkit 1.0. Each framework was tested in two basic scenarios — writing a "hub" (titled collapsible link list frequently seen on sidebars of many Web sites) and a "tab panel" (horizontal tabbed navigation bar). During the process, Dr. Dobb's Journal reviewers noted that "Dojo provides more features and HTML widgets than YUI and Prototype" but eventually "settled on the Yahoo! User Interface Library"."
Power

Submission + - Creating power from wasted heat

Submitted by
Roland Piquepaille
Roland Piquepaille writes: "Today, about 90 percent of the world's electricity is created through an indirect and inefficient conversion of heat. It is estimated that two thirds of the heat used by thermoelectric converters are wasted and released. But now, researchers from the University of California at Berkeley have found a new way to convert this wasted heat into electricity by trapping organic molecules between metal nanoparticles. So far, this method of creating electricity creation is in its very early stage, but if it can scale up to mass production, it may lead to a new and inexpensive source of energy. Read more for many additional references about this research work."
Space

Submission + - Asteroid impact threat

Submitted by
Maggie McKee
Maggie McKee writes: "Kamchatkans and Venezuelans beware. A 20-million-tonne asteroid could be heading your way. Californians have even more reason to worry — the asteroid is more likely to hit the Pacific Ocean, triggering a tsunami that could devastate the west coast of North America. These are among the scenarios projected for asteroid Apophis, which researchers now say has a 1 in 45,000 chance of hitting Earth on 13 April 2036. Calculations show it would strike somewhere along a narrow track that stretches eastward from Siberia to the west coast of Africa. The threat, while small, is real enough to merit a United Nations protocol for dealing with the problem, experts say."

Slashdot Top Deals

Hackers are just a migratory lifeform with a tropism for computers.

Close