Comment Re:33% thinner, 2x faster, 500% does anyone care? (Score 2) 1118
Care to link to a similarly featured and cheaper alternative?
Massive Star Burps, Then Explodes 110
gollum123 writes with a link to the Berkley site about an impressive star explosion that took place some tens of millions of years ago. We first caught sight of it in 2004, when there was a bright outburst, ahead of a massive supernova. "All the observations suggest that the supernova's blast wave took only a few weeks to reach the shell of material ejected two years earlier, which did not have time to drift very far from the star. As the wave smashed into the ejecta, it heated the gas to millions of degrees, hot enough to emit copious X-rays. The Swift satellite saw the supernova continue to brighten in X-rays for 100 days, something that has never been seen before in a supernova. All supernovae previously observed in X-rays have started off bright and then quickly faded to invisibility."
Apple Ships 8-Core MacPro 628
ivan1024 writes "The Apple website is announcing the availability of an 8-core Mac Pro. The machine will ship with two 3.0 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon 5300 processors. Older models with the Dual-Core chips remain available. Base model with two 3.0 GHz Quad-Core Xeon processors start at $3997, (albeit with unacceptably minimal RAM or HD space; fully spec'd with dual 30" monitors and tons o' RAM/HD still over $10K... bummer)"
Daylight Saving Change Saved No Power 766
Brett writes "Results from energy companies are coming in, and the word is that moving Daylight Saving Time forward three weeks had no measurable impact on power consumption. The attempt by the US Congress to make it look like they were doing something about the energy crisis has been exposed as the waste it is. But the new DST is probably here to stay — letting the bill expire would mean re-patching a lot of systems again next year. So much for saving energy."
Submission + - Daylight Saving change: no power savings
Brett writes: Results from energy companies are coming in, and the word is that moving
Daylight Saving Time forward three weeks had "no measurable impact" on power consumption. The attempt by the US Congress to make it look like they were doing something about the US energy crisis has been exposed as the waste it is, but the new DST is probably here to stay. Letting the bill expire would mean re-patching a lot of systems again next year. So much for saving energy.
Comment Re:Apple vs Microsoft (Score 1) 133
You're probably right, in an "Apple vs. Microsoft" world, but in environments where Microsoft isn't the knee-jerk default for everything, a combination of Apple for the desktop/workgroup management and *nix for the production side is VERY compelling, cost effective, reliable, and competitive.
Not every move that a company makes is designed to immediately take on the biggest bully on the block. Despite not releasing beta after beta, Apple generally gets it right for what their customers want, at least in the consumer world for now. I think the changes in Leopard Server are indicative of them starting to get it right for the business world as well.
Not every move that a company makes is designed to immediately take on the biggest bully on the block. Despite not releasing beta after beta, Apple generally gets it right for what their customers want, at least in the consumer world for now. I think the changes in Leopard Server are indicative of them starting to get it right for the business world as well.
CD Music Sales Down 20% In Q1 2007 544
prostoalex writes "Music sales are not just falling, they're plummeting — by as much as 20% when you compare January-March 2007 with the 2006 numbers. The revenue numbers are actually worse, since CD prices are under pressure. The Wall Street Journal lists many factors contributing to the rapid decline: 800 fewer retail outlets (Tower Records' demise alone closed 89); increasingly negative attitude towards CD sales from big-box retailers (Best Buy now dedicates less floor space to CDs in favor of better-selling items); and file sharing, among others. Songs are being traded at a rate about 17 times the iTunes Store's recent rate of sales. Diminishing CD sales means that you don't have to sell as many to get on the charts. The 'Dreamgirls' movie soundtrack recently hit #1 by selling 60,000 CDs in a week, a number that wouldn't have made the top 30 in 2005."
Submission + - Another step towards the driverless car
jtogel writes: "At Essex, we have for some time been working on automatically learning how to race cars in simulation. It turns out that a combination of evolutionary algorithms and neural networks can learn how to beat all humans in racing games, and also come up with some quite interesting, novel behaviours, which might one day make their way into commercial racing games. While this is simulation, the race is now on for the real thing — we are setting up a competition for AI developers, where the goal is to win a race between model cars on real tracks. As the cars will be around half a meter long, the cost of participating will be a fraction of that for the famous DARPA Grand Challenge, whereas the challenges will be similar in terms of computer vision and AI."
Did Humans Evolve? No, Say Americans 2155
Stern Thinker writes "In a 2005 poll covering 33 countries, Americans are the least likely (except for Turkish respondents) to assert that 'humans developed ... from earlier species of animals.' Iceland, meanwhile, has an 85% acceptance rating for evolution." The blurb on the site for Science magazine is less circumspect about the findings: "The acceptance of evolution is lower in the United States than in Japan or Europe, largely because of widespread fundamentalism and the politicization of science in the United States."
Scientists Respond to Gore on Global Warming 1496
ArthurDent writes "For quite a while global warming has been presented in the public forum as a universally accepted scientific reality. However, in the light of Al Gore's new film An Inconvenient Truth many climate experts are stepping forward and pointing out that there is no conclusive evidence to support global warming as a phenomenon, much less any particular cause of it."
SPECIAL BIRTHDAY REPORT!!! HEMOS IS 30 :) :) :) 156
Jeff "Hemos" Bates, who you all know and love here on Slashdot, celebrated his 30th Birthday last Monday. The only way to properly celebrate would be to send him belated e-congratulations to hemos at slashdot.org. Show the love. He'd do it for you. No I'm not kidding.
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