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Books

A User's Guide To the Universe 153

Posted by samzenpus from the read-all-about-it dept.
alfredw writes "Have you ever wanted to buttonhole a physicist at a cocktail party? Do you have the burning desire to sit down with a professor and ask a laundry list of 'physics' questions about time travel and black holes? Do you want to know more about modern physics, but want to do it with pop culture experiments instead of mathematics? If you answered 'yes' to any of those questions, then you're in the target audience for A User's Guide to the Universe: Surviving the Perils of Black Holes, Time Paradoxes, and Quantum Uncertainty." Keep reading for the rest of alfredw's review.
Image

Christmas Tree Made From 70 SCSI Hard Drives 248

Posted by samzenpus from the free-time dept.
Trigger writes "At our work we were decomissioning six old HP/Compaq servers to clear up space for new servers and, naturally, each server had a fairly large raid array. Instead of formatting every hard drive (would have taken weeks performing a DoD level wipe) and disposing them all together with the servers, I decided to disassemble the hard drives and recycle them into something neat. With a lot (a lot) of patience, I made this shiny Xmas tree. In total there are around 70 old SCSI hard drives, between 9gb and 18gb in size each. They were nice and chunky, oldschool style. There were quite a few different hard drive models, which is good because they each had different bits which I could use. The Xmas tree is made with parts from hard drives only except for one nut which I had to purchase for $0.39." It's good to see that this guy has plenty to do at work.
Education

Some Mexican Classrooms Adopt Hi-Tech Teaching 150

Posted by Zonk from the creepy-but-cool dept.
An anonymous reader writes "It what is believed to be the most ambitious project of its kind in the world. In a program called Enciclomedia, giant electronic screens have been attached to the walls of about 165,000 Mexican classrooms. Some five million 10 & 11 year-olds now receive all their education through these screens. 'From maths to music, from geography to geometry, black and white boards have given way to electronic screens. During a biology lesson we watch as pupil after pupil comes to the screen to piece together the human body... electronically. One boy taps his finger on the screen and brings up the human heart. He then slides his finger across the screen, taking the heart with him and places it where he thinks it belongs on the body located on the other side of the screen.'"
Bug

What is the Best Bug-as-a-Feature? 861

Posted by Cliff from the unexpected-benefits dept.
Bat Country wonders: "The workflow system, at the department I develop for, was hand-coded by my predecessor in a rather short amount of time, resulting in somewhat unreadable code with a number of interesting 'features.' When I took over maintenance of the code base, I started patching bugs and cleaning up the code in preparation for a new set of features. After I was done, I got a pile of complaints about features that had disappeared, which turned out to be caused by the bugs in the code. So, that leads me to ask: what is your favorite bug that you either can't live without or makes your life easier?"
The Almighty Buck

A Chinese Virtual Currency Challenges the Yuan 183

Posted by Zonk from the now-buying-oil-in-wow-gold-thanks dept.
Radon360 writes "A Wall Street Journal article reports that China's fastest-rising currency isn't the yuan. It's the QQ coin — online play money created by marketers to sell such things as virtual flowers for instant-message buddies, cellphone ringtones and magical swords for online games. In recent weeks, the QQ coin's real-world value has risen as much as 70%. It's the most extreme case of a so-called virtual currency blurring the boundaries between the online and real worlds — and challenging legal limits. A Chinese Internet company called Tencent Holdings Ltd. designed the payment system in 2002 to allow its 233 million regular registered users to shop for treats in its virtual world. Virtual currencies are in use in many countries — but nowhere have they taken root more deeply than in China."

Feed Google rebuilds New Orleans (theregister.com)

From feed by registerfeed
Hurricane? What hurricane?

Google has casued a bit of a kerfuffle down in New Orleans by apparently rebuilding the city overnight and removing post-Katrina satellite images from both Google Maps and Google Earth, according to an Associated Press report.

Feed Technobullies on the rise in school yard stripping games (theregister.com)

From feed by registerfeed
Exploiting anonymity

Canadian researchers studying online bullying have found that teenagers are happily exploiting emerging technologies, such as texting, emails, and social networking sites in their playground power struggles. The ease with which a bully can hide his or her identity is also changing the game.
PlayStation (Games)

PS3 Breaks Records in UK Launch 131

Posted by Zonk from the welcome-news dept.
Aided by racing titles MotorStorm and Formula One, the PlayStation 3 had the best UK console launch ever, according to Joystiq and MCVUK. This generation saw the Wii kick off with 105,000 units and the Xbox 360's sell through 70,000. The PSP still holds the record at 185,000 for a portable console, but I imagine Sony's pretty happy about this either way. "With plenty of consoles left in the 220,000 strong initial shipment, it would appear that a strong supply is the key to launch victory. Will sales remain brisk in the foreseeable future? We'll find out soon enough, but until then, expect some elaborately spun responses from Sony's competitors. Perhaps UK journalists ought to return those stacks of beer to Microsoft -- then again, alcohol already seems a likely explanation for steering the Xboat to the wrong continent."
IBM

IBM Debuts Optical Transceiver Chipset 76

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the tastes-great-less-filling dept.
IBM debuted a new optical transceiver chipset today that researchers within the company promise will allow users to download data eight times faster than current technology. IBM cited the rising demand for digital media such as movies as the driving force behind the new technology. "IBM says it can meet that need, building its new chipset by making an optical transceiver with standard CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor) technology, and combining that with optical components crafted from exotic materials such as indium phosphide and gallium arsenide. The resulting package is just 3.25mm by 5.25mm in size, small enough to be integrated onto a printed circuit board."
Education

Submission + - Online Game Education or College?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: My cousin is about to graduate high school and wants to enter the game industry. I told him to get a day job (possibly QA in a game studio) and get an online degree like DeVry's Game and Simulation Programming degree or The Art Institute of Pittsburgh's Game Art & Design degree. I have a BS and MS in computer science and I've only found what I learned mildly useful for my game programming hobby. Should he suck it up and get a 4-year degree or is taking online courses focused on game development the way to go? Has anybody gotten one of these degrees and done well for themselves?
Toys

A Million-Dollar Laptop Created 404

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the conspicuous-consumption dept.
aluminumangel writes "For those of you who don't know what to do with all your money, why not a one million-dollar laptop from the U.K-based company Luvaglio? With 128GB of solid state disk space, Blu-ray, and a detachable rare diamond that acts like a power button and a security key."

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