nixeagle - Slashdot User

Comment Re:Somehow... (Score 4, Insightful) 286

by nixeagle on Monday March 17, 2008 @04:12AM (#22770988) Attached to: Vista Service Pack One Almost Here

Random stuff does not break. Look at the emergency patching and releasing of the kernel that all distros had to go through a while back to fix the VM splice bug.

All those distros managed to push a replacement kernel in a matter of hours/days that did not adversely affect user systems that I could tell.

Likewise, this patch of an operating system that you pay for ought to work as smoothly as the free one. I'm not really sure how comparable the two are, but it is interesting that the linux distros were able to pull a hot fix like that without too much user consternation.

Submission + - Firefox 3 Performance Gets a Boost (cybernetnews.com) 1

Submitted by jason on Wednesday February 27, 2008 @11:12AM

jason writes: Mozilla has been working hard at making Firefox 3 faster than its predecessor, and it looks like they might be succeeding. They've recently added some significant JavaScript performance improvements that beat out all of the competition, including Opera 9.5 Beta. And it comes out to be about ten times faster than Internet Explorer 7! Things are really starting to fall into place for Firefox 3 Beta 4 which should be available in the next week or two.

Submission + - RoadRunner Intercepts Bad URLs, Bypassing Browsers 2

Submitted by shaunco on Tuesday February 26, 2008 @04:22AM

shaunco writes: Sometime around midnight on February 26th (at least for the SoCal users), TimeWarner's RoadRunner service started intercepting failed DNS requests, redirecting them to RoadRunner's own search and advertising platform. To see if this has been enabled in your area, try visiting www.jkshdfkljh23sadf.com (or something else random) in your web browser. This feature subverts user preferences set within their web browsers, which allow the user to select which search engine receives their typeos and invalid domains.

RoadRunner user's can disable this by visiting: http://ww23.rr.com/prefs.php.

An example RoadRunner results page can be seen at: http://ww23.rr.com/index.php?origURL=http://www.jkshdfkljh23sadf.com.

Submission + - Giant Sheets Of Dark Matter Detected (discovery.com) 2

Submitted by

Wandering Wombat

on Monday February 25, 2008 @08:11PM

Wandering Wombat writes: "The largest structures in the universe have been, if not directly found, then at least detected and pounced upon by scientists. FTA:

The most colossal structures in the universe have been detected by astronomers who tuned into how the structures subtly bend galactic light. The newfound filaments and sheets of dark matter form a gigantic features stretching across more than 270 million light-years of space — three times larger than any other known structure and 2,000 times the size of our own galaxy. Because the dark matter, by definition, is invisible to telescopes, the only way to detect it on such grand scales is by surveying huge numbers of distant galaxies and working out how their images, as seen from telescopes, are being weakly tweaked and distorted by any dark matter structures in intervening space.

By figuring how to spot the GIGANTIC masses of dark matter, hopefully we can get a better understanding of it and find smaller and smaller structures."

Submission + - IBM Trying to Patent Restaurant Waits

Submitted by

theodp

on Saturday February 23, 2008 @06:13PM

theodp writes: "If all goes IBM's way, it'll soon constitute patent infringement if Bennigan's gives you a free lunch for being inconvenienced by a long wait for your meal. Big Blue is seeking a patent for its Method and Structure for Automated Crediting to Customers for Waiting, the purported 'invention' of three IBM Researchers, which IBM notes 'could be implemented completely devoid of computerization or automation of any kind.' Can we count on IBM to withdraw this patent claim, Bob, or will Big Blue weasel out of its patent reform pledge again?"

Submission + - Artificial Intelligence at Human Level by 2029? (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by

Gerard Boyers

on Saturday February 16, 2008 @08:47PM

Gerard Boyers writes: "The US National Academy of Engineering has predicted that Artificial Intelligence will reach the level of humans in around 20 years. Ray Kurzweil explains:
"We will have both the hardware and the software to achieve human level artificial intelligence with the broad suppleness of human intelligence including our emotional intelligence by 2029. We're already a human machine civilisation, we use our technology to expand our physical and mental horizons and this will be a further extension of that. We'll have intelligent nanobots go into our brains through the capillaries and interact directly with our biological neurons," he told BBC News. The nanobots, he said, would "make us smarter, remember things better and automatically go into full emergent virtual reality environments through the nervous system. It's really part of our civilisation, but that's not going to be an alien invasion of intelligent machines to displace us."
Mr Kurzweil is one of 18 influential thinkers chosen to identify the great technological challenges facing humanity in the 21st century by the US National Academy of Engineering. The experts include Google founder Larry Page and genome pioneer Dr Craig Venter."

Submission + - Hacker Could Keep Money from Insider Trading

Submitted by

Reservoir Hill

on Saturday February 16, 2008 @06:59PM

Reservoir Hill writes: "On Oct. 17, 2007, someone hacked into a computer system at IMS Health. A few minutes later Oleksandr Dorozhko, a Ukrainian resident, invested $41,671 in put options that would expire worthless three days later unless IMS shares plunged. The next morning IMS announced earnings and the share price did plunge, making $296,456 for Dorozhko by selling the puts. "Dorozhko's alleged 'stealing and trading' or 'hacking and trading' does not amount to a violation" of securities laws, Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald ruled last month. Although Dorozhko may have broken laws by stealing the information, "Dorozhko did not breach any fiduciary or similar duty 'in connection with' the purchase or sale of a security" and she ordered the SEC to let him have his profits. Through a strange anomaly in American securities laws a person who legally obtains insider information and trades on the basis of that information is breaking the law, while someone who illegally gets their hands on such information may not have violated the securities laws by trading on it. If her opinion stands, it will be very hard for the SEC to go after hackers in the future. The judge herself appreciated the absurdity of the situation, and expressed disappointment that the Justice Department had not brought criminal charges for computer hacking."

Submission + - Dell set to introduce AMD's triple-core Phenom CPU

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 16, 2008 @03:54PM

An anonymous reader writes: AMD is set to launch what is considered its most important product against Intel's Core 2 Duo processors next week. TG Daily reports that the triple-core Phenoms — quad-core CPUs with one disabled core — will be launching on February 19. Oddly enough, the first company expected to announce systems with triple-core Phenoms will be Dell. Yes, that is the same company that was rumored to be dropping AMD just a few weeks ago. Now we are waiting for the hardware review sites to tell us whether three cores are actually better than two in real world applications and not just in marketing.

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