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Submission + - LHCb confirms existence of exotic hadrons (web.cern.ch)

An anonymous reader writes: The Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) collaboration today announced results that confirm the existence of exotic hadrons – a type of matter that cannot be classified within the traditional quark model. Hadrons are subatomic particles that can take part in the strong interaction – the force that binds protons inside the nuclei of atoms. Physicists have theorized since the 1960s, and ample experimental evidence since has confirmed, that hadrons are made up of quarks and antiquarks that determine their properties. A subset of hadrons, called mesons, is formed from quark-antiquark pairs, while the rest – baryons – are made up of three quarks. ... The Belle Collaboration reported the first evidence for the Z(4430) in 2008. They found a tantalizing peak in the mass distribution of particles that result from the decays of B mesons. Belle later confirmed the existence of the Z(4430) with a significance of 5.2 sigma on the scale that particle physicists use to describe the certainty of a result.
LHCb reports a more detailed measurement of the Z(4430) that confirms that it is unambiguously a particle, and a long-sought exotic hadron at that. They analysed more than 25,000 decays of B mesons selected from data from 180 trillion (180 ×10^12) proton-proton collisions in the Large Hadron Collider.

Comment FM service is a Bliss (Score 1) 108

You cannot compare FM Radio's free Music service over Paid Broadband. FM Radio is still a bliss for countries where electricity outages takes place regularly, although this does not seem to be a reason in UK, but i doubt it and those who listen to FM would fight this till the end. Those who are planning this seem not to have heard FM radio and therefore they do not know how much joy it gives. This also can be a step to compel people to pay for Music instead of listening it free, which i do alot.
Graphics

A History of 3D Cards From Voodoo To GeForce 320

Ant sends us to Maximum PC for an account of the history and current state of 3D video cards (single print page). "Try to imagine where 3D gaming would be today if not for the graphics processing unit, or GPU. Without it, you wouldn't be [trudging] through the jungles of Crysis in all its visual splendor, nor would you be fending off endless hordes of fast-moving zombies at high resolutions. For that to happen, it takes a highly specialized chip designed for parallel processing to pull off the kinds of games you see today... Going forward, GPU makers will try to extend the reliance on videocards to also include physics processing, video encoding/decoding, and other tasks that [were] once handled by the CPU. It's pretty amazing when you think about how far graphics technology has come. To help you do that, we're going to take a look back at every major GPU release since the infancy of 3D graphics. Join us as we travel back in time and relive releases like 3dfx's Voodoo3 and S3's ViRGE lineup. This is one nostalgic ride you don't want to miss!"
Google

Google Earth As a Game Engine For Ship Simulation 84

dinther writes "Yesterday the program Ships was released. Ships is significant because it is the first serious application that uses Google Earth as a game engine. In Ships, you take control of a selection of ships and drive them around the world (if you have that much time). Building games around Google Earth is now viable, thanks to its ever-increasing level of detail. From a technical standpoint, the Google Earth browser plugin has proven to be quite a capable platform to work with. Further tech details about the application are available as well."
Graphics

Five Nvidia CUDA-Enabled Apps Tested 134

crazipper writes "Much fuss has been made about Nvidia's CUDA technology and its general-purpose computing potential. Now, in 2009, a steady stream of launches from third-party software developers sees CUDA gaining traction at the mainstream. Tom's Hardware takes five of the most interesting desktop apps with CUDA support and compares the speed-up yielded by a pair of mainstream GPUs versus a CPU-only. Not surprisingly, depending on the workload you throw at your GPU, you'll see results ranging from average to downright impressive."

Comment Re:Surprise? (Score 1) 724

Agreed. That old practice of formatting and reinstalling after some time is not sane now. Programs like ccleaner and Windows 2000 and later have made huge improvements over uptimes and stable intsallations. As far as memory, it may not be the culprit. The mobo can be the problem, even drivers for the mobo under Windows.

Comment It was just too slow for me. (Score 0, Informative) 396

I tried it back in 2004, and the thing that struck me most about it (besides the fact that it was free) was the speed. It took FOREVER to open and save. I was in a phase when I was trying to move over to as much open source software as possible to save money, but OpenOffice just ended up frustrating me. Also, I recall fighting against the program to do simple things in spreadsheets.

I use and love Gnumeric now for spreadsheets, but I resolved that I'd rather pay for MSOffice. It isn't perfect, but I was willing to pay.

I was always so confused about it too, because my initial exposure to open source taught me to expect this kind of software to, as a rule, always be leaner, smaller, cleaner and faster than "bloated" MS products, but I walked away from OO feeling IT was more bloated.

Feed Adobe open sources Flex (theregister.com)

The Mozilla Public Licence is Adobe's Flexible friend

Flex, the Adobe tool for delivering Flash applications that mixes ActionScript and an XML page layout language, will be completely open source by the end of 2007, with much of the code available now.


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