Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
Hardware

Ask Slashdot: Clusters On the Cheap? 264

Posted by samzenpus from the discount-computing dept.
First time accepted submitter serviscope_minor writes "A friend of mine has recently started a research group. As usual with these things, she is on a shoestring budget and has computational demands. The computational task is very parallel (but implementing it on GPUs is an open research problem and not the topic of research), and very CPU bound. Can slashdotters advise on a practical way of getting really high bang for buck? The budget is about £4000 (excluding VAT/sales tax), though it is likely that the system will be expanded later. The computers will probably end up running a boring Linux distro and Sun GridEngine to manage batch processing (with home directories shared over NFS)."
Oracle

RIP, SunSolve 100

Posted by timothy from the to-the-moon-instead dept.
Kymermosst writes "Today marks the last day that SunSolve will be available. Oracle sent the final pre-deployment details today for the retirement of SunSolve and the transition to its replacement, My Oracle Support Release 5.2, which begins tomorrow. People who work with Sun's hardware and software have long used SunSolve as a central location for specifications, patches, and documentation."
Australia

Researchers Create Real Tractor Beams 111

Posted by timothy from the rebels-will-be-crushed dept.
Gadgetank writes "Researchers out of the Australian National University have created a device, working in conjunction with other necessary devices, that can literally move small particles with light. And only light. The way it works is by shining a hollow laser beam around some tiny glass particles. The researchers heat the air around the particles, and therefore cause the dark center of the beam to remain cool."

Comment Re:I need a new computer (Score 1) 361

by pu'u_bear (#32127428) Attached to: AMD Undercuts Intel With Six-Core Phenom IIs

He is running W7 both places on a static IP? Why not just use remote desktop? I know, I dislike Windows A LOT, but for this problem, is there any reason he can't just use remote desktop? If you have access to the office machine, configure the firewall to only allow remote desktop to connect from the home IP, set the preferences on the home machine to connect to the work machine and start in full screen, and you are done. You can even link the rdp file to his desktop and he gets double-clicky access.

Comment Congress First (Score 2, Interesting) 619

by pu'u_bear (#31415820) Attached to: US Immigration Bill May Bring a National Biometric ID Card

I would be much more, okay, slightly less paranoid about things like this with one change. Any legislation like this applies to the members of government FIRST. You want a single biometric ID for all workers, after you, Senator. Don't think we need warrants for wiretaps, fine, we will just install this nice little device on all your phones, and the transcripts can go straight to wikileaks. Have a problem with "government run health care"? Fine, we will just take away your health plan (it's government run after all). Good luck finding insurance now, Mr. Old White guy with a bad heart.
Medicine

Health Insurance When Leaving the Corporate World? 1197

Posted by CmdrTaco from the hey-that-could-be-useful dept.
An anonymous reader writes "I've been working at a large company since I got out of college, so I didn't have to give much thought to getting my own healthcare plan. Now I'm thinking about leaving the corporate world and starting out on my own. I have a family now, so I need to make sure we're going to be covered should anything happen. Researching online turns up horror stories of people trying to get individual healthcare plans, or getting denied coverage on plans they thought they had. Does anyone else have experience going through this and what you've had to deal with, or am I making too big a deal of it?"
Biotech

Robotic Mold 118

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the he-slimed-me dept.
Canis Lupus writes to mention that researchers from the University of West England are designing the world's first biological robot, constructed from mold. The robot, "Plasmobot," will be created using vegetative slime mold called plasmodium (Physarum polycephalum) that is commonly found in forests, gardens, and most damp places in the UK. "This new plasmodium robot, called plasmobot, will sense objects, span them in the shortest and best way possible, and transport tiny objects along pre-programmed directions. The robots will have parallel inputs and outputs, a network of sensors and the number crunching power of super computers. The plasmobot will be controlled by spatial gradients of light, electro-magnetic fields and the characteristics of the substrate on which it is placed. It will be a fully controllable and programmable amorphous intelligent robot with an embedded massively parallel computer."
Space

Fly Me To Which Moon? 183

Posted by kdawson from the life-don't-talk-to-me-about-life dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "NASA and the European Space Agency are expected later this week to settle an ongoing debate on whether to send a robotic mission to Jupiter's moon Europa or Saturn's moon Titan. Both are difficult places to get to — a mission to either would cost several billion dollars/euros to build and execute — and both have become alluring targets in the quest to learn whether Earth alone supports life. On the one hand, Europa is believed to have liquid oceans beneath its frozen crust which (on Earth at least) are a source of life-supporting chemistry. Scientists would like to scan Europa's surface for bits of material that may have seeped up from beneath the ice. 'Imagine if there were microbes entrained in material that has exuded onto the surface of Europa and they've been sitting there for maybe three million years,' says planetary scientist Dr. Brad Dalton. On the other hand, Titan has two enticing features in the search for life: liquids on the surface, and a thick atmosphere that can be used to slow down a spacecraft and help put it into orbit. Titan's surface water is locked into the crust as ice, but scientists suspect there may be a subsurface ocean where water mingles with ammonia. The mission will not get to the launch pad before 2020. 'It's unfortunate that there has to be a decision,' says NASA/JPL astrobiologist Dr. Kevin Hand. 'It's important to go to both. They are both such amazing and tantalizing worlds in terms of finding life.'"
Mozilla

Firefox Download Day To Start At 1 p.m. EST 1080

Posted by timothy from the there's-no-pleasing-some-people dept.
boustrophedon writes "Starting at midnight in their local timezones, downloaders have been asking when Firefox 3 will be ready for Firefox Download Day, June 17, 2008. Mary announced on the Spread Firefox Forum that downloads will commence at 10 AM PST." That means 1 p.m. East Coast time, and, in Justin Mason's view, some pretty annoying times of day for many parts of the world. Reader CorinneI supplies a link to PC Magazine's (very positive) overview of the new version's features, which praises the "speedy performance, thrifty memory usage, and, in particular, the address bar that now predicts where you want to go when you start typing (what Mozilla insiders refer to as the Awesome Bar)." FF3, even in Beta and RC form, and even with the extension incompatibilities I've run into, has quickly replaced FF2 as my preferred browser — for me, the improved drop-down autocomplete behavior alone is enough to justify the switch.
Power

Fuel Tanks Made of Corncob Waste 176

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the corncob-pipes dept.
Roland Piquepaille writes "The National Science Foundation is running a story on how corncob waste can be used to created carbon briquettes with complex nanopores capable of storing natural gas. These methane storage systems may encourage mass-market natural gas cars. In fact, these 'briquettes are the first technology to meet the 180 to 1 storage to volume target set by the U.S. Department of Energy in 2000.' They can lead to flat and compact tanks and have already been installed in a pickup truck used regularly by the Kansas City Office of Environmental Quality. And as the whole natural gas infrastructure exists already, this new technology could be soon adopted by car manufacturers."

Slashdot Top Deals

"There is no distinctly American criminal class except Congress." -- Mark Twain

Close