wongmld - Slashdot User

Linux To Be First OS To Support USB 3.0 296

Posted by timothy on Thursday June 11, 2009 @05:47PM from the three-upmanship dept.

An anonymous reader writes with an excerpt from Neowin.net "Sarah Sharp, a self-styled 'geekess' and Linux developer at Intel's Open Source Technology Center who has recently been working on the Linux USB subsystem, announced on her blog that support of USB 3.0 will soon be integrated into the Linux kernel. This makes Linux the first operating system to support the standard. If you can't wait and have the expertise necessary, she includes instructions on how to get USB 3.0 support in Linux now." Here's Sharp's post.

Submission + - Periodic table gets a new, unnamed element (bbc.co.uk) 2

Submitted by koavf on Wednesday June 10, 2009 @11:11PM

koavf writes: More than a decade after experiments first produced a single atom of "super-heavy" element 112, a team of German scientists has been credited with its discovery, but it has yet to be named. The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry has temporarily named the element ununbium, as "ununbi" means "one one two" in Latin; but the team now has the task of proposing its official name.

Submission + - Yahoo! releases Open Source Yahoo! Hadoop (ostatic.com)

Submitted by ruphus13 on Wednesday June 10, 2009 @05:11PM

ruphus13 writes: Yahoo! has been a vociferous Apache Hadoop user and supporter for several years now, and uses it extensively within its Search technologies. Hadoop has been gaining popularity in the Cloud Computing space, with companies like the NYTimes converting 4TB and 11 million articles to PDFs in under 24 hours using Hadoop and EC2 in late 2007. Hadoop has been made available in Amazon's cloud and Yahoo has now released its own Hadoop version today. From the article, "At today's Hadoop Summit in Silicon Valley, Yahoo! announced the availability of the Yahoo! Distribution of Hadoop, a source-only version of Apache Hadoop that Yahoo! uses within its own search engine. [Hadoop] is an open source software framework that helps process very large data sets, and is widely used in large-scale data mining applications as well as in search tools at sites like Facebook and many others. For developers and users interested in Hadoop, it's worth noting that the Yahoo! Distribution of Hadoop has been widely tested and developed at Yahoo! for years now".

Developer Creates DIY 8-Bit CPU 187

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday May 30, 2009 @08:13AM from the now-that's-impressive dept.

MaizeMan writes "Not for the easily distracted: a Belmont software developer's hand-built CPU was featured in Wired recently. Starting with a $50 wire wrap board, Steve Chamberlin built his CPU with 1253 pieces of wire, each wire wrapped by hand at both ends. Chamberlin salvaged parts from '70s and '80s era computers, and the final result is an 8-bit processor with keyboard input, a USB connection, and VGA graphical output. More details are available on the developer's blog."

Researchers Store Optical Data In Five Dimensions 239

Posted by timothy on Wednesday May 20, 2009 @04:50PM from the don't-forget-time dept.

Al writes "Researchers from Swinburne University of Technology in Victoria, Australia, have developed an optical material capable of storing information in five dimensions. Using three wavelengths and two polarizations of light, the Australian researchers were able to write six different patterns within the same area. The material is made up of layers of gold nanorods suspended in clear plastic that has been spun flat onto a glass substrate and multiple data patterns can be written and read within the same area in the material without interference. The team achieved a storage density of 1.1 terabytes per cubic centimeter by writing data to stacks of 10 nanorod layers."

Five Nvidia CUDA-Enabled Apps Tested 134

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday May 18, 2009 @06:51PM from the need-for-speed dept.

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."

Submission + - AMD Breaks 1GHz GPU Barrier With Radeon HD 4890 (hothardware.com)

Submitted by

MojoKid

on Wednesday May 13, 2009 @09:57PM

MojoKid writes: "AMD announced today that they can lay claim to the world's first 1GHz graphics processor with their ATI Radeon HD 4890 GPU. There's been no formal announcement made about what partners will be selling the 1GHz variant, but AMD does note that Asus, Club 3D, Diamond Multimedia, Force3D, GECUBE, Gigabyte, HIS, MSI, Palit Multimedia, PowerColor, SAPPHIRE, XFX and others are all aligning to release higher performance cards. The new ATI Radeo HD 4890 utilizes advanced GDDR5 memory and a 1GHz core clock speed to deliver 1.6 TeraFLOPs of compute power."

Illusion Cloak Makes One Object Look Like Another 219

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday May 13, 2009 @06:52PM from the cloak-of-the-beholder dept.

KentuckyFC writes "Metamaterials are synthetic substances that can steer light in any way imaginable. Their most famous incarnation is in invisibility cloaks which work by steering light around a region of space making any object inside that region invisible. But invisibility is just the start. A team of physicists in Hong Kong (the same guys who recently worked out how to cloak objects at a distance) have worked out how to create a cloak that makes one object look like another. Instead of steering light to make a region of space look empty, the illusion cloak manipulates light in a way that makes a region of space look as if it contains a specific object. So any object within that region of space, a mouse say, takes on the appearance of an elephant."

How Pirated Software Impacts Free Software 530

Posted by kdawson on Wednesday August 15, 2007 @06:02PM from the free-as-in-cracked dept.

jmglov writes "Dave Gutteridge has an unusual take on why people are not interested in saving money by using a free-as-in-beer OS like Linux or *BSD: because Windows is free. At least, that is an all-too-common perception, thanks to bundling and piracy. Bundling is a well-known problem to the adoption of open source operating systems, so Dave takes a look at the piracy issue in depth. His title may offend you, but his well-written article will most likely get you thinking hard about the question, 'how much does Windows cost?'"

Slashdot Top Deals