Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror

Submission + - World wide web turns 20 today (v3.co.uk)

Submitted by girlmad
girlmad writes: On 6 August 1991, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, then a humble scientist at CERN, made the first page on the World Wide Web publicly available in a move that, unbeknown to him at the time, would change the world more quickly and profoundly than anything before or since. A great look back at the development of the web, from TBL through LolCats to checking in.
Space

Submission + - Do 'Ultracool' Brown Dwarfs Surround Us? (discovery.com)

Submitted by
astroengine
astroengine writes: "The recent discovery of two very cool "T-class" brown dwarfs in our cosmic neighborhood has prompted speculation that there may be many more ultracool "failed stars" nearby. Not only are these objects themselves very interesting to study, should there be many such brown dwarfs spanning interstellar space, perhaps they could be used as "stepping stones" to the stars."
Science

Submission + - Quantum teleportation achieved over 16 km (physorg.com) 1

Submitted by Laxori666
Laxori666 writes: Scientists in China have succeeded in teleporting information between photons further than ever before. They transported quantum information over a free space distance of 16 km (10 miles), much further than the few hundred meters previously achieved, which brings us closer to transmitting information over long distances without the need for a traditional signal.
Google

Submission + - SPAM: Google offers encrypted Web search option

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: People who want to shield their use of Google's Web search engine from network snoops now have the option of encrypting the session with SSL protection.

In the case of Google search, SSL will protect the transmission of search queries entered by users and the search results returned by Google servers. Google began rolling out the encrypted version of its Web search engine on Friday. It will be available by typing "https" instead of "http" in the URL address bar.

"We think users will appreciate this new option for searching. It's a helpful addition to users' online privacy and security, and we'll continue to add encryption support for more search offerings," wrote Evan Roseman, a Google software engineer, in an official blog post. [spam URL stripped]
Link to Original Source
The Military

40 Years Ago, the US Lost a Nuclear Bomb 470

Posted by kdawson from the chrome-dome-down dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "A BBC investigation has found that in 1968 the US abandoned a nuclear weapon beneath the ice in northern Greenland after a nuclear-armed B52 crashed on the ice a few miles from Thule Air Base. The Stratofortress disintegrated on impact with the sea ice and parts of it began to melt through to the fjord below. The high explosives surrounding the four nuclear weapons on board detonated without setting off the nuclear devices, which had not been armed by the crew. The Pentagon maintained that all four weapons had been 'destroyed' and while technically true, investigators piecing together fragments from the crash could only account for three of the weapons. Investigators found that 'something melted through ice such as burning primary or secondary.' A subsequent search by a US submarine was beset by technical problems and, as winter encroached and the ice began to freeze over, the search was abandoned. 'There was disappointment in what you might call a failure to return all of the components,' said a former nuclear weapons designer at the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory. 'It would be very difficult for anyone else to recover classified pieces if we couldn't find them.'"
Microsoft

Windows 7 Benchmarks Show Little Improvement On Vista 369

Posted by kdawson from the second-verse-same-as-the-first dept.
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Randall Kennedy examines Windows 7 from the kernel up, subjecting the 'pre-beta' to a battery of benchmarks to find any signs that the OS will be faster, more responsive, and less resource-intensive than the bloated Vista, as Microsoft suggests. Identical thread counts at the kernel level suggest to Kennedy that Windows 7 is a 'minor point-type of release, as opposed to a major update or rewrite.' Memory footprint for the kernel proved eerily similar to that of Vista as well. 'In fact, as I worked my way through the process lists of the two operating systems, I was struck by the extent of the similarities,' Kennedy writes, before discussing the results of a nine-way workload test scenario he performed on Windows 7 — the same scenario that showed Vista was 40 percent slower than Windows XP. 'In a nutshell, Windows 7 M3 is a virtual twin of Vista when it comes to performance,' Kennedy concludes. 'In other words, Microsoft's follow-up to its most unpopular OS release since Windows Me threatens to deliver zero measurable performance benefits while introducing new and potentially crippling compatibility issues.'"
Cellphones

Project Turns GPS Phones Into Traffic Reporters 119

Posted by timothy from the then-it's-mandatory dept.
narramissic writes "Starting on Monday, researchers from Nokia and UC Berkeley will kick off the Mobile Millennium project. The researchers hope that thousands of volunteers will download a free Java program that figures out by their movement and location when they are driving, and then transmits that information to the project's servers, which then crunch it into a Bay Area traffic map. 'The whole concept here is that if everyone shares just a little bit of what they're seeing ... then everyone can benefit by seeing the conditions ahead of them,' said Quinn Jacobson, a research leader with Nokia in Palo Alto."
Censorship

Explore the Web From China 165

Posted by samzenpus from the walking-in-somebody-else's-shoes dept.
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Download.com: "It slows down your browsing. It makes some Web sites inaccessible for no discernible reason. It doesn't even offer you any xiao long bao or pu'er tea for your troubles. But if you want to know what life behind the Great Firewall of China is like, then the Firefox plug-in China Channel is the cheapest and fastest way to experience using the Internet in China without actually being there."
PlayStation (Games)

Sony Opens PS2 Platform 77

Posted by Soulskill from the about-time dept.
Ars Technica reports that Sony will be removing their content approval process for the Playstation 2 so that developers require less funding to make games. "Since there are no licensing fees, the only cost to the developer would be the PS2 dev kit. In order to help alleviate some of that financial burden, Bain said that in some cases Sony will lend out dev kits. Another option for developers making small, casual titles is to purchase PS2 debug dev kits, which cost about 1/10 of a full version. Bain went on to explain another possible option for smaller local developers: the PlayStation Network. 'One thing that a lot of developers seem to forget is that PlayStation Network is free,' he explained. 'Consumers do not have to pay a monthly fee ... game developers should create games for local markets.'"
Businesses

Should You Break TOS Because Work Asks You? 680

Posted by CmdrTaco from the just-don't-crawl-this-domain-please dept.
An anonymous reader writes "My boss recently assigned me a project that was all his idea, with two basic flaws that would require me to break multiple web sites' Terms of Service (TOS). Part requires scraping most of the site, parsing the data and presenting it as our own without human intervention. While we're safe on copyright issues, clearly scraping like this is normally not allowed. At times it might also put a load on those sites. The other is, for lack of better words, a 'load balancing' part that requires using multiple free accounts instead of purchasing space and CPU time for less than $2,000 USD per month. The boss sees it as 'distributed' computing when in reality it's 'parasitic.' My question is: am I wrong about the ethics? If I do need to walk, how best can I handle it without damaging my reputation and future employment opportunities?"
Debian

Is Ubuntu Getting Slower? 544

Posted by CmdrTaco from the slow-like-a-fox dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Phoronix has a new article where they provide Ubuntu 7.04, 7.10, 8.04, and 8.10 benchmarks and had ran many tests. In that article, when using an Intel notebook they witness major slowdowns in different areas and ask the question, Is Ubuntu getting slower? From the article: 'A number of significant kernel changes had went on between these Ubuntu Linux releases including the Completely Fair Scheduler, the SLUB allocator, tickless kernel support, etc. We had also repeated many of these tests to confirm we were not experiencing a performance fluke or other issue (even though the Phoronix Test Suite carries out each test in a completely automated and repeatable fashion) but nothing had changed. Ubuntu 7.04 was certainly the Feisty Fawn for performance, but based upon these results perhaps it would be better to call Ubuntu 7.10 the Gooey Gibbon, 8.04 the Hungover Heron, and 8.10 the Idling Ibex.'"
Games

Submission + - Vendetta Online lets users create new game content (vendetta-online.com)

Submitted by
Incarnate-VO
Incarnate-VO writes: "Multi-platform space MMO Vendetta Online is now allowing users to create missions and submit other content for use in the game, via their new "Player Contribution Corps" system. Any game subscriber can join the PCC and gain access to a web-based mission editor, permitting them to build and test new missions on Vendetta's test-server. Once the player believes the mission is ready for prime-time, they submit it to the greater PCC community for testing and feedback. The community may then sign off on the mission and push it up to the developer staff for final oversight and propagation into the game. More details available in the press release. Vendetta Online is available for Windows, Mac, Linux/32 and Linux/64."
Linux Business

Will ParanoidLinux Protect the Truly Paranoid? 236

Posted by kdawson from the tinfoil-laptop-carrying-case dept.
ruphus13 writes "There are still places on the world where having anonymity might mean the difference between life and death. Covering one's tracks is considered to be of such paramount importance that we are now witnessing the rise of a Linux distro catering to the most paranoid. The 'alpha-alpha' version of ParanoidLinux is now out. But is this the best way to protect oneself? Couldn't it be easily circumvented? The article asks, 'Why is it necessary to put the applications and services designed to protect anonymity, to encrypt files, to make the user nameless and faceless, all together, in one distribution? Let's think in a truly paranoid manner. Wouldn't it be far easier for a nefarious government organization to target that distribution's repositories, mirror that singular distribution's disk images with files of its own design, and leave every last one of that distribution's users in the great wide open?' What should truly paranoid user do?"

Slashdot Top Deals

The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable. -- John Kenneth Galbraith

Close