A collection of stories tagged 'world' from Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/ Copyright 2006 RoomforMilk.com. RoomforMilk is not affiliated with Slashdot.org. Thu, 20 Nov 2008 05:13:30 EST In recent months, the concept of 'cloud computing' was all the buzz. European researchers think about another name, the World Wide Grid, which could run on top of the Internet. In an article to appear soon, ICT Results will report about the g-Eclipse project. As the scientists said, 'the g-Eclipse project aims to build an integrated workbench framework to access the power of existing Grid infrastructures. The framework will be built on top of the reliable eco-system of the Eclipse community to enable a sustainable development.' The project started in July 2006 and was successfully completed in June 2008 for a total cost of 2.5 million including a EU contribution of 1.96 million."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26280 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/KjW6jTyDTTc/article.pl Wed, 19 Nov 2008 23:05:01 EST After more than 20 years in IT I've learned that the most valuable people in a team are frequently the old timers. Young pups straight out of college might (think they) know all the latest buzzwords and techniques, but in the real world, where getting working products delivered on time and on budget is of paramount importance, people who have been doing the job for a decade or two tend to be the people I'd rather be working alongside. I've recently been elevated to a position where I get to interview and choose those who get hired in my department. Although I'm very much focused on choosing the right person for the role regardless of age, experience or whatever, it's probably fair to say the more mature applicants will get a more sympathetic hearing from me than they might from most other interviewers for IT roles. The question is, what do I ask older applicants to get them to demonstrate the value of their experience? My current gambit is something like 'IT is seen as a young man's game. My next applicant after you is 23 years old. What do you know that he doesn't?' This gets responses ranging from the vague to the truly enlightened. All next week I'm interviewing for a number of senior software designer and developer roles. What should I be asking of the more experienced applicants, and what responses should I be looking out for?"Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26263 http://rss.slashdot.org:80/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/eDZnfPA5beo/article.pl Wed, 19 Nov 2008 18:05:13 EST After more than 20 years in IT I've learned that the most valuable people in a team are frequently the old timers. Young pups straight out of college might (think they) know all the latest buzzwords and techniques, but in the real world, where getting working products delivered on time and on budget is of paramount importance, people who have been doing the job for a decade or two tend to be the people I'd rather be working alongside. I've recently been elevated to a position where I get to interview and choose those who get hired in my department. Although I'm very much focused on choosing the right person for the role regardless of age, experience or whatever, it's probably fair to say the more mature applicants will get a more sympathetic hearing from me than they might from most other interviewers for IT roles. The question is, what do I ask older applicants to get them to demonstrate the value of their experience? My current gambit is something like 'IT is seen as a young man's game. My next applicant after you is 23 years old. What do you know that he doesn't?' This gets responses ranging from the vague to the truly enlightened. All next week I'm interviewing for a number of senior software designer and developer roles. What should I be asking of the more experienced applicants, and what responses should I be looking out for?"Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26260 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/eDZnfPA5beo/article.pl Wed, 19 Nov 2008 17:05:01 EST A week ago we discussed the takedown of McColo (and the morality of that action). McColo was reportedly the source of anywhere from 50% to 75% of the world's spam. On Saturday the malware network briefly returned to life in order to hand over command and control channels to a Russian network. "The rogue network provider regained connectivity for about 12 hours on Saturday by making use of a backup arrangement it had with Swedish internet service provider TeliaSonera. During that time, McColo was observed pushing as much as 15MB of data per second to servers located in Russia, according to... Trend Micro. The brief resurrection allowed miscreants who rely on McColo to update a portion of the massive botnets they use to push spam and malware. Researchers from FireEye saw PCs infected by the Rustock botnet being updated so they'd report to a new server located at abilena.podolsk-mo.ru for instructions. That means the sharp drop in spam levels reported immediately after McColo's demise isn't likely to last."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26240 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/K1ZZFDRpou0/article.pl Tue, 18 Nov 2008 19:05:01 EST The One Laptop Per Child project's XO-1 laptop is once again available to the general public via its Give One Get One promotion, where $400 will buy two laptops, one for the purchaser and one for 'a child in the emerging world.' Having learned from their delivery and fulfillment headaches the first time around, this time they partnered with Amazon.com to handle shipping. But a year after its initial release, the market has become saturated with Eee-wannabe netbooks from every major manufacturer. Can the XO-1's charitable appeal, unique chassis and dual-mode screen compete with the superior performance and standard operating systems of its newer peers?"Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26214 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/3NrNbYDGmeo/article.pl Mon, 17 Nov 2008 15:05:03 EST An international team of physicists has applied the ideas of cloaking to the quantum world and worked out how to hide quantum objects such as molecules. In the quantum world, seeing is equivalent to detecting a quantum object. In the case of molecules, that means looking for the terahertz radiation they produce when they vibrate (abstract). By designing a 'quantum corral,' an elliptical nanostructures that absorbs terahertz waves at a precise frequency, the team says it is possible to hide molecules that emit at exactly that frequency. They say their quantum corral would be ideally suited to detecting molecules of specific species while ignoring others. And that may mean a new generation of molecular detectors on the horizon."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26200 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/9WnzjLBud1o/article.pl Sun, 16 Nov 2008 18:05:01 EST The much-anticipated second expansion to World of Warcraft, entitled Wrath of the Lich King, launched on Thursday, introducing a new continent, raising the level cap to 80, and bringing a wealth of new items, spells, dungeons, and monsters to the popular MMO. Crowds gathered and lines formed outside stores around the world leading up to the release. Massively has put together a series of articles for players wishing to familiarize themselves with the expansion, and CVG has a piece discussing the basics as well. It didn't take long for the first person to reach level 80; a French player called "Nymh" reached the level cap on his Warlock only 27 hours after the expansion went live. Not to be outdone, a guild named "TwentyFifthNovember" managed to get at least 25 raiders to 80 and then cleared all of the current expansion raid content less than three days after the launch. Fortunately for them, the next three content patches are each expected to contain new, more difficult raids.Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26197 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/Ij5cfCO3bUo/article.pl Sun, 16 Nov 2008 14:05:00 EST For the 37th anniversary of Intel's 4004, the world's first off-the-shelf, customer-programmable microprocessor, vintage computer enthusiast Bill Kotaska has successfully built a replica of Busicom's historic 141-PF printing calculator using vintage Intel chips. Decades before the ubiquitous 'Intel inside' sticker, Japanese calculator maker Busicom introduced the first product ever built around an Intel microprocessor. Bill's homebrew replica includes a rare Shinshu Seiki Model-102 drum printer and runs firmware extracted from the original Busicom ROMs. Schematics and photos of his re-creation are available at the unofficial 4004 web site, along with Tim McNerney's new PIC-based emulator of the Model-102 printer. The site includes the Busicom 'source code', 4004 details, interactive simulators, and other goodies for students, engineers, and computer historians." We discussed the 36th 4004 anniversary project here last year.Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26191 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/vU2GPdZ3ijg/article.pl Sun, 16 Nov 2008 07:05:00 EST The National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS), located at Oak Ridge National Labs (ORNL) in Tennessee, has upgraded the Jaguar supercomputer to 1.64-petaflops for use by scientists and engineers working in areas such as climate modeling, renewable energy, materials science, fusion and combustion. The current upgrade is the result of an addition of 200 cabinets of the Cray XT5 to the existing 84 cabinets of the XT4 Jaguar system. Jaguar is now the world's most powerful supercomputer available for open scientific research."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26169 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/hf1oaHoEMUI/article.pl Fri, 14 Nov 2008 19:05:10 EST Monty Python's 'Dead Parrot sketch' — which featured John Cleese — is some 1,600 years old. A classic scholar has proved the point, by unearthing a Greek version of the world-famous piece. A comedy duo called Hierocles and Philagrius told the original version, only rather than a parrot they used a slave. It concerns a man who complains to his friend that he was sold a slave who dies in his service. His companion replies: 'When he was with me, he never did any such thing!' The joke was discovered in a collection of 265 jokes called Philogelos: The Laugh Addict, which dates from the fourth century AD. Hierocles had gone to meet his maker, and Philagrius had certainly ceased to be, long before John Cleese and Michael Palin reinvented the yarn in 1969."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26166 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/XaZm7DHowb8/article.pl Fri, 14 Nov 2008 17:05:11 EST TechDirt is reporting on a disappointing development out of Canada. An Ontario transportation board has fined PickupPal, a Web-based service for arranging carpools, because a local bus company complained of the competition. (TechCrunch apparently first broke the story.) "[The transportation board has] established a bunch of draconian rules that any user in Ontario must follow if it uses the service — including no crossing of municipal boundaries — meaning the service is only good within any particular city's limits. It's better than being shut down completely, and the service can still operate elsewhere around the world, but this is yet another case where we see regulations, that are supposedly put in place to improve things for consumers, do the exact opposite."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26161 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/hADxwMQPnik/article.pl Fri, 14 Nov 2008 13:05:02 EST The original Gears of War was one of the most popular games of 2006, helping to solidify the Xbox 360's place in the console market. Since then, it's sold about 5 million copies. When word leaked out that a sequel was in the works, many wondered if Epic Games could reach the bar set by the first game. As it turns out, they could. Gears of War 2 will feel very familiar to those who have played its predecessor. Games often have a way of reinventing themselves as sequels come and go, but Epic stuck to the basics of what had already worked so well, and simply set about improving, polishing, and fleshing out the Gears world as much as they could. Read on for the rest of the review.Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26148 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/bsWGMpMx0BU/article.pl Fri, 14 Nov 2008 00:05:16 EST Scientists at the Keck and Gemini telescopes stole the thunder of Hubble scientists announcing the first picture of an extrasolar world orbiting a star. Hubble scientists announced today that they were able to discover an extrasolar world for the first time by taking an actual image of the newly discovered exoplanet orbiting Fomalhaut — previous discoveries have always been made by detecting changes in the parent star's movement, or by watching the planet momentarily eclipse the star — not by detecting them in images. Hubble's time to shine was overshadowed though by the Keck and Gemini observatories announcing that they had taken pictures of not just one planet, but an entire alien solar system. The images show multiple planets orbiting the star HR 8799 — 3 have been imaged so far."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26144 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/pEz5D3atsTo/article.pl Fri, 14 Nov 2008 00:05:08 EST If you had 100,000 servers, would you put them on top of a former nuclear fuel facility? One of the world's largest web hosts, 1&1 Internet, is building a new data center on a site in Hanau, Germany previously used by Siemens to produce mixed oxide rods made from enriched uranium and plutonium. The site has been cleaned up, and 1&1 is converting it into a "green" data center powered by renewable energy and using free cooling to save on air conditioning costs."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26135 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/QH0mzbDypQA/article.pl Thu, 13 Nov 2008 08:05:02 EST Last year OLPC's XO-laptop was among the hottest Christmas gadgets thanks to the organization's G1G1 program, where you could donate $399 to give one XO-laptop to a child in the developing world and receive one yourself in return. However in 2007 the program was only available for US and Canadian citizens. This year's program, which takes off November 17, is also available to citizens in the EU member states, Switzerland, Russia, and Turkey. This is certainly awesome news for all the OLPC / Linux / gadget enthusiasts here in Europe! P.S. Before anyone asks, these XOs will come equipped with the child-friendly Sugar platform, which is based on Fedora 9, and not Windows XP."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26100 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/94zTZwm06o0/article.pl Tue, 11 Nov 2008 17:05:19 EST The popular virus scanner AVG released an update yesterday that caused their software to mark user32.dll as a virus. Since this is a rather critical file, AVG's suggestion to remove it caused problems for users around the world who are now advised to restore the file through the Windows Recovery Console. AVG just posted an update about this (FAQ item 1574) in the support section of their site. Their forums are full of complaints."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26089 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/tHxhd-hsphc/article.pl Mon, 10 Nov 2008 21:05:07 EST While reading the two and a half year old Slashdot post on Does Philosophy have a role in Computer Science, it occurred to me that over these past few years Philosophy has a more prominent role in Computer Science then ever before. Cognitive Science and Computer Ethics are more established disciplines in universities, and the numbers of philosophy graduates double majoring in computer science and information systems are climbing. Is a merger of Philosophy, a discipline steeped in history and intelligent thought, and Computer Science, a discipline that looks to the future, the best of both worlds?"Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26085 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/0m_H3z2ZaIc/article.pl Mon, 10 Nov 2008 17:05:34 EST This distinction goes to a future autonomous version of the 700-tons Caterpillar mining truck. In this article, Discovery News reports that Caterpillar engineers and computer scientists from Carnegie Mellon University have teamed up to develop this autonomous truck. Japan-based Komatsu already has already delivered autonomous mining trucks to its customers, but these are smaller than the Caterpillar ones. Both companies are transforming their trucks into 'robots' for three reasons. Improvements in safety, efficiency and productivity will reduce costs and increase availability."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26068 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/_6ZZUDl17_M/article.pl Sun, 09 Nov 2008 20:05:11 EST IBM and Sun joined at the 2008 OpenOffice.org conference in Beijing to announce the ODF Toolkit Union. The ODF Toolkit project will be independent of the development at OpenOffice.org, and will operate under the liberal Apache license. It goes from small tools that simplify using ODF in the software development process to large ODF Java and .NET libraries that can be used within other projects. 'The future of accessing and distributing software is here today,' said Michael Bemmer, senior director of Collaboration Engineering at Sun. 'It is no longer an acceptable business practice to have silos of office document data stored in proprietary formats. The industry has moved forward and is replacing the silos with business content, such as on-premise business applications, software solutions offered over the Internet and applications supported by mobile devices that are critical in Service Oriented Architectures.' Will this help ODF to make inroads in the business world after the successes on the desktops of users at home?"Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26037 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/LJFJ3L9_t_E/article.pl Fri, 07 Nov 2008 20:05:05 EST I am a biomedical researcher interested in having general-purpose, scientific programs developed and released as open source. Interface design and reusability of the code are of primary importance to me. For my purpose, Cocoa applications relying on Core Data seem to be the best way to get the job done quickly. While I have some programming experience, I have few connections to the industrial world. So my question to Slashdot readers is: how do I find someone (individual or business) to write high-quality programs? Are there reputable contractors experienced in Cocoa? What sort of rates should I expect, to use as a starting point in negotiations? Would a requirement that programs are released as open source make it more or less difficult to find someone to do the job?"Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26025 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/lNzFs5Obt_0/article.pl Fri, 07 Nov 2008 12:05:12 EST Guitar Hero: World Tour's recent launch saw boxes of plastic instruments flying off store shelves, quickly selling out in many areas. Unfortunately, many players reported problems with the bundled drums sets, prompting Activision to release a drum "tuning" application and a free midi-USB cable to connect the instruments to a PC. Otherwise, reviews for the game have been largely positive, and MTV's Multiplayer Blog did an analysis of using Rock Band drums in GH:WT, and vice-versa. Kotaku looked at which set was louder, coming to the conclusion that while they sound different, decibel levels are very similar. The early success in sales for GH:WT caused Activision to say holiday demand may not be met, and that they're examining two methods in particular to develop the franchise: instrument upgrades (hopefully less ludicrous than Logitech's $250 axe) and the possibility of a subscription-based model for user-generated content. "[Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby] Kotick says that there are now 25,000 user generated tunes that have been created for the game, and projected 'up to 100,000 songs' by the end of this year."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26017 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/pp7iiAtcLoM/article.pl Fri, 07 Nov 2008 00:05:01 EST Scientists have discovered what they believe is an eight-armed creature, which colonized a large section of the world's oceans over 300 million years before the first dinosaurs emerged."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25981 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/HfdSHYV3wiw/article.pl Wed, 05 Nov 2008 12:05:07 EST Linux Blog recommends an interview up on the O'Reilly site with Greg Kroah-Hartman, long-time Linux kernel hacker and the current Linux kernel maintainer for the USB driver core. He updates the free Linux driver program announced almost two years ago, which has really caught traction now with more than 300 developers volunteering. The interviewer begins by asking about Kroah-Hartman's claim that the Linux kernel now supports more devices than any other operating system ever has. "[One factor is] the ease of writing drivers; Linux drivers are at normally one-third smaller than Windows drivers or other operating system drivers. We have all the examples there, so it's trivial to write a new one if you have new hardware, usually because you can copy the code and go. We maintain them... forever, so the old ones don't disappear and we run on every single processor out there. I mean Linux is 80% of the world's top 500 super computers right now and we're also the number one embedded operating system today. We've got both sides of the market because it's — yeah it's pretty amazing. I don't know why, but we're doing something right."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25971 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/_x2yBTngQXo/article.pl Tue, 04 Nov 2008 19:05:02 EST Version 1.3 of the GNU Free Documentation License is out (FAQ). This license is little-used, except on the #8 site in the world: Wikipedia. And this version includes special provisions to re-license wiki-based content from GFDL to the much simpler Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license 3.0, as requested by the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikipedia plans to hold a public consultation process to decide whether and how to migrate to CC-BY-SA. The discussion is already running hot and heavy."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25956 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/AxnJ62iD_Pw/article.pl Tue, 04 Nov 2008 07:05:00 EST The world of the .NET framework is taken to the next level by the release of .NET 3.5. The intended audience of this book are experienced .NET programmers. There are no sections that tell you details about C#, SQL servers or anything like that. I don't recommend this book if you never worked on a .NET project and don't know how to set up a SQL database. You should be aware that the code is written in C#. You might use one of the software code converters if you prefer Visual Basic instead. I think the code is still readable even if you do not know C#. I appreciate the fact that the authors decided to use one language only because it keeps the book smaller. The authors assume you are using Visual Studio 2008. You don't necessarily need to update to 2008 if you are working with an older edition because you can use the free Express Edition to get started." Keep reading for the rest of Adrian's review.Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25947 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/-Ow90q6aSXE/article.pl Mon, 03 Nov 2008 13:05:03 EST