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Supercomputing

Submission + - IBM touts supercomputers for the enterprise

Submitted by Stony Stevenson
Stony Stevenson writes: IBM has announced an initiative to offer smaller versions of its high-performance computers to enterprise customers. The first new machine is a QS22 BladeCenter server powered by a Cell processor. Developed to power gaming systems, the Cell chip has also garnered interest from the supercomputing community owing to its ability to handle large amounts of floating point calculations. IBM hopes that the chips, which currently power climate modelling and other traditional supercomputing tasks, will also appeal to customers ranging from financial analysis firms to animation studios.
Movies

Submission + - New Indiana Jones movie is dreadful (sffmedia.com)

Submitted by
bowman9991
bowman9991 writes: "Hope this one isn't true! An early negative review calls the upcoming "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" movie predictable, lacking in tension, and a fan's worst nightmare. SFFMedia believes this new Indiana Jones movie could create a similar reaction a lot of people experienced after watching the first of the last three Star Wars movies, "The Phantom Menace": you wait for years and years, the anticipation building, and then it's so awful it taints your view of the original movies. Of course George Lucas was involved with Star Wars too."

Why Microsoft Surface Took So Long To Deploy 187

Posted by Zonk from the delay-delay-delay dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Nearly a year after all the fanfare unveiling a new touchscreen tabletop interface, Microsoft's Surface computer will finally appear in select AT&T stores later this month. Popular Mechanics tech editor Glenn Derene, who first introduced us to Surface in May, seems to have done a complete 180 in this rant, blasting Microsoft for being more obsessed with Surface's novelty as a magnet for image-conscious partners while messing up a rare hardware device — and, surprisingly, the simple software he was told came with it. From Microsoft's official excuse in the article: 'It's actually been a good thing for us,' Pete Thompson, Microsoft's general manager for Surface, told me. 'We were anticipating that the initial deployments were going to be showcase pilots using our own software applications on units to drive traffic. What our partners have decided is that they want to skip that stage and go to an integrated experience where they build their own applications. That's pulled the timeline until this spring.'"
Operating Systems

A Gut Check On Gutsy Gibbon 390

Posted by kdawson from the who-you-callin-windows-like dept.
jammag writes "Linux pundit Bruce Byfield looked inside the pre-release of Gutsy Gibbon and found what he calls 'Windows thinking.' His article, Divining from the Entrails of Ubuntu's Gutsy Gibbon, notes that Ubuntu is the dominant distro, having achieved a level of success that might be leading to complacency. He opines: 'Only once or twice did I find a balance between accessibility to newcomers and a feature set for advanced users. At times, I wondered whether the popularity might be preventing Ubuntu from finishing some rough edges.'"
Toys

Submission + - Entry Level Astronomy 2

Submitted by
brobak
brobak writes: "I'm getting ready to move into a new home on a couple of acres of rural property a significant distance from any large source of light pollution. I've always been interested in astronomy in general, and I was thinking that putting my dark skies to use by picking up decent telescope and learning a bit about the skies over my head. I have been doing a decent amount of web research, but I thought that the Slashdot community would be the perfect place to get opinions on entry level equipment, websites, and books.

The overall budget for this project is going to be around $1,000, and observations will be made from the back of my home primarily. I am particularly interested in the subject of astrophotography, but I understand that may be outside the scope of the initial budget. I would welcome any and all of your comments and suggestions for getting started in this fascinating hobby.

PS — I've already signed up for my local astronomy clubs next monthly meeting."
Spam

Submission + - Does SPF really work?

Submitted by
Intelopment
Intelopment writes: "My Domain name has recently been used a lot as the REPLY field by some inconsiderate spammer and my ISP has suggested that I consider using the Open SPF service (http://openspf.org/) as a way to stop spammers from using my domain name for their REPLY field. From what I can tell it requires the receiving mail server to actually participate in the SPF service, which is where I get my doubts. Does anyone have any experience with this service? Does it work? Are many ISPs using openSFP?"
It's funny. Laugh.

Journal Journal: Al "Green" Gores Shocking Electric Bill 1

Journal by music2myear
Some interested person called the Nashville (TN) Electrical Service and under the Freedom of Information Act asked for the Academy Award Winning Ex-VP's energy bill. Apparently the publicly dull persona has quite the party life going at home. His usage last year? 221,000 kWh, that's a $30,000 bill, more than 20 times the national average. Last August alone he used 22,619 kWh, more than you or me (even with those massive 1000W PS' ru
Software

Submission + - MPAA Fires Back at AACS Decryption Utility

Submitted by RulerOf
RulerOf writes: The AACS Decryption utility released this past December known as BackupHDDVD originally authored by Muslix64 of the Doom9 forums has received its first official DMCA Takedown Notice. It has been widely speculated that the utility itself was not an infringing piece of software due to the fact that it is merely "a textbook implementation of AACS," written with the help of documents publicly available at the AACS LA's website, and that the AACS Volume Unique Keys that the end user isn't supposed to have access to are in fact the infringing content, but it appears that such is not the case. From the thread:

"...you must input keys and then it will decrypt the encrypted content. If this is the case, than according to the language of the DMCA it does sound like it is infringing. Section 1201(a) says that it is an infringement to "circumvent a technological measure." The phrase, "circumvent a technological measure" is defined as "descramb(ling) a scrambled work or decrypt(ing) an encrypted work, ... without the authority of the copyright owner." If BackupHDDVD does in fact decrypt encrypted content than per the DMCA it needs a license to do that.
Businesses

Submission + - CEO resigns over 'Lite Brite'

Submitted by DesertBlade
DesertBlade writes: The CEO of Cartoon Network has resigned over the bomb scare. Turner ended up paying over 2 million in restitution and the city of Boston coming to a stand still over some lite brites. I for one do not want to live in a glass box being scared of everything, and with governments over reacting just fuels the fear. Are we becoming scared of our own shadow?
HP

Journal Journal: Eco-disaster! HP uses Vista to enforce product obsolesence.

Journal by Ecowarrior42
HP Printer and Scanner owners should beware of buying a new Vista PC or upgrading to Vista.
Douglas Adams had it wrong when he predicted that the alien archaeologists would find a shoe layer, they are more likely to find a Vista induced Printer and Scanner layer! A large number HP printer and scanner owners that have chosen to upgrade to Vista will receive the following message when attempting to download Vista drivers for their Scanners and Printers:
"We are sorry to inform you that

Comment Re:NT (Score 1) 194

by Epicyon (#17289426) Attached to: Vista vs. Cairo - A Microsoft History Lesson
My point refers to the statements Microsoft had made during the antitrust hearings regarding the fact that IE was an integral component of Windows and could not be removed.

Microsoft stated that the merging of Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer was the result of innovation and competition, and that the two were now the same product and were inextricably linked together and that consumers were now getting all the benefits of IE for free.

A number of videotapes were submitted as evidence by Microsoft during the trial, including one that demonstrated that removing Internet Explorer from Microsoft Windows caused slowdowns and malfunctions in Windows.
Although I completely agree that marketing != software engineering:

Because of the limited nature of POSIX.1, the POSIX subsystem on Windows NT does not provide any support for networking or system security. Many people feel that the inclusion of the POSIX subsytem was really a marketing ploy to increase NT's market penetration.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Micr osoft http://scilnet.fortlewis.edu/tech/NT-Server/archit ecture.htm

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