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Submission + - Princeton Researchers Announce Open Source 25-core Chip (princeton.edu) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Researchers at Princeton announced at Hot Chips this week their 25-core Piton Processor (http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S47/19/67G69/?section=topstories). The processor was designed specifically to increase data center efficiency with novel architecture features enabling over 8,000 of these processors to be connected together to build a system with over 200,000 cores. Fabricated on IBM’s 32nm process and with over 460 Million transistors, Piton is one of the largest and most complex academic processors every built. The Princeton team has opened their design up and released all of the chip source code, tests, and infrastructure as open source in the OpenPiton (http://www.openpiton.org) project enabling others to build scalable manycore processors with potentially thousands of cores.
Earth

Osage Oppose Wind Power At Tallgrass Prairie 147

Posted by timothy from the shooting-the-breeze-is-more-efficient dept.
Hugh Pickens writes writes "The Tulsa World reports that Principal Chief John D. Red Eagle of the Osage Nation says the tribe, although not opposed to alternative energy development in general, has found significant reasons to oppose wind farms on the tallgrass prairie, 'a true national treasure' whose last small fragments remain only in Osage County and in Kansas. The Osage County wind farms would not be built in the Nature Conservancy's Tallgrass Prairie Preserve, located northeast of Ponca City, but would be visible from it and Preserve Director Bob Hamilton has urged the county and the state to steer wind development to areas of the county that are not ecologically sensitive. 'Not all areas in the Osage are sensitive,' says Hamilton. 'What makes the tallgrass prairie so special is its big landscape. It's not just local — it has global significance.' The Osage also fear that large wind farms will interfere with extracting oil and gas, from which royalties are paid in support of tribal members as the Osage retain their tribal mineral rights owned in common by members of the tribe. 'They weren't thinking about the mineral estate — just about compensating landowners,' says Galen Crum, chairman of the tribal Minerals Council. 'How are we supposed to know the price of oil in 50 years?'"
Google

Google Wallet: the End of Anonymous Shopping 253

Posted by timothy from the if-you-choose-to-accept-it dept.
jfruhlinger writes "Google today announced Google Wallet, an NFC-based payment system that will allow people to pay for purchases just by waving their phone across a reader. It's the beginning of a future where commercial transactions are 'frictionless' and convenient — but it's a future where every transaction can be tracked and data-mined, as Dan Tynan points out. Stores can user information about your Doritos purchases to rearrange their wares; Google could push coupons via its new Google Offers service; your health insurance company might be interested in your sodium intake."
Google

Google's South Korean Offices Raided 99

Posted by CmdrTaco from the hate-when-that-happens dept.
lee1 writes "The Seoul police raided Google's office in Seoul, S. Korea today on suspicion that they have illegally collected users' location data, without consent, for advertising purposes. Google claims to be cooperating with the investigation."

Comment Bose quality (Score 2, Interesting) 275

by FTL (#35988420) Attached to: Amar Bose To Donate Company To M.I.T.

True story: An elderly gentleman walked into an electronics store in Toronto looking to buy speakers. The salesman showed him a couple of different models. The customer pointed at another set on the shelves and asked about them. The salesman said "Oh, those are Bose, they're crap." The customer was Amar Bose.

Comment Re:Shoestring budget (Score 3, Insightful) 40

by FTL (#35977096) Attached to: Endeavour Launch Delayed For At Least 48 Hours

Sorry, your facts are reversed. NASA's budget is $17 billion. China's space budget is $1.3 billion. Russia's space budget is $2.4 billion.

For eight times the money, the US manages to reach approximate parity with the Russians. This is the result of the badly designed Space Shuttle program which over its lifetime has cost $1.5 billion per launch.

Looking forward, SpaceX is on track to cut US launch costs by a factor of ten. That will make the US the #1 place to launch rockets -- for the first time since the 1970s.
Yahoo!

YouTube Founders Acquire Delicious 66

Posted by samzenpus from the is-there-a-video-yet? dept.
An anonymous reader sent in a link to the Delicious blog, which reads, "Today, we're pleased to announce that Delicious has been acquired by the founders of YouTube, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. As creators of the largest online video platform, they have firsthand experience enabling millions of users to share their experiences with the world. They are committed to running and improving Delicious going forward."
Image

Punish Bad Users With Drupal Misery 418

Posted by samzenpus from the what's-good-for-the-goose-is-good-for-the-griefer dept.
If you're sick of banning or deleting troublemakers on your Drupal website, you might want to check out Misery, the module designed to give trolls a taste of their own medicine. Creating a random length delay for a user, redirecting them to a random page, presenting them with a 404 error, and crashing their browser if they're using IE6 are just a few of the things you can make users endure with Misery. I'm still waiting patiently for a Punch In the Nose module, but this is a good start.

Comment Re:Spy plane makes no sense (Score 5, Interesting) 55

by FTL (#34438934) Attached to: X-37B Robotic Space Plane Returns To Earth

I agree completely that the X-37 makes no apparent sense. The only argument I can come up with is that returning is just a nice side effect of its real purpose: inclination changes. Chaning altitude and period and phase is all relatively easy with onboard thrusters (and X-37 has an orbital maneuvering engine almost as big as the Space Shuttle's). But the amount of thurst needed to change oribal inclination from, say equatorial to ISS, is vast. I calculated it recently as being equivalent to the delta-v provided by an earth to LEO launch.

What X-37 might be capable of is dipping into the atmosphere, banking, then thrusting back up to orbit. That's exactly what the Air Force's previous space plane was designed to do, the Dyna-soar. Once one has this capability, returning from orbit to a runway landing is a freebie since you already have the wings.

The recently concluded X-37 test flight did not show an inclination change. But look for it on a future flight. This would allow extreme flexability in imaging enemy action at completely unpredictable times.

Comment Re:Terrorism is EXTREMELY RARE (Score 4, Insightful) 1135

by Cecil (#34257926) Attached to: TSA Pats Down 3-Year-Old

And what do you suppose happens when the people we put in charge of public safety say "terrorism is extremely rare" to explain why they did nothing to stop an attack just like the ones that already happened.

Well, if they were working on the problem the right way, they could then go on to explain how they are tackling the problem at its source by trying to improve freedom, education and living conditions around the world in a considerate, thoughtful manner so that people don't feel miserable and angry enough to want to blow other people up in the first place.

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