Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:With more memory per CPU, it might not suck (Score 1) 124

Please don't confuse the SPUs (the eight coprocessors on the Cell die) with the PPU (the main CPU core). The PPU is also part of the Cell, so don't call the SPUs "Cell CPUs". There is also no MIPS core -- the PPU is a 3.2GHz PPC core with two hardware threads. The SPUs also run at 3.2GHz, but are not considered "real" CPUs since they can't bootstrap themselves, they have to be given tasks from the PPU. SPU programming forces a model on you as a developer -- modularize your tasks with as few synchronization points as possible and treat the SPUs like a thread pool. What's the problem here? This is a good model even if you're not limited to the SPUs. Developers who move more and more tasks to the SPUs will find themselves in a much better position next generation when parallelization is more massive, regardless of whether the Cell or something like it is involved.

Comment No difference (Score 1) 9

The way I've seen this approached is that, if it's a good interview setup you are not the only one interviewing him and there is reasonable coverage with people who can interview on that level.

So interview him as you would someone on your level, this will atleast give coverage on deeper issues they may not get with 'higher ups'

Also you could think of an issue that you personally had trouble with and ask them about that. How they answer it should give you some idea of if they are in fact above your level.

The Internet

The Pirate Bay — "Just a Very Large Hobby" 214

praps writes "In a fascinating interview with two of the founders of The Pirate Bay entitled 'Are they baby-eating monsters or what?,' Swedish news site The Local discovers that far from being the radical Robin Hoods of the digital age, Peter Sunde and Fredrik Neij are actually 'polite, humorous and down-to-earth.' They may run one of the biggest sites in the world but 'it's just a hobby that's grown to be very, very large.' Financially, they are 'happy as long as it doesn't make a loss,' and both hold down regular IT day jobs. And apparently they spend a lot of time with a Bedouin in the Sinai desert."

Comment Re:Murphy's Taproom (Score 1) 22

So we had the party Saturday, and this afternoon, FedEx shows up with a package containing six T-shirts, all size XL. Clearly someone's on the ball out there. I'll be getting hold of those of you who were there to see if you want one and to arrange to get it to you.
Networking

Submission + - IPv6 Cutover January 1, 2011

IO ERROR writes: An internet-draft published this month calls for an IPv6 transition plan which would require all Internet-facing servers to have IPv6 connectivity on or before January 1, 2011. 'Engineer and author John Curran proposes that migration to IPv6 happen in three stages. The first stage, which would happen between now and the end of 2008, would be a preparatory stage in which organizations would start to run IPv6 servers, though these servers would not be considered by outside parties as production servers. The second stage, which would take place in 2009 and 2010, would require organizations to offer IPv6 for Internet-facing servers, which could be used as production servers by outside parties. Finally, in the third stage, starting in 2011, IPv6 must be in use by public-facing servers.' Then IPv4 can go away.
The Courts

Appeals Court Denies Safe Harbor for Roommates.com 253

Mariner writes "The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals denied Roommates.com Safe Harbor status under the Communications Decency Act in a lawsuit brought by the Fair Housing Councils of San Fernando Valley and San Diego. Roommates.com was accused of helping landlords discriminate against certain kinds of tenants due to a couple of questions on the Roommates.com registration form: gender and sexual orientation. 'Though it refused to rule on whether Roommates.com actually violated the Fair Housing Act, the Court did find that it lost Section 230 immunity because it required users to enter that information in order to proceed. As Judge Alex Kozinski put it in his opinion, "if it is responsible, in whole or in part, for creating or developing the information, it becomes a content provider and is not entitled to CDA immunity."'"
Wireless Networking

Nanotech and Wireless Guard Against Earthquakes 45

Roland Piquepaille writes "Two separate efforts using technology to protect people from earthquakes have recently been in the news. At the University of Leeds, UK, researchers will use nanotechnology and RFID tags to build a 'self-healing' house in Greece. The house's walls will contain nanoparticles that turn into a liquid when squeezed under pressure, flow into cracks, and then harden to form a solid material. The walls will also host a network of wireless sensors and RFID tags that can alert the residents to an imminent earthquake. Meanwhile, another team at the Washington University in St. Louis is using a wireless sensor network to limit earthquake damages."

Slashdot Top Deals

Dead? No excuse for laying off work.

Working...