nailchipper - Slashdot User

Comment C is key (Score 4, Insightful) 663

by nailchipper on Thursday May 13, 2010 @05:44AM (#32190688) Attached to: Exam Board Deletes C and PHP From CompSci A-Levels

What a shame. C is an important foundation.

Submission + - Extinct Ibex Resurrected by Cloning (telegraph.co.uk) 1

Submitted by

ScuttleMonkey

on Monday December 28, 2009 @12:35PM

" rel="nofollow">ScuttleMonkey writes: "The Telegraph is reporting that for the first time an extinct animal has been brought back via cloning. The Pyrenean ibex, a type of mountain goat, was declared officially extinct in 2000 but thanks to preserved skin samples scientists were able to insert that DNA into eggs from domestic goats to clone a female Pyrenean ibex. While the goat didn't survive long due to lung defects this gives scientists hopes that it will be possible to resurrect extinct species from frozen tissue. "Using techniques similar to those used to clone Dolly the sheep, known as nuclear transfer, the researchers were able to transplant DNA from the tissue into eggs taken from domestic goats to create 439 embryos, of which 57 were implanted into surrogate females. Just seven of the embryos resulted in pregnancies and only one of the goats finally gave birth to a female bucardo, which died a seven minutes later due to breathing difficulties, perhaps due to flaws in the DNA used to create the clone.""

Submission + - UK consumers to pay for "online piracy"

Submitted by Wowsers on Monday December 28, 2009 @09:29AM

Wowsers writes: An article in The Times states that UK consumers will be hit with an estimated of £500m ($800m US) bill to tackle online "piracy". The dinosaur record and film industries have managed to convince the government to bypass all laws, and get consumers to pay for the record and film industries perceived losses. Meanwhile the record and film industries have refused to move with the times, and change their business models. Other businesses have adapted and been successful in changing their businesses, but the film and record industries refuse to do so, taking the easy way out of protecting their cartels.

Surely the record and film industries should be the ones paying to chase up their perceived losses, not adding another stealth tax to all consumers.

Submission + - HDD manufacturers moving to 4096-byte sectors

Submitted by Luminous Coward on Monday December 28, 2009 @08:29AM

Luminous Coward writes: As previously discussed on Slashdot, according to AnandTech and The Tech Report, hard disk drive manufacturers are now ready to bump the size of the disk sector from 512 to 4096 bytes, in order to minimize storage lost to ECC and sync. This may not be a smooth transition, because some OSes do not align partitions on 4K boundaries.

Submission + - The speculative prehistory of the iPhone (technologizer.com)

Submitted by harrymcc on Monday December 28, 2009 @05:56AM

harrymcc writes: The blogosphere is abuzz with rumors about "iSlate," Apple's supposed upcoming tablet. It's constructive to look back at coverage of the first iPhone in the months before it was announced. A high percentage of what was reported turned out to be hooey--as I remembered as I reviewed stories that said the iPhone would have a click wheel, a slide-out keyboard, and two batteries, and would run on an Apple-branded wireless network. I'm guessing that much of what we "know" about iSlate is similarly off-base.

Submission + - James Cameron's Avatar and Neal Stephenson (jseliger.com)

Submitted by ThousandStars on Monday December 28, 2009 @01:14AM

ThousandStars writes: "The anti-technological aspect [in James Cameron's Avatar] is strange because the movie is among most technically sophisticated ever: it uses a crazy 2D and 3D camera, harnesses the most advanced computer animation techniques imaginable, and has apparently improved the state-of-the-art when it comes to cinema. But Avatar’s story argues that technology is bad. Humans destroyed their home world through environmental disaster and use military might to annihilate the locals and steal their resources." The question is two-fold: why have a technically sophisticated, anti-technical movie, and why are we drawn to it? Part of the answer lies in Neal Stephen's Turn On, Tune In, Veg Out.

Submission + - Worldwide cost of IT failure: $6.2 trillion (20adoptioncommunity.com)

Submitted by blognoggle on Sunday December 27, 2009 @11:12PM

blognoggle writes: Roger Sessions, a noted author and expert on complexity, developed a model for calculating the total global cost of IT failure. Roger describes his approach in a white paper titled, The IT Complexity Crisis: Danger and Opportunity. He concludes that IT failure costs the global economy a staggering $6.2 trillion per year.

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