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Japan

Robo-Chefs and Fashion-Bots On Show In Tokyo 35

Posted by timothy from the someone-will-need-to-nurse-the-elderly dept.
avishere writes "The International Robot Exhibition kicked off this week in Tokyo, unveiling the latest whirring and buzzing inventions from 192 companies and 64 organizations from at home and abroad — and bringing humanity another step closer to irrelevance. Among the humanoid cavalcade was a prototype robo-chef, showing off its cooking and cutting skills, along with robots to play with your children, model clothes, and search for disaster victims. There was also one made almost exclusively of cardboard. The exhibition — which opened with a human-like robot called Nextage cutting the ribbon — runs until Saturday."
Microsoft

Microsoft-Backed Firm Says IBM Is Anticompetitive 174

Posted by timothy from the ibm's-suffered-under-the-antitrust-whip-before dept.
BBCWatcher writes "Microsoft has long claimed that the mainframe is dead, slain by the company's Windows monopoly. Yet, apparently without any mirror nearby, Microsoft is now complaining through the Microsoft-funded Computer & Communications Industry Association that not only are mainframes not dead, but IBM is so anticompetitive that governments should intervene in the hyper-competitive server market. The Wall Street Journal reports that Microsoft is worried that the trend toward cloud computing is introducing competition to the Windows franchise, favoring better-positioned companies including IBM and Cisco. HP now talks about almost nothing but the IBM mainframe, with no Tukwila CPUs to sell until 2010. The global recession is encouraging more mainframe adoption as businesses slash IT costs, dominated by labor costs, and improve business execution. In 2008, IBM mainframe revenues rose 12.5% even whilst mainframe prices fell. (IBM shipped 25% more mainframe capacity than in 2007. Other server sales reports are not so good.) IBM mainframes can run multiple operating systems concurrently, including Linux and, more recently, OpenSolaris."
Power

Vicariously Tour the National Ignition Facility 97

Posted by timothy from the semi-disturbing-place-name dept.
Dave Bullock writes "The National Ignition Facility (NIF) has been discussed several times over the years on Slashdot and just recently fired all of its 192 lasers. LLNL scientists predict NIF will attain ignition (controlled nuclear explosion) in 2010. For now, take a look at the photos I shot of NIF for Wired.com when I toured it earlier this year."
Businesses

Paul Wilmott Wants To Retrain and Reform Wall Street's Quants 198

Posted by timothy from the reductionism-has-its-downsides dept.
theodp writes "What if an aeronautics engineer couldn't reconcile his elegant design for a state-of-the-art jumbo jet with Newton's second law of motion and decided to tweak the equation to fit his design? In a way, Newsweek reports, this is what's happened in quantitative finance, which is in desperate need of reform. And 49-year-old Oxford-trained mathematician Paul Wilmott — arguably the most influential quant today — thinks he knows where to start. With his CQF program, Wilmott is out to save the quants from themselves and the rest of us from their future destruction. 'We need to get back to testing models rather than revering them,' says Wilmott. 'That's hard work, but this idea that there are these great principles governing finance and that correlations can just be plucked out of the air is totally false.'"

Comment Re:Weird advice (Score 1) 445

by und0 (#26111409) Attached to: The Economist Suggests Linux For Netbooks
Kernel 2.6.28 will solve majority of issues so, when adopted, all distributions will get (nearly) full support out of the box. Right now with 2.6.28rc7 sound works correctly when resuming from S3 (mic, headphones and speakers), ath5 wireless kernel module only lacks led activity support versus the madwifi one, and IIRC, they fixed the erratic behaviour of the two SD cards readers. Webcam is supported fine from 2.6.26 if I'm not wrong.

Only the fan control is currently dodgy. According to Matthew Garrett, acerfand could be prone to race conditions and in the worst case scenario the HW could be damaged (overheating)...
Graphics

Silverlight On the Way To Linux 475

Posted by timothy from the howl-at-the-moonlight dept.
Afforess writes "For the past two years Microsoft and Novell have been working on the 'Moonlight' project. It is a runtime library for websites that run Silverlight. It should allow PCs running Linux to view sites that use Siverlight. Betanews reports 'In the next stage of what has turned out to be a more successful project than even its creators envisioned, the public beta of Moonlight — a runtime library for Linux supporting sites that expect Silverlight — is expected within days.' Moonlight 2.0 is already in the works."
Education

Perimeter Institute Launches Modern Physics Resource 30

Posted by Soulskill from the how-things-work dept.
An anonymous reader writes "You can find six new online sources of info about hot topics in modern physics at the 'What We Research' outreach page of Perimeter Institute. The info includes text, graphics and online presentations dealing with Cosmology, Superstring Theory, Quantum Gravity, Quantum Foundations, Quantum Information and Particle Physics. The resource section at the bottom of each page recommends a wealth of interesting online lectures by some famous scientists. PI is an independent, nonprofit scientific research and outreach organization."
Supercomputing

Greenspan Tells Congress Bad Data Hurt Wall Street 496

Posted by timothy from the but-all-this-looted-cash-won't-do-much-harm dept.
CWmike writes "Former Reserve Bank chairman Alan Greenspan has long praised technology as a tool to limit risks in financial markets. In 2005, he said better risk scoring by high-performance computing made it possible for lenders to extend credit to subprime borrowers. But today Greenspan told Congress that the data fed into financial systems was often a case of garbage in, garbage out. Christopher Cox, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, told the committee that bad code led the credit rating agencies to give AAA ratings to mortgage-backed securities that didn't deserve them. Explaining in his testimony what failed, Cox noted a 2004 decision to rely on the computer models for assessing risks — a decision that essentially outsourced regulatory duties to Wall Street firms themselves."
Medicine

Scientists Erase Specific Memories In Mice 320

Posted by samzenpus from the where's-the-cheese dept.
Ostracus writes "It sounds like science fiction, but scientists say it might one day be possible to erase undesirable memories from the brain, selectively and safely. After exposing mice to emotionally powerful stimuli, such as a mild shock to their paws, the scientists then observed how well or poorly the animals subsequently recalled the particular trauma as their brain's expression of CaMKII was manipulated up and down. When the brain was made to overproduce CaMKII at the exact moment the mouse was prodded to retrieve the traumatic memory, the memory wasn't just blocked, it appeared to be fully erased."
Media

MediaDefender's Parent Company Joins P2P Market 40

Posted by Soulskill from the playing-both-sides dept.
An anonymous reader writes with news that ArtistDirect, the company who acquired MediaDefender, has launched another company called PiCast for the purpose of P2P video distribution. The reader says: "This is a strange twist for a company which last year set up a video-sharing site called Miivi in an attempt to entrap users uploading copyrighted content, and was caught launching a DoS attack against Revision3, which we discussed earlier this year."
Earth

Tsunami Invisibility Cloak 172

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the just-deflect-those-waves-to-the-poor-town-next-door dept.
BuzzSkyline writes "New Scientist is reporting on a lab-scale experiment that may lead to a tsunami invisibility cloak, which could protect islands, open-ocean platforms and even coastlines from dangerous waves by effectively making them invisible to tsunamis. The technology is based on the same sorts of negative index of refraction ideas that some physicists are exploring as they try to make an optical invisibility cloak, except that it works with water instead of light."
Microsoft

Microsoft Investing In "Open Source" Lab In Philippines 95

Posted by timothy from the damned-publically-if-they-do-or-don't dept.
jaromil writes "Following up its cozying up to OSCON, now Microsoft is launching its first 'open source' lab in the Philippines, paying for a huge media coverage. From the press release it seems they are also advertising the issue of 'interoperability' to outnumber one of the strongest features of open source in Asia: recycling old computers. Any suggestions for good stories about MS interoperability so far? :)"

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