By Unknown Lamer from
Slashdot's memories-bring-diamonds-and-lasers department:
sciencehabit (1205606) writes
The world's largest laser [the National Ignition Facility], a machine that appeared as the warp core in 'Star Trek into Darkness', has attained a powerful result: It's squeezed diamond, the least compressible substance known, 50 million times harder than Earth's atmosphere presses down on us. ... As the researchers report online today in Nature, the x-ray assault nearly quadrupled the diamond's density. "That's a record," Smith [one of the researchers] says. "No one's compressed diamond to that extent before." The blast pulverized the diamond into dust, but before the mineral's destruction the scientists successfully measured its density ... For a billionth of a second, the diamond, which is normally 3.25 times denser than water, became ... 12.03 times denser than water. ... Scientists have speculated that diamond worlds may exist elsewhere. If a solar system arises with more carbon than oxygen, then carbon should soak up the oxygen by forming carbon monoxide, leaving excess carbon to create carbon planets—which, under pressure, become diamond worlds. Thus, Smith says, the new experiment will probe the nature of such planets.They are performing similar experiments with iron in an attempt to understand the properties of super-Earth cores.
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By Roblimo from
Slashdot's sometimes-you-meet-nice-people-without-looking-for-them department:
When Slashdot's Tim Lord went to
Texas Linux Fest, one of the people he met there was Robinson Tryon. He's a volunteer with LibreOffice, and in this conversation he gave us a nice look at what's going on these days with
LibreOffice and its parent organization,
The Document Foundation. (
Alternate Video Link)
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The Hacking of NASDAQ
Posted by News Fetcher on July 17 '14 at 10:00 AM
By Unknown Lamer from
Slashdot's tales-of-hacking-and-intrigue department:
puddingebola (2036796) writes
Businessweek has an account of the 2010 hacking of the NASDAQ exchange. From the article, "Intelligence and law enforcement agencies, under pressure to decipher a complex hack, struggled to provide an even moderately clear picture to policymakers. After months of work, there were still basic disagreements in different parts of government over who was behind the incident and why. 'We've seen a nation-state gain access to at least one of our stock exchanges, I'll put it that way, and it's not crystal clear what their final objective is,' says House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, a Republican from Michigan, who agreed to talk about the incident only in general terms because the details remain classified. 'The bad news of that equation is, I'm not sure you will really know until that final trigger is pulled. And you never want to get to that.'"Read Replies (0)
By Unknown Lamer from
Slashdot's can't-we-all-get-along department:
An anonymous reader writes
The Russian newswire service Interfax is reporting that a Malaysian passenger plane carrying 295 people was shot down with a Buk ground-to-air missile over Ukraine near the Russian border. The Associated Press cites an adviser to Ukraine's Interior Minister as the source. First reports are that it was mistaken for a Ukrainian AN-26.Malaysia airlines confirms
they lost contact with the plane (
last known position), but there's no confirmation it was shot down (yet). The Ukrainian government
accused Russia of shooting down a fighter jet in Ukrainian airspace last night. Reports indicate there are no survivors.
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By Unknown Lamer from
Slashdot's x11-will-outlast-us-all department:
An anonymous reader writes
The much anticipated Xorg Server 1.16 release is now available. The X.Org "Marionberry Pie" release features XWayland integration, GLAMOR support, systemd support, and many other features. XWayland support allows for legacy X11 support in Wayland environments via GL acceleration, GLAMOR provides generic 2D acceleration, non-PCI GPU device improvements, and countless other changes.The systemd integration finally allows the X server to run without root privileges, something in the works for a
very long time. The non-PCI device improvements mean System-on-a-Chip graphics will work more smoothly, auto-enumerating just like PCI graphics devices do. As covered
previously, GLAMOR (the pure OpenGL acceleration backend) has seen quite a bit of improvement, and now works with Xephyr and XWayland.
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By Unknown Lamer from
Slashdot's burning-the-platform department:
DW100 (2227906) writes
"Satya Nadella has taken an axe to Microsoft's 127,000-strong workforce by announcing a whopping 18,000 job cuts, including 12,500 from the recently integrated Nokia division. At least 13,000 jobs will go within the next six months."It's official, Ballmer's layoff record has been smashed. From the
email sent to employees: "The first step to building the right organization for our ambitions is to realign our workforce. With this in mind, we will begin to reduce the size of our overall workforce by up to 18,000 jobs in the next year. Of that total, our work toward synergies and strategic alignment on Nokia Devices and Services is expected to account for about 12,500 jobs, comprising both professional and factory workers. We are moving now to start reducing the first 13,000 positions, and the vast majority of employees whose jobs will be eliminated will be notified over the next six months."
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By samzenpus from
Slashdot's back-in-the-day department:
dcblogs (1096431) writes
"Apple and IBM, which just announced partnership to bring iOS and cloud services to enterprises, have helped each other before. IBM played a key role in turning the Macintosh into a successful hardware platform at a point when it — and the company itself — were struggling. Nearly 25 years ago, IBM was a part of an alliance that gave Apple access to PowerPC chips for Macintosh systems that were competitive, if not better performing in some benchmarks, than the processors Intel was producing at the time for Windows PCs. In 1991, Apple was looking for a RISC-based processor to replace the Motorola 68K it had been using in its Macintosh line. "The PCs of the era were definitely outperforming the Macintoshes that were based on the 68K," he said. "Apple was definitely behind the power, performance curve," said Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst at Insight 64. The PowerPC processor that emerged from that earlier pairing changed that. PowerPC processors were used in Macintoshes for more than a decade, until 2006, when Apple switched to Intel chips.Read Replies (0)