Posted by Roblimo on Saturday November 27, @12:48PM
from the fading-fireball-of-the-big-bang dept.
mattorb writes "The New York Times [free reg.req.] has an interesting article about a recent cosmological experiment whose results rather strongly imply a flat (omega equals 1) universe. Basically, the authors measured the scale of small variations in the cosmic microwave background, which yields strong constraints on allowed cosmologies. The abstract from the preprint (off LANL astro-ph) is here. Caveats: this is a preprint -- meaning that it hasn't been refereed yet. Also, questions are always raised about the precision of such "angular power spectrum" measurements -- who knows if this result will hold up. But it's an interesting thing to talk about."

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Posted by CmdrTaco on Saturday November 27, @11:30AM
from the dusting-off-the-reviewers-cap dept.
As I'm sure many of you know I'm a big Computer Animation nut. And when pixar dusts off the gloves and releases a movie, I really have no option but to be there opening night. This time it proved to be very worth skipping out a half hour early to catch one of the best movies of the year. Click below to read the review.

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Ask Slashdot: Are BBS-Like Communities Dead?

Posted by Cliff on Saturday November 27, @10:41AM
from the as-the-electronic-frontier-evolves dept.
Fr05t asks: "Since the day the Internet became popular and the good old BBS's faded into the back ground, I myself have had a hard time finding the same kind of active community. Sure there’s Slashdot, BugTraq, and IRC, but for whatever reason it seems people remain private and keep to themselves without a who's online option, and a message feature. I do see other Slashdot members posting often, but there are allot more people that read the articles and have opinions that remain in the background. I guess my question is if anyone has found the same kind of thing as the old BBS's?" (More)

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Chernobyl Reactor Restarted, Claimed Safe for Y2K

Posted by Roblimo on Saturday November 27, @09:42AM
from the if-at-first-you-don't-succeed... dept.
Ydeologi writes "Usually when you hear 'Chernobyl' and 'Y2K' in the same sentence, it's because someone's using the infamous 1986 nuclear catastrophe as a metaphor to scale the predicted impact of Y2K. But here [MSNBC story], it's no metaphor. The Ukranians say they need money and they need electricity; this was their answer. Funny thing that Y2K concerns are preceding the more obvious ones -- say, uh, the reactor with the 'spotty' history."

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Intel Owns Patent on Distributed Computing

Posted by Roblimo on Saturday November 27, @05:57AM
from the patent-office-follies dept.
GnrcMan writes "Now here is something frightening: This patent describes a method of using an ISP subscriber's CPU cycles to process the ISP's data." As if Distributed.net, SETI@home, and other, similar projects hadn't been doing essentially the same thing all along, eh?

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redhat.com Redone

Posted by Justin on Saturday November 27, @02:36AM
from the redeux-part-two dept.
Anonymous Coward writes "Red Hat has re-layed-out the site yet again. Looks like an attempt at a portal, but only internal resources. IWNSM (it would not surprise me) if future versions of Red Hat had netscape and lynx's default home pages set to redhat.com :) " It looks quite a bit like Yahoo. The GeekToys section is a bit timely, too, if not a bit heavy on Nerf.

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Bruce Perens Discusses Lawsuit Against Corel (UPDATED)

Posted by Hemos on Friday November 26, @02:25PM
from the charge-of-the-light-brigade dept.
ac writes "It seems that Corel has made one mistake too many. Bruce Perens ^[?] is calling for a lawsuit against Corel on the behalf of Debian. The text of his message follows and should appear here soon. " Wow - check out the recent story regarding the 18 and older EULA. Update by RM: Bruce later backed off on the lawsuit threat. He reads Slashdot comments and takes them seriously, and he's a good dude at heart, okay?Update: 11/26 08:53 by H:And for all the people e-mailing me, mea culpa. Shoulda checked.

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Peering Into the Future

Posted by Hemos on Friday November 26, @01:41PM
from the anticipating-the-changes dept.
fRy hooked us up with a cool story on MSNBC (originally on Feed) about what we can anticipate coming in the future. Covering everything from nanotechnology ^[?] to toys, genetics to espionage, it's a fun read with loads of interviews with smart people.

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Pioneer to sell first recordable DVD decks

Posted by Hemos on Friday November 26, @12:15PM
from the get-ready-for-the-pirating dept.
Element5 writes "Netcenter's Tech News reports that Pioneer will be selling the first DVD players (not DVD-ROM drives) to be able to record up to six hours of programming to rewritable discs. Check out the story. Pricing is high, as expected: $2399 US for the unit, $28.79 per disc. " And watch closely, as the film industry gets a panicked look in their eyes. Update: 11/27 08:47 by H: Thanks to Jim Choate for the story that Panasonic has introduced DVD-RAM for only 700$US.

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