|
News Feeds |
|
Slashdot
|
News for nerds, stuff that matters
|
|
|
-
Google Turns On User-Tweakable Search Wiki
Barence writes "Google has launched a new service that allows users to tailor to their own search results. Called SearchWiki, the service allows Google account holders to move results up or off the rankings, or even add their own choice of site to the top of the search results. Google claims that any changes a user makes will only affect their results, and not those of fellow surfers, although it's difficult to believe that some of the feedback generated from the SearchWiki won't be used to fine tune the Google search algorithm. Is this a cunning way to encourage people to sign in while they search, thus providing Google with a richer set of data that can be mapped to specific user accounts?"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-
NVIDIA's $10K Tesla GPU-Based Personal Supercomputer
gupg writes "NVIDIA announced a new category of supercomputers — the Tesla Personal Supercomputer — a 4 TeraFLOPS desktop for under $10,000. This desktop machine has 4 of the Tesla C1060 computing processors. These GPUs have no graphics out and are used only for computing. Each Tesla GPU has 240 cores and delivers about 1 TeraFLOPS single precision and about 80 GigaFLOPS double-precision floating point performance. The CPU + GPU is programmed using C with added keywords using a parallel programming model called CUDA. The CUDA C compiler/development toolchain is free to download. There are tons of applications ported to CUDA including Mathematica, LabView, ANSYS Mechanical, and tons of scientific codes from molecular dynamics, quantum chemistry, and electromagnetics; they're listed on CUDA Zone."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-
Zimbra Desktop Vulnerable to Man-in-the-Middle Attack
tiffanydanica writes "For all the flack Mozilla gets about its new security warnings for https sites, at least it warns the user when a mismatch occurs. Sadly the new Yahoo! Zimbra Desktop (released in part to fix some security issues), doesn't bother validating the SSL certificate on the other side before sending along the username and password, making it vulnerable to a man-in-the-middle attack. This is certainly a step up from transmitting the information in the clear, since the attacker must switch from being passive to active, but with all of the DNS security problems, it would be fairly trivial for a malicious attacker to grab a large number of Yahoo! accounts (be it for phishing or spaming). Hopefully this issue will get fixed shortly, but for now Yahoo! Zimbra Desktop users may wish to use the webmail interface."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-
Scientists Add Emotions To Robotic Head
DeviceGuru writes "Claiming that service-class robots will one day be pervasive, researchers at the University of the West of England's Bristol Robotics Laboratory (BRL) have begun investigating ways to make robots seem more human. As part of a project to enhance robot/human relationships, BRL has created a robotic head that can exhibit emotions, based on both verbal and non-verbal cues. Check out the videos in the article — especially the slightly creepy one in which the robot contemplates its purpose and its relationship to its environment."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.

-
How to Deal With an Aging Brain?
An anonymous reader writes "I'm sure this is something all older Slashdotters are aware of: as I get older my once-sharp brain is, well, getting worse. In particular, I'm not able to remember things as well as I once did. As a geek my capacity in this area was always what defined me as a geek. Nowadays things seem to go in OK, but then leak out. A few weeks later I've mostly forgotten. So, I ask Slashdot: how do you cope with your mind getting older? What's your trick? Fish-oil? Brain Training on the DS? Exercise? Or just trying harder to remember things?"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.

|
|