Slashdot Mirror
Domain: kth.se
Stories and comments across the archive that link to kth.se.
Stories · 18
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Stephen Hawking Presents Theory On Getting Information Out of a Black Hole
An anonymous reader writes: Physicist Stephen Hawking claims to have figured out a way for information to leave a black hole. He presented his theory today at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. Scientists have struggled with the black hole information paradox for years, and Hawking thinks this new theory could be a solution. He said, "I propose that the information is stored not in the interior of the black hole as one might expect, but in its boundary, the event horizon." Put in layman's terms, "this jumbled return of information was like burning an encyclopedia: You wouldn't technically lose any information if you kept all of the ashes in one place, but you'd have a hard time looking up the capital of Minnesota." Information can leave the black hole via Hawking radiation, though it will be functionally useless. Hawking worked with Cambridge's Malcolm Perry and Harvard's Andrew Stromberg on this theory. -
Biodegradable Fibers As Strong As Steel Made From Wood Cellulose
Zothecula writes "A team of researchers working at Stockholm's KTH Royal Institute of Technology claim to have developed a way to make cellulose fibers stronger than steel on a strength-to-weight basis. In what is touted as a world first, the team from the institute's Wallenberg Wood Science Center claim that the new fiber could be used as a biodegradable replacement for many filament materials made today from imperishable substances such as fiberglass, plastic, and metal. And all this from a substance that requires only water, wood cellulose, and common table salt to create it. The full academic paper is available from Nature Communications." -
2009 ACM Programming Contest Results and Webcast
Jon Larsson writes "Yesterday, the 33rd World Finals of the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest were held at KTH — The Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. World Champions, for the second consecutive year, are the Saint Petersburg State University of IT, Mechanics and Optics. They won in competition with 99 other teams from all six continents — the best of the over 7000 teams participating in the qualifying rounds during the past half year. The full results can be found here and the contest problem set is available here (PDF). For the first time ever, the whole event was broadcast live, both on the web and on national TV in Sweden. The broadcast was produced by media students of KTH and the Lillehammer University College in Norway. The webcast in its entirety (over 7 hours) can be viewed here." -
2009 ACM Programming Contest Results and Webcast
Jon Larsson writes "Yesterday, the 33rd World Finals of the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest were held at KTH — The Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. World Champions, for the second consecutive year, are the Saint Petersburg State University of IT, Mechanics and Optics. They won in competition with 99 other teams from all six continents — the best of the over 7000 teams participating in the qualifying rounds during the past half year. The full results can be found here and the contest problem set is available here (PDF). For the first time ever, the whole event was broadcast live, both on the web and on national TV in Sweden. The broadcast was produced by media students of KTH and the Lillehammer University College in Norway. The webcast in its entirety (over 7 hours) can be viewed here." -
GPL v3 Coming Out in 2007?
gentoo1337 writes "Eben Moglen of the FSF speaks out in this ZDNet article, noting that GPL v3 may be publicly drafted in early 2006, and in force one year later. The process is very sensitive (noting concerns of forking in the Linux world), but Eben Moglen is optimistic: 'When it's all over, people are going to say, "All that talking for just that much change?" [...] We will do no harm. If we think (some change) may have any unintended consequences, we will not recommend making it.' Controversies aside, there is some good news -- Richard Stallman aims to 'lower barriers that today prevent the mixing of software covered by the GPL and other licenses.' The earlier Slashdot discussion contains complementary info about the intentions of FSF." -
Wellcome Trust to Require Open-Access Publishing
Lars Arvestad writes "The Wellcome Trust, one of the worlds largest research funding agencies, will require results from research funded by the Trust to be available in public repositories six months after publication. The Trust's policy advisor Robert Terry writes in an article in PLoS Biology that the Trust plans to start its own public access repository where authors are expected to deposit their published works. The repository is modeled after NLM's PubMed Central and is called UKPMC. Terry's article also mentions that a recent Wellcome report found that an author-pays business model has the opportunity for a saving of 30 % on publishing costs alone compared to reader-pays. This contrasts the recent IEEE report (Slashdot story last week) where it was claimed that some universities will face higher costs using author-pays." -
New Material for Spintronics Discovered
Cpt_Corelli writes "Researchers at Uppsala University and the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology have discovered a new material with properties suitable for creating spintronic devices at room temperature. Previously this was only believed to be available at very low temperatures. The material is a combination of zinc oxide and manganite. The breakthrough is the cover item of the October issue of Nature Materials. If this new material proves viable for production there is an enormous potential for smaller and faster processors. Could this be the beginning of a new era in processor development?" -
A New Bible For Programmers?
KZigurs writes "The wonders of online publishing... If you are ready to take on a heroic task and read thru all 976 pages of Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming (draft) (pdf file, 3MB, intro here) written by Peter Van Roy and Seif Haridi you won't regret it. Just finished reading it and I feel like I have read the Bible. And who knows? It has the potential, and since current de facto books about programming are aging with increasing speed it very well may become one. (Please read the intro to get more detailed outlook at topics covered)
Anyone before heard about Oz?" -
KTH Game Awards Grande Finale
CoderByBirth writes "The winners of the KTH Game Awards, a game programming competition for students held in Sweden were announced yesterday at KTH (The Royal Institute Of Technology) in Stockholm. 25 teams participated in the competition, which was divided into two parts, where the first part was to create a Technical Design Document (TDD) and a Game Design Document (GDD) and the second was to complete a working game demo or prototype. The student submissions were reviewed by a jury consisting of employees from DICE (creators of Battlefield 1942, Pinball Dreams) and Starbreeze Studios (Outforce, Enclave) as well as a representative from KTH. You can download the top three submissions here." -
OpenBSD 3.2 Available
fredrikv writes "Right on time, the files defining OpenBSD 3.2 have moved away from "snapshots" to the 3.2 directory of the OpenBSD mirrors. It is well known as the world's most secure operating system and now sports chroot'd Apache, fewer suid binaries, cool pictures for xdm-logins, a brilliant "antispoof" packet filtering rule and as usual includes lots of small updates and fixes. The files are there. What are you waiting for?" -
Alternative Art Media?
Anonymous Reader asks: "I'm writing an article on how creative uses of previously unexploited media are changing the way we think about art. My current examples include Telesymphony, Blinkenlights, and the KTH lasershow. Do Slashdotters know of any other projects that should find their place in my list?" -
Send Morse Code Over Stockholm By Laser
bigmac writes "KTH, Royal Institute of technology is celebrating 175 year anniv by making a very spectacular laser show. A green laser sent from the bottom of an old reactor building 30 meters below ground. The beam is then reflected over the city from the schools clock tower. And yes, you can send your own laser-morse messages through their homepage!" Here's an image to chew on. -
The Shakespeare Programming Language
Erik Tjernlund writes: "Oh, where art thou my lovely new programming language? Stop fiddling around with those perl magnets and use a real poetic computer language: The Shakespeare Programming Language. Not a compiler, but it converts to C. Cool 100+ line Hello World example. Amazing what CompSci-students can create when they really should do real work." -
8 Legged Robotic Micro Ant from Sweden
Steinar Bang writes " Swedish researchers at Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan, are creating micro-robots and micro-motion systems as micromachined 3D silicon structures. They have created an 8-legged robotic micro ant able to carry 50 times its own weight on its back. " Cool looking 'bots - if you like this type of thing check out the bionic rats. -
8 Legged Robotic Micro Ant from Sweden
Steinar Bang writes " Swedish researchers at Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan, are creating micro-robots and micro-motion systems as micromachined 3D silicon structures. They have created an 8-legged robotic micro ant able to carry 50 times its own weight on its back. " Cool looking 'bots - if you like this type of thing check out the bionic rats. -
Ask Slashdot: Distributed Filesystems for Linux?
Ledge Kindred asks: "I am looking for a distributed filesystem to run on my Linux boxes at home. I have several and most of the "extra" space on each one is "going to waste" - I'd like to be able to combine it all into a single network-able filesystem. How?" Click below for more."So far the two (three?) solutions that had the most promise are: AFS or Arla, and Coda.
The reasons against: AFS is commercial and I don't want to pay $15,000 in licenses just for a convenience to me. Arla still appears to be extremely alpha quality, even for a Linux hacker used to seeing major parts of his kernel labeled "alpha" or "beta". I had Coda up and running for a couple of days before I ran into a fairly severe flaw in the fundamental design that showed it to be inappropriate for what I want it to do. (But Coda is still the coolest thing since individually-wrapped cheese slices, and if you don't need to worry about that little problem, it's cooler than sex.)
I've found lots of references to the "GFS" project which is not at all what I want, and here and there mentions of other projects such as "DFS", "xFS" and a distributed filesystem for Beowulf clusters but no further details, URLs or most importantly - code - could I dig up.
I don't need RAID, redundancy, failover, or anything like that. I only need to take these extra machines on my home network and make all their extra disk space look like a single volume on the network. Support for Linux as a client is, obviously, essential, but I also have Windows, BeOS, *BSD and Solaris machines on my network, so clients for those would be appreciated but not necessary. Since this is just for me at home, (yes, I've got all that crap on my network at home - so I'm a little crazy) I'd rather stick with free software. Is there anything that can do this? "
If not, then it sounds like it would be an interesting project to work on. The ability to be able to harness the spare disk space across a private network can only be a good thing.
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IBM to Disable serial number in Pentium III
Taz writes "IBM will disable the serial number feature before shipping their PIII. " The question is who will turn it back on? Without asking first? -
Quicky Avalanche
Nate writes "Ed Di Cristofaro of HardWire has announced he will extend his hardware testing to Linux along with the usual Windows testing. "It's quickly spreading in popularity and has the potential to fall right behind Windows and into the #2 spot for desktop operating system users." Click below to read on.Martin Hepworth writes "Looks like SUN are bowing the M$'s 'user-friendly' installation with a deal with Install Shield Software. "
Johan Walles writes "I dunno whether "scoop" is the correct term for this, but anyway: slashdot.org is on tenth place of the site rankings for the "Computers/Internet" category on Sixdegrees link Forty more votes would put Slashdot on third place (before www.linux.org), and 170 votes would put it first (above www.icq.com and www.cnet.com). So if all sixdegrees users reading /. would go "slashdot-effect" the poll, a whole bunch of new readers might very well see the light and come to /. for their daily updates :-)."
James S. Baughn writes "Seeing as how there aren't any good Linux humor sites, I've created Humorix: "All Linux Humor. All Copied Mottos. All the Time."
Exile57 writes "The music industry is trying to end the proliferation of the pirate music scene. Apparently, bootleg CD's are a booming market in other countries. On top of the CD's being pressed illegally, the industry is also a bit miffed at the amount of pirate MP3 sites on the Internet. Here's the story as told by CNN."
Andrew Dalke writes "Python 1.0 was just released It is an implementation of Python (my favorite language :) for the Java virtual machine. With it you get the full power of a very high level dynamic language able to access all of the Java classes, including awt, java beans, swing, jdbc and corba. It includes a binary version of OROMatcher to implement perl5 style regular expressions. I worked with the most recent beta version and didn't come across any bugs. The only problem I had was the startup time, which was about two seconds on my Indigo2 compared to the fraction of a second for the C implementation, but much of that was the JVM starting up. We also needed to sidegrade to Netscape's 4.05 AWT 1.1 Preview release to develop applets. The biggest advantage was the interactive nature of the implementation where I could test new code or examine the behaviour of different Java classes without recompiling. Overall I estimate that it took me about a quarter of the time to implement my project in JPython instead of straight Java. *advocacy on* I can predict people will comment on two things about Python as a language, so let me preemptively address them here: 1) Python isn't as flexible as Perl -- sure, but it is a lot cleaner in general and easier to do OO programming. I rarely notice the lack of the more baroque Perl control features since Python's exception handling and ease of creating helper classes simplify tasks like finalizing resource handling during error conditions. Python's real flexibility is integrating new functionality like Java classes, COM objects or database support in a straight-forward, modular fashion. More to the point of this announcement, you can't get a Perl applet running on top of the JVM. 2) Python uses indentation and newlines for scoping and statement end instead of {} and ; -- most people find it enjoyable once they get used to it (and when using an editor like emacs that understands the language syntax). It is a suprisingly nice feeling to be several blocks in at the end of a function definition and only having to press 'enter' to finish instead of ';enter}enter}enter}' to fulfil the requirements of the parser. *advocacy off* "
Robert Macaulay writes "There is a new CScene up: Issue 5"
