Slashdot Mirror

Lucas123 writes: A DARPA-funded project has successfully developed a .50 caliber sniper round capable of maneuvering during flight in order to remain on target. The self-guiding EXACTO bullet, as it's being called, is optically guided by a laser that must remain on target for the bullet to track. The EXACTO round is capable of accurately tracking a target up to 1.2 miles away, DARPA stated. The technology, which is being developed by Teledyne Scientific and Imaging, is targeted at helping snipers remain at longer distances from targets as well as improving night shots. While DARPA's tracking bullet is the first to use a standard, small-arms caliber round, in 2012 Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) successfully demonstrated a prototype self-guided bullet that was more like like a four-inch dart.

coondoggie writes "Researchers with the Sandia National Laboratory have tied together 300,000 virtual Android-based devices in an effort to study the security and reliability of large smartphone networks. The Android project, dubbed MegaDroid, is carefully insulated from other networks at the Labs and the outside world, but can be built up into a realistic computing environment, the researchers stated."

An anonymous reader writes "An achievement that would have extraordinary energy and defense implications might be near at Sandia National Laboratories. The lab is testing a concept called MagLIF (Magnetized Liner Inertial Fusion), which uses magnetic fields and laser pre-heating in the quest for energetic fusion. A paper by Sandia researchers that was accepted for publication states that the Z-pinch driven MagLIF fusion could reach 'high-gain' fusion conditions, where the fusion energy released greatly exceeds (by more than 1,000 times) the energy supplied to the fuel."

An anonymous reader writes "Sandia Research Laboratory believes it has come up with a much more efficient solution than heatsink-fan cooling a CPU that simply combines the heatsink and fan components into a single unit. What you effectively get is a spinning heatsink. The new design is called the Sandia Cooler. It spins at just 2,000 RPM and sits a thousandth of an inch above the processor. Sandia claim this setup is extremely efficient at drawing heat away from the chip, in the order of 30x more efficient than your typical heatsink-fan setup. The Sandia Cooler works by using a hydrodynamic air bearing. What that means is when it spins up the cooler actually becomes self supporting and floats above the chip (hence the thousandth of an inch clearance). Cool air is drawn down the center of the cooler and then ejected at the edges of the fins taking the heat with it. And as the whole unit spins, you aren't going to get dust build up (ever)."

New submitter jpwilliams writes "Gizmag reports that researchers at Sandia National Laboratories have tested a 10-centimeter bullet that can be fired from a smooth-bore rifle to hit a laser-marked target one mile away. The bullet 'includes an optical sensor in the nose to detect a laser beam on a target. The sensor sends information to guidance and control electronics that use an algorithm in an eight-bit central processing unit to command electromagnetic actuators. These actuators steer tiny fins that guide the bullet to the target.' Interestingly, accuracy improves with targets that are further away, because 'the bullet's motions settle the longer it is in flight.'"

An anonymous reader writes "There's a fundamental flaw with fan-and-heatsink cooling systems: no matter how hard the fan blows, a boundary layer of motionless, highly-insulating air remains on the heatsink. You can increase the size of the heatsink and you can blow more air, but ultimately the boundary layer prevents the system from being efficient. But what if you did away with the fan? What if the heatsink itself rotated? Well, believe it or not, rotating the heat exchanger obliterates the boundary layer, removes the need for a fan, and it's so efficient that it can operate at low and very quiet speeds. That's exactly what the Air Bearing Heat Exchanger, developed by Jeff Koplow of the Sandia National Laboratories, has developed. It's even intrinsically immune to the build up of dust and detritus!"

CWmike writes "The Smithsonian Museum of American History on Tuesday added a number of robotic technologies to its collection, including what may have been one of the smallest robots in the world. The robot known as Marv, short for Mini Autonomous Robot Vehicle, is just one cubic inch in size. It was developed in 1996 and 1997 at the Department of Energy's Sandia National Lab. Its footprint is not much larger than a penny, and it was cobbled together from commercially available parts, including a microprocessor, that moved on wheels. Marv is one of about 100 robotic artifacts in the collection, which includes a large collection of other technology-related artifacts. Barry Spletzer, a retired engineer and scientist at Sandia, worked on Marv, an effort that began 'almost on a whim.' The robots merit a place at the museum because there are more than 1 million industrial robots in use today, said Carlene Stephens, a curator. While most of those robots perform rudimentary tasks, the sheer number is evidence that 'robots are now among us,' she said. For More info on the institute's National Robotics Week plans, see the Lemelson Center site."

Ponca City, We love you writes "The NY Times has the story of researchers at Sandia National Laboratories creating what is in effect a vast digital petri dish able to hold one million operating systems at once in an effort to study the behavior of botnets. Sandia scientist Ron Minnich, the inventor of LinuxBIOS, and his colleague Don Rudish have converted a Dell supercomputer to simulate a mini-Internet of one million computers. The researchers say they hope to be able to infect their digital petri dish with a botnet and then gather data on how the system behaves. 'When a forest is on fire you can fly over it, but with a cyber-attack you have no clear idea of what it looks like,' says Minnich. 'It's an extremely difficult task to get a global picture.' The Dell Thunderbird supercomputer, named MegaTux, has 4,480 Intel microprocessors running Linux virtual machines with Wine, making it possible to run 1 million copies of a Windows environment without paying licensing fees to Microsoft. MegaTux is an example of a new kind of computational science, in which computers are used to simulate scientific instruments that were once used in physical world laboratories. In the past, the researchers said, no one has tried to program a computer to simulate more than tens of thousands of operating systems."

Dan100 brings us an announcement that Sandia and Oak Ridge National Laboratories are setting their sights on an exaflop supercomputer. Researchers from the two laboratories jointly launched the Institute for Advanced Architectures to facilitate development. One of the problems they hope to solve is how to provide each core of each processor with enough data so that cycles aren't going to waste. "The idea behind the institute — under consideration for a year and a half prior to its opening — is 'to close critical gaps between theoretical peak performance and actual performance on current supercomputers,' says Sandia project lead Sudip Dosanjh. 'We believe this can be done by developing novel and innovative computer architectures.' The institute is funded in FY08 by congressional mandate at $7.4 million."

malachiorion writes "The Tunguska event, an explosion on June 30, 1908, cleared an 800-sq.-mi. swath of Siberian forest. Was it a UFO crash? An alien weapons test? Now, Sandia National Laboratories has released its own explanation for the Tunguska event. Using supercomputers to create a 3D simulation of the explosion, the Department of Energy-funded nuke lab has determined that Tunguska was, indeed, the explosion of a relatively small asteroid. The simulation videos are well worth checking out — they show a fireball slamming into the earth from the asteroid's air burst. The researchers caution that we should be keeping watch for many more small, potentially earth-impacting asteroids than we are currently tracking."

Sandia Labs has announced a new milestone in Linear Transformer Driver technology that aims to solve one of the biggest obstacles to practical fusion reactors. Getting the current needed to "spark" a burst of fusion is doable; getting a constant series of sparks going to create a continuous chain of fusion bursts has never been achieved. The LTD, which allows the Sandia Z machine to fire once every 10.2 seconds, makes it look achievable. The press release (which has been picked up in a few places, but with no further analysis) says that practical fusion power could now be 20 years off.

An anonymous reader writes "A robotics hobbyist has created what he claims is the world's smallest autonomous robot. The robot is half the volume of the robots produced by Sandia National Labs in 2001, moves quite a bit faster, and was made using techniques and supplies accessible to anyone." While Sandia Labs has had some time to improve on their original designs, it's still pretty cool to see what one can do at home as well.

jfleck writes with news that researchers at Sandia National Laboratories have released a paper on a technique they have developed for passively fingerprinting wireless device drivers (PDF). The researchers comment, "This technique is valuable to an attacker wishing to conduct reconnaissance against a potential target so that he may launch a driver-specific exploit." They sketch the loose language in the 802.11 standard describing the way client devices should probe for access points. Because probing is not spelled out in any detail, the authors say, "...implementing active scanning within wireless drivers [is] a poorly guided task. This has led to the development of many drivers that perform probing using slightly different techniques. By characterizing these implementation-dependent probing algorithms, we are able to passively identify the wireless driver employed by a device." This technique beats Wi-Fi Fingerprints by a country mile.

Roland Piquepaille writes "A new U.S. research center, the National Center for Design of Biomimetic Nanoconductors, has been opened to promote new ideas in the field of nanomedicine. For example, a team of researchers at Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) is developing a nano-size battery to be implanted in the eye to power artificial retina. But this center will also design and build 'nanomedical devices based on natural and synthetic ion transporters -- proteins that control ion motion across the membranes of every living cell.'"

team99parody writes "An 'Active Denial System' weapon that 'fires a 95GHz microwave beam at rioters to cause heating and intolerable pain in less than five seconds' is scheduled for service in Iraq in 2006 according to CNET and the print version of New Scientist. It was recently tested on people playing the part of rioters at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico where they asked the subjects to remove glass and contact lenses to protect their eyes. Hopefully real rioters will get the same courtesy. Police and the Marines are working on portable versions. Sandia Labs also has a nice writeup on this system with pictures of smaller versions of the weapon."

emtboy9 writes "Yahoo News is reporting that scientists at Sandia National Labs have created a magnetic pulse gun (rail gun) that can accelerate small aluminum plates at 34 kilometers per second, faster than the Earth travels through space. The accelerated plates strike a target after traveling only five millimeters, or less than a quarter-inch. The impact generates a shock wave -- in some cases, reaching 15 million times atmospheric pressure -- that passes through the target material turning matter into various states almost instantly (solids into liquids, liquids into gas, and even gas into plasma)."

pankaj_kumar writes "'Tools are an aid to productivity, but you only get the benefits of the tool by using it for the right task; hammers bang in nails and screwdrivers are for screws.' This quote from chapter 9 ("Scripting") from Alan Monnox's Rapid J2EE Development applies not only to the choice of the programming language but to the whole array of software development activities thoroughly and eloquently covered in the book." Read on for the rest of Kumar's review. Rapid J2EE Development: An Adaptive Foundation for Enterprise Applications author Alan Monnox pages 395 publisher Prentice Hall PTR rating 8 reviewer Pankaj Kumar ISBN 0131472208 summary A telescopic view of tools, techniques and processes for boosting Java software development productivity

"Using a Hole-Hawg for the job of a homeowners drill can have deleterious effect on productivity by causing serious harm to the health of the inexperienced operator." Just identifying a tool for a task is not enough. You should also be able to match the demands of the task to the characteristics of the tool and your ability to handle the tool. The good news is that this book passes even this stringent test, suggesting very practical and hands-on approach for choosing the tool with right characteristics for the specific demands of the task.

The ever-growing body of literature on development best practices, the burgeoning ranks of supporting tools and the accompanying debates on their relative merits can easily overwhelm most practitioners. Worst, a large chunk of the developer community may never spend the time and effort and miss the opportunity to take advantage of them altogether. Rapid J2EE Development offers an easy path to such Java developers by bringing together a number development techniques, best practices and description of supporting open source tools in a single book.

Whether you are a confused Java developer, overwhelmed project leader or plain lost manager, this book has something for you. Wondering about how to design complicated class hierarchies to encapsulate the ever-changing business rules? Worry not, follow the advice of Chapter 10, "Working to Rule" and use Jess, an open-source Expert System Shell. Don't have the time or motivation to download and play with it? No problem. The coverage includes not only an overview and discussion on when and where to use it but also presents a sample session and illustrative code snippets.

If you're confused with all the hype around AOP (Aspect Oriented Programming) and uncertain about where to start, start with the chapter "Aspect Oriented Programming," which introduces the notion of crosscutting concerns in any large software project, presents the AOP terminology to nail down these concerns and associated actions, and covers AspectJ and AspectWerkz to apply AOP to your projects. The brief description of these tools may not answer each and every question, but the example- and code-driven approach will certainly make you feel a lot more comfortable and motivate to explore further.

Not able to decide whether to use XP (Extreme Programming) or RUP (Rational Unified Process) for your next project involving four different development teams in three different continents interacting with as many customer groups? The Chapter "Embracing Adaptive Methods" outlines an approach to making such methodology decisions, though it is not very obvious from the chapter title. (Of course, you will have to read the sections that talk about when XP works best and when the rigors of RUP start paying off to make your decision.) And although there is not much discussion around mixing elements of development methodologies or adapting them in the middle of an ongoing project, the author's account of a real case study does exactly this.

These are just a few examples. Other topics covered include use of UML for modeling, code generators, Model-Driven Architectures, Java-based scripting languages, Object Relational mapping, build and test automation, and use of the right IDE plug-ins for J2EE projects. Among the development tools, all the usual suspects are there: Apache Ant, Eclipse, Jython, JUnit, HttpUnit, JMeter. In fact, I also found description of tools that were somewhat new to me: MyEclipse, AndroMDA, Middlegen and few others.

I found the book to be highly readable, insightful and loaded with the right kind of details. For example, the information on debugging with Eclipse explains how to configure a J2EE program for remote debugging, and how to debug a Web application using JSPs, something that is quite hard to do without the right tools and the right methods. Even the UML primer, with its well-chosen examples, is a good refresher.

It is easy to get superficial when covering a lot of ground: a common pitfall for authors of books on new technologies is that they themselves get caught up in the hype and lose perspective, but Alan somehow manages to keep the extraneous stuff out and deliver what a hands-on professional looks for. He tempers his zeal with practical realities and conveys the same to the reader with anecdotes and discussions with colorful stories such as the Cargo Cult Software trap and Christmas Puppy Syndrome.

The book manages to introduce a number of the very best open source Java tools available to boost productivity in a very natural manner and with the appropriate context, and it succeeds in giving a "feel" for the tool by presenting hands-on sessions. Most other such efforts that I am aware of usually end up being a drab list of tools with descriptions taken from home pages.

Given the number of topics and tools covered, it would be unrealistic to expect in-depth coverage of everything. What this book does is to create the right context, introduce the appropriate topics, and generate sufficient motivation to explore further. Fair enough. In fact, I believe this is the best approach for any book in this "Google era" -- the book should tell what you should look for and let Google do the rest.

So, is there anything not to be liked about the book? Well, I was a little disappointed to not find my favorite BeanShell among various Java scripting alternatives. Another thing I noticed is that the coverage of system manageability issues, especially in a book with J2EE in its title, was quite conspicuous by its absence. Also, some of the points, especially those around use of best practices and development techniques, could be made more emphatically with help of focused and concrete anecdotes.

Of course, no book can cover everything, especially on topics that are open-ended by nature. Overall, I think it does justice to the subject matter and is worth reading by anyone even remotely connected to the business of creating, maintaining or operating Java/J2EE software.

You can purchase Rapid J2EE Development from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

anzha writes "Cray's XT-3 has shipped. Using AMD's Opteron processor, it scales to a total of 30,580 CPUs. The starting price is $2 million for a 200 processor system. One of its strongest advantages over the std linux cluster is that it has an excellent interconnect built by Cray. Sandia National Labs and Oak Ridge National Labs are among the very first customers. Read more here."

Vexar writes "Memorable for its Back-to-the-Future room of electric arcs in 1998, Sandia Labs' Z-Machine is getting $61.7 Million in new funding. In addition to more physics textbook-worthy photos, the scientists at this lab intend to hit the all-important, fusion-ready 2.0 million degrees C."

Vexar writes "Memorable for its Back-to-the-Future room of electric arcs in 1998, Sandia Labs' Z-Machine is getting $61.7 Million in new funding. In addition to more physics textbook-worthy photos, the scientists at this lab intend to hit the all-important, fusion-ready 2.0 million degrees C."

Vexar writes "Memorable for its Back-to-the-Future room of electric arcs in 1998, Sandia Labs' Z-Machine is getting $61.7 Million in new funding. In addition to more physics textbook-worthy photos, the scientists at this lab intend to hit the all-important, fusion-ready 2.0 million degrees C."

dread minerva writes "This week, Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories publicly reported that sensitive material stored on removable data storage devices was missing." In Sandia's case, "According to the Las Vegas Sun, this 'prompted the lab to halt all classified work Thursday while officials conduct a wall-to-wall inventory of sensitive data.' Sandia also reported that a 'computer floppy disk was missing.' However, according to the Albuquerque Journal, 'lab officials said they don't believe it contains any weapons information or any other information that could harm national security,' only admitting that the material on the disk was classified. Due to these latest events, LANL has shut down all work on classified projects as of Friday." (Read more below.) Update: 07/17 21:21 GMT by T : A correction -- research was shut down only at LANL (not, as I mistakenly claimed, at Sandia) -- and an update: Sandia's missing disk was recovered.

"These snafus have led the government to open up the labs to defense-contracting bids for the first time in their 60+ year history (until now the labs have been run by UC-Berkeley). As NPR reported on Friday, the researchers at the labs were upset by this move, as they are afraid of the labs losing their academic nature. Perhaps the best question to ask in this situation is why these labs are still using removable data storage devices to store sensitive information."

(Other institutions, including The University of Texas system, are also angling for a share of the lab's management.)

Roland Piquepaille writes "At Sandia National Laboratories (SNL), a data mining and visualization software suite developed in the last two years is now able to extract information from many sources of data and to return 3D images as results. In Sandia's intelligence lab converts business data into 3-D images, the New Mexico Business Weekly reports that Sandia's Information Visualization Lab is able to search structured documents, such as scientific journals, or unstructured ones, such as the Web or an intranet. Since the lab has been established five months ago, this software has already been used to determine the potential of several partnerships with SNL. Other firms, such as Lockheed Martin, also are starting to use the lab. Let's hope that SNL releases this software as open source. It should be fun to use it. For more details and pictures, please read this overview."

Our Man In Redmond writes "OK, yeah, it sounds weird, but it just might work. Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories have come up with the idea of attaching genetically-modified yeast to the back of a cockroach - or a cockroach-sized robot - and using the yeast to detect chemical or biological agents. The story's in today's Seattle Post-Intelligencer. They point out some other possible nifty uses for the yeast-based technology, like detecting diseases by having a patient blow on a piece of paper 'printed' with the yeast."

Roland Piquepaille writes "At Sandia National Laboratories, new "smart" machines can accurately infer your intents and help you to take better decisions or avoid mistakes. They could change in a near future how we interact with computers, according to this news release. The team who developed the concept associated cognitive psychologists and robotics researchers. The Sandia team thinks that "it's entirely possible that these cognitive machines could be incorporated into most computer systems produced within 10 years." This summary contains more details, including a photo of a "Sandia software developer operating a simulation trainer while a cognitive model of the software runs simultaneously.""

D3 writes "This report on a solar power tower (pdf) looks extremely interesting. Maybe one day we can have international power lines where all the countries with lots of sunshine provide power to the rest of the world? How cool would that be?" The NY Times has a good article on solar power in Japan.

robosmall writes "Sandia Labs has successfully demostrated the emission of neutrons (a side effect of thermonuclear fusion) from a BB-sized capsule of deuterium using using their venerable Z-Machine (eye-candy!). With this achievement they enter the race to create sustained fusion reactions."

robosmall writes "Sandia Labs has successfully demostrated the emission of neutrons (a side effect of thermonuclear fusion) from a BB-sized capsule of deuterium using using their venerable Z-Machine (eye-candy!). With this achievement they enter the race to create sustained fusion reactions."

mckennabluedot.com writes "Laptops aren't truly portable until you can stand to sit with one on your lap for more than 30 minutes. Sandia National Labs has developed small copper 'wicks' to transport methanol--and waste heat--from one area of a computer to another, where it can be dispersed more efficiently, comfortably and compactly than with heat sinks. The technology is being licensed to an undisclosed startup." So this stuff (mentioned here previously) might soon make it to a lap near you.

cworley submitted - several times - this well-linked submission about a slightly boring topic - fast computers. "Top500.org has just released its latest list of the world's fastest supercomputers (updated twice yearly). For the first time, Linux Beowulf clusters have joined the teraFLOP club, with six new clusters breaking the teraFLOP barrier. Two Linux clusters now rank in the Top 10: Lawrence Livermore's "MCR" (built by Linux NetworX ) ranks #5 achieving 5.694 teraFLOP/s, and Forecast Systems Laboratory's "Jet" (built by HPTi) ranks #8 reaching 3.337 TeraFLOP/s. Other Linux clusters surpassing the teraFLOP/s barrier include: LSU's "SuperMike" at #17 (from Atipa ), the University at Buffalo at #22 and Sandia National Lab at #32 (both from Dell ), an Itanium cluster for British Petroleum Houston at #42 (from HP ), and Argonne National Labs at #46 (from Linux NetworX ) reached just over the one teraFLOP/s mark with 361 processors. In the previous Top500 list compiled last June, the fastest Intel based Netfinity 1024 processor clusters from IBM were sub-teraFLOP/s and the University of Heidelberg's AMD based "HELICS" cluster (built by Megware ) held the top tux rank at #35 with 825 GFLOP/s."

HorsePunchKid writes "According to an article on CNN (SNL version), ancient meteorites may have glanced off of the surface and shattered, causing rings around the Earth. These rings, which may have persisted for hundreds of thousands of years, could have had a profound effect on the climate in tropical regions, where the rings would block out light from the Sun. Still rather speculative, but the theory may help explain some patterns observed in the geological record. The idea has been around for a while, and some scientists are skeptical."

sydlexius writes "A press release from Sandia tells of the discovery of niobium HPA, a chemical that bonds to viruses. Many scientists have been interested in the properties of various HPAs (heteropolyanions), however this is the first such case that is stable in basic and neutral solutions. The Albuquerque Tribune covers the story here. For subscribers of Science Magazine, you can find an article in this month's issue (Abstract)."

anzha writes "It seems Cray is alive and kicking at least. They might even be making a come back after its very rough time as a part of SGI. The big news? Cray seems to have won the Red Storm contract - Sandia's newest supercomputer procurement - from Sandia National Labs. Check out the press release here. I'd say that this is probably an SV2, but the press release is a bit scant on details."

macnigel writes "DOE tries to find a good warning sign for the nuclear waste dump out in Nevada. This is one of those scary yet true things our government actually does; research into finding what exactly can be interpreted as "dangerous" 10,000 years from now." I was sure we had run a story about this before, but I don't see it in the archives. The report on how to mark the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (complete version in pdf 19.5Mb) makes chilling, yet somehow inspiring reading, and IMHO is much less deserving of mockery than the Salon author makes it out to be.

coldfire writes: "At LISA2001 there was a neat presentation on a PC104 based mini-parallel computer. It seems that the how-to has now been posted, for the world to behold." From last year or not, this has some great pictures.

An Anonymous Coward writes "A new experimental microscopic tungsten lattice can increase the efficiency of an incandescent electric bulb from 5 percent to greater than 60 percent. This is done by converting waste heat into visible light. "

DanielRavenNest writes: "Sandia Labs has built a tiny bicycle chain type drive out of silicon. This allows one micromechanical motor to drive multiple devices scattered about a chip."

NanotechNews.com writes: "It seems that researchers (One of those is Norm Bartelt) at the U.S. Department of Energy?s Sandia National Laboratory have created a new way to represent self-assembling nanostructures (The bottom up approach of nanotechnology). They can record in real time, real space (real time video) the nanostructures, which self-assemble and transform. They used a low-energy electron microscope (LEEM). Furthermore the core of the news is: "Theorists long have believed that competing attractive and repulsive inter-atomic interactions can lead to the spontaneous formation of ordered patterns in widely varying chemical and physical systems. Potentially, such patterns could be used as templates for nanostructure fabrications.""

schauba writes: "Cipherwar has an article describing Sandia National Laboratories' new 10-foot by 13-foot, 20-million-pixel screen. The screen was created to allow scientists to view extremely complicated systems without sacrificing detail. The images are created through a parallel imaging system using 64 computers to generate the output. This makes my 17" monitor suddenly seem so inadequate." You can also view the same text with pretty pictures on Sandia's site.

SEWilco writes "Sandia National Laboratories has released its "Cplant" massively parallel processing software. This is related to the software used in their ASCI Red supercomputer, and eliminates several scalability problems to allow hundreds of nodes for algorithms which can't be parallelized for Beowulf-type clusters. This is now number 2 on the TOP500 supercomputer list. The press release refers to "licensing terms", but the license is the GPL. We discussed this in a Linux clusters discussion and several earlier reports as ASCI Red grew."

SEWilco writes "Sandia National Laboratories has released its "Cplant" massively parallel processing software. This is related to the software used in their ASCI Red supercomputer, and eliminates several scalability problems to allow hundreds of nodes for algorithms which can't be parallelized for Beowulf-type clusters. This is now number 2 on the TOP500 supercomputer list. The press release refers to "licensing terms", but the license is the GPL. We discussed this in a Linux clusters discussion and several earlier reports as ASCI Red grew."

SEWilco writes "Sandia National Laboratories has released its "Cplant" massively parallel processing software. This is related to the software used in their ASCI Red supercomputer, and eliminates several scalability problems to allow hundreds of nodes for algorithms which can't be parallelized for Beowulf-type clusters. This is now number 2 on the TOP500 supercomputer list. The press release refers to "licensing terms", but the license is the GPL. We discussed this in a Linux clusters discussion and several earlier reports as ASCI Red grew."

"Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories have used their Z Accelerator, a magnetic accelerator used in equations of state research, to accelerate pellets to speeds of about 20 km/s (about twenty times faster than a high-powered rifle bullet). Full story is here." Uses projected for this technology include simulating the impact of space junk, and, Yes, as the core of a hyper-velocity weapon.

justin sane writes: "The NY Times has an article about the one of the tiniest functioning robots to date.[Note: free reg. req. ^[?] -- t.] They faced numerous problems and build the robots layer by layer with photolithography on expoxy compounds. The microprocessor is raw (i.e. without a package to save on size). The batteries are the biggest part by far (not surprisingly). There is an MPEG of one in action as it's speed 20 in/min velocity but alas it just looked like a photo album on my M$ player--still the photos are cool. No word if they are working on a port of Embedded Linux that can run the 8k memory space though. That would be my next step, then ... Python ;-)"

An anonymous reader sent in linkage about itty bitty research robots. Less then a quarter inch cubed, and includes a camera, microphone, and cute little treads. Includes cheesy picture of the robot turning on a dime. I guess if I had a few million of them, they could clean my living room or something, but for now this looks like pure research and not much of anything useful.

Fact-o-matic writes: " Compaq, government weapons facility Sandia National Laboratories and genetics researcher Celera Genomics are teaming up to build a petaflop computer -- one that will process 1,000 trillion operations per second. To listen to an audio playback of today's press conference announcing the project, Celera has set up a phone-in recording: call (800) 642-1687, and enter the conference ID: 818790 You can read the joint press release or the Compaq press release"

Effugas writes: "Thank Memepool for pointing everyone towards The LED Museum, an absolute geek haven if there ever was one. The Museum archives, tests, and describes the multitude of LED types out there, from Ultraviolet to Turquoise to Infrared--and, most amazingly, true full color LEDs! Apparently, I wasn't the only tech drooling over the possibilities that these devices could be put to use towards: Color Kinetics threw 75 of 'em into a spotlight can and added a surprisingly versatile digital controller with external interfaces. The result: A 16.7 Million Color Programmable Spotlight, for $500US." This is an incredible site; I look forward to when the full color LEDs (and that spotlight - Yow!) are a lot cheaper. And unaccountably, Effugas has linked that "A" to something awful.

mindpixel writes: "Sandia National Laboratories is reporting the demonstration of the first UV microcavity laser which could be used to replace gas-filled fluorescent tubes in home and commercial lighting applications. Successful penetration of the lighting market by this and LED technology by 2025 "should translate [globally] into cost savings of $100 billion a year, power generation capacity reductions of 120 gigawatts, and carbon emission reductions of approximately 350 million tons per year (assuming that all the savings come from coal-fired plants)."

"

Effugas writes: "Thank Memepool for pointing everyone towards The LED Museum, an absolute geek haven if there ever was one. The Museum archives, tests, and describes the multitude of LED types out there, from Ultraviolet to Turquoise to Infrared--and, most amazingly, true full color LEDs! Apparently, I wasn't the only tech drooling over the possibilities that these devices could be put to use towards: Color Kinetics threw 75 of 'em into a spotlight can and added a surprisingly versatile digital controller with external interfaces. The result: A 16.7 Million Color Programmable Spotlight, for $500US." This is an incredible site; I look forward to when the full color LEDs (and that spotlight - Yow!) are a lot cheaper. And unaccountably, Effugas has linked that "A" to something awful.

mindpixel writes: "Sandia National Laboratories is reporting the demonstration of the first UV microcavity laser which could be used to replace gas-filled fluorescent tubes in home and commercial lighting applications. Successful penetration of the lighting market by this and LED technology by 2025 "should translate [globally] into cost savings of $100 billion a year, power generation capacity reductions of 120 gigawatts, and carbon emission reductions of approximately 350 million tons per year (assuming that all the savings come from coal-fired plants)."

"

Imagine a novelist, trapped in a nightmarish world of credit cards and micropayments, facing devilish odds and the belligerent stares of publishers everywhere ... picture a team of hackers brazen enough to break into dozens of secure government sites without incurring a single lawsuit ... scream in terror at the thought of mutant penguin-kangaroo hybrids swimming deviously onto our shores ...

Revenge of the naysayers' naysayers: Just yesterday, jamie sallied forth with the theory that Stephen King was setting himself up for disappointment by expecting enough paying customers for his new online book to justify the experiment.

jheinen writes, though, "According to MSNBC, of the 41,000 downloads for the first installment so far, 32,000 (~78%) have already paid via credit card. Kinda shoots to hell the theory that people won't pay."

[Jamie adds: I stand by my prediction that "Stephen King is never going to have to publish the end of his novel." I'd love to see him succeed, but I just don't think so this time around. We'll see in September!]

Red Five, I'm going in. You may recall the story a little while ago about a distributed anti-cracking bot at Sandia National Laboratory. Rest assured, those clever folks don't confine themselves to practicing only one side of the ol' thrust-and-feint.

In fact, leb writes: "Over the past two years, a group at Sandia National Laboratories known informally as the Red Team has, at customer invitation, either successfully invaded or devised successful mock attacks on 35 out of 35 information systems at various sites, along with their associated security technologies. Their work - challenged only by a new style of defense, also developed at Sandia, called an "intelligent agent" - demonstrates that competent outsiders can hack into almost all networked computers as presently conformed no matter how well guarded, say spokespeople for the group, formally known as the Information Design Assurance Red Team or IDART. Check out their site here."

Stir, leave plot overnight to thicken. vjlen writes: "Now it sounds like corinthians.com is just another cybersquatting case. From an article in USA Today: 'But the case is not as black-and-white as it seems, says Dave Fogelson, a spokesman for the team, which recently put up its own site in Brazil. Fogelson says the arbitrator had to consider several factors, including the fact that Sallen did not use the site for Bible quotes until after he contacted the team to talk about selling the name, which suggests his main motive was profit.'"

Or ... or ... or ... we'll strike! stattouk writes "The BBC has a story on a court case currently happening in France over whether Yahoo France can be held responsible for people being able to access auctions of Nazi memorabilia. The courts say that even though fr.yahoo.com has blocked access, the fact that www.yahoo.com can still be used to get them amounts to no action by Yahoo." Asking Yahoo! to block Internet auctions in the first place seemed rather stretchy; now it seems that Yahoo! is supposed to police the entire world.

Penguins do come from that hemisphere, after all ... Tsujigiri writes "To follow up a previous story on Slashdot about the Australian InstallFest 2000, Fairfax IT is running this story about the recently held (well, July the 15th) Adelaide InstallFest 2000 and its "unexpected surge in interest". Quite successfull all round. Congratulations to all involved, and good luck to the rest of the Australian Install Season. (For anyone who'd like to see some pictures, go here)"

If there's an "install season" down there, one questions leaps to mind: Is there a limit on those things?

tgw writes: "Beyond 2000 is reporting that Sandia National Laboratories has created a unique type of bot that can defend against cracking attacks and viruses. The bot 'runs on multiple computers in a network and depending on circumstances the separate copies of the agent can act alone or together as a single, distributed program. The [bots] across the network constantly compare notes to determine if any unusual requests or commands have been received from external or internal sources.'" A cool-sounding project, to be sure -- but how much control is too much to cede to the intelligent agents?