CodeFixer writes "Herman Goldstine, who as a mathematician working at the Ballistic Research Lab convinced the US Army to fund the development of the ENIAC and EDVAC, has died at the age of 90. His obituary can be found at the New York Times and descriptions of his involvement in the development of the ENIAC can be found at the Army Research Laboratory."

An anonymous reader writes "It's 1998 all over again gamers. A major release from ID software, and an expensive hotrod video card all in one year. However, rather than Quake and the Voodoo2 SLI, it's Doom3 and Nvidia SLI. Hardware Analysis has the scoop, 'Exact performance figures are not yet available, but Nvidia's SLI concept has already been shown behind closed doors by one of the companies working with Nvidia on the SLI implementation. On early driver revisions which only offered non-optimized dynamic load-balancing algorithms their SLI configuration performed 77% faster than a single graphics card. However Nvidia has told us that prospective performance numbers should show a performance increase closer to 90% over that of a single graphics card. There are a few things that need to be taken into account however when you're considering buying an SLI configuration. First off you'll need a workstation motherboard featuring two PCI-E-x16 slots which will also use the more expensive Intel Xeon processors. Secondly you'll need two identical, same brand and type, PCI-E GeForce 6800 graphics cards.'"

Ant writes "MSNBC has a Newsweek article on Warren Lieberfarb, the father of DVD, transformed the movie business. And yet his reward was he was fired."

phycoman writes "900,000 HP and Compaq laptops have potential memory issues and are being recalled. The RAM chips from four manufacturers can possibly lead to system corruption and lockups. The affected notebooks are Compaq Evo Notebook N610c, Compaq Evo Notebook N610v, Compaq Evo Notebook N620c, Compaq Evo Notebook N800c, Compaq Evo Notebook N800v, Compaq Evo Notebook N800w, Compaq Evo Notebook N1000c, Compaq Evo Notebook N1000v, Compaq Presario 1500, Compaq Presario 2800, Compaq Presario x1000, Compaq Presario x1200, HP Compaq Business Notebook nx7000 and HP Pavilion zt3000. As a result, HP has created a website whick allows users to download a program to test for faulty RAM chips."

PSUdaemon writes "Over at Kernel Trap they have an announcment that Red Hat has released GFS under the GPL and offer it through RHN. This could potentially be a very substantial offering from Red Hat."

RuiFerreira writes "Artificial Intelligence and Robotics researchers meet in Portugal from 27th June to 5th July in the 8th Robocup Football World Championships. RoboCup is an international research and education initiative. Its goal is to foster artificial intelligence and robotics research by providing a standard problem where a wide range of technologies can be examined and integrated. The RoboCup Federation proposed the ultimate goal of the RoboCup Initiative to be stated as follows: 'By 2050, a team of fully autonomous humanoid robot soccer players shall win a soccer game, complying with the official FIFA rules, against the winner of the most recent World Cup of Human Soccer.' Robocup has an exciting programme including RoboCup Symposium, the RoboCup Soccer (humanoid, middle-size, small-size, 4-legged, simulation), the RoboCup Rescue (real and simulated robots) and the RoboCup Junior (dance, soccer and rescue) competitions. The robotic competitions will take place at Pavilion 4 of Lisbon Industry Fair located at the Parque das Nações, the site of the 1998 World Exposition (EXPO'98)."

VD writes "Intel Corp., world's largest chip maker, has made a serious mistake, which led the chip giant to recall its recently launched 925 and 915 chipset based motherboards. Intel reported the problem to be with the ICH6 and requested that motherboard makers recall their motherboards from the channel. The chip maker has agreed to pay compensation to motherboard makers for the losses." There's also a Reuters story as well.

sciguy125 asks: "I switched to Linux a few months ago and the biggest problem that I've had is with my printer. I've got a Canon S520 and Red Hat 9. It prints painfully slow. If I want to print word documents that are more than 5 pages, it's faster to reboot into Windows and print from there. I've scoured the Internet and found that many people are having this problem, but nobody has a satisfactory solution. The most common suggestion is to get a faster computer, thinking that GhostScript is running slow. I'm fairly sure that isn't my problem because the processor is only at about half load when printing. I'm not exactly sure how wide spread this problem is, but I do know that there is at least a decent sized handful of people struggling with it. At first, I was considering dropping Linux because this printing problem is a serious issue with me, but now I just leave a good chunk of my printing until after 2am." Has anyone run into the problem before? What could make a print job spool at unusually slow rates to the printer?

pa3gvr writes "This weekend many Amateur Radio operators (HAMs) throughout the US and Canada will take their equipment to public parks, campgrounds and Emergency Operation Centers. With all the coverage that BPL has gotten lately it might be interesting to see what this Amateur Radio thing actually is. Field Day is setup as an exercise for HAMs to test their readiness and ability to operate under less than ideal (emergency) conditions. Besides the training and exercise aspect, this is also a social event. Visitors are welcome to have a look and maybe even operate some of the equipment. K4FAU, Florida Atlantic University ARC and Boca Raton ARC will be setting up their Field Day station on the Boca Raton, FL FAU campus."

XopherMV cuts-and-pastes from Wired: "In an article from Wired, 'Consider the progress of just the past 15 years. There are now robots that can get around on two legs, participate in simple conversations, and manipulate objects in rudimentary ways. Of course, we don't yet have a bot that can navigate downtown Manhattan, tie its shoelaces, or even tell a chair from a desk. MIT's Cynthia Breazeal holds out hope that within five years, robots will cross a critical threshold, becoming partners rather than tools - in other words, we'll have friends, not appliances.'" Reader ptorrone adds: "In Los Angeles, CA at the Century Plaza Hotel for the 4Site conference, our favorite robot vacuum/military supplier, iRobot, showed off the tactical mobile robot! The 'Tactical mobile Robot' has its own brochure and site: www.packbot.com. The rad thing about this platform is its skateboard design, where it appears to support various plug-in modules. Here are some photos of the packbot!"

Dozix007 writes "IEEE has approved a new wireless security protocol dubbed 802.11i, intended to finally provide sufficient security for wireless connections that users don't need to rely on alternate security layers. The new specification works by using AES encryption in the transceiver itself, encrypting data directly at the level just above the actual radio pulses themselves. That makes it transparent for applications sending data through the radio, so legacy programs running on new 802.11i-compliant hardware will automatically get the benefits of the new protocol without the need for modification."

levin writes "According to an article over at EETimes, magnetoresistive RAM chips are getting a little more practical. Infineon Technologies released info on a new 16M MRAM component on Tuesday and the read and write cycle times of this chip make it 'competitive with established DRAM.' How long before nonvolatile memory becomes the solution to crash-prone software rather than better programming?"

An anonymous reader writes "When you think of Toshiba, you might think of notebooks, but fuel cells? Never. Well, at least not until up to now. Toshiba claims to have made the world's smallest fuel cell to date. The direct methanol fuel cell can fit inside of the smallest of gadgets, ranging from MP3 Players to portal DVD Players. Most fuel cells require a pump that can mix the methanol and water, and a fan to help cool the pump. This makes installing fuel cells in smaller items out of the question. However, Toshiba's new fuel cell does not require a fan or a pump to operate, which means it's much smaller in size, and can be installed in almost any small device."

An anonymous reader writes "VIA is shipping an ultra-low profile mini-ITX mainboard suitable for flat TVs, LCD-panel computers, and other vertically challenged devices. The Epia MS uses a minimalistic I/O backplate and SODIMM memory for a slimmer form-factor, and is VIA's first mini-ITX board available with a fanless 1GHz Eden embedded processor. The board has several processor options, but they all include the PadLock Ace hardware RNG and AES encrypt/decrypt features that are now supported by the Linux and BSD kernels."

Agent Green writes "It's definitely not the first time someone has been sued over a standard, but Wi-LAN is in the process of taking Cisco to court over the OFDM encoding which it claims to have patents for - the standards in question apply to 802.11a/g. Interestingly, this case is being brought in Canada, where the defense needs to prove its case. Might be time to join and expand the patent busting brigade?"

Emmanuel Goldstein writes "We've gone through all of our submissions, and selected nearly 70 talks and panels for the next HOPE conference in New York City, to be held from July 9th-11th. We have Steve Wozniak, Kevin Mitnick, and Jello Biafra as keynotes, and many more interesting talks and seminars, plus a round the clock hacker movie room and a lockpicking workshop." The official website explains: " This is a conference by, for, and about hackers on as many levels as we can come up with, ranging from the highly technical to the down to earth, from computers to phones, from serious to hilarious. And our doors are open to anyone interested in what the hacker world has to say." We previously ran a story on this conference a couple of months back, before full speaker details were available.

femto writes "The Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that the Australian Computer Museum (archive.org) is to close due to lack of funds. It is the largest computer collection in Australia. Failing an offer of a permanent home, they need storage space or money to pay for it. They also need some way to sort the collection."

robmueller asks: "Like most of you here on Slashdot, I've got my entire music collection on my PC, and would like to share it around the house to at least my lounge room stereo. While the AirPort Express is still a month away (mid July), and the lack of a remote control seems like a problem for a stereo away from the computer, there's a number of other devices out there already; D-Link DSM-320, Squeeze Box, Actiontec, Virtuoso MC-500 (uh... looks like the Actiontec), and a standard 'we hooked it up for 5 minutes' review of several more devices here. However, I want to hear from people who have actually used one, and what they liked, didn't like, ease of use, audio only, is audio & video useful? etc. So who's using one of these things?"

mmonkey writes "With the seemingly small amount of summer we get here in the UK, the last thing I want to be doing on a sunny day is mow the lawn. So I started thinking "surely a light-ish lawnmower could 'gain' a couple of motors, and suddenly be computer-controlled?". Then I started thinking about stuff like obstacle avoidance, optimum path planning, guidance system, how to get pretty-looking stripes, and I realised that it's actually a potentially complex (read: fun) thing to do. So, have any Slashdotters done this before? Did you modify an existing lawnmower or build a whole new one from scratch? What motors work best? For that matter, what type of mower works best? I know you can already get these, but that detracts from both my geek-drive and my wallet, both of which I'd prefer to keep as full as possible."

An anonymous reader writes "The Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, California will host its third annual Maxgames videogame tournament on Friday, July 23. Finalists on several of the games will duke it out for the championship on the museum's Giant Dome Screen [82 feet in diameter, and covering 12,000 square feet] and its 13,000 watt, 44 speaker sound system. The tournament will also feature two of the creators of the well-known Red vs. Blue machinima series, who will talk about the series during the day, and then show episodes on the Giant Dome Screen during the evening. Bungie will also provide a hi-res version of their nine-minute trailer for the upcoming Halo 2." Plus, any tournament which has a Super Monkey Ball 2 Monkey Target competition is a friend of ours.