Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Awesome, I shall buy one in a year (Score 4, Informative) 114

by mc6809e (#48880859) Attached to: NVIDIA Launches New Midrange Maxwell-Based GeForce GTX 960 Graphics Card

Personally I love the GTX 750. It gives the biggest bang-for-the-buck and running at about 55 watts max or so it usually doesn't require a larger power supply. It can run completely off motherboard power going to a 16-lane 75 watt PCIe slot.

It's the perfect card for rescuing old systems from obsolescence, IMO.

The only trouble you might have is finding a single-slot-wide card if your system doesn't have room for a double slot card, though in my case I found a double-slot card that I could modify to fit in a single-slot of an old Core 2 Duo E8500 system.

And heat doesn't seem to be a problem at all, even with the mod I did. The low power of the card means less heat. Even if heat becomes a problem, the card is capable of slowly clocking itself down, though I've never seen that yet, even running Furmark.

Comment Re:Crusty Hardware (Score 1) 189

by operagost (#48875951) Attached to: User Plea Means EISA Support Not Removed From Linux

I had an AMD 486DX-40 system with two VLB slots. I had both VLB graphics and multi-I/O. Before the Pentium era, a motherboard didn't usually have all the basic I/O on it, so you had to buy a card with serial, parallel, and usually an IDE controller on it. Anyway, the second most annoying thing with VLB is that it ran at your FSB speed, so if you had a 25 MHz FSB you could have three cards, 33 MHz you could have two. I had 40, so I was only supposed to have one. It was surprisingly stable, but when I had the occasional video glitch I understood why it happened and could deal. It got better when I dumped the Computer Shopper white-box special for a DX2/80 with a decent ASUS board.

The most annoying thing with VLB being, of course, that every card was almost full-length because the VLB part sat behind the ISA slot. They popped out all the time.

Comment Re:Yep it is a scam (Score 1) 667

by mc6809e (#48872909) Attached to: US Senate Set To Vote On Whether Climate Change Is a Hoax

Sub freezing temperatures aren't necessary.

In the UK, for example, for every one degree drop in temperature below 18C, deaths in the UK go up 1.5%. The risk of heart attack and stroke seem to increase with dropping temperatures.

And in the USA, the mortality rate is highest in January.

Vietnam shows a similar pattern.

Comment Re:yeah... (Score 1) 208

by ScentCone (#48863051) Attached to: US Army Wants Weapon To Destroy Drone Swarms

What happens when the drones are self-controlled and their internals hardened against RF interference?

How is that self-controlled navigation working - image recognition based on ground features? Because otherwise, they're navigating using GPS or the equivalent. Interfere with that by saturating them with the same freqs, and they'll have no idea where they are. Sure some sort of inertial navigation system might be viable, but probably not with the precision needed to get some small drone as close to its specific target as such small devices would need to be (presuming they're not just spraying bio-hazards and the like over a football stadium or some such).

Submission + - Holder's end to federal property seizure greatly exaggerated

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: A few days ago there was a /. story titled Eric Holder Severely Limits Civil Forfeiture. A close look at Eric Holder’s announcement on Friday that he was ending the use of federal law to seize private property turns out to be greatly exaggerated.

Holder’s order applies only to “adoption,” which happens when a state or local agency seizes property on its own and then asks the Justice Department to pursue forfeiture under federal law. “Over the last six years,” the DOJ says in the press release announcing Holder’s new policy, “adoptions accounted for roughly three percent of the value of forfeitures in the Department of Justice Asset Forfeiture Program.” By comparison, the program’s reports to Congress indicate that “equitable sharing” payments to state and local agencies accounted for about 22 percent of total deposits during those six years. That means adoptions, which the DOJ says represented about 3 percent of deposits, accounted for less than 14 percent of equitable sharing. In other words, something like 86 percent of the loot that state and local law enforcement agencies receive through federal forfeitures will be unaffected by Holder’s new policy.

The story also notes how the press, especially the Washington Post which led with this story, teamed up with Holder to overstate the impact Holder’s order would have.

Submission + - Interior of burnt Herculaneum scroll read for first time 1

Submitted by Solandri
Solandri writes: When Mt. Vesuvius erupted in A.D. 79, it destroyed a library of classical works in Herculaneum. The papyrus scrolls weren't incinerated, but were instead carbonized by the hot gases. The resulting black carbon cylinders have mostly withstood attempts to read their contents since their discovery. Earlier attempts to unfurl the scrolls yielded some readable material, but were judged too destructive. Researchers decided to wait for newer technology to be invented that could read the scrolls without unrolling them.

Now, a team led by Dr Vito Mocella from the National Research Council's Institute for Microelectronics and Microsystems (CNR-IMM) in Naples, Italy has managed to read individual letters inside one of the scrolls. Using a form of x-ray phase contrast tomography, they were able to ascertain the height difference (about 0.1mm) between the ink of the letters and the papyrus fibers which they sat upon. Due to the fibrous nature of the papyrus and the carbon-based ink, regular spectral and chemical analysis had thus far been unable to distinguish the ink from the paper. Further complicating the work, the scrolls are not in neat cylinders, but squashed and ruffled as the hot gases vaporized water in the papyrus and distorted the paper.

Full paper in Nature Communications (paywalled).

Slashdot Top Deals

Real Programs don't use shared text. Otherwise, how can they use functions for scratch space after they are finished calling them?

Close