jskora - Slashdot User

Submission + - Flapping NAV Performs Controlled Hovering Flight (businesswire.com) 1

Submitted by

Anonymous Coward

on Wednesday July 01, 2009 @10:41AM

Anonymous Coward writes: "AeroVironment, Inc. was awarded a Phase II contract extension in April from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to design and build a flying prototype for the Nano Air Vehicle (NAV) program. As part of this program AV has accomplished a technical milestone never before achieved: the controlled hovering flight of an air vehicle system with two flapping wings that carries its own energy source and uses only the flapping wings for propulsion and control. Two wings for propulsion and control, nothing else. Video at http://www.avav.com/uas/adc/nano/"

Submission + - Emulated PC enables Linux desktop in your browser! (ox.ac.uk) 1

Submitted by

Ianopolous

on Wednesday July 01, 2009 @05:24AM

Ianopolous writes: "Classic DOOM and DSL Linux Desktop inside your Java-enabled browser! The latest JPC, the fast 100% java x86 PC emulator, is now available online at http://www-jpc.physics.ox.ac.uk with online demos and downloads. JPC is open source and is the most secure way of running x86 software ever — 2 layers (applet sandbox, JPC sandbox) of independently validated security make it the world's most secure means of isolating x86 software. Visit the website to try out some classic games and play around with Linux all within your web browser — refresh = reboot!"

Submission + - New Pattern Found in Prime Numbers 1

Submitted by

stephen.schaubach

on Sunday May 10, 2009 @04:43AM

stephen.schaubach writes: "Spanish Mathematicians have discovered a new pattern in primes that surprisingly has gone unnoticed. "Besides providing insight into the nature of primes, the finding could also have applications in areas such as fraud detection and stock market analysis." Bueno! "

Comment Trademarks != (Copyright || DRM) (Score 4, Informative) 226

by jskora on Sunday May 10, 2009 @01:29AM (#27894251) Attached to: Trademarks Considered Harmful To Open Source

DRM and copyright protect stuff, technology or data or ideas. Trademark, on the other hand protects a name, an identity.

Kleenex has not been the only brand of facial tissues for a very long time, the name is protected but not the concept. RedHat and CentOS, as already mentioned, are a perfect example of this working, the name RedHat is protected but the open source code is not.

Brand means more in some cases and than in others, as consumers and techies are at times very brand loyal. But when things become commodity items, consumers look less at brand than function, need, and appeal.

Submission + - Masters or not? 2

Submitted by mx12 on Sunday May 10, 2009 @01:01AM

mx12 writes: With the semester finishing up, I have been thinking about my education future. I am currently an undergrad in computer engineering and I am thinking about getting my masters. I have a year left in school, and most of my professors seem to think that getting a masters is a great idea, but I wanted to hear from people out in the working world. If I could get my masters paid for by the lab I work in, is a masters in computer engineering better than two years of experience at a company?

Thanks everyone!

Zombie Macs Launch DoS Attack 757

Posted by timothy on Thursday April 16, 2009 @07:50PM from the but-wait-you-told-me dept.

Cludge writes "ZDNet has a story (and several related articles) about how Symantec has discovered evidence of an all-Mac based botnet that is actively involved in a DOS attack. Apparently, security on the exploited Macs (call them iBots?) was compromised when unwary users bit-torrented pirated copies of iWork 09 and Photoshop CS4 that contained malware. From the article: 'They describe this as the "first real attempt to create a Mac botnet" and note that the zombie Macs are already being used for nefarious purposes.'"

Judge Rules Fox Has Copyright Claim To Watchmen 262

Posted by timothy on Thursday December 25, 2008 @08:44PM from the there-are-ways-of-telling dept.

fermion writes "According to the NYT, a judge has decided that Fox owns the copyright to Watchmen, not Warner. Is this an example of copyright law becoming so complex that companies can abuse the court system to prevent competition, or just extreme incompetence by Warner? In the current business environment, either explanation is believable. Yet it is unbelievable that seasoned producers would spend hundreds of millions of dollars to create a movie that they can't even release. It seems the judge didn't want to bring this to a jury, and maybe daring Warner to appeal, or Fox to settle." The article says that Fox acquired movie rights to the Watchmen story in the late 1980s, but budget disputes and personnel changes have muddied the waters; Wikipedia has a bit more on the "development hell" which has plagued the film project.

Amazon 1-Click Lawyers Make USPTO Work Xmas Eve 117

Posted by timothy on Thursday December 25, 2008 @07:05PM from the hey-those-guys-are-there-by-choice dept.

theodp writes "In a move that would do pre-makeover Ebenezer proud, Amazon.com's 1-Click lawyers put the USPTO to work on Christmas Eve. On Dec. 24th, the USPTO acknowledged receipt of yet another round of paperwork submitted by Amazon's high-priced legal muscle, the latest salvo in Amazon's 3-year battle to fend off a patent reexamination triggered by the do-it-yourself legal effort of actor Peter Calveley. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' 1-Click patent is also under attack on another front — on Dec. 23rd, the USPTO received $810 from Amazon's attorneys together with a request that the agency invalidate Patent Examiner Mark A. Fadok's final rejection of 1-Click patent claims on the grounds of obviousness. On the bright side, patent clerks — unlike Bob Cratchit — get the day after Christmas off!"

Submission + - SpringSource Readying Custom Tomcat Server

Submitted by

jskora

on Tuesday December 02, 2008 @01:29AM

jskora writes: "At the Americas SpringOne conference in Fort Lauderdale, CEO Rod Johnson announced that SpringSource will be releasing a version of the Apache Tomcat web server/servlet container called "SpringSource tc Server", providing administration and management features currently lacking in Tomcat compared to other Java server platforms. See Solomon Duskis's blog for more about this and other notables from tonight's SpringOne keynote."

Anti-Matter Created By Laser At Livermore 465

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday November 18, 2008 @01:28AM from the billions-and-billiions dept.

zootropole alerts us to a press release issued today by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, announcing the production of 'billions of particles of anti-matter.' "Take a gold sample the size of the head of a push pin, shoot a laser through it, and suddenly more than 100 billion particles of anti-matter appear. The anti-matter, also known as positrons, shoots out of the target in a cone-shaped plasma 'jet.' This new ability to create a large number of positrons in a small laboratory opens the door to several fresh avenues of anti-matter research, including an understanding of the physics underlying various astrophysical phenomena such as black holes and gamma ray bursts." The press release doesn't characterize the laser used in this experiment, but it may have been this one.

Digital Photos Give Away a Camera's Make and Model 260

Posted by kdawson on Monday November 17, 2008 @10:57PM from the nobody-saw-me-you-can't-prove-anything dept.

holy_calamity writes "Engineers at Polytechnic University Brooklyn have discovered that digital snaps shorn of any metadata still reveal the make and model of camera used to take them. It is possible to work backwards from the relationships of neighboring pixel values in a shot to identify the model-specific demosaicing algorithm that combines red, green, and blue pixels on the sensor into color image pixels. Forensics teams are already licking their chops."

Urine Passes NASA Taste Test 404

Posted by kdawson on Monday November 17, 2008 @09:35PM from the not-mine dept.

Ponca City, We love you writes "Astronauts flying aboard space shuttle Endeavour are delivering a device to the International Space Station that may leave you wondering if NASA is taking recycling too far. Among the ship's cargo is a water regeneration system that distills, filters, ionizes, and oxidizes wastewater — including urine — into fresh water for drinking or, as one astronaut puts it, 'will make yesterday's coffee into today's coffee.' The US space agency spent $250M for the water recycling equipment but with the space shuttles due to retire in two years, NASA needed to make sure the station crew would have a good supply of fresh water. The Environmental Control and Life Support Systems uses a purification process called vapor compression distillation: urine is boiled until the water in it turns to steam. In space, there's an additional challenge: steam doesn't rise, so the entire distillation system is spun to create artificial gravity to separate the steam from the brine. The water has been thoroughly tested on Earth, including blind taste tests that pitted recycled urine with similarly treated tap water. 'Some people may think it's downright disgusting, but if it's done correctly, you process water that's purer than what you drink here on Earth,' said Endeavour astronaut Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper."

How To Verify CD-R Data Retention Over Time? 303

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday November 06, 2008 @12:29PM from the saving-boobies-for-future-generations dept.

Peter (Professor) Fo writes "I've recently had two CD-Rs reported to me as faulty which are just 3 years old. This is worrying — I suspect the failure rate for this batch could be 10%. When researching CD longevity there is old and unreliable information; pious 'how to cosset your discs so they last 100 years' blurb; and endless discussions of what sort of dye to use, don't use cheap media, burn slower (or don't), but not much by way of hard facts besides there's a lot of data loss going on. Does anyone know of a generic utility (win or *nix would suit me) that can map sector readability/error rates of CDs? I'd like to measure decay over time in my environment with my media and my other variables; and I expect others would too."

OpenBSD 4.4 Released 235

Posted by kdawson on Sunday November 02, 2008 @05:31PM from the fresh-daemons dept.

Linux blog writes "The new version of OpenBSD is available for download. There are lots of nifty new features to try out including OpenSSH 5.1 with chroot(2) support, Xenocara, Gnome 2.20.3, KDE 3.5.8, etc. Machines using the UltraSPARC IV/T1/T2 and Fujitsu SPARC64-V/VI/VII are now supported. It seems amazing to me that they keep delivering these new results on a six-month release cycle."

Google Adopts, Forks OpenID 1.0 316

Posted by timothy on Wednesday October 29, 2008 @05:20PM from the complicationism dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Right on the heels of Microsoft's adoption of the OpenID protocol by announcing their intention to enable OpenID authentication against all Live IDs, Google has announced their intention to join the growing list of OpenID authentication providers. Except it turns out they're using their own version of OpenID that is incompatible with everyone else. It seems that Google will be using their own 'improved' version of OpenID (based upon research and user feedback of the OpenID system) which isn't backwards compatible with OpenID 1.0/2.0, in hopes of improving end-user experience at the cost of protocol compatibility and complexity."

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