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Robotics

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

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward
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/"
Earth

Submission + - Ant mega-colony rules the world

Submitted by Deag
Deag writes: A mega colony of one family of ants has spread all over the world. Previous mega colonies in California, Europe and Japan have been shown to be in fact one global colony. Ants from the smaller super-colonies were always aggressive to one another. So ants from the west coast of Japan fought their rivals from Kobe, while ants from the European super-colony didn't get on with those from the Iberian colony. But whenever ants from the main European and Californian super-colonies and those from the largest colony in Japan came into contact, they acted as if they were old friends.
Software

Submission + - GPL Usage: Growing And Shrinking, Both

Submitted by svonkie
svonkie writes: If the latest round of statistics are to be believed, the GPL — the most popular license for open source software — is undergoing a slow but fundamental shift. Licensing statistics compiled and analyzed by Black Duck Software show that a strong and accelerating portion of GPL licensed projects are shifting to GPLv3. InformationWeek reports that this trend shows a 'growing awareness amongst the little guys that the major software movers and shakers are getting more into open source.' But at the same time, 'other licenses are gaining ground on the GPL as a whole.'
Unix

Submission + - 35 Years of the UNIX Time-Sharing System (blogspot.com)

Submitted by
Tobias Svensson
Tobias Svensson writes: "Earlier this year, people in many places wrote about the 40th anniversary of the moment Ken Thompson sat down and started to work on UNIX (which is actually in August). In fact, UNIX celebrates another birthday this year, even though on a slightly smaller scale. This is about the seminal paper by Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson which played a massive role in the widespread adoption of UNIX."
Hardware Hacking

Submission + - Triple-engined car could smash land-speed record (newscientist.com)

Submitted by wjousts
wjousts writes: New Scientist has a piece about the Bloodhound SSC that is due to try and break the land speed record next year. The "car" will have not one, but three separate engines:

A rocket will boost the car to around 1200 kilometres per hour, (Mach 1) while a Eurofighter jet engine will provide more controllable thrust to coax it up to 1600 km/h (1000 miles per hour). Finally, the car is equipped with a V12 petrol engine to pump the fuel and provide electrical and hydraulic power to the jet and rocket.
Java

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

Submitted by
Ianopolous
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!"
Real Time Strategy (Games)

Submission + - Starcraft 2 Drops LAN Support, Battle.net Only (gamespot.com) 2

Submitted by Kemeno
Kemeno writes: Blizzard has announced that they will be dropping LAN support for Starcraft II, citing piracy and quality concerns. Instead, ALL multiplayer games will be hosted through their new Battle.net service. I suppose I shouldn't be suprised by this move, but wasn't LAN play how the original Starcraft became popular? It's the only way I ever played it, and I don't see why Blizzard would alienate casual LAN gamers in favor of forcing their new service upon everyone (well, except for more profit, of course).

Comment Re:i use folding@home (Score 2, Interesting) 88

by jowilkin (#28334229) Attached to: The Science of Folding@home

I think it's debatable if using research facility workstations for FAH is a good use of taxpayer money. What about powering them down instead?

I have been wondering about power consumption of these distributed computing projects for a while. How do you justify the sheer amount of energy used to run these things?

SETI is a much more questionable use of power IMO, but Folding@home has not really shown to be enormously useful considering the amount of power it uses.

Why not put all the money used powering computers involved in FAH into innovative research grants instead? Granted this is logistically much harder than convincing people to install a program on their computer, but it would be much more effective in furthuring cancer research.
Operating Systems

Submission + - Ext4: Stable for production systems? 1

Submitted by dr_dracula
dr_dracula writes: Earlier this year the ext4 filesystem was accepted into the Linux kernel. Shortly thereafter it was discovered that applications, such as KDE, were at risk of loosing files when used on top of ext4 http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/19/1730247. This was diagnosed as a rift between the design of the ext4 filesystem and the design of applications running on top of ext4. The crux of the problem was that applications were relying on ext3 specific behavior for flushing data to disk, which ext4 was not following. Recent kernel releases include patches to address these issues. My questions to the early adopters of ext4 is if the patches have performed as expected. What is your overall feeling about ext4? Do you think is solid enough for most users to trust it with their data? Did you find any significant performance improvements compared to ext3? Is there any incentive to move to ext4, other than sheer curiosity?

Comment The OK-ness depends on the popularity of the war (Score 5, Insightful) 295

by jowilkin (#27976653) Attached to: When Does It Become OK To Make Games About a War?
I think time is only a minor factor in this case. The level of "OK-ness" of making a war game is also highly correlated with the popularity of the war IMO. In World War II we seemed to have a clear enemy who was clearly in the wrong. It was cause for celebration to defeat them at the time and thus it's OK to relive this defeat in the form of a game. The Iraq war is extremely unpopular, and it's unclear whether we really "won" anything as a result of it.

Comment Re:Hilarious Overkill (Score 1, Informative) 100

by jowilkin (#27948455) Attached to: Java Program Uses Neural Networks To Monitor Games
It IS a neural network. A neural network is a mathematically well defined thing. That doesn't mean it was a good idea to use a neural network in this case (it wasn't IMO). I certainly wouldn't sign off on this as a thesis, what is the research aspect supposed to be? Using neural networks for image recognition was done and recognized to be a bad idea a really long time ago.

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