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Comment Re:Yes (Score 1) 502

Onboard sound sucks.

My work laptop (Lenovo T420s) is useless for microphone audio (some Conexant chip). The company keeps wanting us to use Skype and Lync and SoftVTC to do meetings, but all the people who try to use the onboard audio are inaudible (because the built-in noise cancellation keeps ducking their voice), or if they manage to dig 5 dialogs deep to disable the noise cancellation (with an option that gets reset every reboot), they have lots of system noise over their voices (even if they're using an external mic. ). So everyone dials in via phone for group VTCs and mutes their PCs.

I have an expensive Jabra headset with a USB dongle. That gives me pretty clean audio. Should be able to use bluetooth too, but that takes more driver updates and even then it's still a pain.

My gaming PC has somewhat nicer onboard audio, but even with a S/PDIF link to my Logitech Z-560 speakers, I still get a hiss whenever the OS turns on and "opens" the audio device. Would be nice to be able to input digital audio somehow for Skype, but I ended up just plugging in a cheap USB webcam with a digital mic instead.

Still, it's kinda sad that any cheap mobile phone has a better microphone with AEC (for speakerphone use) and NC than you can get on most computers.

Submission + - New released NOAA data now confirms decades long cooling (forbes.com)

Submitted by bricko
bricko writes: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s most accurate, up-to-date temperature data confirm the United States has been cooling for at least the past decade.

Responding to widespread criticism that its temperature station readings were corrupted by poor citing issues and suspect adjustments, NOAA established a network of 114 pristinely sited temperature stations spread out fairly uniformly throughout the United States. Because the network, known as the U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN), is so uniformly and pristinely situated, the temperature data require no adjustments to provide an accurate nationwide temperature record. USCRN began compiling temperature data in January 2005. Now, nearly a decade later, NOAA has finally made the USCRN temperature readings available.

According to the USCRN temperature readings, U.S. temperatures are not rising at all – at least not since the network became operational 10 years ago. Instead, the United States has cooled by approximately 0.4 degrees Celsius, which is more than half of the claimed global warming of the twentieth century.

USCRN data debunk claims that rising U.S. temperatures caused wildfires, droughts, or other extreme weather events during the past year. The objective data show droughts, wildfires, and other extreme weather events have become less frequent and severe in recent decades as our planet modestly warms. But even ignoring such objective data, it is difficult to claim global warming is causing recent U.S. droughts and wildfires when U.S. temperatures are a full 0.4 degrees Celsius colder than they were in 2005.

Comment Re:Not surprising. (Score 2) 725

by rwa2 (#47393175) Attached to: When Beliefs and Facts Collide

Is climate change human caused? Hell if I know. But I know it's been pushed on the public about as unscientifically as Eugenics and Phrenology.

Null hypothesis: Does human activity have no impact on the environment?

Comment Re: "Swap out" - LOL (Score 1) 122

by rwa2 (#47392261) Attached to: New Single Board Computer Lets You Swap Out the CPU and Memory

eh, there's ArsTechnica for that kind of thing. Or of course, you know, the /. comment filters that can also make the ACs invisible to you.

That said, I haven't really figured out what to use my Pi for yet. I have enough old smartphones to throw at random little projects that could use cameras/audio/touchscreens/wifi, and an Arduino Uno that does a better job at little ADC/DAC projects. Critically, I have only one monitor with an HDMI port, and my my PC is connected to that. Best I could come up with so far is just a device I could use to throw the BSOD screensaver up on LCDs at work or in public.

Submission + - 3D Printed PiGRRL - Raspberry Pi Gameboy

Submitted by coop0030
coop0030 writes: Celebrate the 20th anniversary of the classic gaming device, Game Boy, by building your own with 3d printing and DIY electronics. This project uses a Raspberry Pi and TFT touch screen to make an epic DIY Game Girl. The 3d printed enclosure houses all of the components and can be printed in your favorite color. It's controlled with SNES gaming controller components, reusing the printed circuit board, buttons and elastomers. The 3D files can be found on Thingiverse, and a video of the finished product is provided as well.

Comment Re:Emacs, vi, IDE (Score 1) 359

Depends on whose code I'm editing.

If it's my own, then emacs.

If it's someone else's, then usually vi since I'm probably in a hurry.

IDEs I play with every once in a while, but invariably I hit some silly brick wall where it's better/faster/dareIsayeasier to bring it up in emacs.

I have been using notepad++ on Windows a lot lately, and just wondering what the closest thing to that there is on Linux. It's the only thing I've seen that combines the feature set of emacs with the snappiness of vi while still having a pretty consistent GUI. I have to admint I learned a lot about what emacs can do by discovering features and plugins in notepad++ and Googling how to do that in emacs :-P (speedbar, whitespace-mode)

Sublime Text editor was a lot of fun to play with if only for the multi cursor mode, but there's a great howto on doing the same thing in emacs.

Comment Re:Feel good legislation vs. cost (Score 1) 532

by rwa2 (#47329239) Attached to: NYC Loses Appeal To Ban Large Sugary Drinks

Eh, all good points.

I think the mistake was just in making it a heavy-handed ban. Bringing out the ban hammer just turned it into a joke.

I'm sure they will successfully reintroduce the behavior-modification measure by creating a higher sales tax on large drinks. Which will probably have an as good or better impact as a silly ban that people would gladly find ways to circumvent just to "stick it to the man".

We have these luxury taxes on alcohol that corresponds to the proof (one tax bracket for wine and beer, another for hard liquor). It could certainly work like that, and not come across as freedom-limiting nanny-statism.

Submission + - Surgical Snakebots Are Real, And Heading For Humanity's Orifices (popsci.com) 1

Submitted by malachiorion
malachiorion writes: Last week marked the first use of a surgical snakebot—the Flex system, from MA-based Medrobotics—on living human beings. It wriggled down two patient's throats, to be specific, at a hospital in Belgium. That's neat, and could mean an interesting showdown-to-come between this snake-inspired robot (invented by a Carnegie Mellon roboticist), and the more widely-used da Vinci bot. But this is bigger than a business story. The next era in general surgery, which involves making a single small incision after entering the anus or vagina, instead of multiple punctures in the abdomen, might finally be feasible with this kind of bot. This is my analysis for Popular Science about why instrument-bearing snakebots wriggling into our orifices is a technology worth rooting for.

Submission + - Is Suspension-Energy Recovery The Next Big Thing?

Submitted by cartechboy
cartechboy writes: Let's face it, regenerative braking is now old tech. It's on everything from the Toyota Prius to your mom's new Ford Fusion Hybrid. So what's next? We've already heard about thermoelectric technology which recovers energy from hot surfaces such as exhaust, but what about the energy used by your car while moving up and down? That's right, recovering energy normally lost through a vehicle's suspension. Audi is reportedly developing a regenerative suspension system that could reclaim energy in a similar way to regenerative braking, providing an extra boost of electricity from the up-and-down motion of the shock absorbers. Shocks can become quite hot, especially on a bumpy road. That heat is pretty much wasted as it dissipates into the atmosphere as wasted energy, but the Audi system would collect it with an attached generator. That recovered energy would be stored in batteries and used to power a hybrid's electric motor or electrical accessories in a conventional car. Audi hasn't said when this tech will make its public debut, but this stuff is the next step in when it comes to energy recovery in cars.

Submission + - Evidence Of A Correction To The Speed of Light

Submitted by KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: In the early hours of the morning on 24 February 1987, a neutrino detector deep beneath Mont Blanc in northern Italy picked up a sudden burst of neutrinos. Three hours later, neutrino detectors at two other locations picked up a second burst. These turned out to have been produced by the collapse of the core of a star in the Large Magellanic Cloud that orbits our galaxy. And sure enough, some 4.7 hours after this, astronomers noticed the tell-tale brightening of a blue supergiant in that region, as it became a supernova, now known as SN1987a. But why the delay of 7.7 hours from the first burst of neutrinos to the arrival of the photons? Astrophysicists soon realised that since neutrinos rarely interact with ordinary matter, they can escape from the star's core immediately. By contrast, photons have to diffuse through the star, a process that would have delayed them by about 3 hours. That accounts for some of the delay but what of the rest? Now one physicist has the answer--the speed of light through space requires a correction. As a photon travels through space, there is a finite chance that it will form an electron-positron pair. This pair exists for only a brief period of time and then goes on to recombine creating another photon which continues along the same path. This is a well-known process called vacuum polarisation. The new idea is that the gravitational potential of the Milky Way must influence the electron-positron pair because they have mass. This changes the energy of the virtual electron-positron pair, which in turn produces a small change in the energy and speed of the photon. And since the analogous effect on neutrinos is negligible, light will travel more slowly than them through a gravitational potential. According to the new calculations which combine quantum electrodynamics with general relativity, the change in speed accounts more or less exactly for the mysterious time difference. Voila!

Submission + - US releases memo justifying drone strike on American citizen (theverge.com) 1

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Under orders from a US appeals court, the Obama administration has released a memo justifying the killing of American citizens with a targeted "drone strike." The memo presents a case for killing Anwar al-Awlaki, an al-Qaeda propagandist who was killed in Yemen in 2011. The strike on al-Awlaki has been widely debated since then, especially after a separate attack inadvertently killed al-Awlaki's 16-year-old son Abdulrahman. Now, thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request made by the ACLU and others, it's possible to read both the court's reasoning and the 30-page legal debate on whether he and others could be killed without due process under the CIA's drone program.

Comment Re:Indirect Route? (Score 1) 4

by rwa2 (#47284699) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Orbital Mechanics

Yeah, with enough hand waving, anything is plausible. You could have something in between a low energy transfer on the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I... and waiting lots of time, or some kind of slingshot, or just burn fuel to do simple transfers between orbits. But I guess since your propulsion is on all the time for artificial gravity, you're kinda doing a propellant-assisted slingshot. The slingshot does require the planets and the sun have to be lined up just right, so it does make sense that the company wants to depart early and use more fuel on a longer journey, because they wouldn't get as much gravitational assist if they had waited a week for Venus and the Sun to be in a better position relative to the source and destination.

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