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Data Storage

Submission + - Geeks give the ultimate digital care package (tgdaily.com)

Submitted by
not5150
not5150 writes: "Geeks are helping overseas troops by sending the ultimate digital care package. Dubbed 'The Traveling Terabyte', the package is basically a bunch of drives in a USB enclosure, all packed inside of a Pelican case. Containing music, movies and even educational material the Traveling Terabyte gives soldiers and Marines a digital slice of home."
Sony

Submission + - PS3 DVD quality is on par with a $5000 processor (firingsquad.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: FiringSquad just posted an article with 1080p .PNG screenshots comparing the PlayStation 3 against a $5000 Silicon Optix Realta HQV based video processor. Surprisingly, the PS3 is almost as good as the dedicated processor in terms of image quality and handily outperforms both ATI and NVIDIA HTPC solutions.
Privacy

Submission + - SHA-1 cracking on a budget (hackaday.com)

Submitted by cloude-pottier
cloude-pottier writes: One thing that is always amazing is what people manage to pull off on absolutely minimal resources. One enterprising individual went on eBay and found boards with more than half a dozen Virtex II Pro FPGAs, nurse them back to life and build a SHA-1 cracker with two of the boards. This is an excellent example of recycling, as these were originally a part of a Thompson Grass Valley HDTV broadcast system. As a part of the project, the creator wrote tools designed to graph the relationships between components using JTAG as to make reverse engineering the organization of the FPGAs on the board more apparent. More details can be seen on the actual project page. If an individual is able to pull this off for under 500 dollars, it almost makes one wonder what resources the government has available to them to do the same thing...
Displays

Submission + - 360 Degree Light Field Display

Submitted by
Gary
Gary writes: "Designed by USC's Institute for Creative Technologies the Interactive 360 Degree Light Field Display won the Best Emerging Technology Award at SIGGRAPH 2007. The system is capable of producing 3D images which can be viewed by multiple users. The display uses a standard programmable graphics card to render over 5,000 images per second of interactive 3D graphics, projecting 360-degree views with 1.25 degree separation up to 20 updates per second. As the video shows it is capable of Star Wars styled Holographic Style Projections."
United States

Submission + - The Great Iraq Swindle

Submitted by Drahgkar
Drahgkar writes: Have you ever wondered where all the money the government has spent on the war in Iraq has gone? Wonder no more as you read The Great Iraq Swindle on Rolling Stone's website. "How is it done? How do you screw the taxpayer for millions, get away with it and then ride off into the sunset with one middle finger extended, the other wrapped around a chilled martini? Ask Earnest O. Robbins — he knows all about being a successful contractor in Iraq."
Hardware Hacking

Submission + - Blueprints for quantum computer RAM (newscientist.com)

Submitted by
willatnewscientist
willatnewscientist writes: "Researchers in Italy have produced a paper about RAM for quantum computers. Vittorio Giovannetti of the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy, and colleagues point out that the way RAM currently works would be unsuitable for quantum computers, because it would result in too much interference. Their simplified scheme would allow let quantum computer to access its RAM without losing data. The original paper can be found here."
Security

Submission + - Do hackers prevent the release of source code? 3

Submitted by
HotdogsFolks
HotdogsFolks writes: "I've been considering releasing the source code from one of my job websites under the GPL licence for quite some time now. It's a fully functioning, everything-you-could-possibly-want system, so I'm happy to give it away to save people from having to write a similar system from scratch.

The only thing holding me back is the cycle of security patches I'll no doubt find myself in once the bad guys start analysing my code.

I'm not a security expert — I code for fun — so I'm not totally confident I'd be able to spot security issues even if I analysed my code myself.

What would you do if you were in my shoes? How do I get my software out there in the least painful way possible?"
Power

Submission + - The Whole House-Off Switch 3

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Wouldn't it be convenient if you had just one switch to power-off the whole house? Something like what you have at hotels, but over there it's your room key that does the trick. For homes its better to fit the Whole House-Off Switch by designer Jack Godfrey Wood. The idea behind the concept is to turn off of the unnecessary power in the house when you step out, with a single switch. The Whole House-Off Switch was designed to make "the green way the most convenient way," and was part of a larger project to "encourage 'green' action among the environmentally disenfranchised."
Sun Microsystems

Submission + - Jonathan Schwartz on Sun's Open Source Strategy (cnet.com)

Submitted by
enaiel
enaiel writes: "At LinuxWorld, Matt Assay did an interesting interview with Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems about Sun's Open Source strategy:

One of our biggest strategic challenges is that we have roughly 4,000 quota-bearing salespeople. To me, it feels like my biggest competitors have 4 trillion sales reps. I'm not going to beat them by hiring more sales reps. I'm going to beat them by leveraging the single-biggest sales channel the world has ever known: the Internet.
Think about this: nearly every Brazilian sees my logo. Every day. Not because a sales rep puts it in front of them, but because they see it on OpenOffice, which their government or they downloaded for free.
Customers now find us. When I see Sun's free software downloads in Western China or Siberia, two regions where we have no sales presence at all, and yet we're doing business there, I have to ask how my competitors are going to survive when no one knows about them.
The question to ask is, "What portion of the world knows my brand?"
With the Java platform I'd guess we reach 20 to 30 percent of the Internet every day (powering the games kids play online, the intranet application at a bank, etc.). Each of these constituents may think about Java in different ways, but in each case Java "sells" my brand. If you believe that brand is central to the next wave of Internet monetization — and I believe it is absolutely central — then the more people that know my brand, the more benefit inures to me.
We distributed nine million licenses of Solaris in the last two years. I guarantee we wouldn't have been able to make nine million sales calls. Seventy percent of these licenses are on Dell, HP, and IBM. This gives us a great platform to build a partnership with these hardware companies, and it also gives us a great pool of users, some percentage of which will want to pay us.
Why? How do we monetize these? When that technology is run in a Fortune 100 company in a mission-critical app, the CIO will hunt me down to pay me money. The cost of downtime for them is huge compared to the cost. "
Media

Submission + - Journalist detained for Segway-photo (webwereld.nl)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Dutch IT-Journalist Brenno de Winter was detained Tuesday (in Dutch)for taking a picture of Dutch Railway staff on a Segway. The transporters are generally outlawed in the Netherlands making the device quite rare. When asked to hand over his camera De Winter refused and Railway Police were called to the scene. When ordered to remove the picture the journalist agreed under protest, but was still detained. After cops confiscated the camera they removed the image and searched the other pictures. After promising 'serious consequences' if the photo would be made public somewhere. Despite the fact that Dutch Railways forbids photographs for journalistic purposes, a legal expert writes that European Human Rights prevail over civil rights. The Netherlands Association of Journalists has officially protested on behalf of De Winter and is demanding an apology, removal of the criminal record and compensation. They also have demanded that Dutch Railways adjust their rules to align it with the freedom of press.
Operating Systems

Old School Linux Remembered, Parts 0.02 & 0.03 163

Posted by CowboyNeal from the turn-back-the-clock dept.
eldavojohn writes "Following our last history lesson of Linux 0.01, the Kernel Trap is talking about the following announcements that would lead to one of the greatest operating systems today. A great Linus quote on release 0.02 (just 19 days after 0.01): 'I can (well, almost) hear you asking yourselves "why?". Hurd will be out in a year (or two, or next month, who knows), and I've already got minix. This is a program for hackers by a hacker. I've enjoyed [sic] doing it, and somebody might enjoy looking at it and even modifying it for their own needs. It is still small enough to understand, use and modify, and I'm looking forward to any comments you might have.'"
Sun Microsystems

Submission + - Sun Releasing 8-Core Niagara 2 Processor

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Sun Microsystems is set to announce its eight-core Niagara 2 processor next week. Each core supports eight threads, so the chip handles 64 simultaneous threads, making it the centerpiece of Sun's "Throughput Computing" effort. Along with having more cores than the quads from Intel and AMD, the Niagara 2 have dual, on-chip 10G Ethernet ports with crytopgraphic capability. Sun doesn't get much processor press, because the chips are used only in its own CoolThreads servers, but Niagara 2 will probably be the fastest processor out there when its released, other than perhaps the also little-known 4-GHz IBM Power 6.
Robotics

First Armed Robots on Patrol in Iraq 661

Posted by CowboyNeal from the number-johnny-five dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Robots have been roaming Iraq, since shortly after the war began. Now, for the first time — the first time in any war zone — the 'bots are carrying guns. The SWORDS robots, armed with M249 machine guns, "haven't fired their weapons yet," an Army official says. "But that'll be happening soon." The machines have actually been ready for a while, but safety concerns kept them off the battlefield. Now, the robots have kill switches, so "now we can kill the unit if it goes crazy," according to the Army. I feel safer already."
Amiga

Submission + - Minimig: Amiga on FPGA with GPL'd verilog code (hetnet.nl)

Submitted by
akkartik
akkartik writes: "Minimig stands for Mini Amiga. Minimig is an FPGA-based re-implementation of the original Amiga 500 hardware. In it's current form, Minimig is a single PCB measuring only 12*12cm which makes it the smallest "Amiga" ever made and the first new "Amiga" in almost 14 years!"
Education

Monkeys and Humans Learn the Same Way 91

Posted by Zonk from the we're-all-ugly-bags-of-mostly-water dept.
Lucas123 writes "A new study from UCLA showed that monkeys, like humans, learn faster by being actively involved in the learning process rather than just having information placed before them, according to a story in ScienceDaily. In the study, two rhesus macaque monkeys learned to put up to 18 photos on an ATM-like touch screen in a row. 'The monkeys did much better on the first three days when they had the help than when they didn't, but on the test day, it completely reversed. When they studied with the hint, there is no evidence they learned anything about the list. They learned the lists when they didn't get the help.'"

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