Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Image

World's Northernmost Town Gets Nightlights Screenshot-sm 144

Posted by samzenpus from the goodbye-darkness-my-old-friend dept.
Velcroman1 writes "On October 26, 2,000 Norwegians watched the sun set. The next time they'll see it rise? Sometime in February. Extended nighttime is an annual occurrence for the residents of Longyearbyen, Norway — Earth's northernmost town. Located at 78 degrees north latitude in the Arctic circle, Longyearbyen experiences a phenomenon called Polar Night, in which the town remains in perpetual darkness for four months each winter. To lighten up the seemingly endless night, Philips has started an experiment called 'Wake Up the Town.' And anyone who's complained about the brief daylight hours in winter will want to know how it works."
Image

Denver Rejects UFO Agency To Track Aliens Screenshot-sm 80

Posted by samzenpus from the name-and-galaxy-of-origin-please dept.
Republicans weren't the only ones to win big yesterday. Aliens in The Mile-High City can breathe easier thanks to voters rejecting a plan to officially track them. From the article: "The proposal defeated soundly Tuesday night would have established a commission to track extraterrestrials. It also would have allowed residents to post their observations on Denver's city Web page and report sightings." Let the anonymous probings begin!
Image

British Pizza Chain To Install Cones of Silence Screenshot-sm 122

Posted by samzenpus from the sound-of-silence dept.
itwbennett writes "British pizza chain Pizza Express is installing iPod docks and soundproof domes in booths of their new iPizzeria stores. 'The idea is that you can plug in your iPod and play whatever music you like without disturbing other diners,' says blogger Peter Smith. 'But I'm sure it'd work for talking about government secrets and other spy stuff, too.'"
Media

1928 Time Traveler Caught On Film? 685

Posted by samzenpus from the I-hate-time-travel-stories dept.
Many of you have submitted a story about Irish filmmaker George Clarke, who claims to have found a person using a cellphone in the "unused footage" section of the DVD The Circus, a Charlie Chaplin movie filmed in 1928. To me the bigger mystery is how someone who appears to be the offspring of Ram-Man and The Penguin got into a movie in the first place, especially if they were talking to a little metal box on set. Watch the video and decide for yourself.
Graphics

The First Photograph of a Human 138

Posted by samzenpus from the fist-cheese dept.
wiredog writes "The Atlantic has a brief piece on what is likely to be the first photograph (a daguerreotype) showing a human. From the article: 'In September, Krulwich posted a set of daguerreotypes taken by Charles Fontayne and William Porter in Cincinnati 162 years ago, on September 24, 1848. Krulwich was celebrating the work of the George Eastman House in association with the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County. Using visible-light microscopy, the George Eastman House scanned several plates depicting the Cincinnati Waterfront so that scholars could zoom in and study the never-before-seen details.'"
Image

Officials Use Google Earth To Find Unlicensed Pools Screenshot-sm 650

Posted by samzenpus from the eye-in-the-sky dept.
Officials in Riverhead, New York are using Google Earth to root out the owners of unlicensed pools. So far they've found 250 illegal pools and collected $75,000 in fines and fees. Of course not everyone thinks that a city should be spending time looking at aerial pictures of backyards. from the article: "Lillie Coney, associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, DC, said Google Earth was promoted as an aid to curious travelers but has become a tool for cash-hungry local governments. 'The technology is going so far ahead of what people think is possible, and there is too little discussion about community norms,' she said."
Mars

New Mars Rover Rolls For the First Time 100

Posted by Soulskill from the keep-them-doggies-rollin dept.
wooferhound writes "Like proud parents savoring their baby's very first steps, mission team members gathered in a gallery above a clean room at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to watch the Mars Curiosity rover roll for the first time. Engineers and technicians wore bunny suits while guiding Curiosity through its first steps, or more precisely, its first roll on the clean room floor. The rover moved forward and backward about 1 meter (3.3 feet). Mars Science Laboratory (aka Curiosity) is scheduled to launch in fall 2011 and land on the Red Planet in August 2012. Curiosity is the largest rover ever sent to Mars. It will carry 10 instruments that will help search an intriguing region of the Red Planet for two things: environments where life might have existed, and the capacity of those environments to preserve evidence of past life."
Input Devices

BlindType — the Amazing Keyboard of the Future 125

Posted by kdawson from the do-what-i-mean dept.
kkleiner writes "BlindType has created a new touchscreen keyboard program of the same name that changes size, orientation, and position to match your wandering fingers as they type. BlindType also features some of the most impressive typing correction software I've ever seen. The result is a practical touchscreen interface that knows what you meant to type, even if you make mistakes. Lots of them. In fact, you can type without looking at the screen at all."
Perl

Perl 6, Early, With Rakudo Star 220

Posted by timothy from the if-you-call-that-early dept.
Perl 6 may have been "finally coming within reach" in 2004, but now it's even closer. Reader rnddim writes "The Perl 6 implementation Rakudo Star has been released today for 'early adopters.' This release of Rakudo is different from the normal monthly compiler releases in that it is bundled with a draft of a Perl 6 book, and several modules. It's not complete, and it's not as fast as it should be, but Rakudo in its current state is proving to be usable and useful. Rakudo Star releases will come monthly or as major features or bugfixes are made. It is available for download at github.com."
Programming

Something For (Almost) Every Developer 263

Posted by kdawson from the get-coding dept.
First up, reader martinjlogan sends along a tutorial for setting up a workable Erlang/OTP development environment on a Mac. Next, reader acid06 notes news of Perl 5.12, including what may be the first delivered fix for the Y2K38 bug. (Hit the Read More link below for some details on Perl's new release strategy.) "After two years of development, the new major version of Perl is now available. Notable new features are: better Unicode support, proper support for time after the Y2038 barrier, new APIs to allow developers to extend Perl with 'pluggable' keywords and syntax, warnings for deprecated features and more. From the linked post: You can get it from the CPAN right now or wait for a platform-specific release (such as Strawberry Perl for Windows)." Finally, from reader snydeq: "InfoWorld's Martin Heller provides an in-depth review of Visual Studio 2010 and finds Microsoft taking several large steps away from its legacy IDE code. 'Visual Studio 2010 is a major upgrade in functionality and capability from its predecessor. Developers, architects, and testers will all find areas where the new version makes their jobs easier. Despite the higher pricing for this version, most serious Microsoft-oriented shops will upgrade to Visual Studio 2010 and never look back,' Heller writes. Chief among the improvements are Microsoft's revamping the core editing and designer views to use WPF, its overhaul of IntelliSense and support for test-driven development, and its intelligent support for multiple versions of the .Net Framework."
Open Source

Helping Perl Packagers Package Perl 130

Posted by samzenpus from the dress-it-up dept.
jamie writes "chromatic has a great post today on the conflict between OS distributions and CPAN's installations of perl modules, along with some suggestions for how to start resolving this maddening problem: '[Though Debian has] made plenty of CPAN distributions available as .debs, I have to configure my CPAN client myself, and it does not work with the system package manager. There's no reason it couldn't. Imagine that the system Perl 5 included in the default package... had a CPAN client configured appropriately. It has selected an appropriate mirror (or uses the redirector). It knows about installation paths. It understands how to use LWP...' The idea of providing guidelines to distros for how to safely package modules is a great one. Could modules request (a modified?) test suite be run after distro-installation? Could Module::Build help module authors and distro maintainers establish the rules somehow?"
Christmas Cheer

The Perl 6 Advent Calendar 160

Posted by timothy from the possibly-recognizable-tune dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Larry Wall wasn't joking when he said that Perl 6 would be ready by Christmas. Perhaps not this Christmas, but that hasn't stopped a group of people (including head Rakudo developers Patrick Michaud and Jonathan Worthington) from putting together an Advent Calendar, featuring one cool Perl 6 feature every day until Christmas. Topics currently covered include how to get and build Rakudo (the most actively developed and progressed implementation of Perl 6) and the new Metaoperators. For those wondering when Perl 6 will be finished: Rakudo will be having its official 'production release' (dubbed Rakudo Star) April 2010."

Comment Mythbusting Colorado's Fish Freshness (Score 1) 554

by Tom Christiansen (#30199594) Attached to: Is That Sushi Hazardous To Your Health?

> Considering that Colorado is surrounded by land on all sides and New York is
> about as far away as possible from the pacific ocean (while staying in the US)
> i'm not surprised the tuna sushi you get there is a bit off.

Nonsense! The distance from wharf to table is the same as the distance
from wharf to major airline hub to table. Denver is United's main hub.
That means everything is as fresh as the airport is distant--very close.
Any quality restaurant gets its fish flown in daily.

Regard:

Sushi Den; Denver CO

        How does Sushi Den get such fresh fish?

        One of the most important ingredients of sushi making is getting the
        freshest fish available. In Colorado, as a land locked state, many
        sushi bars do not have easy access directly to the fish market. We are
        one of the very first sushi bars in the United States to purchase
        directly from the fish market in Japan. At Sushi Den, Koichi, our
        youngest brother, is stationed at one of the largest fish markets,
        Nagahama Fish Market, located in our home prefecture in the
        southern-most island, called Kyushu Island. At 4:00 AM, he carefully
        hand selects the freshest fish just unloaded from the boat, then within
        a few hours, the fish speeds its way to Denver, arriving within 24
        hours. Toshi also goes to the local fish market at 7:00 AM in Denver 6
        days a week, where he painstakingly handpicks the freshest fish
        available just for that day. We also source many exotic fish from
        Alaska, Seattle, Boston, Hawaii, Florida as well as from Philippines,
        Canada, Mexico, and Spain.

        http://www.sushiden.net/faq.html#faq7

Hapa Sushi; Boulder & Denver CO

        "We owe our awards to our loyal customers, who have come to Hapa since
        we opened 10 years ago," says owner Mark Van Grack. "We believe we have
        the freshest sushi in town -- most of the tuna is flown in from Hawaii.

        http://bouldercountygold.com/2009/eats-drinks-entertainment/best-sushi-hapa-sushi/
        http://www.franchise.hapasushi.com/

Sushi Tora; Boulder CO

        We get fresh fish flown in daily including fish from Tsukiji Market in
        Tokyo every Wednesday.

        http://sushitora.net/bouldersushi.html

Jax Fish House; Boulder CO

        Jax famous Raw Bar features a variety of fresh oysters, clams, chilled
        crabs and lobsters, all flown in daily.

        http://www.jaxfishhouseboulder.com/Portals/0/Jax%20Fish%20House%20Boulder%20Press%20Kit.pdf
        http://www.jaxfishhouseboulder.com/Menus/DinnerMenu/tabid/62/Default.aspx

Flagstaff House; Boulder CO

        Mark's menu changes daily to take advantage of the freshest seasonal
        ingredients including fresh fish flown in daily, locally grown organic
        products, and herbs from his own organic garden.

        http://www.flagstaffhouse.com/about_us_mark.html
        http://www.flagstaffhouse.com/menu.html

        The menu, which changes daily, offers an excellent selection of fresh
        fish, flown in from the source, and Rocky Mountain game, all prepared
        with a creative flair. Typical appetizers include pancetta-wrapped
        rabbit loin or pheasant breast, calamari, black trumpet mushrooms, and
        caviar. Entrees, many of which are seasonal, might include Colorado
        rack of lamb, Maine lobster, veal cheeks, and mahimahi. The restaurant
        also has dessert soufflés, a world-renowned wine cellar (at, 20,000
        bottles, perhaps the best in Colorado), and an impressive selection of
        after-dinner drinks.

        http://travel.nytimes.com/travel/guides/north-america/united-states/colorado/boulder/44791/flagstaff-house-restaurant/restaurant-detail.html

There. May be now put this unfounded but stupidly repeated rumor to rest
once and for all. PLEASE?

--tom
Programming

Interview With Brian Kernighan of AWK/AMPL Fame 117

Posted by kdawson from the series-of-pipes dept.
Reader oranghutan brings us another in Computerworld's series of interviews with icons of the programming world, this one with Brian Kernighan, who helped popularize C with his book (co-written with the creator Dennis Ritchie) The C Programming Language, and contributed to the development of AWK and AMPL. In the past we've chewed over a few other interviews in this series, including those with Martin Odersky on Scala and Larry Wall on perl. "In this interview, Brian Kernighan shares his tips for up-and-coming programmers and his thoughts on Ruby, Perl, and Java. He also discusses whether the classic book The Practice of Programming, co-written with Rob Pike, needs an update. He highlights Bill and Melinda Gates as two people doing great things for the world enabled through computer science. Some quotes: 'A typical programmer today spends a lot of time just trying to figure out what methods to call from some giant package and probably needs some kind of IDE like Eclipse or XCode to fill in the gaps. There are more languages in regular use and programs are often distributed combinations of multiple languages. All of these facts complicate life, though it's possible to build quite amazing systems quickly when everything goes right.' 'Every language teaches you something, so learning a language is never wasted, especially if it's different in more than just syntactic trivia.'"
Perl

Perl 5.11.0 Released 235

Posted by Soulskill from the and-so-soon dept.
jamie points out that Perl 5.11.0 was released yesterday, as well as a schedule for future 5.11.x releases, planned for the 20th of every month. Jesse Vincent encouraged testing of the new (development) version, saying, "If you write software in Perl, it is particularly important that you test your software against development releases. While we strive to maintain source compatibility with prior releases wherever possible, it is always possible that a well-intentioned change can have unexpected consequences. If you spot a change in a development release which breaks your code, it's much more likely that we will be able to fix it before the next stable release. If you only test your code against stable releases of Perl, it may not be possible to undo a backwards-incompatible change which breaks your code."

Slashdot Top Deals

Thus spake the master programmer: "Time for you to leave." -- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"

Close