Comment Re:TiVo invented timeshifting? (Score 1) 490
You did not use a ReplayTV before TiVo. TiVo was the first to ship product - Replay announced first.
Researchers Pooh-Pooh Algae-Based Biofuel 238
Julie188 writes "Researchers from the University of Virginia have found that current algae biofuel production methods consume more energy, have higher greenhouse gas emissions and use more water than other biofuel sources, such as switchgrass, canola and corn. The researchers suggest these problems can be overcome by situating algae production ponds behind wastewater treatment facilities to capture phosphorous and nitrogen — essential algae nutrients that otherwise need to come from petroleum."
Super-Earths Discovered Orbiting Nearby, Sun-Like Star 242
likuidkewl writes "Two super-earths, 5 and 7.5 times the size of our home, were found to be orbiting 61 Virginis a mere 28 light years away. 'These detections indicate that low-mass planets are quite common around nearby stars. The discovery of potentially habitable nearby worlds may be just a few years away,' said Steven Vogt, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UCSC. Among hundreds of our nearest stellar neighbors, 61 Vir stands out as being the most nearly similar to the Sun in terms of age, mass, and other essential properties."
Comment Re:Oblig Simpson Quote (Score 1) 389
The limit if you ordered XP was 16GB SSD, not 8GB.
Comment Re:My read from the trailer (Score 1) 82
I happened upon an exhibit of Tezuka's work at the Tokyo-Edo Museum when I was visiting Japan in April. It had a TV showing an extended clip from the movie. It didn't show anything that hinted at the overall plot, other than it evidently being, as noted in the interview, an "origin movie". All of the text on the displays was in Japanese, so if there was any explanation of the movie plot, it eluded me. As a big fan of the English version from the 1960s, I'm eager to see the movie, but my expectations are low.
Comment Re:Nobody needs more than 640K of RAM (Score 3, Informative) 756
If your Windows 7 system with 4GB RAM shows less than that "usable", go into your BIOS options and turn off PCI memory remapping. The name of the option may vary and some motherboards may not support this. On my Asus P5B, it is under the North Bridge Configuration.
This drove me crazy until I found a forum post describing the solution. Even Windows 7 x64 was showing about 3GB "usable" for me before I did this.
Submission + - SSN overlap with Micronesia haunts NH woman
stevel writes: Holly Ramer, who lives in Concord, NH, has never been to the Federated States of Micronesia, but debt collectors dun her mercilessly for unpaid loans taken out by a small business owner in that Pacific island nation. Why? Micronesia and other countries in the region have their own Social Security Administrations which gave out numbers to residents applying for US disaster relief loans. The catch is that the Micronesian SSNs have fewer digits than the nine-digit US version, and when credit bureaus entered these into their database, they padded them out with zeros on the front. These numbers then matched innocent US citizens with SSNs beginning with zeroes, as many in northern New England do. The credit bureaus say to call the Social Security Adminustration, the SSA says call the credit bureaus, the FTC says they can't help, and nobody is taking responsibility for the confusion.
Comment You're making things harder for yourself (Score 1) 154
I think you need to get over your dislike of Fortran and make use of the many good and modern Fortran compilers available to you, both freeware and commercial. Any of them has got to be a better solution than f2c - if you think Fortran is hard to read, that's nothing compared to the cryptic output of f2c, and then you're locked in to using the buggy and archaic f2c support library.
I am not familiar with the application you're using, but the limits you describe are almost certainly not due to the coding language chosen. As for programming interface, it's easy to call Fortran from other languages and, in most cases, to call other languages from Fortran.
One can write unreadable and unmaintainable code in any language. A big benefit of Fortran is that old code is still supported by modern Fortran compilers.
World's Biggest Alarm Clock Shakes You Out of Bed
100
tugfoigel writes "Built by "Kevin" for a contest, this computer-controlled alarm clock is touted as the world's largest. To be more specific, he 'mounted a large air cylinder to the head of [his] bed and a valve, controlled by a computer, which [he programmed] to wake [him] up in the morning.'"
Submission + - Google develops a landmark recognition engine (scientificamerican.com) 1
SpuriousLogic writes: While it's possible to search the Web for images, there's still no way of searching the images themselves. Google is hoping to change this through a research project that can match digital photos of certain famous landmarks with text descriptions of those landmarks (including their namesname and where they're located) without the need for a conventional search engine.
The system is 80 percent accurate when it is given an image and asked to describe it, says Jay Yagnik, Google's head of computer vision research. Google is presenting this research, conducted with the help of researchers at the National University of Singapore, today at the IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference in Miami.
Submission + - US city's right to build own network upheld
BcNexus writes: Here's the latest development in a fight pitting a telecommunication company against government competition. The telco TDS took its fight all the way to the state supreme court because it thought he city had no right to serve people's internet, voice and television needs with its own network, but has failed.
Submission + - Netbook run machine rolls 1.3 million dice a day
stevel writes: The owner of games site GamesByEmail.com created Dice-O-Matic, "a machine that can belch a continuous river of dice down a spiraling ramp, then elevate, photograph, process and upload almost a million and a half rolls to the server a day.
"The Dice-O-Matic is 7 feet tall, 18 inches wide and 18 inches deep. It has an aluminum frame covered with Plexiglas panels. A 6x4 inch square Plexiglas tube runs vertically up the middle almost the entire height. Inside this tube a bucket elevator carries dice from a hopper at the bottom, past a camera, and tosses them onto a ramp at the top. The ramp spirals down between the tube and the outer walls. The camera and synchronizing disk are near the top, the computer, relay board, elevator motor and power supplies are at the bottom."
While not called out in the article, the pictures clearly show a Dell Mini 9 running the show (and performing the optical recognition of the dice values.) No, it's not running Linux...
"The Dice-O-Matic is 7 feet tall, 18 inches wide and 18 inches deep. It has an aluminum frame covered with Plexiglas panels. A 6x4 inch square Plexiglas tube runs vertically up the middle almost the entire height. Inside this tube a bucket elevator carries dice from a hopper at the bottom, past a camera, and tosses them onto a ramp at the top. The ramp spirals down between the tube and the outer walls. The camera and synchronizing disk are near the top, the computer, relay board, elevator motor and power supplies are at the bottom."
While not called out in the article, the pictures clearly show a Dell Mini 9 running the show (and performing the optical recognition of the dice values.) No, it's not running Linux...
Comment I've actually read the book... (Score 1) 73
The review is pretty much spot-on. I started reading SF in the early 60s, and have read a lot of the "pulp" SF from the 1930s, so I have a feel for what Space Vulture is trying to imitate.
I agree that it's not a very good homage, and certainly not a parody. The writing is clumsy and a bit over-the-top in places - E.E. Doc Smith, or even E.R. Burroughs, these guys aren't. When I was about halfway through the book, I found myself wondering if I would finish it or throw it against the wall in frustration.
I did finish it, though. I won't say that it redeemed itself in the end, but there were some amusing bits in there. Not something I would choose to reread or recommend to others.
If you think Space Vulture would interest you, may I suggest instead any of the E.E. "Doc" Smith books available for free at feedbooks.com, Project Gutenberg or elsewhere. Any one of them is better than Space Vulture.
Comment Re:The problem are the other two thirds (Score 1) 230
As a Mini 9 owner and participant in the mydellmini.com forum, another not-insignificant number are running Windows 7. Oh, and Vista runs fine there too.
I will agree, from what I see, that there are a lot of Mini 9 owners running Ubuntu. But an equal number, I would estimate, buy the smallest, cheapest configuration (which is available with Ubuntu only) and then add their own memory, larger SSD and OS install - which might be OS X, XP, Vista or Windows 7. Someone has even managed to boot BeOS on a Mini 9!
FWIW, my Mini 9 runs Windows 7.
Comment Re:What about outside the USA? (Score 4, Insightful) 434
There's nothing that special about the iPhone - all phones are "software driven". With other tethering-capable phones, tethering is done by either Bluetooth (with a standard "Personal Area Network" profile), or by a USB connection (requires software on the tethered computer). On my WM6 Treo 750, I just start the AT&T-provided "Internet Sharing" application and tap "Connect" - done.
I think that many who gush about the iPhone and think it is unique have never used a smartphone before, of which there are many excellent examples on the market. What is unique about the iPhone is the way Apple decides what you are allowed to use it for.
