Comment Re:Not all tech companies start in California (Score 5, Funny) 555
I mean, I can think of a little company from Albuquerque that ended up doing pretty well for itself.
Los Pollos Hermanos?
Submission + - Sergey: In Soviet Russia, Rocket Detonates You!
theodp writes: 'We were all foolish enough to go on this adventure,' Google co-founder Sergey Brin told the assembled Brainiacs at Google's Solve for X event last week, recalling the time he and Google co-founder Larry Page took their Gulfstream on a $100K journey to watch a 2008 Soyuz launch in Baikonur, Kazakhstan. 'If the rocket blows up, we're all dead,' Sergey overheard a Russian guard say. 'It was incredibly close,' Sergey continued. 'We drove in toward this rocket and there were hundreds of people all going the other way. It was really an astonishing sight. If you ever have the opportunity, I highly recommend it. It's really not at all comparable to the American launches that I've seen...because those are like five miles away behind a mountain, and the Russians are not as concerned with safety.' Sergey received film credit for the recently-opened Man on a Mission, a documentary on the Russian Soyuz mission that wound up putting Ultima creator Richard Garriott into orbit (for $30 million) instead of changing the course of Google history. BTW, with that new beard he's sporting, could a remake of 'Lenny' be Sergey's next film role?
Psychics Say Apollo 16 Astronauts Found Alien Ship 285
astroengine writes "A group called Transception Incorporated, self-described as an Austin, Texas-based psychic R&D operation, sent a letter (PDF) to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden that nominates the Apollo 16 crew for the Congressional Space Medal of Honor. Why? Well, a variety of 'shipwreck elements' on the Moon — described as 'structures, people/aliens, biological technology, and their plight' — were reportedly 'seen' through remote viewing (PDF) by six experts at Transception. These 'elements' can be seen, along with Apollo 16 moonwalkers John Young and Charles Duke, in photographs during that famous mission, obviously making this the first ever alien encounter."
Submission + - First AMD 16-core Opteron chips arrive (techworld.com.au)
angry tapir writes: "After a brief delay and more than a year of chatter, Advanced Micro Devices has announced the availability of its first 16-core Opteron server chips, which pack the largest number of cores available on x86 chips today. The new Opteron 6200 chips, code-named Interlagos, are 25 per cent to 30 per cent faster than their predecessors, the 12-core Opteron 6100 chips, according to AMD."
Submission + - World's Largest Digging Machine Goes to Work (singularityhub.com) 1
kkleiner writes: "Meet the bagger 288, the worlds largest digging machine. It’s 311 feet (95 meters) tall, 705 feet (215 meters) long. That’s almost two football fields (American). It weighs in at 45,500 tons (the Titanic weighed 46,328 tons). Completed in 1978, it took the German steelmaking company Krupp–now ThyssenKrupp–five years to build and carried a manufacturing cost of $100 million."
Submission + - Keys Can Be Copied From Pictures Taken 200ft Away (singularityhub.com) 1
kkleiner writes: "A group of computer scientists at UC San Diego have developed software, called Sneakey, that can copy keys using digital images taken from large distances, and from almost any angle. In one demonstration they duplicated a key using an image captured on a cell phone camera. In another demonstration, with the help of a telephoto lens they were able to duplicate keys sitting on a café table almost 200 feet away. Incredibly, all of the copies worked when tested out on the relevant locks."
Submission + - ISS nearly clobbered by space debris (bbc.co.uk)
erice writes: A chuck of space debris came within 334 meters of the space station, forcing the crews to their escape capsules and prepare for emergency evacuation to Earth.
Submission + - 2011 MacBook Pros Confirmed To Crash Under Load (apple.com) 5
sammcj writes: 2011 Macbook crashing under heavy load?... you are not alone. While trying to figure out what was wrong with my fancy new Macbook I soon realised that the issue is very wide spread.
Submission + - Kaku's Dark Prediction for the End of Moore's Law (salon.com)
nightcats writes: "An excerpt from Michio Kaku's new book appears at salon.com, in which he sees a dark economic future within the next 20 yrs. as Moore's law is brought to an end when single-atom transistors give way to quantum states. Kaku predicts: "Since chips are placed in a wide variety of products, this could have disastrous effects on the entire economy. As entire industries grind to a halt, millions could lose their jobs, and the economy could be thrown into turmoil.""
Submission + - The Challenge In Delivering Open-Source GPU Driver (phoronix.com)
yuhong writes: After the recent Intel Sandy Bridge launch leaving Linux users at launch day having to build the latest source from Git repositories in order to have full support for the integrated graphics, Phoronix looks at the problems involved in delivering new graphics drivers for Linux.
Submission + - What does Windows 7 track, exactly? (windowsteamblog.com) 1
techmuse writes: A posting on the Windows Team Blog states that "In the last month, Windows 7 users have used Jump Lists 339,129,958 times!" How does Microsoft know this? Microsoft gathers telemetry for some products, especially those in development. Does it also gather it for products on the market? What exactly does it track? Are most users aware of this (beyond a screen that says "Help make Windows better"?)
Submission + - Interactive, emotion-detecting robot developed (gizmag.com)
cylonlover writes: A team of Cambridge University researchers have now developed a system that can not only detect a user's emotional state, but can also make expressive responses of its own. Using a robotic likeness of the godfather of the programmable computer, Charles Babbage, the team has hooked the system up to a driving simulator and created a computerized driving companion and navigator that reacts to the driver in much the same way as a human passenger.
Submission + - Method history for Subversion released (blogspot.com)
rocket22 writes: 99% of the times you search through the history of a file in Subversion you're probably looking for what happened to a specific method. But, following a method is not easy since most likely it has been moved around the file, heavily refactored and modified over time. The "method history for Subversion" Visual Studio plugin tries to come up with a solution: it is able to find what happened to a given method exploring the different revisions in the history of the file and locating the given method on each of them. It is available for Visual Studio and C# and the Eclipse plugin will follow shortly.
Submission + - Honeycomb to Require Dual-core Processor
adeelarshad82 writes: According to managing director of Korean consumer electronics firm Enspert, Google's new Android Honeycomb tablet OS will require a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor to run properly. That means that many existing Android tablets will not be upgradeable to Honeycomb, as they lack the processor necessary to meet the spec. Currently, Nvidia's Tegra 2 platform is the only chipset in products on the market to include a Cortex-A9, although other manufacturers have said they're moving to the new processor architecture for 2011 products.
Submission + - Postal Trucks to Become Sensor Platforms? (nytimes.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The U.S. Postal Service may face insolvency by 2011 (it lost $8.5 billion last year). An op-ed piece in today's New York Times proposes an interesting business idea for the Postal Service: use postal trucks as a giant fleet of mobile sensor platforms. (Think Google Streetview on steroids.) The trucks could be outfitted with a variety of sensors (security, environmental, RF ...) and paid for by businesses. The article's author addresses some of the obvious privacy concerns that arise.
