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Transportation

Berkeley Engineers Have Some Bad News About Air Cars 278

Posted by timothy from the puff-the-magic-dragon-was-involved dept.
cheeks5965 writes "We've argued before over compressed air vehicles, a.k.a. air cars. Air cars are an enchanting idea, providing mobility with zero fuel consumption or environmental impacts. The NYTimes' Green Inc. blog reports that the reality is less rosy. New research from UC Berkeley and ICF International puts a period at the end of the discussion, showing that compressed air is a very poor fuel, storing less than 1% of the energy in gasoline; air cars won't get you far, with a range of just 29 miles in typical city driving; and despite appearing green the vehicles are worse for the environment, with twice the carbon footprint as gasoline vehicles, from producing the electricity used to compress the air. Given these barriers, manufacturer claims should definitely be taken with a grain of salt."

Comment Re:wow, a whole million? (Score 1) 773

by jackhererUK (#30119924) Attached to: Mark Cuban's Plan To Kill Google
Sorry but this is not true, you can be specific about which robots you want to exclude. More importantly google chooses to respect robots.txt and noindex meta tags, if it decided it was in its interest not to respect them - either at all or just for the sites that did the deal - then there is precisely nothing anyone could do about it.

Comment Re:wow, a whole million? (Score 1) 773

by jackhererUK (#30119278) Attached to: Mark Cuban's Plan To Kill Google
The thing is though if the top 1000 sites used robots.txt and the noindex meta tag to remove themselves from google, then google could just ignore robots.txt and the noindex meta tag for the top 1000 sites and index them anyway. Ultimately if the site is publicly accessible then google can index it and there is nothing anybody could do about it.

Comment Re:US vs UK... (Score 1) 1174

by jackhererUK (#29986714) Attached to: Plug vs. Plug — Which Nation's Socket Is Best?
The circuit breakers in my house are 30 amps, they protect against current overload in the wiring in my house. The fuses in my plugs are between 3 and 13 amps (as appropriate to the particular appliance) they protect against circuit overload in the appliance and associated wiring. This is not redundancy it is 2 different fuses/breakers that serve totally different purposes.
Portables

ARM Stealthily Rising As a Low-End Contender 285

Posted by timothy from the raising-an-arm dept.
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Neil McAllister examines how the ongoing rise of netbooks, decline of desktops, and the smartphone explosion are reconfiguring the processor market, putting Intel's Atom processor on a clear collision course with ARM. And here, on the low end of computing, Intel may have finally met its match. Thanks to a unique licensing model, ARM will ship an estimated 90 chips per second this year, and the catalog of OSes and apps available for ARM has been growing for decades, including several complete Linux distributions such as Google's Android OS and Chrome OS when it ships. 'One thing ARM doesn't have, however, is Windows,' McAllister writes, something that could ultimately stymie ARM's plans to compete on the low end of the netbook market. And yet Intel's bet on Windows and its x86 compatibility appeal among developers could backfire, McAllister writes. In the end, it's all about performance. Thus far, Intel has yet to demonstrate a model with power characteristics comparable to those of the current generation of ARM chips, which are fast proving their ability to handle high-performance applications."

Comment Put all projects together (Score 1) 103

by jackhererUK (#29784115) Attached to: How To List FOSS Experience On Your Resume
Most tech cvs/resumes i have seen list the various projects worked on in the career history section. If you wanted to include open source projects that don't relate to a specific job then you could have a cut down career history section with just an explanation of each job and then split out the projects into a seperate section. You could then just put a reference with each project to say which job or open source project it related to. That way your commercial work and open source work get equal precedence and you don't have to relegate your open source projects to their own little ghetto.

Comment Insert (Score 1) 939

by jackhererUK (#29616589) Attached to: The Most Useless Key On My Keyboard Is...
Insert is not only useless it is actually irritating that it exists. I always want to type text in insert mode and never in overwrite mode. If I want to overwrite some text i will highlight it first. The only time i am ever in overwrite mode is by accidentally hitting the insert key. A colleague of mine has even gone so far as to prize the key off his keyboard cos he i so fed up of hitting it accedentally.
Transportation

(Near) Constant Internet While RV'ing? 438

Posted by timothy from the use-a-thumper dept.
Neilio writes "What systems would Slashdotters recommend for staying connected while RV'ing across the US and Canada? While a 3G data plan seems obvious, the intrepid RV'er wants to get remote and into those parts of the coverage map that are usually gray (no coverage). But satellite can be expensive, includes high latency for VoIP and gaming, and requires a clear view of the southern sky. I've come across some intriguing products that use an amplified 2G/3G signal and bridge to WiFi, like WiFi In Motion, and CradlePoint's MBR1000 (I have no affiliation with either). Do folks have any experience with these, or can you recommend another approach (even homebrew)? While I am an electrical engineer by degree, you have to go back a few decades since I last expertly sported a soldering iron, so the less DIY the better. My wife and I now run a web-based business, so nearly daily connectivity is a must, no matter where we are."
Earth

US Nuclear Power Industry Poised For a Comeback 853

Posted by kdawson from the do-not-want dept.
ThousandStars sends us to The Wall Street Journal for a report that momentum for nuclear energy is waxing in the US. "For the first time in decades, popular opinion is on the industry's side. A majority of Americans thinks nuclear power, which emits virtually no carbon dioxide, is a safe and effective way to battle climate change, according to recent polls. At the same time, legislators are showing renewed interest in nuclear as they hunt for ways to slash greenhouse-gas emissions. The industry is seizing this chance to move out of the shadow of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl and show that it has solved the three big problems that have long dogged it: cost, safety and waste."
Education

Submission + - Students' Scheduling Errors May Last Days 2

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "The Washington Post reports that thousands of high school students in Prince George's County missed a third day of classes Wednesday, and school officials said it could take more than a week to sort out the chaos caused by a computerized class-scheduling system as students were placed in gyms, auditoriums, cafeterias, libraries and classes they didn't want or need at high schools across the county and their parents' fury over the logistical nightmare rose. "The school year comes up the same time every year," said Carolyn Oliver, the mother of a 16-year-old senior who spent Wednesday in the senior lounge at Bowie High School. "When I heard they didn't have schedules, I was like, 'What have they been doing all summer?' " When school opened Monday, about 8,000 high school students had no class schedules and were sent to wait in holding spaces while administrators tried to sort things out. By Tuesday evening, that number was down to 4,000. As of noon Wednesday, 3,400 of the school district's 41,000 high school students had no class schedules, officials said. Superintendent William R. Hite Jr. said that some schools didn't realize there was a problem with schedules until school started and that the trouble was exacerbated by difficulties with SchoolMax, a $4.1 million computer system introduced last school year. SchoolMax went online in Prince George's a year ago to help the county track students' grades, attendance and discipline data. Last year, the program crashed at least four times and was plagued by errors that led to botched schedules, an overcount of students and mistakes on report cards. Jessica Pinkney, a junior, said she was moved to the cafeteria Wednesday morning after two days in the gymnasium because the cafeteria had air conditioning. "We just sit and do nothing," says Pinkney. "But I'm meeting new people, so it's getting more interesting.""
Earth

Submission + - Climate change? There's an elephant in the room.

Submitted by Morlenden
Morlenden writes: Whether or not climate change is caused by human activity, there are several other ecological problems caused by a increasing human population. A constant focus on climate change leaves these other problems un-addressed, perhaps leading to problems ahead where the carrying capacity of the Earth is reduced by ecological damage even while the human population continues to increase.
Security

Submission + - Techdirt Hacked

Submitted by
jackhererUK
jackhererUK writes: "Someone calling themselves BIOHAZARD appears to have hacked/defaced techdirt. It seems to be a fairly low impact hack with the body of a number of posts defaced but most of the rest of the site is intact."
Books

U of Michigan and Amazon To Offer 400,000 OOP Books 160

Posted by timothy from the had-no-idea-so-many-people-loved-object-oriented-pumas dept.
eldavojohn writes "Four hundred thousand rare, out of print books may soon be available for purchase ranging anywhere from $10 to $45 apiece. The article lists a rare Florence Nightingale book on Nursing which normally sells for thousands due to its rarity. The [University of Michigan] librarian, Mr. Courant said, 'The agreement enables us to increase access to public domain books and other publications that have been digitised. We are very excited to be offering this service as a new way to increase access to the rich collections of the university library.' The University of Michigan has a library where Google is scanning rare books and was the aim of heavy criticism. (Some of the Google-scanned books are to be sold on Amazon.) How the authors guild and publishers react to Amazon's Surge offering softcover reprints of out of print books remains to be seen."
Space

An Inside Look At the SpaceX Rocket Factory 50

Posted by Soulskill from the pretty-pictures dept.
Dave Bullock writes "The folks at SpaceX are working hard in their Hawthorne labs, cubicles and factory, building rockets that will hopefully bring future astronauts to the International Space Station. At the behest of Wired, I toured the former 747 factory which is now a rocket assembly line. 'Eschewing the traditional startup trappings of two college grads eating ramen, watching Adult Swim and coding until the wee hours of the night, SpaceX instead employs hundreds of brainiacs and builds its rockets in a massive hangar that once housed a 747 assembly line. Started in 2002 by PayPal founder Elon Musk, SpaceX (short for Space Exploration Technologies Corporation) brings a startup mentality to launching rockets into orbit, which until recently was almost exclusively government turf. The hope is that minimal bureaucracy, innovation and in-house manufacturing and testing can be used to put payloads into space at roughly one-tenth the cost of traditional methods.'"
Biotech

Top 10 Disappointing Technologies 682

Posted by timothy from the top-10-lists-are-a-disappointing-technology dept.
Slatterz writes "Every once in a while, a product comes along that everyone from the executives to the analysts to even the crusty old reporters thinks will change the IT world. Sadly, they are often misguided. This article lists some of the top ten technology disappointments that failed to change the world, from the ludicrously priced Apple Lisa, to voice recognition, to Intel's ill-fated Itanium chip, and virtual reality, this article lists some of the top ten technology disappointments that failed to change the world." But wait! Don't give up too quickly on the Itanium, says the Register.

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