RicRoc - Slashdot User

Submission + - Face-mounted nose stylus created for phones (wired.co.uk)

Submitted by Lanxon on Wednesday May 04, 2011 @08:00AM

Lanxon writes: Designer Dominic Wilcox has come up with a Pinocchio-style "finger-nose stylus" that lets you use your phone hands free, reports Wired. He came up with the design after he found that he wanted to use his touchphone in the bath. A wet hand is not a good touchscreen navigation device, so he found himself using his nose to scroll, but found it hard to see precisely where his nose was touching the screen. The solution was to create a nose extension "finger" that would allow for navigation while holding the phone firmly in his one dry hand.

Submission + - Forty Years of P v NP

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 04, 2011 @07:57AM

An anonymous reader writes: In the afternoon of May 4, 1971, in the Stouffer's Somerset Inn in Shaker Heights, Ohio, Steve Cook presented his STOC paper proving that Satisfiability is NP-complete and Tautology is NP-hard.
The theorems suggest that Tautology is a good candidate for an interesting set not in [P] and I feel it is worth spending considerable effort trying to prove this conjecture. Such a proof would be a major breakthrough in complexity theory.

And thus Cook formulated what was soon to be called the P versus NP problem. The rest is history.

Here's the 1971 STOC Program (there were 143 attendees)and what that sacred ground looks like today.

Submission + - WOZ and the RCA character-generator patent (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by doperative on Wednesday May 04, 2011 @07:55AM

doperative writes: "A lot of patents are pretty much not worth that much .. In other words, any fifth-grader could come up with the same approach .. And then we find out RCA has a patent on a character generator for any raster-scanned setup .. And they patented it at a time when nobody could have envisioned it really being used or anything ... and they got five bucks for each Apple II, based on this little idea that's not even an idea. Y'know: store the bits, store the bits, then pop in a character on your TV"

Submission + - Internet Interconnection Ecosystem Resilience (net-security.org)

Submitted by Orome1 on Wednesday May 04, 2011 @07:46AM

Orome1 writes: The Internet has so far been extremely resilient. But will this last? A systemic failure of the Internet would cause significant problems for several sectors like energy, transport, finance, healthcare and the economy. The European Network and Information Security Agency launched a new report on the resilience of the Internet interconnection ecosystem. The focus of the report is the complex ecosystem of the interconnected network layers that make up the Internet. It identifies a number of concerns, for example by unveiling a striking lack of information of the size and shape of the Internet infrastructure. The study also recommends that incidents should be investigated by an independent body in order to understand the nature of success and failures.

Submission + - Inside India's fastest Super Computer (blogspot.com)

Submitted by

karthikmns

on Wednesday May 04, 2011 @07:21AM

karthikmns writes: "It can perform billions or even trillion of operations in a second or even less time. Presently, the supercomputer segment is dominated by U.S.A. Indian space research organization(ISRO) has recently developed a supercomputer named SAGA-220 making it the fastest super computer in India."

Submission + - Why Intelligent People Use More Drugs (makeahistory.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 02, 2011 @04:17AM

An anonymous reader writes: The human consumption of psychoactive drugs, such as marijuana, cocaine, and heroin, is of even more recent historical origin than the human consumption of alcohol or tobacco, so the Hypothesis would predict that more intelligent people use more drugs more frequently than less intelligent individuals.

Comment Re:Data Search Interface (Score 1) 65

by RicRoc on Thursday January 14, 2010 @05:57AM (#30762194) Attached to: Attractive Open Source Search Interfaces?

VisiNav looks very interesting, with a strong focus on class/object hierarchies that could work well on clean, well-structured data sets -- and may be exactly what the poster needs!

Could you explain here how to continue with VisiNav past the demo? How would the poster adapt VisiNav to his needs: set up his own system and use his own dataset?

Is VisiNav a research experiment, an open source project, or a commercial product? What licences is it available with? Is it open source?

Comment Enterprise Content Management with Alfresco (Score 5, Informative) 232

by RicRoc on Monday October 19, 2009 @06:54PM (#29801439) Attached to: What Desktop Search Engine For a Shared Volume?

Yes, Google's Search Appliance (GSA) could be used, I have seen it used with limited success. The main problem was how to respect access control on documents: either you index them or you don't, and if you index them with GSA, sensitive data may show up in search results. Also, we had a lot of trouble "taming" GSA: it would regularly take down servers that were dimensioned for light loads.

I would suggest using Alfresco http://www.alfresco.com/ as a CIFS (Common Internet File System) or WebDav store for all those documents. This would give you the simplicity of a shared folder and the opportunity to enrich the documents with searchable metadata such as tags, etc. Each folder (or any item, in fact) could have the correct access control that would be respected by the search engine, Lucene. http://lucene.apache.org/java/docs/

Alfresco comes in both Enterprise and Community Edition, it's very easy to try out -- even our non-techie project manager could install it on his PC within 10 minutes. Try that with Documentum, FileNet or IBM DB2 Content Manager!

Comment Re:Thats about it for me (Score 1) 205

by RicRoc on Friday October 02, 2009 @05:05AM (#29614819) Attached to: UK Court Order Served Over Twitter, To Anonymous User Posing As Another

I guess you will be deleting you Slashdot account as well, then? Are you talking seriousity? :-)

Might as well cut yourself out of society. Facebook et al are minuscule steps toward the singularity - do you think that will happen without loss of privacy? It will be painful.

Stand up and sing out: "YES! I cut my finger today! Revel in the mundane details of my life, will you?" And the discordant songs shall melt in the fire of onrushing destiny until we are all united as one melody, beating in harmony with the pain and dreams of an entire civilization.

Man, what am I smoking today?

Submission + - France Presses Ahead With Bill To Cut Off File Sha (eweekeurope.co.uk)

Submitted by judgecorp on Wednesday September 16, 2009 @06:53AM

judgecorp writes: A law which which would cut persistent file-sharers off the Internet has been passed by the French National Assembly — and now only needs to clear a panel of senators to become law. The bill was rejected by the French Constitutional Court in April, but is back again, and if passed might be a green light to similar laws proposed in other countries including the UK. Pirate Party branches have been set up in several European states to oppose moves which campaigners see as governments bowing to the demands of big media players.

Submission + - ARM takes the fight to Intel, risks hurting its pa (hexus.net)

Submitted by unts on Wednesday September 16, 2009 @05:51AM

unts writes: UK CPU designer ARM is moving to make it easier for companies to produce systems containing ARM processors. The company is offering up "hard macro" implementations of its newest Cortex-A9 CPU, ready for integration into System-on-Chip designs, reducing the cost and time involved in designing and testing them. In doing so, it claims it is upping the ante in its battle to beat Intel in the mobile and netbook spaces, and indeed beyond. This is a departure from the existing so-called "ARM ecosystem" whereby its partners must come up with the hard implementation of the cores themselves. However, HEXUS.channel mulls over the possibility of such a move creating issues with existing partners who've already invested heavily in their own ARM-based designs:
The likes of Qualcomm and NVIDIA didn't spend zillions of dollars developing Snapdragon and Tegra respectively, only to find themselves having to compete with numerous other entrants to the market, all facilitated by their supposed partner ARM. This could be an additional reason for ARM to continually make such a big point about how its targeting Intel.

Submission + - SPAM: Facebook passes 300m user milestone, makes some mo 1

Submitted by dreemteem on Wednesday September 16, 2009 @05:21AM

dreemteem writes: It's been a good day for Facebook.
The social networking giant announced late this afternoon that it had grabbed its 300 millionth user and claimed that it became "cash flow positive" months ahead of expectations.
[spam URL stripped]
Link to Original Source

Submission + - BBC Wants DRM on HD Broadcasts (boingboing.net) 1

Submitted by NickFortune on Wednesday September 16, 2009 @05:09AM

NickFortune writes: Over on BoingBoing, Danny O'Brien has pointed out that, the BBC has asked the regulator for permission to add DRM to their High Definition broadcasts.
Apparently this is at the behest of "content providers".

Offcom, the regulatory body in question, has asked for comments, but the window closes today. So if you don't want DRM added to the Beeb's broadcasts, read the
proposal and explain why this is a bad idea.

Submission + - Shouldn't the Kessler syndrome be taken seriously (wikipedia.org)

Submitted by lwiniarski on Wednesday September 16, 2009 @05:04AM

lwiniarski writes: Shouldn't the Kessler syndrome be taken seriously by NASA? It seems this issue of space junk has the potential to completely render earth orbit unusable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_Syndrome

Nasa claims the possibility of collisions is "small" but it has already happened.
http://orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/faqs.html#15

Donald Kessler predicted this back in 1978 and made of rough prediction of 2 collisions by 2009
http://webpages.charter.net/dkessler/files/KesSym.html
It seems he should get credit for predicting this over 30 years ago

It seems that NASA managment might be ignoring or paying minor lip service (again) a potentially devastating problem.as they did in the 2 shuttle disasters, possibly claiming "ooopss we just didn't think it could happen"

Submission + - Linux kernel 2.6.32 starts gathering pace (cio.com.au)

Submitted by TimmyC on Wednesday September 16, 2009 @02:11AM

TimmyC writes: A week after the previous version (2.6.31) was released, the kernel developers are beginning to submit changes and improvements across virtualization, power management, file systems and device driver code for the upcoming 2.6.32 version. For example, KVM hypervisor changes include better SMP performance and the Linux power management system will also get a significant update. Interestingly, the lack of communication by the Android and Hyper-V developers with the kernel hackers could mean staging drivers are dropped in future releases.

Slashdot Top Deals