bwintx - Slashdot User

Submission + - BBC delivered 2.8PB on busiest Olympics day, reaching 700Gb/s as Wiggo won gold (computerworlduk.com)

Submitted by Qedward on Tuesday August 14, 2012 @06:35AM

Qedward writes: The BBC has revealed that on the busiest day of its London 2012 Olympics coverage it delivered 2.8 petabytes worth of content, peaking when Bradley Wiggins won gold, where it shifted 700Gb/s.

It has also said that over a 24-hour period on the busiest Olympic days it had more traffic to bbc.co.uk than it did for the entire BBC coverage of the FIFA World Cup 2010 games.

They revealed they had 106 million requests for BBC Olympic video content, which included 12 million requests for video on mobile devices across the whole of the Games.

Mobile saw the most uptake at around 6pm when people had left the office but still wanted to keep informed of the latest action.

Tablet usage, however, reached a peak at around 9pm, where people were using it as a second screen or as they continued to watch the games in bed.

Submission + - How Google+ Punk'd The Oatmeal (techcrunch.com)

Submitted by ryzvonusef on Tuesday August 14, 2012 @05:56AM

ryzvonusef writes: This summer, the artist (Matthew Inman) wrote that Google+ comment threads sound like *crickets*, poking fun at the social network's lack of engagement. He also criticized not being able to “set up a fancy profile URL so I don't have to link people to http://plus.google.com/blergasdf1234thimbleturdorgasm99meatpoopypoopxv9donkeypie ” — a made-up, ridiculously long string of random characters.

In retaliation, the Google+ team didn’t cite its user growth stats or give an excuse for why there are no custom profile URLs. Instead, Tech Crunchreports that they just redirected the vanity URL *back* to The Oatmeal author Matthew Inman’s Google+ profile .

Congrats, Matt, you’ve now got “donkey pie” at the end of your own special Google+ vanity URL.

Comment Re:it's simple (Score 5, Funny) 671

by bwintx on Friday August 10, 2012 @01:20PM (#40948099) Attached to: CowboyNeal Weighs In On the Windows 8 "Metro" GUI

Ssshhh, he's talking about management.

Submission + - Seizure detector treats epilepsy in rats (nature.com)

Submitted by ananyo on Friday August 10, 2012 @10:32AM

ananyo writes: A skull implant that can detect an epileptic seizure and deliver therapeutic electrical impulses can reduce the length of these events by 60% in rats.
Most electrical stimulation devices, such as those that deliver deep-brain stimulation (DBS) to treat Parkinson’s disease and depression, operate continuously, delivering impulses regardless of the patient’s brain activity. But this can cause a range of undesirable side effects, such as headaches, and worsen symptoms for those with epilepsy.
The challenge for the researchers was to engineer a device that could detect a seizure and stimulate the brain amid noisy electrical activity from the body's neighbouring muscles and from the electrodes themselves. The researchers got around some of the electrical-noise issues by fitting the device with an accelerometer which helps the device filter out muscle signals by revealing correlations between the signals and movements (abstract).

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Personal tape drive NAS?

Submitted by hey_popey on Friday August 10, 2012 @10:01AM

hey_popey writes: I would like to piggyback on the previous "Ask Slashdot" question; do you know of any realistic way to use a tape drive solution at home, not as a backup, but as a regular NAS. I would like, for example, to save the torrents of my linux distributions on it, and at the same time, play the family videos on a computer.
It would seem at a first glance, that the transfer rates and capacity of Linear Tape-Open (1.5TB, 280MB/s in 2010) and the functionality of LTFS would allow me to do that, but I don't know the details, and if this would be economically viable.

Submission + - Facebook's Post-IPO Talent Drain Begins (itworld.com)

Submitted by

itwbennett

on Friday August 10, 2012 @09:31AM

itwbennett writes: "In the past week, four high-level Facebook employees (Ethan Beard, director of platform partnerships; Kate Mitic, platform marketing director; Jonathan Matus, mobile platform marketing manager; and Ben Blumenfeld, design manager) have resigned to take on more entrepreneurial adventures."

Submission + - Cops Pirate 100's of DVDs, Get Slap on Wrist (kttc.com)

Submitted by AbsoluteXyro on Friday August 10, 2012 @08:51AM

AbsoluteXyro writes: Apparently, the big FBI warning we all see whenever you pop in a DVD does not apply to the fuzz. From KTTC.com — "In mid-2009, former Houston County digital network administrator Lindsay Pierce saw what he calls "suspicious activity" at the Sheriff's Office. "The county owns a duplicator that will make five discs at a time that we use for court cases and things like that, and I had replaced four or five drives and that seemed unusual. I actually saw one of the people involved actually making movies," Pierce said. Kevin Kelleher was a Houston County Commissioner for 16 years. He says he brought the issue before the county board a number of times. "I've given them evidence that I had that showed that members of the Houston County Sheriff's Department were in fact copying DVDs. Not just ones or twos, but hundreds," Kelleher said. FBI agents from Rochester confirmed that they looked into the allegations. They said they spent an hour in Caledonia before deciding the case didn't fall within their federal prosecuting guidelines. No one in the case has yet been charged with any criminal wrongdoing. But the county gave written reprimands to the county's finance director. The Houston County Attorney's Office says the case is closed."

Comment Re:I'm not bothered... (Score 1) 605

by bwintx on Tuesday August 07, 2012 @09:56AM (#40904839) Attached to: NASA Scientist: Heat Waves Really Are From Global Warming

Not to mention you'll also have learned to put your shoes away when your wife-in-the-dream tells you to do so.

Comment Re:The Book said it (Score 4, Interesting) 258

by bwintx on Monday August 06, 2012 @11:13AM (#40894983) Attached to: Did an Unnamed MIT Student Save Apollo 13?

You are correct, and I should've been more specific. In Apollos 12 through 17, TLI put the S-4B/Apollo stack on a free-return trajectory; and, then, an early mid-course correction burn (perhaps MCC #1; don't recall) would put the Apollo CSM and successfully docked/extracted LM on the non-free-return trajectory.

Comment Re:The Book said it (Score 5, Interesting) 258

by bwintx on Monday August 06, 2012 @10:36AM (#40894529) Attached to: Did an Unnamed MIT Student Save Apollo 13?

Yes and no. The slingshot or "free-return" method was taken out of the default mission starting with Apollo 12 because it was believed that they could achieve a more accurate orbital path, and thereby lunar landing, that way. Remember that the Apollo 11 landing occurred roughly four miles off target, but it was the only one of the six eventual landings that didn't land where they'd planned. Getting back on free-return was always considered an option in case of an emergency, as occurred with Apollo 13. Working purely off memory, but I do know that getting on free-return was mentioned early on in the post-explosion hours. Oblig: Get off my lawn.

Submission + - Why Intel should buy Nokia (zdnet.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 03, 2012 @11:06AM

An anonymous reader writes: There's a lot of talk about which company, if any, should buy Nokia: Lenovo was the latest company rumoured to be interested (until a Lenovo executive dismissed the idea as 'a joke').

But, for me, there's one firm that would be a more natural fit than any of the others being rumoured as potential new owners of Nokia: Intel.

Of course, there's been no suggestion that such a thought has ever occurred to either Nokia or Intel, and no suggestion from either that such an acquisition is ever likely to happen — but the way the mobile market is developing right now, there's no denying an alliance between the pair would make a lot of sense.

Firstly, Intel is desperate to get its chips into the smartphone market in a big way, as the introduction of the first handsets to use the Intel Atom Z2460 processor (previously codenamed Medfield) showed.

However, right now, Intel clearly needs...(read more)

Submission + - US will Oppose Bid to Hand Control of Internet to United Nations (paritynews.com)

Submitted by hypnosec on Friday August 03, 2012 @10:41AM

hypnosec writes: The United States has said that it is going to oppose and reject any proposal that might seek handing over control of the internet to the United Nations at the upcoming World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) convened by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) from December 3 to 14, 2012. United States is going to submit first group of proposals about changes to the International Telecommunications Regulations (ITRs) treaty today, which hasn’t been revised since the 1988. The treaty is due for revision not only because it needs a modern touch but because fundamentally there have been major changes in the telecommunications world like adoption of packet switching over circuit switching, cellular roaming and broadening of the Internet. Many nations, as per leaked proposals, are of the view point that control of the internet's technical specifications should be relinquished from a select group of non-profit US companies and be given to UN's International Telecommunications Union (ITU). This hasn’t gone down well with the United States and Terry Kramer, head of the US delegation to the WCIT, believes that the current multi-stakeholder structure is working well and is effectively maintaining the health of the Internet. "The United States believes that the existing multi-stakeholder institutions, incorporating industry and civil society, have functioned effectively and will continue to ensure the health and growth of the internet and all of its benefits," he said.

Submission + - Ubuntu for Android (ubuntu.com) 2

Submitted by

ozmanjusri

on Friday August 03, 2012 @10:31AM

ozmanjusri writes: "Ubuntu for Android allows you to install a full Linux desktop on your phone and use it when the phone is docked. According to Ubuntu,

Ubuntu for Android is a complete desktop with a full range of desktop applications including office, web browsing, email, media and messaging. Personal information like contacts, calendars, photo galleries and music can be accessed from both the phone and the desktop interface. SMS texts arrive on your desktop if you are docked when they show up, and calls are handled like VoIP if you want to stay working while you chat. Ubuntu for Android brings the desktop world together with the phone world, seamlessly.

Youtube videos show users loading a full Unity desktop from their docked phone, including MS Office applications via Citrix. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzc0uMXGFBY."

Submission + - Google+ Account Suspended? You Won't Find Out Why (itworld.com)

Submitted by

jfruh

on Friday August 03, 2012 @09:39AM

jfruh writes: "Dan Tynan is a tech writer and blogger who discovered, while trying to post links to his writing on his Google+ profile, that his account had been suspended. This despite the fact that he used his real name and didn't violate the terms of service in any other way. Upon appeal his account was reinstated, just as mysteriously as it was shut down, but along the way he discovered a rash of people with suspended Google+ accounts who can't figure out what they did to anger the Google gods."

Submission + - Electronic sensor rivals sensitivity of human skin (nature.com)

Submitted by ananyo on Monday July 30, 2012 @10:41AM

ananyo writes: A flexible electronic sensor made from interlocking hairs can detect the gentle steps of a ladybird and distinguish between shear and twisting forces.
The sensor consists of two interlocking sheets of nanfibres. When the sensor sheet is pressed, twisted or brushed, the squishy, metal-coated hairs change position, generating changes in the sensor’s electrical resistance (abstract). Such subtle tactile input would be very useful for robots designed to interact with people, says Matei Ciocarlie, a scientist at robotics company Willow Garage. “Skin has been an overlooked part of robotics”, says Ciocarlie, because it poses such a challenging problem: in addition to being robust, sensitive and flexible, it needs to be made in very large sheets.

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