8392466
submission
ianare writes:
It is safe to bet that a flying motorcycle will never be a practical transportation option, but that has not stopped Samson Motorworks, a small engineering firm in northern California's Sierra Nevada foothills, from playing the long odds. The company is building a prototype of its Switchblade Multi Mode Vehicle, or flying motorcycle, and hopes to sell a $60,000 do-it-yourself kit as early as 2011 (engine and avionics are sold separately). The Switchblade might even have "green" appeal. The engines suitable for the craft all use ordinary unleaded gas and meet California emissions standards, which are stricter than those issued by the U.S.
6448845
submission
ianare writes:
Uruguay has become the first country to provide a laptop for every child attending state primary school. The project is being promoted as an achievement of the Tabaré Vázquez government. Over the last two years 362,000 pupils and 18,000 teachers have been involved in the programme, which has cost the state $260 per child (less than 5% of the country's education budget). The annual cost of maintaining the programme, including an information portal for pupils and teachers, will be $21.The laptops use the Sugar interface running on Linux , though blind children are being taught on MS Windows. There are plans to extend the scheme to secondary schools and pre-school children next year.
5605757
submission
ianare writes:
Attempts to rig or interfere with Afghanistan's election could be caught by a system that allows anyone to record incidents via text message. The text messages are collected via an open source platform known as FrontlineSMS, which has been used to monitor elections in Nigeria. It has now been combined with a "crowd-sourced, crisis-mapping" tool known as Ushahidi, also open source, and which plots the reports on a freely-accessible map. Together they allow reports to be gathered from any part of the country with mobile phone coverage. Even though it costs the same amount of money to send an SMS as it costs to buy bread for your family, some people have said that they will be willing not to eat that evening in order to tell the international community what is going on in the country.
4887291
submission
ianare writes:
The manufacturer of a hydrogen car unveiled in London on Tuesday will make its designs available online so the cars can be built and improved locally. The Riversimple car can go 80km/hr (50mph) and travels 322km (200mi) per re-fuelling, with an efficiency equivalent to 300 miles to the gallon. The cars will be leased with fuel and repair costs included, at an estimated £200 ($315) per month. The company asserts that in the leasing model, the vested interest for the manufacturer is in producing long-lasting, fuel-efficient, high-quality products, since it bears the cost of both hydrogen and repairs. The agreement will be such that if the designs are improved by a local manufacturer, those improvements will be sent back, so that what the company refers to as its "network of manufacturers" can contribute to the overall development of the product line.
3300535
submission
ianare writes:
COROT has found the smallest terrestrial planet ever detected outside the Solar System. The amazing planet is less than twice the size of Earth and orbits a Sun-like star. It is located very close to its parent star, and has a high temperature, between 1000 and 1500C. This discovery is significant because recent measurements have indicated the existence of planets of small masses but their size remained undetermined until now. "For the first time, we have unambiguously detected a planet that is 'rocky' in the same sense as our own Earth.", said Malcolm Fridlund, ESA's COROT Project Scientist.
1720187
submission
ianare writes:
A few days ago someone found a serious flaw in the Android firmware that allowed root access. Unfortunately, once there, it's difficult to accomplish anything given Google's overly simplistic busybox replacement, toolbox. What is really needed is a complete Unix userland.
Jay Freeman was able to install the ARM distribution of Debian with the ability to add almost all applications available. He has posted full instructions that explain how to create and load a custom image on an SD card. In the end, both Android and Debian will co-exist happily on the device. Note that the bug which allows this process has been patched by Google, so get this done while you still can!
1225921
submission
ianare writes:
There are an estimated 45m PCs in Brazil, but 59% of Brazilians have never accessed the internet or used a computer. However, measures are underway to change all that. 56,000 public schools are presently being fitted with broadband internet, with an aim to have all of the urban public schools in the country connected by 2010. The Brazilian government is also trialling a number of laptop projects, including the OLPC, Intel's Classmate, and Encore's Simputer. Children in Brazil only spend between four or five hours at school, so being able to take the laptop home extends the time that they have to learn. The Brazilian government has a profound conviction that free software is the way to go, and is demanding that there be a whole suite of free and open-source software installed in these computers.
653466
submission
ianare writes:
The first legalised home computers have gone on sale in Cuba, the latest in a series of restrictions on daily life which President Raul Castro has lifted in recent weeks. The desktop computers cost almost $800, in a country where the average wage is under $20 a month, but some Cubans do have access to extra income. Internet access remains restricted to certain workplaces, schools and universities on the island which the government claims is due to low bandwidth availability. Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez is laying a new cable under the Caribbean, but it remains unclear whether once the connection is completed, the authorities will allow unrestricted access to the internet.
529460
submission
ianare writes:
Microsoft has released the specifications of its Office binary formats (Office 97-2007: .doc, .xls, .ppt, drawing) under the MS Open Specification Promise, a program under which Microsoft promises not to sue developers who use the specifications. They are available for direct download as PDF or XPS documents, previously, it was necessary to contact Microsoft to receive the documentation.
Secondly, Microsoft addressed translating from binary formats into the Open XML formats, and concluded that the best option was to create an open source translation project to achieve this. The project has now launched, and is released under the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) license. Although it is still in early stages of development, a first result is expected for April 1st, with the final Word translator (and more) due on June 30th.
These changes are aimed at alleviating criticisms related to the Open XML specifications, specifically the use of undocumented legacy document rendering compatibility tags.
493408
submission
ianare writes:
A new method of digital rights management which relies on a user's profile has been pioneered by Aboriginal Australians for a multimedia archive. The need to create profiles based on a user's name, age, sex and standing within their community come from traditions over what can and cannot be seen. For example, men cannot view women's rituals, and people from one community cannot view material from another without first seeking permission. Meanwhile images of the deceased cannot be viewed by their families. This threw up issues surrounding how the material could be archived, as it was not only about preserving the information into a database in a traditional sense, but also how people would access it depending on their gender, their relationship to other people and where they were situated.
466832
submission
ianare writes:
The European Commission is launching two new anti-competition investigations against US computer giant Microsoft. The first will look at whether Microsoft unfairly ties its Explorer internet browser to its Windows operating system, stemming from a complaint by browser maker Opera. The second area of investigation will concern the interoperability of some of Microsoft's products, including Office 2007, the .NET Framework, and some server products. This one stems from a complaint by the European Committee for Interoperable Systems which alleges that the new Office Open XML does not play nice with competing products.
Microsoft's opponents are certain to embrace the new investigation, while others will accuse the EU of singling out and taking an unnecessarily hard line with the company.
459232
submission
ianare writes:
A new ornamental flower, just patented by Cornell, can last for two weeks in a vase, but when left in the garden, it blooms all summer long in the cooler, northern states until the first hard freeze in the fall. Its lavender-lilac flower color is adorned with dark speckling and a creamy yellow throat. The hybrid, which botanically is not a lily, took five years to develop, this included testing it and growing in large enough quantities to sell.
425284
submission
ianare writes:
Akin to Damien Hirst's bodies in formaldehyde, the frog is suspended in clear liquid contained in a glass cube, with a blue ethernet cable leading into its splayed abdomen. The computer stores a website that enables users to trigger physical movement in the corpse: the resulting movement can be seen in gallery, and through a live streaming webcamera.
Includes a high-resolution image and a video.
422173
submission
ianare writes:
Eight tusks and a bison skull all show signs of having being blasted with iron-nickel fragments, typical meteorite material. Raised, burnt surface rings trace the point of entry of high-velocity projectiles; and the punctures are on only one side, consistent with a blast coming from a single direction. But the team was astonished to find the animal remains were about 35,000 years old, rather than from the known impact of 13,000 years ago.
Was there more than one impact, or were these animals already dead when the meteorite hit?
406759
submission
ianare writes:
Nick Breese, a security consultant at Security-assessment.com, has come up with a way of cracking encryption algorithms 100 times faster, using a Sony PS3. The speed increase relates to the use of the Cell processor's SIMD (or vector) computing, allowing him to run cryptography calculations in parallel. Breese has pushed the current upper limit of 10-15 million cycles per second on Intel-based architecture to 1.4 billion cycles per second for MD5 calculations. This discovery will unfortunately make cracking certain types of passwords much faster, hopefully it will also drive stronger and better implemented cryptography.