Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Games

Submission + - Putting the 'we' in Wii for blind gamers (cnet.com)

Submitted by angrymilkman
angrymilkman writes: Researchers of the University of Nevada in Reno have adapted two Wii Sports games, such that they can be played without visual feedback.
With the recent national attention to childhood obesity this technology could help increase the exercise opportunities for children with the highest obesity rates.
Iphone

Submission + - Android working on the iPod Touch 1G (isaiahjroberts.com)

Submitted by dreadpirate15
dreadpirate15 writes: A couple years ago, I stumbled upon the Linux on iPhone blog. I was really quite intrigued by it An open OS on Apple hardware? Perfect! Open software plus beautiful hardware. Awesome. So I followed it I kept the site in my RSS reader And nothing. No updates for the longest time. I was getting discouraged, thinking that my only way of getting Android was to buy a smartphone. Then, I got an update. Planetbeing had done it! He’d quietly reverse engineered the drivers for the iPhone 2G, and got Android actually working on it! I was thrilled, and anxiously followed his updates. When he got Android working on the iPhone 3G, I rejoiced, knowing the iPod Touch 1G would surely come soon. It took a while, but this morning I got it working. I wrote a tutorial detailing how anyone can get it working themself! Here is the link: iDroid on the iPod Touch 1G.
The Military

Submission + - V-22 Osprey: “Flying Shame” or future (failuremag.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In 2007 Time magazine referred to the V-22 Osprey as A Flying Shame. But as military and aviation writer Richard Whittle relates in his new book The Dream Machine, the history of the V-22 Osprey—a multi-mission tiltrotor aircraft—is as complex as the engineering challenges that had to be overcome to build it. But has the Osprey, with all of its failures, tainted the tiltrotor concept? Or much like the Concorde, will tiltrotor technology remain too expensive to be commercially viable?
Cellphones

Submission + - 4G: is it worth the hype? (skunkpost.com)

Submitted by crimeandpunishment
crimeandpunishment writes: Cell phone companies are about to bombard us with advertising for the next big thing: 4G access. The first 4G phone, Spring Nextel's EVO, comes out this week. But just how big is 4G? Is it fast enough to warrant the hype, or are consumers better off waiting a while? Associated Press technology writer Peter Svensson looks at the difference between 4G and 3G technology.

Submission + - Bangladesh blocks Facebook over Mohammed cartoons 1

Submitted by lbalbalba
lbalbalba writes: Bangladesh has blocked access to Facebook after satirical images of the prophet Muhammad and the country's leaders were uploaded. One man has been arrested and charged with "spreading malice and insulting the country's leaders" with the images. Officials said the ban was temporary and access to the site would be restored once the images were removed. It comes after Pakistan invoked a similar ban over "blasphemous content".
Link to original source
NASA

Submission + - Senators Question Removal of NASA Program Manager 1

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "The NY Times reports that one day after the removal of NASA's head of the Constellation Program, Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, chairman of the Committee that oversees NASA, and Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, the committee’s ranking Republican have asked NASA's inspector general to look into whether the NASA leadership is undermining the agency’s moon program and to “examine whether this or other recent actions by NASA were intended or could reasonably have been expected to foreclose the ability of Congress to consider meaningful alternatives” to President Obama’s proposed policy, which invests heavily in new space technologies and turns the launching of astronauts over to private companies. Congress has not yet agreed to the president’s proposed policy, which invests heavily in new space technologies and turns the launching of astronauts over to private companies, and inserted into this year’s budget legislation a clause that prohibits NASA from canceling the Constellation program or starting alternatives without Congressional approval. The manager, Jeffrey M. Hanley, whose reassignment is being called a promotion, had been publicly supported by Maj. Gen. Charles F. Bolden Jr., the NASA administrator, and other NASA officials, but he may have incurred displeasure by publicly talking about how Constellation could be made to fit into the slimmed-down budgets that President Obama has proposed for NASA’s human spaceflight endeavors. “It’s enough for us to be extraordinarily concerned,” said a Congressional staff member, who was authorized to speak only anonymously. “We just want the inspector general to follow the path and report back to us what he’s finding.”"
Intel

Submission + - Intel announces low-voltage, 32-nm mobile CPUs (techreport.com)

Submitted by EconolineCrush
EconolineCrush writes: Intel has announced a new line of Consumer Ultra-Low Voltage mobile CPUs designed for thin-and-light 10-13" notebooks. Fabricated on the same 32-nm process as the company's flagship Core i7-980X Extreme desktop chip, the new mobile line spans multiple models between budget Celeron and Pentium models and more expensive Core i3, i5, and i7 offerings. Intel claims a TDP of just 17W for the new CPUs, which is less than half the power draw of standard notebook chips. Systems based on the new CPUs are expected to arrive on the market starting early next month.
Linux

Submission + - What is the best cross-platform build system?

Submitted by rippeltippel
rippeltippel writes: I write embedded software for multiple linux-based platforms and use different build systems (makefiles, buildroot, ...) to cross-compile software, kernel, and to generate the final rootfs. I would now like to uniform the build system with a tool which is actively maintained and updated, allows to easily add/remove packages and, most of all, to cross-compile the same codebase to different platforms with little effort.
I've seen that there are several solutions available, e.g. PTXdist, CMake, LTIB, T2 SDE, OpenEmbedded, Poky, Bitbake and, of course, Buildroot. From my understanding, some of them are integrated into each other (e.g. OpenEmbedded uses Bitbake) but unfortunately I couldn't find any serious comparison or review of those tools.
What cross-platform build system do Slashdotters reckon to be the most suitable?
Medicine

Submission + - SPAM: Researcher discovers online health info is wrong

Submitted by
destinyland
destinyland writes: ""Even widely trusted sites like WebMD are not that accurate when it comes to adolescent reproductive health," reports a Stanford Med School researcher. After conducting a survey, she determined that "Half of the sites, including such highly trafficked destinations as Wikipedia and Mayoclinic.com, failed to provide accurate, complete information about emergency contraception," for example. 60% of the sites had misinformation about birth control pills, and 40% of the web sites actually contradicted the guidelines of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists on PAP exams."
Link to Original Source
Programming

Submission + - Hope for multi-language programming?

Submitted by
chthonicdaemon
chthonicdaemon writes: "I have been using Linux as my primary environment for more than ten years. In this time, I have absorbed all the lore surrounding the Unix Way — small programs doing one thing well, communicating via text and all that. I have found the commandline a productive environment for doing many of the things I often do, and I find myself writing lots of small scripts that do one thing, then piping them together to do other things.

While I was spending the time learning grep, sed, awk, python and many other more esoteric languages, the world moved on to application-based programming, where the paradigm seems to be to add features to one program written in one language. I have traditionally associated this with Windows or MacOS, but it is happening with Linux as well. Environments have little or no support for multi-language projects — you choose a language, open a project and get done. Recent trends in more targeted build environments like cmake or ant are understandably focusing on automatic dependancy generation and cross-platform support, unfortunately making it more difficult to grow a custom build process for a multi-language project organically.

All this is a bit painful for me as I know how much is gained by using a targetted language for a particular problem. Now the question: Should I suck it up and learn to do all my programming in C++/Java (insert other well-supported, popular language here) and unlearn ten years of philosophy or is there hope for the multi-language development process?"
Space

Submission + - First solar eclipse recorded from moon

Submitted by
dazza101
dazza101 writes: "For the first time ever, we have witnessed a solar eclipse from the moon. On 10 February 2009 Japan's Kaguya lunar orbiter captured the sight of the Earth eclipsing the sun. The spacecraft also recorded this video showing the Earth surrounded by a glowing ring and briefly forming the classic diamond ring that often occurs during a solar eclipse, as seen from down here on Earth."

Comment TV, but not video (Score 1) 42

by Rastloser (#25366569) Attached to: DIY Live Photos From ISS
For all the non-hams reading this, it should be pointed out that SSTV transmits images based on the same technical principles as television, but that it's not video. The transmission of a single "frame" takes several dozen seconds. This has several advantages, however. The greatest is probably that the requirements for signal quality and receiving equipment are much lower than for TV, meaning that anyone interested will be able to pick up those images with relatively little tech on the ground.
Space

Mysteries Swirl Around Cyclones At Saturn's Poles 67

Posted by kdawson from the call-the-wind-mariah dept.
Riding with Robots writes "New images of Saturn from the robotic spacecraft Cassini are shedding new light on monstrous storms that swirl at both poles of the ringed planet. 'These are truly massive cyclones, hundreds of times stronger than the most giant hurricanes on Earth,' said one mission scientist. Cumulus clouds twirl around the vortices, betraying the presence of giant thunderstorms lurking beneath. But the storms do not disturb the bizarre hexagonal cloud formation previously reported."

Slashdot Top Deals

Our OS who art in CPU, UNIX be thy name. Thy programs run, thy syscalls done, In kernel as it is in user!

Close