lemonfresh33 - Slashdot User

Submission + - Brooklyn Father, Son Launch Homemade Spacecraft (wpix.com)

Submitted by Adair on Sunday October 03, 2010 @03:24PM

Adair writes: A father and son team from Brooklyn successfully launched a homemade spacecraft nearly 19 miles (around 100,000 feet) above the Earth's surface. The craft was a 19-inch helium-filled weather balloon attached to a Styrofoam capsule that housed an HD video camera and an iPhone. The camera recorded video of its ascent into the stratosphere, its apogee where the balloon reached its breaking point, and its descent back to earth. They rigged a parachute to the capsule to aid in its return to Earth, and the iPhone broadcast its GPS coordinates so they could track it down. The craft landed a mere 30 miles from its launch point in Newburgh, NY, due to a quick ascent and two differing wind patterns. The pair spent 8 months researching and test-flying the craft before launching it in August. Columbia University Professor of Astronomy Marcel Aguera said, "They were very good but also very lucky."

Submission + - Plane Finder iPhone app - aid to terrorist ? (ndtv.com) 1

Submitted by ProgramErgoSum on Sunday October 03, 2010 @01:55PM

ProgramErgoSum writes: The Plane Finder AR application, developed by a British firm for the Apple iPhone and Google's Android, allows users to point their phone at the sky and see the position, height and speed of nearby aircraft. It also shows the airline, flight number, departure point, destination and even the likely course-the features which could be used to target an aircraft with a surface-to-air missile, or to direct another plane on to a collision course, the 'Daily Mail' reported. The programme, sold for just 1.79 pounds in the online Apple store, has now been labelled an 'aid to terrorists' by security experts and the US Department of Homeland Security is also examining how to protect airliners.

The new application works by intercepting the so-called Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcasts (ADS-B) transmitted by most passenger aircraft to a new satellite tracking system that supplements or, in some countries, replaces radar.

Submission + - STEC Unveils Industrial-Strength SSD (eweekeurope.co.uk)

Submitted by geek4 on Tuesday September 21, 2010 @05:31AM

geek4 writes: The ZeusRAM SSD is aimed at enterprises deploying heavy-duty workloads that need ultra-low latency

Solid-state storage drive maker STEC on 20 September introduced a new industrial-strength SSD aimed at enterprises deploying fast and/or continuous read/write workloads that include metadata logging, journaling, and database indexing applications.

The announcement was made at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco at the Moscone Centre.
STEC’s ZeusRAM, which is currently being tested by several high-performance OEMs, will be launched later this fall in a 3.5-inch standard form factor using a native 6Gb SAS interface, said chairman and chief executive Manouch Moshayedi.

U. Penn Super Quadcopter Learns New Tricks 124

Posted by timothy on Sunday September 19, 2010 @02:44PM from the hit-squads-want-these dept.

Freddybear writes "University of Pennsylvania's GRASP lab posted new video of their scary fast maneuverable quad-rotor drone. It can now fly through openings (hoops) which are themselves moving." The entire list of GRASP projects is worth crawling through.

Submission + - Mass Mailer Worm Brings Email Misery Back (eweekeurope.co.uk)

Submitted by geek4 on Friday September 10, 2010 @05:35AM

geek4 writes: A mass mailer worm that links to a UK website is a throwback to the days of old, security researchers said

A mass-mailer worm flooded inboxes at a number of high-profile organisations today. It struck havoc in the US yesterday and may be lurking in UK inboxes when the workforce logs-in today.

The worm, dubbed ‘Here you have’ because of its email subject line, contains what appears to be a link to an Adobe PDF file. In fact, the link takes the victim to a screensaver (.scr) file on a web page hosted on the members.multimania.co.uk domain. Users who agree to install the file are then infected by the worm which mails itself to the users’ email contacts.

Yellowstone Hot Spot Shreds Ancient Pacific Ocean 69

Posted by Soulskill on Sunday September 05, 2010 @05:17AM from the tectonic-violence dept.

jamie passes along this excerpt from DiscoveryNews: "If you thought the geysers and overblown threat of a supervolcanic eruption in Yellowstone National Park were dramatic, you ain't seen nothing: deep beneath Earth's surface, the hot spot that feeds the park has torn an entire tectonic plate in half. The revelation comes from a new study (abstract) in the journal Geophysical Research Letters that peered into the mantle beneath the Pacific Northwest to see what happens when ancient ocean crust from the Pacific Ocean runs headlong into a churning plume of ultra-hot mantle material."

Six Reasons Why Flash Isn't Going Away 483

Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday August 17, 2010 @02:55PM from the flash-in-the-pan dept.

CWmike writes "While Steve Jobs is betting his mobile platform on it, predicting Flash's demise is short-sighted, say industry analysts. 'There are many people who despise Flash, but I'm not sure they'd love the alternative right out of the gate. The open-source world has not blown everyone out of the water with their video work thus far,' Michael Cote, an analyst at RedMon, told Howard Wen. 'Adobe has spent a lot of time optimizing Flash, and I'd wager it'd take some time to get HTML 5 video as awesome.' Here are six factors that give Flash a strong position over HTML 5 and other alternative Web media technologies in the foreseeable future. For starters, While Android has made Flash a wedge issue, Flash is just beginning to show up on multiple mobile device platforms, Wen writes. Ross Rubin, an analyst at NPD Group, reminds us how Flash ushered in video on Web pages, but Craig Barberich, vice president of marketing and business development at Coincident TV, highlights the pervasiveness of Flash on the Web as we know it: 'Everybody is talking about video, but what doesn't necessarily get talked about is a lot of the interactive elements.'"

Apple, RIM, Google All Bid On Palm 117

Posted by timothy on Thursday July 15, 2010 @07:00PM from the face-palm-apple dept.

imamac writes "It seems HP was only one of many bidders for the struggling Palm. The others included Apple, RIM and even Google. You may now commence speculation on why the various companies wanted Palm."

OpenSUSE 11.3 Is Here 156

Posted by timothy on Thursday July 15, 2010 @03:19PM from the lovely-little-lizard dept.

lukehashj writes "The openSUSE Project is pleased to announce the release of the latest incarnation of openSUSE, with support for 32-bit and 64-bit systems. OpenSUSE 11.3 is packed with new features and updates including SpiderOak to sync your files across the Internet for free, Rosegarden for free editing of your audio files, improved indexing with Tracker, and updates to Mozilla Firefox, and Thunderbird."

After a Decade, Digital Radio Still an Also-Ran In UK 200

Posted by timothy on Saturday July 10, 2010 @05:07AM from the played-out-in-advance dept.

beschra writes "Digital Audio Broadcast (DAB) was developed as early as 1981. After launching in the UK 10 years ago, only 24% of listeners listen on DAB. The article credits a good part of the delay to the fact that the technology was largely developed under the Europe-wide Eureka 147 research project. How does government vs. commercial development help or hinder acceptance of new technology? From the article: '"If Nokia develops something, they'll be bringing out the handsets before you know it," [analyst Grant Goddard says]. "Because DAB was a pan-European development, you had to have agreement from all sides before you could do anything. That meant progress was extremely slow." But this alone did not account for the hold-up. The sheer complexity of introducing and regulating the system was also a major factor, Mr. Goddard adds."'

When Telemarketers Harass Telecoms Companies 234

Posted by timothy on Saturday July 10, 2010 @02:06AM from the listen-through-the-glitches dept.

farnz writes "Andrews & Arnold, a small telecoms company in the UK, have recently been hit with an outbreak of illegal junk calls. Unlike larger firms, they've come up with an innovative response — assign 4 million numbers to play recordings to the telemarketers, put them on the UK's Do-Not-Call list and see what happens. Thus far, the record is over 3 minutes before a telemarketer works out what's going on." The sound quality (and the satisfying humor) of the recording gets better as it goes on.

Why I Steal Movies (Even Ones I'm In) 753

Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday May 17, 2010 @09:40AM from the no-not-me-him dept.

Jamie found a link saying "Like a billion other people, I download things illegally. I'm also an actor, writer, and director whose income depends on revenue from DVDs, movies, and books.This leads to many conflicts in my head, in my heart, and in bars."

Jupiter Is Missing a Belt 187

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday May 12, 2010 @10:11AM from the what-holds-up-its-pants dept.

mbone writes "Jupiter just went through Superior Conjunction (i.e., went behind the Sun as seen from the Earth), so it has been out of view for a while. Now that it has returned, it is different — the South Equatorial Belt (SEB) is missing. The SEB has about 10 times the surface area of the Earth, so this is not a small change. Here are a series of photos of Jupiter's new look. The Great Red Spot typically inhabits the southern border of the SEB, but it doesn't seem to be affected by the change. It's a pity that this happened at Superior Conjunction, and that there is no satellite in Jupiter orbit, so details of the change are largely missing. The SEB has previously gone missing in 1973 and 1990. Since no one really knows what makes the Jovian belts, no one knows why they disappear either. If the belts are really just material from deeper layers coming to the surface, it is possible that the convection has stopped for some reason, or that high-altitude clouds have covered it over."

Visually Demonstrating Chrome's Rendering Speed 140

Posted by kdawson on Friday May 07, 2010 @11:22AM from the want-to-see-it-again dept.

eldavojohn writes "Recent betas of Google's Chrome browser are getting seriously fast. Couple that with better hardware, on average, and it's getting down to speeds that are difficult to demonstrate in a way users can appreciate. Which is why Google felt that some Rube Goldberg-ish demonstrations with slo-mo are in order. Gone are the days of boring millisecond response time metrics."

Japan To Standardize Electric Vehicle Chargers 240

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday March 16, 2010 @04:05PM from the twist-of-lemon-please dept.

JoshuaInNippon writes "Four major Japanese car manufacturers and one power company (Mitsubishi, Nissan, Subaru, Toyota, and Tokyo Electric) have teamed up with over 150 business and government entities in Japan to form a group to promote standardization in electric vehicle chargers and charging stations. The group hopes to leverage current Japanese electric vehicle technology and spread standardization throughout the country, as well as aim towards worldwide acceptance of their standardized charger model. In a very Japanese manner, the group has decided to call themselves 'CHAdeMO,' a play on the English words 'charge' and 'move,' as well as a Japanese pun that encourages tea-drinking while waiting the 15+ minutes it will take to charge one's vehicle battery."

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