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Comment Let down (Score 1) 41

by tyggna (#48534415) Attached to: Ultrasound Used To Create Haptics That Can Be Touched and Felt
Went and read the article (hey, someone on slashdot had to put up the $15). Anyway, at the end they had participants see if they could correctly guess the shape, and about 90% of them could. The haptic field produced here is no where near strong enough to stop or hinder hand movement. I imagine that the closest sensation to this in real life would be running your hand under a balloon and feeling the shape by how your hand hairs respond.

Submission + - Intel Invests Billions in Mobile Ambitions (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: The allure of mobile devices has led Intel to take some uncharacteristic moves, partnering with Chinese companies to build some smartphone and tablet chips, and relying on third parties to manufacture those chips. Intel is betting the partnerships will accelerate its business in China, where smartphone shipments are booming. But the company wants to regain complete control over manufacturing, and on Thursday said it was investing $1.6 billion over 15 years in a China plant for mobile chip development and manufacturing.

Submission + - Robo-Wars: The regulation of robotic weapons (robohub.org)

Submitted by Hallie Siegel
Hallie Siegel writes: Robotic weapons, whether autonomous or remote controlled, have generated widespread controversy in recent years.
Alex Leveringhaus, author of a recent Oxford Martin School policy paper titled Robo-Wars: The Regulation of Robotic Weapons discusses the ethics of autonomous weapons, urges governments to recognise the increasing prominence of these weapons in contemporary and future forms of warfare, and proposes steps towards suitable regulation. This article is part of a series on regulating robotics.

Submission + - The Orion Spacecraft Runs On 12-Year-Old Computer Tech (computerworld.com)

Submitted by Lucas123
Lucas123 writes: While NASA's Orion spacecraft, which blasted off on a successful test flight today, may be preparing for a first-of-its-kind mission to carry astronauts to Mars and other deep-space missions, the technology inside of it is no where near leading edge. In fact, its computers and its processors are 12 years old — making them ancient in tech years. The spacecraft, according to one NASA engineer, is built to be rugged and reliable in the face of G forces, massive amounts of radiation and the other rigors of space."Compared to the [Intel] Core i5 in your laptop, it's much slower — much less powerful. It's probably not any faster than your smartphone," Matt Lemke, NASA's deputy manager for Orion's avionics, power and software team, told Computerworld. Lemke said the spacecraft was built to be rugged and reliable — not necessarily smart. That's why there are two flight computers. Orion's main computer was built by Honeywell as a flight computer originally for Boeing's 787 jet airliner.

Submission + - IBM Researchers: Old Laptop Batteries Can Power Slums

Submitted by mrspoonsi
mrspoonsi writes: Old laptop batteries still have enough life in them to power homes in slums, researchers have said. An IBM study analysed a sample of discarded batteries and found 70% had enough power to keep an LED light on more than four hours a day for a year. Researchers said using discarded batteries is cheaper than existing power options, and also helps deal with the mounting e-waste problem. The concept was trialled in the Indian city of Bangalore this year. The adapted power packs are expected to prove popular with street vendors, who are not on the electric grid, as well as poor families living in slums. The IBM team created what they called an UrJar — a device that uses lithium-ion cells from the old batteries to power low-energy DC devices, such as a light. The researchers are aiming to help the approximately 400 million people in India who are off grid.

Comment Apart from his position. . . (Score 0) 764

by tyggna (#48271111) Attached to: Tim Cook: "I'm Proud To Be Gay"
is there absolutely ANY reason this should be posted on slashdot? MSNBC, sure, but for a technical and nerdy news, why do I even care what his preference is? Shame on you slashdot--stay away from sensationalist media before we lose hope for having a news outlet of substance.

Comment There's a solution: (Score 1) 522

by tyggna (#48170571) Attached to: Debian Talks About Systemd Once Again
Break up systemd into its components and let certain functionality of it be augmented or replaced by sysvinit. The ONLY problem with systemd is that it's rather monolithic and breaks the *nix paradigm of do one thing an do one thing well. We break out the features of systemd, and let each one work in a stand-alone way, then great.
One binary for parallelized boot
One binary for syslog database
One binary for daemon chroot
and in one kernel module for interface!

Submission + - Microsoft's 'Room Alive' Turns Your Room Into a Huge Game (gizmorati.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: This new technology is unbelievable, once the game is initiated the players no long sit on the couch and interact via controllers. The players hit their target with a plastic gun or by slapping it with their hands.

Submission + - Jennifer Lawrence Speaks Out Against Hackers of Nude Photos

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: The NY Daily News reports that Jennifer Lawrence has broken her silence on the massive celebrity nude photo leak speaking out about being a victim of hackers who released countless amounts of intimate images of her on the Internet. "It is not a scandal. It is a sex crime," Lawrence told Vanity Fair. "It is a sexual violation. It's disgusting. The law needs to be changed, and we need to change. That’s why these Web sites are responsible.” Lawrence revealed that the selfies were for her ex-boyfriend and "X-Men" co-star Nicholas Hoult's eyes only. "I was in a loving, healthy, great relationship for four years. It was long distance, and either your boyfriend is going to look at porn or he's going to look at you," Lawrence explained voicing her anger toward the Web users who chose to view a very personal side of her life. "Anybody who looked at those pictures, you're perpetuating a sexual offense. You should cower with shame. Even people who I know and love say, 'Oh, yeah, I looked at the pictures.' I don't want to get mad, but at the same time I'm thinking, ‘I didn't tell you that you could look at my naked body.’"

Submission + - AMD Building New GPU Linux Kernel Driver To Unify With Catalyst Driver (phoronix.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: AMD is moving forward with their plans to develop a new open-source Linux driver model for their Radeon and FirePro graphics processors. Their unified Linux driver model is moving forward albeit slightly different compared to what was planned early this year as they're now developing a new "AMDGPU" kernel driver to power both the open and closed-source graphics components. This new driver model will also only apply to future generations of AMD GPUs, Catalyst is not being open-source but will be a self-contained user-space blob, and the DRM/libdrm/DDX components will be open-source and shared. This new model is more open-source friendly, places greater emphasis on their mainline kernel driver, and should help Catalyst support Mir and Wayland.

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