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Security

Doom-Like Video Surveillance For Ports In Development 56

Posted by Soulskill from the hurt-me-plenty dept.
oranghutan writes "A research and development group down under is working to develop an advanced video surveillance system for ports around the world that uses video superimposed onto a 3D map. With 16-megapixel high-definition cameras on a distributed (cabled) network and a proprietary system written in a variety of languages (C++, Python, SQL, etc.), the group from NICTA is aiming to allow security teams at the Port of Brisbane — which is 110km long — to monitor shipping movements, cargo and people. By scrolling along a 3D map, the security teams can click on a location and then get a real-time video feed superimposed onto the map. Authorities from around the world with the right permissions can then access the same system. The main difference from regular surveillance systems is the ability to switch views without having to know camera numbers/locations and the one screen view."
Earth

CERN Physicist Warns About Uranium Shortage 581

Posted by timothy from the switch-to-geraniums dept.
eldavojohn writes "Uranium mines provide us with 40,000 tons of uranium each year. Sounds like that ought to be enough for anyone, but it comes up about 25,000 tons short of what we consume yearly in our nuclear power plants. The difference is made up by stockpiles, reprocessed fuel and re-enriched uranium — which should be completely used up by 2013. And the problem with just opening more uranium mines is that nobody really knows where to go for the next big uranium lode. Dr. Michael Dittmar has been warning us for some time about the coming shortage (PDF) and has recently uploaded a four-part comprehensive report on the future of nuclear energy and how socioeconomic change is exacerbating the effect this coming shortage will have on our power consumption. Although not quite on par with zombie apocalypse, Dr. Dittmar's final conclusions paint a dire picture, stating that options like large-scale commercial fission breeder reactors are not an option by 2013 and 'no matter how far into the future we may look, nuclear fusion as an energy source is even less probable than large-scale breeder reactors, for the accumulated knowledge on this subject is already sufficient to say that commercial fusion power will never become a reality.'"
Power

Chevy Volt Rated At 230 mpg In the City 1006

Posted by kdawson from the bragging-rights dept.
necro81 writes "General Motors, emerging from bankruptcy, today announced that its upcoming plug-in hybrid vehicle, the Volt, will have an EPA rating of 230 mpg for city driving (about 98 km/L). The unprecedented rating, the first in triple digits, is the result of a new (draft) methodology for calculating the 'gas' mileage for vehicles that operate primarily or extensively on electricity. The Volt, due out late next year, can drive approximately 40 miles on its Li-Ion battery pack, after which a gasoline engine kicks in to provide additional electricity to charge the battery. Running off the gasoline engine yields approximately 50 mpg. Of course, the devil's in the details, because the conversion of grid-based electricity to gasoline-mileage is imprecise." Now we know the meaning of the mysterious "230" viral marketing campaign.

Comment Re:Big Question... (Score 1) 513

by JayJay.br (#28960891) Attached to: Goodbye Apple, Hello Music Production On Ubuntu

You'll find that many pro-audio products are supported by ALSA, thus work well in JACK (though never as many as we wish we had). The favorites as far as I can recall (it's been a while since I've bought equipment are the Delta 1010 and the low-budget 1010LT (ten in, ten out), and a few other well-known brands (edirol, steinberg and even some amateur hardware such as creative labs -- check the matrix at http://www.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Matrix:Main).

It's quite an adventure to get it all together, and I spent a couple of days understanding everything only to get the first few seconds recorded, but it's a nice journey.

Comment Re:Big Question... (Score 1) 513

by JayJay.br (#28950375) Attached to: Goodbye Apple, Hello Music Production On Ubuntu

I'm pretty sure TFA (which is slashdotted ATM) might be referring to some very well-done, production-grade software for pro audio on Linux:

JACK Audio Connection Kit, by Paul Davis, and Ardour - a digital audio workstation also by him (and many contributors of course... really an outstanding piece of software).

These are my favorites and the main pieces around which a DAW is built around.

You can also try looking for Rosegarden, Jack-Rack, Seq29, Qsynth, Zynaddsubfx (a little outdated but still nice synth), aeolus and I'm sure we could go on for a while.

Your hardware interfaces will mostly have a hard time working in Linux, but check out the options, they might be worth it.

Comment Re:Legos vs Lego - US vs UK language divide? (Score 3, Interesting) 396

by JayJay.br (#28715597) Attached to: My toy collection is ...

If I may add only R$0.02 from Brazil here...

From my understanding in studying English (which I -- maybe incorrectly -- pride myself of being fluent in), pluralization depends on whether the noun is a countable or an uncountable one.

Bear with me for a moment.

For instance, you don't pluralize "rice" as "rices" because you don't care how many grains there are (and you would never be practically able to count them or even to use that measure for anything significant). So you don't count them as two, three or four rices. There's just rice. Same with coffee, sugar, sand or whatever uncountable thing you want.

OTOH, when you talk about countable things, you pluralize: Two eggs, four bricks, a dozen bananas.

So I don't think it's easy to come into consensus here. I tend to use "Lego" (BTW, in Brazil they're "Lego", not "Legos") because it 'looks' uncountable to me. But maybe some people see Lego more like "bricks", and I can certainly see some reason into that too.

Anyway, I don't really see an end to the discussion, but wanted to provide food for thought.

And yes, I realize I am throwing too much of a philosophy into a rather useless discussion. But hey, this is Slashdot.
Operating Systems

Linux Kernel 2.6.30 Released 341

Posted by Soulskill from the stick-a-fork-in-it-wait-let-me-rephrase dept.
diegocgteleline.es writes "Linux kernel 2.6.30 has been released. The list of new features includes NILFS2 (a new, log-structured filesystem), a filesystem for object-based storage devices called exofs, local caching for NFS, the RDS protocol (which delivers high-performance reliable connections between the servers of a cluster), a new distributed networking filesystem (POHMELFS), automatic flushing of files on renames/truncates in ext3, ext4 and btrfs, preliminary support for the 802.11w drafts, support for the Microblaze architecture, the Tomoyo security MAC, DRM support for the Radeon R6xx/R7xx graphic cards, asynchronous scanning of devices and partitions for faster bootup, the preadv/pwritev syscalls, several new drivers and many other small improvements."

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