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Comment Re:Important part the summary neglected (Score 1) 81

by khundeck (#44892511) Attached to: South African Research Team Creates World's First Digital Laser

I fail to see how that's digital ...

Well you said it not me. :-) ["fail"] It's pretty obvious FTA. Maybe you're subtly suggesting that lasers have always been digital??? I don't know enough about it.

FTA: A 'laser beam' apparently has a few components. The "analogue" way - two mirrors on each end of the device. The "digital" way - replace the one curved mirror with an LCD THAT HOOKS UP TO A COMPUTER. The computer controls the LCD (orientation of the liquid crystals) and ultimately affects the laser shape. I'm amazed that they can use an LCD instead of the mirror..

KPH

PS: FRIGGIN' DIGITAL LAZZZZZERS!?!?!!

Comment "Open Systems" (Score 1) 131

by khundeck (#44496457) Attached to: IBM Opens Up POWER Architecture For Licensing

I use a lot of IBM software and hardware on a daily basis. I /really/ feel like this is more of a 'corporate alliance' than an 'opening up' of their 'intellectual property."

I guess I just dislike the fact it's called the "OpenPower Consortium". Somehow I feel it dilutes the word "open", which has a lot to free/libre.

KPH

Comment Re:Not really (Score 1) 717

by khundeck (#43640877) Attached to: The First Fully 3D-Printed Gun Has Been Successfully Test-Fired
This is mostly true, except, I'm curious about this part (in the article):

"But one important trick may be the group’s added step of treating the gun’s barrel in a jar of acetone vaporized with a pan of water and a camp stove, a process that chemically melts its surface slightly and smooths the bore to avoid friction."

I don't do 3D printing, but this sounds kind of like digital-age gunsmithing (?)
KPH
Math

Submission + - The Blackjack Player Who Broke Atlantic City

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Mark Bowden writes in the Atlantic about blackjack player Don Johnson who won nearly $6 million playing blackjack in one night, single-handedly decimating the monthly revenue of Atlantic City’s Tropicana casino after previously taking the Borgata for $5 million and Caesars for $4 million. Johnson doesn't just walk into a casino and start playing, which is what roughly 99 percent of customers do. This is, in his words, tantamount to “blindly throwing away money.” How does Johnson do it? First with Johnson, it’s all about the math, and Johnson knows it cold. But that's not enough to beat the house edge. As good as Johnson is at playing cards, his advantage is that he's even better at playing the casinos. When revenues slump as they have for the last five years at Atlantic City, casinos must rely more heavily on their most prized customers, the high rollers who wager huge amounts and are willing to lessen its edge for them primarily by offering discounts, or “loss rebates.” When a casino offers a discount of, say, 10 percent, that means if the player loses $100,000 at the blackjack table, he has to pay only $90,000. Two years ago, Johnson says, the casinos started getting desperate and offered Johnson a 20 per cent discount. They also offered playing with a hand-shuffled six-deck shoe; the right to split and double down on up to four hands at once; and a “soft 17". By Johnson's calculations, he had whittled the house edge down to one-fourth of 1 percent so in effect, he was playing a 50-50 game against the house, and with the discount, he was risking only 80 cents of every dollar he played. Johnson had to pony up $1 million of his own money to start, but, as he would say later: “You’d never lose the million. If you got to [$500,000 in losses], you would stop and take your 20 percent discount. You’d owe them only $400,000.”"
Space

Submission + - Baumgartner Completes 13.5-Mile Free-Fall Jump, Aims For Record (google.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: On Thursday Felix Baumgartner climbed into a capsule carried by a balloon, floated up to 71,500 feet, and jumped out. He free-fell through the atmosphere for almost four minutes, hitting an estimated top speed of 364 mph. "I wanted to open the parachute after descending for a while but I noticed that I was still at an altitude of 50,000ft," he said. After finally deploying his chute, he fell for a bit over four more minutes, before successfully touching down in the New Mexico Desert. This jump was to prepare him for a record-breaking jump of 120,000 feet later this summer, during which Baumgartner will break the record for highest free-fall jump — and the sound barrier. '... a 36-pound spacesuit is all that separates Baumgartner from a hostile world that would boil the blood in his body. Baumgartner will wear a chest pack crammed with data-hungry instruments to help ground controllers monitor the attempt — and log scientific data. Some will keep tabs on his heart rate and oxygen intake to see how a body in a spacesuit reacts to a boundary no one has broken (and lived to tell the tale): the speed of sound.'

Comment Re:How do you determine healthy food? (Score 4, Insightful) 455

by khundeck (#38514548) Attached to: IBM Granted Your-Paychecks-Are-What-You-Eat Patent
I barely want to point this out, but, what's "affordable" has a lot to do with where you geographically live.

    Fishing == rivers, oceans (ie. coasts, islands,..)
    Red Meat / Chicken == land (ie. farms, mountain herds, ..)

What's missing in our 'food equation' is self-production and high-valued local produce. Whatever is good/sustainable for your region is what you should consider consuming. Reliance on cheap/subsidized imported food just won't add-up long-term.

KPH
China

Submission + - Chinese robots play ping pong (io9.com)

Submitted by wisebabo
wisebabo writes: While I'm not sure I'd agree with the commentary as to their emotional disposition, I'm glad that finally someone has built a robot capable of playing ping pong. They don't seem to be that great at playing, but hopefully the technology will get better. As a side note, while the humanoid design is appealing and might help it qualify for competition, is that really the best design? I recall seeing once some Japanese robot that was decidedly not anthropomorphic that did some amazing super fast ball bouncing. Are there any other designs that have been used or even tried?
Unix

Submission + - a Ritch legacy (google.com)

Submitted by zenbo
zenbo writes: After a long illness, Dennis Ritchie "died at home this weekend", according to his longtime friend Rob Pike. Not only the creator of C, he coauthored (with Kernighan) the first great programming book (The C Programming Language), helped develop the first versions of UNIX with Ken Thompson, and won the Turin award in 1983.

A giant in the field, dmr perhaps said it best when he quipped "UNIX is very simple, it just needs a genius to understand its simplicity." RIP

Submission + - More flammable water possibly linked to fracking (wsj.com)

Submitted by Gideon Wells
Gideon Wells writes: "Many water supplies in northern Pennsylvania have long contained methane, because of the area's poorly constructed water wells and unusual geological features. But the contamination in Ms. Vargson's well is among the first cases that state regulators have attributed to natural-gas drilling."

Not sure what to say really. On one hand I feel sorry that a person's water has turned flammable for any reason. On the other hand I'm just glad this wasn't the Granville, PA a county over. My county is already in heavy debates over shale drilling and how close some of those potential wells are to local reservoirs.
Cloud

Submission + - Google Drops Cloud Lawsuit Against US Gov't (itworld.com)

Submitted by
jfruhlinger
jfruhlinger writes: "A year ago, Google sued the U.S. government because the government's request for proposals for a cloud project mandated Microsoft Office; Google felt, for obvious reasons, that this was discriminatory. Google has now withdrawn the suit, claiming that the Feds promised to update their policies to allow Google to compete. The only problem is that the government claims it did no such thing."

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