Comment Re:This is good (Score 3, Funny) 564
Yep - 2014 will be the year of Linux (with hot grits).
Comment Re:Make mining useful (Score 1) 213
There's PrimeCoin where the miners generate prime numbers
Comment SSDs need NAND.... (Score 1) 182
OCZ is/was a horribly managed company, but IMO one of their other core problems is/was that they arn't a flash memory (NAND) manufacturer... Difficult to compete on price when their major SSD competitors (Intel, Samsung, Crucial/Micron, SanDisk) all have their own fabs...
Comment Re: "Driving like a fool" (Score 1) 666
Presumably you're assuming a 6 chamber gun with one bullet and "therefore" a 1-in-6 chance of getting shot.
However... due to the weight of the bullet, when you spin the chamber prior to firing, the bullet will tend (due to gravity) to end up in one of the lower vs the highest (firing) positions, so the average chance of getting shot should actually be somewhat less than 1-in-6.
Using Raspberry Pi and iOS App To Catch Rhino Poachers 52
v3rgEz writes "Cambridge Consultants has rigged together about a hundred motion-triggered cameras around Kenyan watering holes to help catch and dissuade elephant poachers. 'The challenge was to create a remote monitoring system that was robust enough to withstand extreme weather conditions and animal attacks and could be easily hidden in any surroundings – all within the available budget,' according to one of the projects leads. And to help make sure all those cameras are being monitored, the team has released an iOS app that lets users review, tag, and flag images, tracking what kinds of animals pass by and keeping an eye open for any human predators on the prowl."
RHex Robot Shows Off Parkour Moves 46
Zothecula writes "Parkour is all about hurling yourself quickly and efficiently past whatever obstacles are in your path while maintaining as much momentum as possible. It's a challenge for humans, so how would robots fare? In an effort to push the boundaries of robotic agility, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania decided to find out by teaching their RHex robot some Parkour moves."
See the Kod*lab homepage for much, much more on the RHex family.
Comment Re:scale (Score 1) 327
The story is clearly about the competition between Apple and Samsung, and fact is that Samsung now makes more profit ($5B last in most recent quarter - that's earnings, not revenue) from smart phones than Apple does.
Apple has mostly saturated the US market and to save the stcok price from collapsing needs to find other markets for growth... China was one big hope, but it appears it's not happening. That's certainly news.
Comment Re:For how long...? (Score 1) 106
And now someone like Henry Blodget is trying to say that newspapers need stuff that can't be found elsewhere to survive, which basically means to become the local gossiping outlet?
That's your conclusion, not his.
Investigative journalism is indeed unique content - the product of unique real people with the investigative skills to unearth and develop these stories. Watergate didn't hit the news via a syndicated Whitehouse press release.
You're also going to find more compelling content in media that is published less frequently, or in occasional rather than daily editorials. At web-speed you're just going to get a firehose of daily chatter.
HAARP Ionospheric Research Program Set To Continue 112
cylonlover writes "Reports that the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) had been shut down permanently were apparently a bit premature. According to HAARP program manager James Keeney, the facility is only temporarily off the air while operating contractors are changed. So why does anyone care? Despite being associated with various natural disasters over the past two decades by the conspiracy fringe, HAARP is in reality a facility for studying the ionosphere. Gizmag takes a look at the goings on at HAARP – past, present, and future."
Comment 4,000,000 actually (Score 1) 587
From a NASCOM-1 1MHz Z-80 with 2KB of RAM in 1978 to a 3GHz PC with 8GB of RAM today.
Comment OpenCV (Score 1) 198
Try Intel's free OpenCV (Computer Vision) library, which includes GPU acceleration.
Comment Not really... (Score 1) 142
http://www.cmog.org/article/does-glass-flow
Old glass windows more likely show variability in width due to the way "plate" glass used to be manufactured... It was spun out into a sheet under centripetal force by swirling a blob of molten glass on a rod (the center swirly piece, broken off the rod, sometimes being seen in old cottage windows, etc).
Comment Screens?! (Score 1) 194
I don't need no stinking screens!
I browse
Comment Re:/. is a bad place for Apple feature advice (Score 1) 262
Adding features doesn't necessarily mean making the user experience/interface more complicated, although that's certainly the norm in the software industry.
For example, Siri has the potential to be the main user interface to new features without the user having to be aware of them at all unless they are using them.
The user interface also doesn't have to be the same for everyone - it could potentially adapt to the user such that a user that routinely invokes advanced functionality could choose to have the corresponding controls promoted to a more prominent place in the UI.
Comment Re:Do they have tail-recursion or lazy evaluation? (Score 1) 404
I don't know what the case is with Dao, but optionally typed doesn't necessarily mean no type checking. For example, in Google's Dart, variables are optionally typed in the sense that if you choose not to statically declare their type then the type is determined dynamically by assignment - but they are stll typed.
