tomstdenis - Slashdot User

Submission + - VHS presents VHSdecel - The latest in startup incubation (vhsdecel.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 12, 2013 @04:34PM

An anonymous reader writes: After recently celebrating its 5 year anniversary, the Vancouver Hackspace (VHS) have now decided it's time to give back to the global community, and the Vancouver community in particular. It does so by offering a unique and experimental startup incubator programme that leverages — between its members, keyholders and other experts — more than 100+ years of hands-on experience in hands-on development and being at the pen-ultimate forefront of new technology.

VHS is proud to present VHSdecel, a brand new proud Canadian hands-on alternative to academic product development and startup incubator. VHS is the opensource equivalent of traditional startup incubators. VHSdecel aims to alleviate the stress of a startup by providing the tools and experience of our veteran hackers to make startups fun again.

About VHS

The Vancouver Hackspace, locally better known as VHS, was founded in 2008. Its mission, to provide a common workspace where its members, hackers, makers, crafters and otherwise (technically) creative people could work on projects and find like-minded people, in sharing knowledge and ideas.

Comment Re:Mintchip is designed to track you (Score 2) 84

by Robbat2 on Thursday August 16, 2012 @12:46PM (#41012841) Attached to: Voting Begins For Canadian Digital Currency App

You missed something critical posted by the AC. He said you have to assign a unique prime number to each user. Not simply a number.
The 30 millionith prime is 573259391. The 50 millionith prime is 982451653. I couldn't find the 60 millionith prime anywhere, and another 20M should be enough room for the corporations. In either case ceil(log2(573259391)) == ceil(log2(982451653)) == 30. The beauty of this is you can multiply two large primes, take the modulo and somebody with the primes can still verify/extract them later: This isn't very different from doing RSA crypto with very short primes...

Comment Seriously tape backup (Score 3, Informative) 326

by Robbat2 on Friday August 10, 2012 @05:08PM (#40951473) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Best On-Site Backup Plan?

Look for a used LTO3/LTO4 tape drive, then bulk-buy tapes.
Write each set of content to two tapes, ideally of different brands, and store in different places if you're really concerned.

I've been backing up to LTO3 tapes for ~3 years now, i've got 50+ tapes, mostly in my safety deposit box at the bank (cost $75/year)

LTO4 based on eBay prices right now would be an initial expenditure of ~$1k for the drive, and $25-30 per 800GB of storage.

The cloud options aren't really feasible for me, as the upload time & bandwidth cost is horrendous.

Comment Gentoo Statistics (Score 1) 101

by Robbat2 on Tuesday May 17, 2011 @08:23PM (#36160660) Attached to: 10,000 Commits To an Open-source Project

http://dev.gentoo.org/~tove/stats/gentoo-x86/cvs-log-sum.txt

I'm number 20 on that list, having recently surpassed 10k commits to Gentoo myself (in 7 years). The top of our list is somebody with 70k commits.

- robbat2@gentoo

Comment Watt's Up Pro (Score 2, Insightful) 172

by Robbat2 on Friday September 24, 2010 @04:57PM (#33692014) Attached to: Real-Time Power Monitoring Options?

I use the Watt's Up Pro, but it's for monitoring a single outlet.

Do you intend to monitor your entire house, or just some devices?

Comment Another vote for WiSpy (Score 1) 499

by Robbat2 on Tuesday June 29, 2010 @01:45AM (#32726932) Attached to: Tracking Down Wi-Fi Interference?

I have the original WiSpy model, from when they first hit the market, and I still use it extensively.

It's been insanely useful in tracing the problems, just put it on a laptop, with a long USB extension cable, and wander around. I will admit that I've only used it on Linux, as I don't have any Windows around, but it's been perfectly suited to my needs.

A friend of mine was having a similar interference problem, during a subset of hours, and I traced it to one of the neighbours that would prepared dinner while using a set of wireless headphones.

Comment Urquan Masters/Star Control 2 (Score 3, Informative) 634

by Robbat2 on Monday December 15, 2008 @04:47PM (#26124141) Attached to: Great Games To Put On a Free PC?

Very worthwhile, for both the strategy and melee modes.

Permanent Links For US Legislation Documents 42

Posted by timothy on Thursday October 09, 2008 @07:46PM from the get-crackin'-blue-book-kids dept.

dizzymslizzy writes "With prompting from the Sunlight Foundation's Open House Project, the US Library of Congress announced today that its online database THOMAS will now generate persistent URLs, known as legislative handles, for legislation documents. As Free Government Info says, 'it is certainly nice to be able to link to legislation with a persistent link! But it would be much better if one could click to create a link rather than following a 600-word description of how to link on another page.' Still, this is a definite step forward for the Library of Congress and for government transparency. From THOMAS: 'Legislative Handles are a new persistent URL service for creating links to legislative documents from the THOMAS web site (http://thomas.loc.gov). With a simple syntax, Legislative Handles make it easy to type in legislative links to bibliographies, reference guides, emails, blogs, or web pages. Legislative Handles, for instance, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.uscongress/legislation.110hconres196, are a convenient way to cite legislation.'

Comment Abyss movie (Score 1) 755

by Robbat2 on Saturday August 30, 2008 @02:27AM (#24807243) Attached to: Any Suggestions For a Meaningful Geeky Wedding Band?

And if they are marginally movie-geek, here's another reason why:
http://www.titaniumrings.com/AbyssDVD.html

Comment Re:$399 is pricey (Score 2, Insightful) 282

by tomstdenis on Monday November 12, 2007 @10:20AM (#21322807) Attached to: OLPC Launches Buy One, Give One Free Program

Because you're supporting a cause?

Using your logic, why would I donate $100 to the Red Cross when I could just as easily get a mickey of vodka and have a good time for less!!!

Tom

GOOG-411's "Biddy-Biddy-Boop" Sound Backstory 194

Posted by kdawson on Saturday November 10, 2007 @05:28PM from the party-to-whom-i'm-speaking dept.

Chris Albrecht writes "The bippedy-bippedy-bippedy sound you hear when using 1-800-GOOG-411 is actually a senior voice designer at Google. (Here's the sound.) The technical term for that noise is the 'fetch audio,' and it's more complicated to design than you'd think. For the first time, the voice of GOOG-411 talks about how he came up with it, how important that sound is, and how people now ask him to 'perform' it."

Ballmer Calls Android a "Press Release" 270

Posted by kdawson on Thursday November 08, 2007 @09:34AM from the laugha-while-you-can dept.

Bergkamp10 writes "Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer tried to shoot down Google's new mobile platform at a press conference in Tokyo. Ballmer called Android a mere 'press release' at present, and said the mobile platform market is 'Microsoft's world.' Ballmer dodged requests to comment on specifics of the Android software platform, preferring instead to highlight the successes of the Windows Mobile platform which he said is on 150 different handsets and is available from over 100 different mobile operators. 'Well of course their efforts are just some words on paper right now, it's hard to do a very clear comparison [with Windows Mobile],' Ballmer said. 'Right now they have a press release, we have many, many millions of customers, great software, many hardware devices and they're welcome in our world,' he added."

512GB Solid State Disks on the Way 186

Posted by CmdrTaco on Sunday October 28, 2007 @11:34AM from the and-eventually-they'll-be-affordable dept.

Viper95 writes "Samsung has announced that it has developed the world's first 64Gb(8GB) NAND flash memory chip using a 30nm production process, which opens the door for companies to produce memory cards with upto 128GB capacity"

Another Man Dies After Marathon Gaming Session 486

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday September 17, 2007 @02:12PM from the need-wearable-computing-to-multitask dept.

loserMcloser writes "Another Chinese man has died after spending three days in an internet cafe for an online gaming marathon session. He apparently fainted and died at the cafe from exhaustion. 'The report did not say what the man, whose name was not given, was playing. The report said that about 100 other Web surfers "left the cafe in fear after witnessing the man's death."'"

Scientists Create Di-positronium Molecules 160

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday September 13, 2007 @08:04AM from the super-laser dept.

doxology writes "The BBC reports that scientists have been able to create di-positronium molecules. A di-positronium molecule consists of two positronium atoms, exotic atoms which are made from an electron and a positron (the anti-particle of the electron). A potential use of these molecules is to make extremely powerful gamma-ray lasers, possibly on sharks."

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