Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Submission + - Nuclear power plant was shut down at Busan, South Korea due to heavy rain

Submitted by rtoz
rtoz writes: Heavy rain hit the southern part of the south Korea, causing flash floods, landslides, and suspension of subway service in some areas.

The massive rain also halted the operation of a nuclear reactor in Busan.

The Korea Hydro and Nuclear Power Co. (KHNP) manually stopped operation of the Gori-2 nuclear power plant in Busan for safety reason due to excessive water in the area.

There were no signs of a radiation leak or of any immediate risk, the KHNP said. It was the first time in history that a Korean nuclear reactor had been shut down because of rain. The Gori-2 reactor has been in operation since July 1983.

Submission + - Would you buy a waterproof eReader or Tablet? (the-digital-reader.com)

Submitted by Nate the greatest
Nate the greatest writes: Following only a couple months after a TechCrunch review of a waterproof Kindle Paperwhite, new leaks have revealed that Kobo is working on a waterproof ereader. The new Kobo Aura H2O is expected to go up for pre-order at the beginning of next month for $179, and while that's a high price it's not bad when you consider what you get with it.The Aura H2O will come certified to meet the IP67 standard, meaning that it will be dustproof and able to withstand being dunked in a meter of water for up to 30 minutes. The leaked specs tell us that it will have a larger screen than that waterproof Kindle — a 6.8" display, in fact. That's going to make the Aura H2O the best as well as one of the biggest ereaders on the market.

Would you buy one? I wouldn't. I don't have a problem with my electronics getting wet so i don't see a need to pay extra, and even if I did I wouldn't want a device which was tied to Kobo. If I were going to get a waterproof gadget it would probably be a tablet like the Xperia Z2 tablet from Sony. I might also pay for Waterfi to waterpoof a tablet as an aftermarket mod, but as I see it an ereader just isn't worth it.

Comment Re:Drop solar heat for direct conversion (Score 1) 521

by advid.net (#47718609) Attached to: Solar Plant Sets Birds On Fire As They Fly Overhead

Sorry, but if you think you can run the country on just renewables plus NG, you're insane.

I don't think renewables and NG will be enough with current and foreseeable technologies, maybe I've been misunderstood...

My point is just that for the solar part of the renewable mix, the direct conversion way is a better bet than conversion to heat.
Even with the problem of power adjustment, storage, etc.

Comment Re:Drop solar heat for direct conversion (Score 1) 521

by advid.net (#47711859) Attached to: Solar Plant Sets Birds On Fire As They Fly Overhead

Nuclear plants can't be used to adjust production on the fly, it's a baseline production.

One can't just start or stop the nuclear reactor in a few minutes or even an hour of response time to answer for power increase or decrease of fluctuating renewable source.
(I also remind that emergency shutdown of a nuclear reactor is quite bad for its components)

Keeping some NG plants handy while increasing renewable sources is actually a pretty good deal.

Comment Re:Drop solar heat for direct conversion (Score 1) 521

by advid.net (#47710621) Attached to: Solar Plant Sets Birds On Fire As They Fly Overhead

I know, but this may not compensate
- the lack of efficiency
- the point that we use most of electricity during day time (not at night)
- the need of fast starting alternate source like hydro or natural gas power plants for shaded days (even with molten salt solar heat which only last for the night time)

However I won't say that we can hope for a cheap and efficient electricity technology anytime soon.

Comment Drop solar heat for direct conversion (Score 2) 521

by advid.net (#47710401) Attached to: Solar Plant Sets Birds On Fire As They Fly Overhead

Solar to heat to mechanical to electricity as already reached its maximum efficiency.

Photovoltaic has still many recent discoveries for great efficiency improvements, and more are likely to come.

Using heat for conversion is degrading the energy to its worst and less usable form, direct conversion is the way to go. Halting those heat projects is good news.

Submission + - Software Combines Thousands of Online Images Into One That Represents Them All (gizmag.com) 1

Submitted by Zothecula
Zothecula writes: If you're trying to find out what the common features of tabby cats are, a Google image search will likely yield more results than you'd ever have the time or inclination to look over. New software created at the University of California, Berkeley, however, is designed to make such quests considerably easier. Known as AverageExplorer, it searches out thousands of images of a given subject, then amalgamates them into one composite "average" image.

Submission + - Machine Vision Reveals Previously Unknown Influences Between Great Artists

Submitted by KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: Art experts look for influences between great masters by studying the artist’s use of space, texture, form, shape, colour and so on. They may also consider the subject matter, brushstrokes, meaning, historical context and myriad other factors. So it's easy to imagine that today's primitive machine vision techniques have little to add. Not so. Using a new technique for classifying objects in images, a team of computer scientists and art experts have compared more than 1700 paintings from over 60 artists dating from the early 15th century to the late 20 the century. They've developed an algorithm that has used these classifications to find many well known influences between artists, such as the well known influence of Pablo Picasso and George Braque on the Austrian symbolist painter Gustav Klimt, the influence of the French romantic Delacroix on the French impressionist Bazille, the Norwegian painter Munch’s influence on the German painter Beckmann and Degas’ influence on Caillebotte. But the algorithm also discovered connections that art historians have never noticed (judge the comparisons for yourself). In particular, the algorithm points out that Norman Rockwell’s Shuffleton’s Barber Shop painted in 1950 is remarkably similar to Frederic Bazille’s Studio 9 Rue de la Condamine painted 80 years before.

Submission + - City of Munich is considering to switch back from Linux to Windows (golem.de)

Submitted by Golem.de
Golem.de writes: The vice-mayor of Munich Josef Schmid wants a group of experts to analyse the use of Linux in the municipality. According to Schmid, there have been multiple complaints about the lack of interoperability with other city and government administrations. There have also been doubts that the city is lowering costs by using FOSS. Munichs project Limux was started ten years ago. The city wanted to reduce its budget by switching to Linux and FOSS intead of upgrading to newer versions of Microsoft's Windows and Office products. At the end of last year almost all of the 15000 workstations in the municipality were using OSS.

Submission + - Daimler's solution for annoying out-of-office email: delete it

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: Sure, you can set an out-of-office auto-reply to let others know they shouldn't email you, but that doesn't usually stop the messages; you may still have to handle those urgent-but-not-really requests while you're on vacation. That's not a problem if you work at Daimler, though. The German automaker recently installed software that not only auto-replies to email sent while staff is away, but deletes it outright.

Slashdot Top Deals

"May your future be limited only by your dreams." -- Christa McAuliffe

Close