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Network

Submission + - WaveRelay Rescues US Coast Guard (persistentsystems.com)

An anonymous reader writes: After Hurricane Sandy the Coast Guard's network has been down in NYC. We used our Wave Relay MANET system to establish connectivity from mid-town Manhattan all of the way out to the Coast Guard station on Staten Island. We setup the whole network in 5 hours and the network has been used operationally since last Thursday. The network is still up and running and the wired connectivity has not been restored yet. Right now they are tightening up the install as we brace for the next storm which is coming in Wednesday and Thursday.
In addition to providing connectivity to the Coast Guard Station, we also extended the network out to their cutter ship which is anchored in NY Harbor. Commercial ships had not been permitted into NY harbor while the Coast Guard network was down. They believe that by installing this network ships were able to return to NY Harbor around 96 hours sooner then waiting for the wired network to be restored which is still not restored.
This was a great feat since those ships that were not allowed to enter carry gas, supplies, food, etc.

Medicine

Submission + - A piezoelectric pacemaker that is powered by your heartbeat (extremetech.com)

MrSeb writes: "It sounds like the theoretical impossibility of perpetual motion, but engineers at the University of Michigan have created a pacemaker that is powered by the beating of your heart — no batteries required. The technology behind this new infinite-duration pacemaker is piezoelectricity. Piezoelectricity is is literally “pressure electricity,” and it relates to certain materials that generate tiny amounts of electricity when deformed by an external force — which, in the case of the perpetual pacemaker, the vibrations in your chest as your heart pumps blood around your body. Piezoelectric devices generate very small amounts of power — on the order of tens of milliwatts — but it turns out that pacemakers require very power, too. In testing, the researchers’ energy harvester generated 10 times the required the power to keep a pacemaker firing. Currently, pacemakers are battery powered — and the battery generally need to be replaced every few years, which requires surgery. According M. Amin Karami, the lead researcher, “Many of the patients are children who live with pacemakers for many years,” he said. “You can imagine how many operations they are spared if this new technology is implemented.” This piezoelectric energy harvester is about half the size of a conventional battery, too, which is presumably a good thing."

Comment Re:Who said there was no revenue? Free != no reven (Score 2) 156

Software needs support because it is complex and buggy. Books, not so much.

Really? Many textbooks are used by professors at universities and supported quite heavily. I think that the problem that these guys had was that they tried to follow the old model, where textbook writing subsidizes the university professor's salary. A more realistic model is for a group of professors to band together to write a textbook (or rewrite one that is in the public domain). That can work because professors are paid based on prestige (i.e. the university is effectively subsidizing the textbook rather than the other way around). However, that model doesn't include a publisher, except one that does print-on-demand (as Amazon and university presses do).

I think that the biggest problem is that near-perpetual copyright means that books have to be quite old before they go out of copyright. That means that all the existing public domain books are out of print and out of date. Writing a book from scratch takes time. Once they have the books, it will probably be easier to keep them up to date under an open source model. Unfortunately, it's hard to get started.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: How to organizing articles and reports in a small company?

An anonymous reader writes: I m working in the research department of a small company. Over the years we have collected tons of articles related to our field. Additionally there are reports written by my colleagues and me. In total this is about 1000 documents. It would be great to be able to (fulltext) search these documents and have some keywords as well. Revision control is not as important as some kind of auto-import function. It would be great if the keywords of articles could be automatically detected / downloaded (Elsevier, Jstore, IEEE,...) .
I am not sure what to google for. On the one hand a DMS seems to be the right choice to keep different revisions of a document and for fulltext search on the otherhand a reference management system (bibliographie) seems to be creating less work. In short I would like top have these features:

1. Fulltext search for the following formats doc, docx, pdf, txt
2. Some kind of auto import for the purchased articles/journals
3. An easy way to import reports me and my colleagues wrote and add some tags
4. Simple interface to search or add information which can be used by different users at a time. So far this would be a maximum of 7 users most likely not more than 2 at a time.

How would this system be named? What is your experience with using such a system, does it really help or just create a lot of overhead? I would be happy about suggestions of practical/simple solutions.
Power

Submission + - Researchers Claim to have solved Efficiency Problem of Power Amplifiers (paritynews.com) 2

hypnosec writes: Two MIT electrical engineering professors, Joel Dawson and David Perreault, have claimed that they have cracked the age old efficiency problem related to the power amplifier in smartphones by designed a new amplifier that consumes just half the power as compared to their current counterparts. Current transistor based power amplifiers consume power in two modes – standby and output signal mode. The only way to reduce power consumption and increase battery life is to use the least possible power when in standby mode. The problem here is that if the power is kept very low when in standby mode, because of sudden jumps from low-power standby mode to high-power output mode, signals get distorted. This is why current technologies waste a lot of electricity as standby power levels are kept at a relatively higher level to avoid distortion. The new technology, dubbed asymmetric multilevel outphasing, is basically a blazingly fast electronic gearbox that would select the best possible voltage to send across to the transistors that would minimize power consumption.
Games

Submission + - Will Star Citizen project fund Linux and Mac ports for CryENGINE 3? (robertsspaceindustries.com) 2

Mr. Jaggers writes: "Chris Roberts, game designer of Wing Commander fame, has had great success with his new crowd-funded Star Citizen project — so much that the $2m base goal has been smashed with weeks to go on the kickstarter portion of the campaign. Now Chris is floating a list of stretch goals for fans to vote on, with Linux and Mac support both listed as stretch goal candidates. Since Star Citizen is based on the popular CryENGINE 3 game engine, these stretch goals are equivalent to funding Linux and Mac ports of CryENGINE. Chris couldn't make any absolute promises yet, since he doesn't own the engine, but CryENGINE 3 already supports Android so at least there is existing OpenGL ES support to be leveraged towards adding Linux and Mac OpenGL support. If there is enough outpouring of cross-platform support from fans in this poll, Star Citizen could turn out to be the high-profile game that brings a AAA game engine to the growing Mac and Linux gaming communities — analogous to the role played by Wasteland 2 in bringing official Linux support to the Unity 4 engine popular among so many Indie developers."
Microsoft

Submission + - Will Microsoft dis-Kinect Freeloading TV Viewers? 2

theodp writes: Just when you think the cable TV viewing experience couldn't get any worse, GeekWire reports on the Microsoft Xbox Incubation team's patent-pending Consumer Detector, which uses cameras and sensors like those in the Xbox 360 Kinect controller to monitor, count and in some cases identify the people in a room watching television, movies and other content. Should the number of viewers detected exceed the limits of a particular content license, the system would halt playback unless additional viewing rights were purchased. As Yakov Smirnoff might say: In Soviet Russia, Kinect-equipped Motorola Model 20F2 console TV watches your family!
Data Storage

Submission + - An Inside Look at Apple's Fusion Drive (networkcomputing.com)

CowboyRobot writes: "Last week Apple announced a hybrid flash/hard disk technology — the first mainstream hybrid for desktops — for iMacs called Fusion Drive, promising the performance of a solid-state drive and the capacity of a hard disk

"In typical Apple fashion, the announcement had lots of dazzle and little technical detail, but a few specifications emerged. Fusion Drive uses separate SSD and HDD to provide 128Gbytes of flash and 1 to 3Tbytes of spinning disk... When an SSD and hard drive are combined into a single volume in Apple's core storage, the volume manager will dedicate 4GBbytes of the SSD as a write cache and place newly written data there. Frequently-accessed data will be promoted from the hard disk to the SSD as well. The 128GBbytes of flash Apple uses should be enough to hold all the programs and data most desktop users access more than once in a blue moon, giving those programs SSD-like performance.""

Transportation

Submission + - Hyundai Overstated MPG on Over 1 Million Cars

Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Reuters reports that Hyundai and its affiliate Kia Motors conceded that they overstated the fuel economy on more than 1 million recently sold vehicles, and agreed to compensate owners for the additional fuel costs after the EPA found the errors in 13 Kia and Hyundai models from the 2011 to 2013 model years. The findings were a blow to the two carmakers who have centered their marketing campaigns on superior fuel economy. "Given the importance of fuel efficiency for all us, we are extremely sorry for these errors," says John Krafcik, head of Hyundai Motor America. "When we say to Hyundai owners, 'We've got your back,' that's an assurance we don't take lightly." The mileage on most labels will be reduced by 1 to 2 miles per gallon, with the largest adjustment being a 6-mpg highway reduction for one version of the Kia Soul, the EPA said. Hyundai previously touted the fact that many of its models get 40 miles per gallon on the highway. Now three Hyundai models, the Elantra, Accent and Veloster, as well as the Kia Rio fall short of that mark as will the Hyundai Sonata and Kia Optima hybrids. "The fact that the companies' ballyhooed 40 mpg cars are no longer members of that august club...will be something that haunts the companies for a long time to come," says Edmunds car editor John O'Dell."
Networking

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Is Samba4 a viable alternative to Active Directory?

BluPhenix316 writes: I'm currently in school for Network Administration. I was discussing Linux with my instructor and he said the problem he has with Linux is he doesn't know of a good alternative to Active Directory. I did some research and from what I've read Samba 4 seems very promising. What are your thoughts?
Security

Submission + - Building the Ultimate Safe House

Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Candace Jackson writes that an increasing number of home builders and buyers are looking for a new kind of security: homes equipped to handle everything from hurricanes, tornados and hybrid superstorms like this week's Sandy, to man-made threats ranging from home invasion to nuclear war and fueling the rise of these often-fortresslike homes are new technologies and building materials—which builders say will ultimately be used on a more widespread basis in storm- and earthquake-threatened areas. For example, Alys Beach, a 158-acre luxury seaside community on Florida's Gulf Coast, have earned the designation of Fortified...for safer living® homes and are designed to withstand strong winds. The roofs have two coats of limestone and exterior walls have 8 inches of concrete, reinforced every 32 inches for "bunkerlike" safety, according to marketing materials. Other builders are producing highly hurricane-proof residences that are circular in shape with "radial engineering" wherein roof and floor trusses link back to the home's center like spokes on a wheel, helping to dissipate gale forces around the structure with Deltec, a North Carolina–based builder, saying it has never lost a circular home to hurricanes in over 40 years of construction. But Doug Buck says some "extreme" building techniques don't make financial sense. "You get to a point of diminishing returns," says Buck. "You're going to spend so much that honestly, it would make more sense to let it blow down and rebuild it.""

Submission + - How should one dealing with a DDoS attack?

TheUnFounded writes: A site that I administer was recently "held hostage" for the vast sum of $800. We were contacted by a guy (who was, it turns out, in Lebanon), who told us that he had been asked to perform a DDoS on our site by a competitor, and that they were paying him $600. He then said for $800, he would basically go away. Not a vast sum, but we weren't going to pay just because he said he "could" do something.

Within 5 minutes, our site was down.

The owner of the company negotiated with the guy, and he stopped his attack after receiving $400. A small price to pay to get the site online in our case. But obviously we want to come up with a solution that'll allow us to deal with these kinds of attacks in the future.

While the site was down, I contacted our hosting company, Rackspace. They proceeded to tell me that they have "DDoS mitigation services", but they cost $6,000 if your site is under attack at the time you use the service. Once the attack was over, the price dropped to $1500. (Nice touch there Rackspace, so much for Fanatical support; price gouging at its worst).

So, obviously, I'm looking for alternative solutions for DDoS mitigation. I'm considering CloudFlare (https://www.cloudflare.com/) as an option; does anyone have any other suggestions or thoughts on the matter?

Comment Re:It will win soon (Score 1) 151

I've never lived anywhere that didn't have businesses between the UPS depot and me. It doesn't take a lot of pickups to keep the truck from being empty. One is sufficient; more is gravy.

I also think that you underestimate the concentration of pickups. A single Amazon warehouse ships a lot of packages from that one location. So many that they tend to ship trailers that they load rather than have UPS load individual trucks. For that reason, I doubt that most business routes (i.e. ones that aren't to Amazon) are mostly pickups. Business routes would be more evenly divided. Some pickups and some deliveries. It's the home routes that would be concentrated on deliveries. You also need to remember that a UPS truck delivers a large number of packages per day.

I did some Googling to confirm what I thought: http://www.browncafe.com/forum/f6/average-stops-per-day-delivery-pickups-35610/

Note that even the most delivery oriented route still had two pickups. The median seems to be in the eight to ten range. The business route had thirty-seven pickups and almost a hundred deliveries. I'm sure that it happens for a truck to leave or return empty, but it doesn't seem to be typical.

Comment Re:It will win soon (Score 1) 151

If the FedEx truck was also self driving than it would only make one trip empty.

Why make any empty trips? Do pickups as well as drop offs and the truck can avoid being empty altogether. Of course, that only applies to generic package shippers like FedEx and UPS. More specific delivery vehicles may not be able to do that.

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