GrayArea - Slashdot User

Comment Re:Well (Score 5, Interesting) 405

by JPRelph on Monday March 07, 2011 @07:12PM (#35412830) Attached to: The Car Faster Than a Speeding Bullet

I know someone who is involved in the Bloodhound project, working with a large education company over here (one of the sponsors of the car). There is a really big focus on the education side of things with this; they're touring schools and colleges doing presentations, along with a full size replica of the car. One of the big reasons for doing it is to get kids at school interested in science, maths and engineering and that seems like a pretty good idea because there has been a continuing decline in students going on to study those subjects at higher levels in the UK (and I believe most Western countries these days).

There's a bit about it on their website http://www.bloodhoundssc.com/education.cfm . I also doubt that the overall resource usage for the entire project is actually that high (I'd bet fewer resources used than most Hollywood films for instance), so if it increases interest in the areas they're targeting so that general science and engineering gets a bit more attention, I don't think that's too bad a result.

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Comment Re:Not fiber? (Score 1) 368

by JPRelph on Wednesday February 23, 2011 @02:52PM (#35292436) Attached to: MacBook Pro Specs Leaked, iPad Event March 2

I've not seen many that come with full-sized displayport and even the Apple ones don't use mini displayport... And, of course, none of these adaptors are standard anymore, they're all $20 extra...

The Apple Cinema Displays *do* use Mini DisplayPort, and it's been officially brought into the standard now, so isn't just an Apple only port. There's also quite a few laptops out there using it, from Dell, Toshiba HP... The Wikipedia page for Mini DisplayPort has a list of a few.

Comment Re:"Thunderbolt"? Bleh... (Score 1) 368

by JPRelph on Wednesday February 23, 2011 @02:28PM (#35292130) Attached to: MacBook Pro Specs Leaked, iPad Event March 2

...At least "Light Peak" gave me a vague idea of how the tech works by the name alone, whereas Thunderbolt just sounds completely unrelated to the technology.

It's worth bearing in mind that the version of Light Peak that we're likely to see tomorrow, is probably going to be copper-based rather than optical, so Light Peak would probably be just as unrelated as Thunderbolt

Comment Re:When will we get automatic patching? (Score 1) 321

by JPRelph on Saturday June 19, 2010 @07:25PM (#32628624) Attached to: Apple Quietly Goes After Mac Trojan With Update

What's wrong with an ARD Task Server and scheduled tasks to push out softwareupdate commands to clients? Tends to work pretty well in my experience.

Comment Re:No surprise (Score 4, Informative) 334

by JPRelph on Friday May 28, 2010 @08:14AM (#32374412) Attached to: UK Home Office Set To Scrap National ID Cards

Since we already are required by law to carry our driving licence while driving most people just keep it in their wallet. This allows the police to stop and search you at any time and find out who you are. Stop and search in the UK does not require a warrant.

We're not required to have it with us while driving. If you don't have it on you the Police can demand that you take it into a Police station within 7 days though.

Comment Re:Not really so (Score 1) 367

by JPRelph on Monday April 05, 2010 @04:38PM (#31740468) Attached to: Microsoft and Apple Rumble Into Middle Age

3 years is not that old for a PowerMac purchased in late 2006, and which now refuses to run Safari 4 and other recent software, since they require 10.6 or higher.

That's not actually true, Apple provide a download of Safari 4 for Snow Leopard (10.6), Leopard (10.5) and Tiger (10.4). That G5 purchased in 2006 would have shipped with 10.4, so you don't even need to have purchased any additional software in order to use the very latest version of Safari. You can download a 10.4 compatible version of Safari from here.

I really don't know where you're getting this 10.6 requirement from, because there really isn't one.

Evolution of Mona Lisa Via Genetic Programming 326

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday December 09, 2008 @02:07AM from the but-the-target-was-given dept.

mhelander writes "In his weblog Roger Alsing describes how he used genetic programming to arrive at a remarkably good approximation of Mona Lisa using only 50 semi-transparent polygons. His blog entry includes a set of pictures that let you see how 'Poly Lisa' evolved over roughly a million generations. Both beautiful to look at and a striking way to get a feel for the power of evolutionary algorithms."

Comment Re:Ominous! (Score 2, Funny) 716

by JPRelph on Monday September 15, 2008 @01:36PM (#25013279) Attached to: Hubble Finds Unidentified Object In Space

Certainly Interesting Times...

Comment Re:Tactile response (Score 1) 231

by *weasel on Monday July 07, 2008 @12:26PM (#24085159) Attached to: Meet the Laptop You Will (Won't?) Use In 2015

In any respectable future we have at least foolproof voice-to-text, if not sub-vocal mics and/or brain-interfaces.

Submission + - Solar engine breakthru by inventor of supersoaker. 2

Submitted by

arbitraryaardvark

on Wednesday January 09, 2008 @12:23PM

arbitraryaardvark writes: "Popular Mechanics writes that Lonnie Johnson, a former NASA scientist who got rich from inventing the supersoaker squirt gun, has invented a new kind of device for turning heat into electricity, at up to 60% efficiency.
The device involves passing hydrogen through membranes, taking advantage of pressure differentials between the hot and cold ends.
A solar collector could provide the heat source.
For some background here's a 2001 New York Times story on the guy."

Submission + - NASA's Phoenix lander could miss life on Mars (arxivblog.com)

Submitted by

KentuckyFC

on Monday October 08, 2007 @08:53AM

KentuckyFC writes: "When Viking landed on Mars over 30 years ago, it famously found evidence for life on Mars which NASA later rejected as a false positive. Now the Phoenix lander is en route to the red planet with an experiment designed to end the controversy by looking for hydrogen peroxide, the chemical that NASA says probably caused the Viking result. Now astrobiologists have recreated the Phoenix experiment on Earth (abstract, pdf) and the signs are that NASA could again end up with an ambiguous result."

Submission + - Is the internet bad for professional writers? (10zenmonkeys.com)

Submitted by

destinyland

on Monday October 08, 2007 @04:20AM

destinyland writes: "The internet democratized writing — but has there been collateral damage? A former magazine editor asks 10 professional writers how the net has changed their profession, and even the act of writing itself. Has the net changed the demand for longer articles, or created more opportunities for more kinds of writing? It's a fascinating read that belongs in a time capsule for the variety of reactions captured — including the author who complains reading time was traded away for time to maintain our applications, and adding "Gates and Jobs...ought to be disemboweled — yes, on the internet.""

Submission + - 1300 Unopened Fry's Rebate Forms Found In Dumpster (consumerist.com) 2

Submitted by

blackmonday

on Thursday September 06, 2007 @01:23PM

blackmonday writes: "The Consumerist is reporting a find of 1,300 unopened rebate submissions in a dumpster belonging to Vastech, a rebate processor hired by Fry's Electronics. Vastech's management blames it on a bad employee."

Submission + - A telescope as big as the Earth

Submitted by

Roland Piquepaille

on Thursday September 06, 2007 @01:23PM

Roland Piquepaille writes: "A week ago, seven telescopes around the world were linked together to watch a distant galaxy called 3C273 in real time and create a single world telescope. The data from these telescopes, which are located in Australia, China and Europe, was streamed around the world at a rate of 256 Mb per second. One of the Australian researchers involved in the project said that it was the first time that astronomers have been able to instantaneously connect telescopes half a world apart. He added that 'the diameter of the Earth is 12,750 km and the two most widely separated telescopes in our experiment were 12,304 km apart.' So he's almost right by cliaming they created 'a telescope almost as big as the Earth.' But read more for additional references and a picture showing the location of these telescopes."

Submission + - Server benchmarking lone wolf bites Intel again (worlds-fastest.com)

Submitted by

Ian Lamont

on Thursday September 06, 2007 @12:34PM

Ian Lamont writes: "Neal Nelson, the engineer who conducts independent server benchmarking, has nipped Intel again by reporting that AMD's Opteron chips "delivered better power efficiency" than Xeon processors. Nelson's specific observations included:

1) Larger memory configurations deliver both higher throughput and better power efficiency, 2) Intel's power efficiency advantages decrease as memory size increases, 3) AMD's power efficiency advantages increase as memory size increases, 4) For primarily calculation type workloads, the Xeon delivers 8.0 to 14.0 percent higher peak throughput, and 5) For primarily disk I/O intensive workloads the Opteron delivers 11.3 to 19.4 percent higher peak throughput.
Intel has discounted the findings, claiming that Nelson's methodology "ignores performance," but the company may not be able to ignore Nelson for much longer: the Standard Performance Evaluation Corp., a nonprofit company that develops computing benchmarks, is expected to publish a new test suite for comparing server efficiency that Nelson believes will be similar to his own benchmarks that measure server power usage directly from the wall plug."

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