darenw - Slashdot User

Submission + - Student photographer threatened with suspension for sports photos (petapixel.com)

Submitted by sandbagger on Thursday May 21, 2015 @01:46PM

sandbagger writes: Anthony Mazur is a senior at Flower Mound High School in Texas who photographed school sports games and other events. Naturally he posted them on line. A few days ago he was summoned to the principal's office and threatened with a suspension and 'reporting to the IRS' if he didn't take those 4000 photos down. Reportedly, the principle's rationale was that the school has copyright on the images and not him.

Submission + - How Java Changed Programming Forever

Submitted by snydeq on Thursday May 21, 2015 @12:26PM

snydeq writes: With Java hitting its 20th anniversary this week, Elliotte Rusty Harold discusses how the language changed the art and business of programming, turning on a generation of coders. 'Java’s core strength was that it was built to be a practical tool for getting work done. It popularized good ideas from earlier languages by repackaging them in a format that was familiar to the average C coder, though (unlike C++ and Objective-C) Java was not a strict superset of C. Indeed it was precisely this willingness to not only add but also remove features that made Java so much simpler and easier to learn than other object-oriented C descendants.'

Submission + - Army develops blast-proof wallpaper (thestack.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 21, 2015 @12:07PM

An anonymous reader writes: U.S. army engineers are developing a new blast-proof wallpaper prototype that they claim could help protect soldiers from the impact of an explosion and flying debris. The lightweight adhesive fabric is lined with ballistic Kevlar fibers embedded in flexible polymer film. Nick Boone, a research mechanical engineer at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, said that the rolls of paper could be easily transported by military troops and used to quickly line the walls in temporary buildings. Without the wallpaper, a wall that is hit will “rubblize,” said Boone, hurling shards of rock and mortar at the soldiers inside. However when the blast occurs with the wallpaper installed, he explained that the fabric acts as a “catcher's net,” and is able to contain the flying rubble and prevent debris from injuring soldiers.

Submission + - What's the best dumb phone?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 21, 2015 @07:13AM

An anonymous reader writes: For those of us who don't need or want a smartphone, what would be the best dumb phone around? Do you have a preference over flip or candy bar ones? What about ones that have FM radio? Do any of you still use dumb phones in this smart phone era?

Submission + - NASA gives away over 1000 of its tool to the public (nextgov.com)

Submitted by ganjadude on Tuesday May 19, 2015 @03:46PM

ganjadude writes: Once again NASA is giving back to the people. They just recently released over 1000 of the tools that it uses to the people in its second annual Software Catalog.
From the article :

The program tools are organized into 15 separate categories, which range in scope from aeronautics and propulsion, to system testing and handling, according to the catalog.
For example, the Vehicle Sketch Pad, or OpenVSP, is a tool NASA uses to design aircrafts by way of geometry modeling.

so go have a look and see what kind of use you can get from these tools

Submission + - Software Glitch Caused Crash of Airbus A400M military transport aircraft 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 19, 2015 @03:28PM

An anonymous reader writes: A software glitch caused the crash of an Airbus A400M military transport aircraft, claims German newspaper Der Spiegel (Google translation). The accident, which happened in Seville on the vehicle's first production test flight on 9 May, killed four crew members.

Submission + - China plans to land on the far side of the moon by 2020 (examiner.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 19, 2015 @02:13PM

An anonymous reader writes: According to a story in Quartz, the Chinese have decided to land the Chang’e 4 probe on the far side of the moon. Chang’e 4 is a backup probe to the Chang’e 3, which landed on the lunar surface in December 2013 and carried a rover called Yutu. Because the spacecraft will have to be reconfigured, its scheduled launch will be delayed until sometime before 2020, likely after the Chang’e 5 sample return mission which is currently scheduled to launch in 2017.

Submission + - Google Offers Cheap Cloud Computing For Low-Priority Tasks (itworld.com)

Submitted by jfruh on Tuesday May 19, 2015 @11:53AM

jfruh writes: Much of the history of computing products and services involves getting people desperate for better performance and faster results to pay a premium to get what they want. But Google has a new beta service that's going in the other direction — offering cheap cloud computing services for customers who don't mind waiting. Jobs like data analytics, genomics, and simulation and modeling can require lots of computational power, but they can run periodically, can be interrupted, and can even keep going if one or more nodes they're using goes offline.

Submission + - Should I get an Arduino or a Raspberry Pi? (opensource.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 19, 2015 @10:33AM

An anonymous reader writes: I spend a lot of time at conferences and events like Maker Faires, and having co-authored a book on the Raspberry Pi, I spend a lot of time talking to people about things like small electronics and open hardware. Probably the most frequent question I hear is, "Should I get a Raspberry Pi or an Arduino?" They're both inexpensive boards, but if you want to reuse it in the future, you'll need to think about multiple projects as you're planning.

Submission + - Microsoft Graph Engine 1.0 Preview Released

Submitted by Yatao Li on Tuesday May 19, 2015 @10:22AM

Yatao Li writes: We are very pleased to announce that the Graph Engine 1.0 preview has finally been released to the public. Graph Engine, previously known as Trinity, is a distributed, in-memory, large graph processing engine.

Submission + - World's Smallest Beamsplitter Paves Way Toward Computing at the Speed of Light (gizmag.com)

Submitted by Zothecula on Tuesday May 19, 2015 @10:05AM

Zothecula writes: Silicon photonics is an emerging technology that incorporates electronic circuits using photons of laser light rather than electrons to transmit, receive, and manipulate information. As such, a silicon photonic CPU could potentially process information at the speed of light – millions of times faster than computers available today. In a step towards this goal, engineers working at the University of Utah have developed an ultra-compact photonic beam-splitter so small that millions of these devices could fit on a single silicon chip.

Submission + - Why Apple decided to axe its mythical HDTV (bgr.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 19, 2015 @09:44AM

An anonymous reader writes: After nearly a decade worth of research and prototyping, Apple last year finally put to bed any designs it may have had on releasing a branded HDTV set, this according to a recently published report in The Wall Street Journal.

The report claims that Apple seriously investigated the development of an HDTV but was ultimately unable to come up with a set of differentiating features that would position its own offering apart from the competition.

Submission + - Two thirds of public sector workers keep quiet on major security breaches (thestack.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 19, 2015 @07:53AM

An anonymous reader writes: A cybersecurity survey conducted by British IT and telecom firm Daisy Group has revealed that almost two thirds of public sector employees would not report a serious data breach that they thought would cause problems in the workplace. The research, which was based on a study involving 2,000 public sector staff, also discovered that many workers held a negligent attitude toward sufficient password protection. It found that respondents were willing to sidestep corporate security policies to ease their work life. The survey showed that 64% of employees in the public sector would keep quiet about major security breaches, and that 5% had disabled password protection features on a laptop, mobile or other mobile devices. 20% confirmed that they do not regularly update their passwords, while a further 8% answered that they used ‘simple’ passwords that could be easily guessed. Daisy Group’s product director of cloud services Graham Harris explained that the survey served to highlight the importance of staff awareness and involvement in effective IT security management.

Submission + - Robotic Space Plane Launches in Mystery Mission This Week (discovery.com) 1

Submitted by mpicpp on Monday May 18, 2015 @04:38PM

mpicpp writes: he United States Air Force’s mysterious X-37B space plane will head to orbit this week for the fourth time.

The unmanned X-37B spacecraft is scheduled to launch Wednesday (May 20) at 10:45 a.m. EDT (1445 GMT) atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. The liftoff will begin the reusable space plane’s fourth mission, which is known as OTV-4 (short for Orbital Test Vehicle-4).

Most of the X-37B’s payloads and specific activities are classified, so it’s not entirely clear what the space plane will be doing once it leaves Earth Wednesday. This secrecy has led to some speculation that the vehicle might be some sort of space weapon, but Air Force officials have repeatedly refuted that notion, saying X-37B flights simply test a variety of new space technologies

Submission + - Is Lily a Drone? Or Is It a Camera? (ieee.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 12, 2015 @12:46PM

An anonymous reader writes: Antoine Balaresque and Henry Bradlow have developed an autonomous flying video camera for use in filming action sports on land and water, capturing scenery while hiking and sightseeing, and covering family events (so everyone gets in the picture). They think they’ve made it simple enough that a parent could just toss it in the air and forget about it while coaxing a child to take her first steps. They have enough seed money ($1 million in investment) to get the prototype they’ve been developing for the past year into production. The technology is coming along nicely; they’ve been able to hire the experts in computer vision, controls, and industrial design that they need, and they’re on track to ship in February 2016.

But they have a problem. Their product looks an awful lot like a drone—and they don’t want to be a drone company, they want to be a camera company. Has drone technology evolved to the point that it's not a drone--in the same way a smart coffeemaker is not a computer--and they really can call this a camera, not a drone?

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