ldpercy - Slashdot User

Submission + - Full spectrum solar cells (lbl.gov) 1

Submitted by

Diego Manuel

on Sunday July 22, 2007 @10:56PM

Diego Manuel writes: "BERKELEY, CA — Researchers in the Materials Sciences Division (MSD) of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, working with crystal-growing teams at Cornell University and Japan's Ritsumeikan University, have learned that the band gap of the semiconductor indium nitride is not 2 electron volts (2 eV) as previously thought, but instead is a much lower 0.7 eV. The serendipitous discovery means that a single system of alloys incorporating indium, gallium, and nitrogen can convert virtually the full spectrum of sunlight — from the near infrared to the far ultraviolet — to electrical current"

Submission + - Rolling my own parental controls in Linux

Submitted by ZekeSMZ on Sunday July 22, 2007 @09:26PM

ZekeSMZ writes: It's been a year since I made the switch from windows to Ubuntu, and I can safely say I'm never going back. One of the best things I've done is to set up an Edubuntu system for my kids — ages 4 and 2. With applications such as Supertux, TuxPaint, G Compris, Stellarium and even Kolf, they amuse themselves for hours with the machine and can't damage it like they can a Windows box.

Now that my 4 year old is learning to read and type, I'd like to set up some form of parental controls on my network. I consider myself a moderately competant Linux user, but I do not have anything approaching the skills of the talented sysadmins I've worked with over the years. So, I'd like to reach out to the Slashdot community for advice on how to lock down my network so that they won't accidentally bump into the seedier side of the web.

What are the best firewall apps to use for internal filtering? Do (or could) any of them support pro-active whitelisting, where I could get an email with a blocked URL that my kids tried to visit, and in response — I set up a rule to allow or deny access to the URL. This is a fairly mainstream feature of various parental control software out there, how could a similar solution be set up in Linux?

I'm going to assume that my kids are smarter than me and will one day figure out how to own the network. You get bonus points if you can give pointers on setting up a dual system, one that they can hack, and one that is running in the background in silent or stealth mode to monitor activity. My intent here is not to be big brother, but rather a responsible parent.

Submission + - HAL, open source? (nasa.gov)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 22, 2007 @08:19AM

An anonymous reader writes: I was going through a list of NASA's open source licensed software and stumbled a project called Livingstone2. From their site: "Livingstone2 is a reusable artificial intelligence (AI) software system designed to assist spacecraft, life support systems, chemical plants or other complex systems in operating robustly with minimal human supervision, even in the face of hardware failures or unexpected events." They even have a SDK and a real-time interface to it.

Submission + - A $200 60ppm inkjet?

Submitted by

ldpercy

on Tuesday March 20, 2007 @03:38AM

ldpercy writes: "Quoted from http://texyt.com/silverbrook+memjet+printer+inkjet +mems+lyra+canon+epson+hp+kodak:

A $200 desktop printer with a color printing speed of 60 A4 pages per minute is just one of the revolutionary new devices promised by Silverbrook, a company which holds more than 1400 patents, but has never released a product. Analysts from leading printer market research firm, Lyra Research Inc, showed this video of the prototype Memjet inkjet printer today, and say they have personally examined it and verified that it is real.

I'm assured by a very good friend who has worked for Silverbrook here in Sydney for a few years that it is real, even though the vid looks a bit fake."

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