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Comment It's absolutely NOT worth it (Score 1) 126

by bsdasym (#47664591) Attached to: Android Motorcycle Helmet/HUD Gains Funding
Spoken like.. someone who isn't a rider.

Helmets are 'disposable' gear. If you damage it in a crash, you toss it. If you drop it down the stairs, you toss it. If there is *any* doubt in your mind that it's 100% intact, you toss it.

I'd rather not toss the GPS, computer, and the rest of the techno gear out with it. Drop the price and release it as a 'retrofit kit' and I'm in. Until then, I'll keep buying 'normal' helmets (which these days offer integrated speakers and mounting for bluetooth dongles for GPS/phone/etc).

Submission + - Techno-Archaeologists Used an Abandoned McDonald's to Hijack a Satellite (vice.com)

Submitted by Daniel_Stuckey
Daniel_Stuckey writes: From an abandoned McDonald's in the backyard of NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, a dozen or so volunteer scientists and engineers have taken control of a decommissioned, still running, 70s-era space satellite, currently some 20,000 kilometers away, by using discarded vintage space computers and a few sweet eBay finds. The so-named "McMoon's" Control Center is some sort of bizarre testament to human ingenuity and what a bunch of very smart people with virtually no budget or proper authorization can pull off. A bit of context: The International Sun-Earth Explorer (ISEE-3) satellite was launched on August 12, 1978, and was originally meant to study the Earth’s magnetosphere from the L1 Lagrangian point between the Sun and the Earth, where the gravity of both bodies cancel each other out.

Submission + - Gas cooled reactors shut down in UK (nytimes.com)

Submitted by mdsolar
mdsolar writes: EDF Energy, the British subsidiary of the French state-controlled utility, said on Monday that it was shutting down three nuclear reactors and that a reactor with a fault that has been shut down since June would remain so. The facilities, which are being investigated as a precaution, generate nearly a quarter of nuclear capacity in Britain.

The British Office for Nuclear Regulation said that there had been no release of radioactive material and no injuries. Industry experts did not anticipate much effect on electricity supplies or prices in the short term.

EDF said that over the next few days it would idle a second reactor at the facility where the fault was found last year, Heysham 1, in northwest England. The company said it would also shut down two other reactors of similar design at Hartlepool in northeast England to investigate whether they had the same flaws.

Submission + - Google Is Backing A New $300 Million High-Speed Internet Trans-Pacific Cable 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Google has announced it is backing plans to build and operate a new high-speed internet Trans-Pacific cable system called “FASTER.” In addition to Google, the $300 million project will be jointly managed by China Mobile International, China Telecom Global, Global Transit, KDDI, and SingTel, with NEC as the system supplier. FASTER will feature the latest high-quality 6-fiber-pair cable and optical transmission technologies. The initial design capacity is expected to be 60Tb/s (100Gb/s x 100 wavelengths x 6 fiber-pairs), connecting the US with two locations in Japan.

Submission + - Intel's 14-nm Broadwell CPU primed for slim tablets

Submitted by crookedvulture
crookedvulture writes: Intel's next-gen Broadwell processor has entered production, and we now know a lot more about what it entails. The chip is built using 14-nm process technology, enabling it to squeeze into half the power envelope and half the physical footprint of last year's Haswell processors. Even the thickness of the CPU package has been reduced to better fit inside slim tablets. There are new power-saving measures, too, including a duty cycle control mechanism that shuts down sections of the chip during some clock cycles. The onboard GPU has also been upgraded with more functional units and hardware-assisted H.265 decoding for 4K video. Intel expects the initial Broadwell variant, otherwise known as the Core M, to slip into tablets as thin as the iPad Air. We can expect to see the first systems on shelves in time for the holidays.

Comment Re:Accept, don't fight, systemd (Score 1) 533

by bsdasym (#46953321) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Practical Alternatives To Systemd?
A few years ago I would've called this ludicrous. I've been using FreeBSD for almost 20 years now and the idea of something like systemd (and the horrorshow it's become) making it's way into the base system was laughable. These days, I'm not so sure. Every release seems to take the system one step closer to exactly what you describe, with occasional steps the other direction (such as llvm/clang replacing gcc). I doubt FreeBSD will use systemd any time *soon* but one day, it might. By then bsdinstall will probably have been replaced with something even worse as well, and I will have moved on to some other flavor.

Submission + - Carpenter who cut off his fingers makes 'Robohand' with 3-D printer (cnn.com)

Submitted by mpicpp
mpicpp writes: "I was in a position to see exactly what happens in the human hand. I got the basics of what it's all about and thought yeah, I'll make my own."
Richard van As is recalling the moment in May 2011 when he sat in a Johannesburg hospital waiting to hear if his fingers could be stitched back on. Just an hour earlier, he had been in his carpentry workshop sawing wood when the saw slipped and ripped diagonally through the four fingers on his right hand. "It all happened too quickly to know what actually happened," he remembers.

Rather than fear the outcome, or dwell on the repercussions of losing his fingers, he was already thinking of ways to fix the problem, like a true carpenter.

After days of scouring the Internet he couldn't find anywhere to buy a functional prosthetic finger and he was astonished at the cost of prosthetic hands and limbs which began in the tens of thousands of dollars. But his online surfing paid off as it brought him to an amateur video posted by a mechanical effects artist in Washington State, by the name of Ivan Owen.

Submission + - Windows XP did not instantly become unsafe on April 8. 1

Submitted by Futurepower(R)
Futurepower(R) writes: Windows XP did not instantly become unsafe on April 8, 2014, the date Microsoft calls the "end of life" for Windows XP.

"End of life" is a way for Microsoft to make more money. Governments and big corporations are often influenced by people with no technical knowledge. Because of their ignorance, governments have already paid Microsoft probably more than it costs to fix the few security defects found each year. However, the taxpayers of those governments will not be allowed to have the fixes.

It's like Toyota told all owners of older Toyota vehicles that the vehicles are unsafe now and owners must buy new vehicles or pay millions of dollars to keep them. Except its worse: Software doesn't have mechanical wear.

This article contains tips about how to use any version of Microsoft Windows safely that can be shared with people you want to help. Unnecessary computer maintenance is an ugly way to make money.

Comment The Seconc Coming (Score 2) 250

by bsdasym (#46488349) Attached to: Why San Francisco Is the New Renaissance Florence
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Submission + - Slashdot's new interface could kill what keeps Slashdot relevant (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Technology Lab / Information Technology
Slashdot’s new interface could kill what keeps Slashdot relevant
Flashy revamp seeks to draw new faces to the community—at the cost of the old.

by Lee Hutchinson — Feb 12 2014, 6:55pm E

        Web Culture

131

In the modern responsive Web Three Point Oh Internet, Slashdot stands like a thing frozen in time—it's a coelacanth stuck incongruously in an aquarium full of more colorful fish. The technology news aggregator site has been around since 1997, making it positively ancient as websites are reckoned. More importantly, Slashdot's long focus on open source technology news and topics has caused it to accrete a user base that tends to be extremely technical, extremely skilled, and extremely opinionated.

That user base is itself the main reason why Slashdot continues to thrive, even as its throwback interface makes it look to untrained eyes like a dated relic. Though the site is frequently a source of deep and rich commentary on topics, the barrier for new users to engage in the site's discussions is relatively high—certainly higher than, say, reddit (or even Ars). This doesn't cause much concern to the average Slashdot user, but tech job listing site Dice.com (which bought Slashdot in September 2012, along with Sourceforge and a number of other digital properties) appears to have decided it's time to drag Slashdot's interface into the 21st century in order to make things comfortable for everyone—old and new users alike.

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