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Submission + - Cubli – A cube that can jump up, balance, and walk across your desk (robohub.org)

Submitted by rminsk
rminsk writes: The Cubli is a 15 × 15 × 15 cm cube that can jump up and balance on its corner. Reaction wheels mounted on three faces of the cube rotate at high angular velocities and then brake suddenly, causing the Cubli to jump up. Once the Cubli has almost reached the corner stand up position, controlled motor torques are applied to make it balance on its corner. In addition to balancing, the motor torques can also be used to achieve a controlled fall such that the Cubli can be commanded to fall in any arbitrary direction. Combining these three abilities — jumping up, balancing, and controlled falling — the Cubli is able to 'walk'.

Submission + - Newegg infringes Spangenberg patent, must pay $2.3 million (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by rminsk
rminsk writes: Newegg, an online retailer that has made a name for itself fighting the non-practicing patent holders sometimes called "patent trolls," sits on the losing end of a lawsuit tonight. An eight-person jury returned to court shortly after 7:00pm and found that the company infringed all four asserted claims of a patent owned by TQP Development, a company owned by patent enforcement expert Erich Spangenberg.

Comment Revision control systems are not installation syst (Score 1) 211

by rminsk (#45137559) Attached to: How To Develop Unmaintainable Software

svn up git pull hg pull

Quoting user tdammers on reddit:

  • Excess files in document root - version control cruft, project documentation, etc. Happens all the time, and is an actual real security problem.
  • Development race conditions. Ever done svn up on the production server, just to find that someone had committed broken code between your test run and the deployment? Ever "solved" this problem by stopping all development activity during deployment? Ever noticed how this essentially means that this makes frequent deployments practically impossible?
  • File permissions and ownership. Need I go into detail here? I think not.
  • What if you want to do things like precompile templates, preprocess CSS, minify and concatenate your JavaScript offline, move stuff around, or just make sure that your deployment will only go through if it passes a minimum set of tests?
  • What about database changes?

Submission + - Was the destruction of the Death Star an inside job? (youtube.com)

Submitted by
rminsk
rminsk writes: "An examination of some questionable events and circumstances leading up to the destruction of the Death Star, through the eyes of an amateur investigative journalist within the Star Wars galaxy. The focus is mainly on the connections between the people who created and operated the Death Star and those responsible for destroying it."

Comment Re:Storing plaintext passwords should be illegal (Score 1) 84

by rminsk (#43034911) Attached to: Australian Tax Office Stores Passwords In Clear Text

...browsers should not allow "hidden" fields to be transmitted directly, instead should have a default action of encrypting them with Bcrypt or SHA-256.

So now I steal the database of hashes that the browser transmitted. Just as good as having the plaintext. Now all I need to do is send the hash.

Comment Each 12-month period is not identical (Score 4, Informative) 725

by rminsk (#38508606) Attached to: Christmas Always On Sunday? Researchers Propose New Calendar

...have created a new calendar in which each new 12-month period is identical to the one which came before, and remains that way from one year to the next in perpetuity.

and then later in the article

This adjustment was necessary in order to deal with the same knotty problem that makes designing an effective and practical new calendar such a challenge: the fact that each Earth year is 365.2422 days long. Hanke and Henry deal with those extra “pieces” of days by dropping leap years entirely in favor of an extra week added at the end of December every five or six years.

So it does not remain consistant from one year to the next.

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