Comment Re:Prejudiced much? (Score 1) 394
This is a response to the claim that Gimp can't rotate by an arbitrary number of degrees.
http://docs.gimp.org/en/gimp-layer-rotate-arbitrary.html
Comment Re:Just one question (Score 1) 333
That benchmark is old. OpenMP support for Clang was announced last week.
http://openmp.org/wp/2013/09/clang/
OpenBSD 10 hasn't been released yet, so it is premature to say that "BSD users are the loser here".
Comment fab at home (Score 1) 72
The fabathome.org 3D printer is open source, has been available for years, and can print a wide range of materials, including conductors. It's never really taken off, probably due to having lower resolution than the popular FDM printers that print with melted plastic. But if you want a home printer that can print objects with a range of materials, including conductors, check it out.
Comment gallium is expensive (Score 4, Interesting) 72
I'm paying $25 for a kilogram of 3D-printable ABS filament. A kilogram of gallium is probably close to $1000, based on prices I've seen on ebay.
Comment Walled Garden App Stores (Score 2) 572
I would uninvent all operating systems that include the concept of third party apps, but that prevent you from writing your own applications without getting permission from the OS developer.
Comment not a "mobile" technology (Score 4, Interesting) 156
As I understand it, this is a replacement for running a fibre optic link between your house and your ISP. Instead, you mount an antenna on your roof, which engages in narrow beam, line of sight 60 GHz communication with your ISP. I think the benefits are that it is potentially cheaper than running a fibre optic cable to your house. The signal is attenuated by rain, and by atmospheric oxygen. I doubt the signal can travel very well through walls. And I don't think it is useful for mobile devices.
Doug Moen
Intel Cache Poisoning Is Dangerously Easy On Linux 393
Julie188 writes "A researcher recently released proof-of-concept code for an exploit that allows a hacker to overrun an Intel CPU cache and plant a rootkit. A second, independent researcher has examined the exploit and noted that it is so simple and so stealthy that it is likely out in the wild now, unbeknownst to its victims. The attack works best on a Linux system with an Intel DQ35 motherboard with 2GB of memory. It turns out that Linux allows the root user to access MTR registers incredibly easily. With Windows this exploit can be used, but requires much more work and skill and so while the Linux exploit code is readily available now, no Windows exploit code has, so far, been released or seen. This attack is hardware specific, but unfortunately, it is specific to Intel's popular DQ35 motherboards."
Comment Striking a balance (Score 5, Insightful) 192
"the iPhone
The correct "balance" between open and closed is *open*.
The Deceptive Perfection of Auto-Tune 437
theodp writes "For a medium in which mediocre singing has never been a bar to entry, a lot of pop vocals suddenly sound better than great — they're note- and pitch-perfect. It's all thanks to Auto-Tune, the brainchild of Andy Hildebrand, who realized that the wonders of autocorrelation — which he once used to map drilling sites for the oil industry — could also be used to bestow perfect pitch upon the Britney Spears of the world. While Auto-Tune was intended to be used unnoticed, musicians are growing fond of adjusting the program's retune speed to eliminate the natural transition between notes, which yield jumpy and automated-sounding vocals. 'I never figured anyone in their right mind would want to do that,' says Hildebrand."
As these techniques improve and become more popular, it makes me wonder what music produced twenty or fifty years from now will sound like, and how much authenticity will be left.
New Memristor Makes Low-Cost, High-Density Memory 86
KentuckyFC writes "A group of electronics engineers have discovered that a thin layer of vanadium oxide acts as a memristor, the fourth basic component of circuits after resistors, capacitors, and inductors that was discovered last year. At a critical temperature, a current passing through the layer causes it to change from an insulating state to a metal-like state, thereby changing its resistance (abstract). The effect lasts many hours — which is what makes the layer a memristor (a resistor with memory). The team says this could be scaled up to make resistive random access memory, or RRAM, at very low cost, from little more than layers of vanadium oxide."
Comment Re:Scientific community? (Score 5, Funny) 578
Do you have any evidence to support your assertion that Flat Earthers have the ability to get laid?
Submission + - ZFS committed to FreeBSD CVS
An anonymous reader writes: Pawel Jakub Dawidek has announced on the freebsd-current mailing list that he has committed Sun's ZFS file system to FreeBSD 7-CURRENT. This full support for its logical volume management via storage pools, self-healing and data corruption detection, NFS export, and more. Arguably the most exciting new file system on the planet will be available out of the box in FreeBSD 7.0 later this year!
Journal Journal: I love Ubuntu Linux
I just tried upgrading to Ubuntu Linux 7.4 Fiesty Fawn beta 1 last night. I started the update-manager -c to chose to upgrade online. I had one little problem
Anne turned off the lightswitch where teh laptop was plugged in during the upgrade.
Submission + - Third Stargate TV series gets a name
Anonymous Coward writes: "The working title of the third Stargate television series is Stargate Universe , executive producer Robert C. Cooper told GateWorld. The show currently exists in the form of a one-page treatment of the story and characters. Cooper and executive producer Brad Wright will start writing the pilot after shooting on the two Stargate SG-1 movies finishes in June. Meanwhile, new episodes of SG-1 and Atlantis start airing April 13 in the U.S., on The SCI FI Channel. Read lots more from Cooper at GateWorld ..."
