Comment: Kid Detectives (Score 1) 191
This makes all those kid detecive stories about kids busting international spy operations SO much more believeable.
Comment: Re:a day late... (Score 2, Insightful) 602
Yep, we were all thinking the noise could be filtered, this guy just was the first to act.
Digitally Filtering Out the Drone of the World Cup 602
Posted
by
timothy
from the it's-called-an-off-switch-use-it dept.
from the it's-called-an-off-switch-use-it dept.
qubezz writes "World Cup soccer fans may think a hornet's nest has infiltrated their TVs. However the buzz that is the background soundtrack of the South African-hosted games comes from tens of thousands of plastic horns called vuvuzelas, that are South Africa's version of ringing cowbells or throwing rats. It looks like the horns won't be banned anytime soon though. A savvy German hacker, 'Tube,' discovered that the horn sound can be effectively filtered out by applying a couple of digital notch filters to the audio at the frequencies the horn produces (another summary in English). Now it looks like even broadcasters like the the BBC and others are considering using such filters on their broadcasts."
Comment: This will never fly (Score 1) 1217
The school probably doesn't realize how much it's going to cost to install 20-30 electrical outlets in every classroom. If its for learning, they can't rely on the students to keep 'em charged.
Comment: Whoever funds those companies... (Score 1) 280
... must be really bad at math, or they would have been a little nervous about the line on the balance sheet that reads: Total Liabilities: $6,000,000,000
Comment: No more snow shovelling... (Score 1) 456
... if they would just install a heated driveway. Like on http://landscaping.about.com/cs/winterlandscaping/f/upfront_cost.htm
Comment: Re:I'm not sure I understand (Score 4, Informative) 348
Cloud computing is just a little step above web site hosting. Instead of some online space accessible through HTTP, they give you a little more - a virtual machine with an external IP, for example. You get charged for the convenience of not having to: buy hardware, set up a firewall, set up an internet connection, obtain space, obtain electricity. Sometimes it is scalable so you can run exactly as many virtual machines as you need for a particular task, and it's great if you temporarily want some powerful, flexible web hosting.
Comment: Re:the answer is in the abc article (Score 2) 599
i would say that this girl, uh, young woman, has an incredibly rare, unique mutation: insensitivity to human growth hormone. it would explain all of her symptoms
Alternately, wouldn't it also be plausable that her immune system adapted to attack growth hormones so that they cannot exist in her system at a reasonable concentration for any length of time? This would explain why hormone therapy had little effect, and she seems to have a unique immune system from TFA. I think this would be a (relatively!) easy thing to test for.
Comment: Re:Beta testers (Score 2, Insightful) 61
I wish more companies would do this with patches. Historically, some non-trivial percentage of all patches (to some OS or software) also caused a new bug under some small percentage (like 10%) of the possible software configurations out there. It's better to patch, cause issues, and roll back on a few thousand users than a few hundred thousand. A week later, the quality for all users is the same.
Comment: Re:If we started again, today (Score 0) 806
My favorite from just last week: I opened up a brand new HP Vista box of someone I know that they got on air miles to install a TV tuner card, only to find that there were no expansion slots at all, except for the one AGP slot the graphics card was already filling. At least it had a graphics card; the on-board video was crap and even had plastic covers screwed over the connectors just in case someone might accidentally try to use it. The plastic covers and the expansion slot cover used star screws. How badly do you not want people to upgrade? This enforces my mantra "Never buy an assembled computer when you know how to build one from parts."