Forgot your password?

Close
typodupeerror

Comment: Re:Live Footage! (Score 2) 95

by david.given (#43687927) Attached to: Space Station Crew Prepare For Emergency Spacewalk
In order for the station to reenter, you'd have to change its orbital velocity by a substantial amount. The interwebs suggests that it's about 150m/s (that's about 300 mph for the metrically challenged).

To change the ISS's velocity that much in a single impact would destroy the entire station. I don't even think the ISS is capable of being deorbited without additional hardware; the Progress supply drones it currently uses to adjust its orbit carry very little thruster fuel. (Just enough to deorbit the Progress itself, plus some spare.)

Personally, the main bit which caused me to roll my eyes is right at the beginning, where the two astronauts admire the sunset, tumbling uncontrollably, while facing in entirely the wrong direction...
Data Storage

WD Explains Its Windows-Only Software-Based SSHD Tech 286

Posted by timothy
from the horse-before-the-cart dept.
crookedvulture writes "Seagate and Toshiba both offer hybrid hard drives that manage their built-in flash caches entirely in firmware. WD has taken a different approach with its Black SSHD, which instead uses driver software to govern its NAND cache. The driver works with the operating system to determine what to store in the flash. Unfortunately, it's Windows-only. You can choose between two drivers, though. WD has developed one of its own, and Intel will offer a separate driver attached to its upcoming Haswell platform. While WD remains tight-lipped on the speed of the Black's mechanical portion, it's confirmed that the flash is provided by a customized SanDisk iSSD embedded on the drive. The iSSD and mechanical drive connect to each other and to the host system through a Serial ATA bridge chip, making the SSHD look more like a highly integrated dual-drive solution than a single, standalone device. With Intel supporting this approach, the next generation of hybrid drives appears destined to be software-based."
China

Pentagon Ups Hacking Accusations Against China 151

Posted by Soulskill
from the polite-warnings-and-gentle-reprimands dept.
wiredmikey writes "A new report from the Pentagon marked the most explicit statement yet from the United States that it believes China's cyber espionage is focused on the U.S. government, as well as American corporations. China kept up a steady campaign of hacking in 2012 that included attempts to target U.S. government computer networks, which could provide Beijing a better insight into America's policy deliberations and military capabilities, according to the Pentagon's annual assessment of China's military. 'China is using its computer network exploitation capability to support intelligence collection against the U.S. diplomatic, economic, and defense industrial base sectors that support U.S. national defense programs,' said the report to Congress (PDF). The digital espionage was part of a broader industrial espionage effort that seeks to secure military-related U.S. and Western technology, allowing Beijing to scale back its reliance on foreign arms manufacturers, the report said. One day later, Beijing dismissed the Pentagon's report that accused it of widespread cyberspying on the U.S. government, rejecting it as an 'irresponsible' attempt to drum up fear of China as a military threat."
Stats

LLNL/RPI Supercomputer Smashes Simulation Speed Record 79

Posted by timothy
from the in-a-world-of-make-believe dept.
Lank writes "A team of computer scientists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have managed to coordinate nearly 2 million cores to achieve a blistering 504 billion events per second, over 40 times faster than the previous record. This result was achieved on Sequoia, a 120-rack IBM Blue Gene/Q normally used to run classified nuclear simulations. Note: I am a co-author of the coming paper to appear in PADS 2013."
AMD

AMD's Open Source Linux Driver Trounces NVIDIA's 147

Posted by timothy
from the hari-seldon dept.
An anonymous reader writes "In a 15-way graphics card comparison on Linux of both the open and closed-source drivers, it was found that the open-source AMD Linux graphics driver is much faster than the open-source NVIDIA driver on Ubuntu 13.04. The open-source NVIDIA driver is developed entirely by the community via reverse-engineering, but for Linux desktop users, is this enough? The big issue for the open-source 'Nouveau' driver is that it doesn't yet fully support re-clocking the graphics processor so that the hardware can actually run at its rated speeds. With the closed-source AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce results, the drivers were substantially faster than their respective open-source driver. Between NVIDIA and AMD on Linux, the NVIDIA closed-source driver was generally doing better than AMD Catalyst."

Comment: Re:language (Score 1) 302

by david.given (#43546619) Attached to: Stop Standardizing HTML

Using words I recognize as nonsense isn't the sole problem. It's vocabulary collisions.

I had precisely this problem the other day, when talking to someone about DVCSes. It took about five minutes (of face-to-face conversation, mind; five minutes is a lot) to figure out that git and hg use the word 'revert' to refer to fundamentally different operations.

It would have been less confusing if he'd just said 'I don't know what that word means'. It was the fact that he thought he knew what I meant, but didn't, which was causing the problems...

Firefox

Browser Choice May Affect Your Job Prospects 374

Posted by Soulskill
from the good-god,-this-applicant-is-using-Lynx dept.
krygny sends this quote from The Economist: "The internet browser you are using to read this blog post could help a potential employer decide whether or not you would do well at a job. How might your choice of browser affect your job prospects? When choosing among job applicants, employers may be swayed by a range of factors, knowingly and unknowingly. ... Evolv, a company that monitors recruitment and workplace data, has suggested that there are better ways to identify the right candidate for job. ... Among other things, its analysis found that those applicants who have bothered to install new web browsers on their computers (such as Mozilla's Firefox or Google's Chrome) perform better and stay in their posts for 15% longer, on average."

Comment: Re:What's so special about that? (Score 1) 63

by david.given (#43279545) Attached to: Landsat's First Images Show Rocky Mountains In Stunning Detail

How do these images compare to the absurdly high resolution images provided by the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter? The PR images look fairly small scale.

It's always struck me a bit odd that we seem to have vastly higher resolution pictures of Mars from space than we do of Earth; and Earth's, like, right here...

Comment: Re:White Noise (Score 1) 561

by david.given (#43180785) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Best Way To Block Noise In a Dorm?

You might find Andrew Plotkin's Pocket Storm interesting: http://zarfhome.com/pocketstorm/ It's an iOS app that will produce a procedurally generated soundscape of a summer storm. By default the whole thing takes an hour; it's tweakable.

(That's a turnkey version of the storm module for his Boodler ambient sound generation engine, wrapped in an iOS app. Boodler itself is in relatively portable Python and is open source. And scriptable. So you can build your own soundscapes with it. There's a zillion different Boodler soundscapes available.)

United States

Is Daylight Saving Time Worth Saving? 646

Posted by Soulskill
from the either-that-or-it's-not dept.
Daniel_Stuckey writes "In politics, health, and academia, there are plenty of detractors that say daylight saving might not be worth saving. One vocal opponent is Missouri State Representative Delus Johnson, who wants to end the watch and clock switchery altogether. In short, he says we should spring forward this one last time, without ever falling back. He wants Missouri – and other states willing to join a pact – to permanently adopt daylight saving time and call it Standard Time. He's sure that it'll increase economic development in the later part of the year; giving people a little more daylight to do their Black Friday shopping. Matthew J. Kotchen and Laura E. Grant at the National Bureau of Economic Research have argued that DST has had adverse effects on energy spending. They calculate some extra $10-16 million spent by Indiana due to time changes. Their research concluded it's probably a much bigger loss in other states. A year ago, Motherboard's Kelly Bourdet reported on a health study that concluded DST might actually kill you. Chances of heart-attack were stated to increase by 10 percent on the days following the spring change, and to decrease by 10% after gaining the hour in the fall." There's even a We The People petition about it.
Google

Moon Mining Race Under Way 150

Posted by samzenpus
from the a-lot-of-cheese dept.
New submitter rujholla writes "The race to the moon is back! This time, though, it's through private enterprise. Google has offered a $20m grand prize to the first privately-funded company to land a robot on the moon and explore the surface (video) by moving at least 500 meters and sending high definition video back to Earth by 2015."

Comment: Re:$4.30 MSP430 Launchpad for starters (Score 1) 228

by david.given (#42725869) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Best Electronics Prototyping Platform?

I had totally forgotten about the MSP430 --- thanks for the reminder; ordered one. I don't have an application in mind but it'll be fun to play with...

I'm particularly intrigued to see they do a bundle of two MSP430 LaunchPads and two low-power RF modules for $23.30. That looks like it would make a very interesting way to experiment with ultra-low-power radio at about $10 a node.

TI's got a lot of interesting stuff. The devkit in a watch looks fun. Pity it's (a) not a dot matrix LCD and (b) out of stock. It's also a pity their website is so broken...

YOW!! The land of the rising SONY!!

Close