38751997
submission
An anonymous reader writes:
Hi Slashdot,
I am in a high school Physics class and for a recent experiment to measure the acceleration due to gravity our teacher had us drop NXT bricks with accelerometers off of balconies to be caught by someone below. The problem was as you might guess and fortunately never happened was that if the NXT was missed $200 of NXT and sensors would be destroyed. As we were preforming the experiment I thought of a way to replicate the experiment with an Arduino and accelerometer for $50. Hope you like it!
Ben
http://www.instructables.com/id/Accelerometer-Shield-for-Physics-Class-and-beyond/
38751365
submission
mikejuk writes:
Conway's Game of Life is well known, but what about a version that works not on a discrete grid but in the continuum? It has all of the features of Life, including gliders, and it really looks alive.
A paper published at the end of last year by Stephan Rafler described a generalization of Life to a continuous domain. He called it SmoothLife. Now we have a new video by Tim Hutton of SmoothLifeL (a particular version of the rule) in action complete with gliders — see the video.
Does it have a purpose? Does it have to?
38750623
submission
another random user writes:
The third and fourth spacecraft in Europe's satellite navigation system have gone into orbit. The pair were launched on a Russian Soyuz rocket from French Guiana.
It is an important milestone for the multi-billion-euro project to create a European version of the US Global Positioning System.
With four satellites now in orbit — the first and second spacecraft were launched in 2011 — it becomes possible to test Galileo end-to-end. That is because a minimum of four satellites are required in the sky for a smartphone or vehicle to use their signals to calculate a positional fix.
38746577
submission
SpzToid writes:
Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta warned Thursday that the United States was facing the possibility of a “cyber-Pearl Harbor” and was increasingly vulnerable to foreign computer hackers who could dismantle the nation’s power grid, transportation system, financial networks and government.
Countries such as Iran are motivated to conduct such attacks, in retaliation actually.
Perhaps old news around here, even though Panetta is in-fact requesting new legislation from congress and the sentate, isn't the message wise and current that "we would be much better served if we accepted that prevention eventually fails, so we need detection, response, and containment for the incidents that will occur." as Richard Bejtlich has argued in his security blog?
Incidentally, Richard has also written a Top 10 list of the best ways to stir up the security pot (http://taosecurity.blogspot.nl/2012/09/top-ten-ways-to-stir-cyber-pot.html):
If you want to start a debate/argument/flamewar in security, pick any of the following.
"Full disclosure" vs "responsible disclosure" vs whatever else
Threat intelligence sharing
Value of security certifications
Exploit sales
Advanced-ness, Persistence-ness, Threat-ness, Chinese-ness of APT
Reality of "cyberwar"
"Builders vs Breakers"
"Security is an engineering problem," i.e., "building a new Internet is the answer."
"Return on security investment"
Security by mandate or legislation or regulation
But seriously folks, time do change, don't they? (Even in the technology sector) Currently the congress is preoccupied with the failure of US security threats in Benghazi, while maybe Leon isn't getting the press his recent message deserves?
38745345
submission
An anonymous reader writes:
When all 3 legs of your 3-legged strategy fail, what do you do? You rush — run run run — to change your total strategy. But what would a madman do? — Read Tommi Ahonen's new article to find out. Is the Nokia board either asleep at the wheel, or incompetent, or in collusion with the incompetent CEO? Tommi gives full details, not just of how Nokia's Windows phone strategy has failed, but how this has spread to other parts of the companies technology and the "Elop Effect" has single-handedly destroyed [...] Europe's biggest tech giant" and leaves us only with the question: Why is Nokia's board failing to act?
We've discussed Tommi's articles before where he was correctly predicting Windows phones market failure at a point where others were claiming that "the Lumia line is, in fact, selling quite nicely"
38744219
submission
sfcrazy writes:
The Linux Foundation has released a pre-booter which enabled any Linux or BSD distribution to run on any UEFI Secure boot windows PC. The Linux Foundation will obtain a Microsoft Key and sign a small pre-bootloader which will, in turn, chain load (without any form of signature check) a predesignated boot loader which will, in turn, boot Linux (or any other operating system).
38741127
submission
An anonymous reader writes:
AMD is preparing to lay off 20 to 30 percent of its workforce after warning of a 10 percent decline in Q3 revenues driven by the weak global economy and PC sales, according to AllThingsD's Arik Hesseldehl. The layoffs will reportedly focus on engineering and sales, and are in addition to a 10 percent headcount reduction 11 months ago. Teams of consultants from McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group are reportedly swarming headquarters to advise the
CEO Rory Read, who took over from Dirk Meyer a little over a year ago; several
senior executives including the CFO, have recently departed.
38737783
submission
theodp writes:
In Ken Kesey's 1962 novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Nurse Ratched maintained order in the mental institution by dispensing antipsychotic and anticonvulsant drugs to the patients. Fifty years later, the NY Times reports that some physicians are prescribing stimulants to struggling students in schools starved of extra money, not to treat ADHD, necessarily, but to boost their academic performance. 'We as a society have been unwilling to invest in very effective nonpharmaceutical interventions for these children and their families,' said Dr. Ramesh Raghavan, an expert in prescription drug use among low-income children. 'We are effectively forcing local community psychiatrists to use the only tool at their disposal, which is psychotropic medications.'
38736923
submission
NeutronCowboy writes:
From the yahoo story:
"The majority of top decision-makers at the Federal Trade Commission believe that an antitrust case should be brought against Google Inc, meaning the search giant could soon be headed into tough negotiations, three people familiar with the matter said.
Four of the FTC commissioners have become convinced after more than a year of investigation that Google illegally used its dominance of the search market to hurt its rivals, while one commissioner is skeptical, the sources said."
38730645
submission
An anonymous reader writes:
Is Google planning on integrating an antivirus scanner into Android? A just-released Google Play store app update as well as the company’s recent acquisition of VirusTotal seem to hint that yes, Google is looking into it.
38730309
submission
stinkymountain writes:
At a launch event for MIT's new wireless technology research center, PhD student Swarun Kumar presented technology for a new autonomous vehicle that recognizes when it may be in danger of striking other cars and pedestrians.
38730219
submission
colinneagle writes:
Several other autonomous cars have been developed elsewhere, most famously by Google, and they are generally capable of identifying objects in the road directly ahead of or behind them. The challenge undertaken by the MIT researchers is making these cars aware of dangers lurking around corners and behind buildings.
MIT PhD student Swarun Kumar showed a video of a test run by the MIT researchers in which an autonomous golf cart running the technology, called CarSpeak, encountered a pedestrian walking from the entrance of a building to a crosswalk. The golf cart stopped roughly five yards ahead of the crosswalk and waited long enough for the pedestrian to walk to the other side of the road. The vehicle then continued driving automatically.
The solution Kumar presented is based on a method of communications that is intended to expand the vehicle's field of view. This can be accomplished by compressing and sharing the data that autonomous vehicles generate while they're in motion, which Kumar says can amount to gigabits per second.
In a comparison test, a car using CarSpeak's MAC-based communications was able to stop with a maximum average delay of 0.45 seconds, compared to the minimum average delay time of 2.14 seconds for a car running 802.11, the report noted.
38727137
submission
another random user writes:
Apple is planning to shift production of its ARM-based microprocessors from Samsung to the Taiwanese chip-baking giant TSMC as early as next year, according to a report by the China Economic News Service (CENS).
The report cites CitiGroup Global Markets analyst J.T. Hsu as saying that TSMC will be Apple's sole supplier of 20nm quad-core processors, with volume production to begin in the fourth quarter of 2013. He also noted that Apple began its 20nm chip-verfication process at TSMC in August of this year.
Hsu told CENS that the future quad-core chips were intended for Apple's "iPad, iTV and even Macbook," turning up the heat on two rumors that have been simmering for months: that Apple is planning a move into the television market, and that an ARM-based MacBook is in the works.
