Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:My setup (Score 1) 421

by johndmartiniii (#28450345) Attached to: How Do You Sync & Manage Your Home Directories?
I have been doing something like this for a few years now with an NSLU2 loaded with Debian. NFS shares between systems when I am at home. Rsync mirrors the 1TB disk on the server. I have recently been using Back-in-time to keep incremental snapshots. I will upgrade to the OpenRD-Client when we manage to get Debian sorted out fully on the SOC that it uses (which is the same as the SheevaPlug).

It isn't exactly the sort of solution the asker in TFA is seeking, but it could be applied similarly to meet his needs.
Earth

DoE Considers Artificial Trees To Remove CO2 418

Posted by timothy from the putting-the-artifice-in-artificial dept.
eldavojohn writes "CNN is running an article on a new angle of attack to reducing greenhouse gases. After meeting with the US Department of Energy on the concept, the researchers revealed the details that each 'tree' (really a small building structure in the concept design) would cost about as much as a Toyota and remove 1 ton of CO2 from the air per day. Don't worry, they're accounting for the energy the 'tree' uses to operate: 'By the time we make liquid C02 we have spent approximately 50 kilojoules [of electricity] per mole of C02. Compare that to the average power plant in the US, which produces one mole of C02 with every 230 kilojoules of electricity. In other words, if we simply plugged our device in to the power grid to satisfy its energy needs, for every roughly 1,000 kilograms [of carbon dioxide] we collected we would re-emit 200, so 800 we can chalk up as having been successful.' Each unit would remove 20 automobiles' worth of CO2 from the air and cost about as much as a Toyota... so the plan might be a five percent surcharge on automobiles to fund these synthetic tree farms."
Windows

Submission + - Microsoft to "Give Away" Anti-virus Softwa (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by
johndmartiniii
johndmartiniii writes: "Microsoft is preparing to release a beta version of an anti-virus program called "Morro". It will apparently lack many of the features of full security suites by companies such as McAffee and Symantec and focus only on virus detection and removal. In this case it is probably best to attempt to do one thing and try to do it well rather than a bunch of tasks. This is Microsoft's second attempt to move into the virus removal game. Perhaps it will be more successful than their OneCare offering last year."
Communications

Submission + - Twitter Experiment in Parapsychology (newscientist.com)

Submitted by
johndmartiniii
johndmartiniii writes: "New Scientist has a story about a Richard Wisemann's Twitter-based study in paranormal psychology. He asked Twitter-users to send him responses based on psychic questions like "Where am I right now?" and "What am I looking at?" Each of the four tests conducted returned negative results. Interesting method or practical joke on parapsychology fanatics everywhere?"

Comment Quite a lot... (Score 3, Interesting) 226

by johndmartiniii (#28277219) Attached to: Frank Herbert's Moisture Traps May Be a Reality
...of water in the desert air, apparently.

The caretaker of my building in Cairo directs the water that condenses in all of the air-conditioner units in the building into the gardens. While it isn't energy efficient AT ALL, I am always surprised by how much water gets to the garden. And as the weather gets hotter, the residents use their air-con more meaning more water for the garden. Again, it's not energy efficient in any way, but it does save water by reclaiming it from the air, and quite a lot of it.
Portables

Canonical Demos Early Stage Android-On-Ubuntu 165

Posted by kdawson from the source-code-soon dept.
An anonymous reader notes Ars Technica's report from the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Barcelona, where Canonical has unveiled a prototype Android execution environment that will allow Android applications to run on Ubuntu and "potentially other conventional Linux distributions." "Android uses the Linux kernel, but it isn't really a Linux platform. It offers its own totally unique environment that is built on Google's custom Java runtime. There is no glide path for porting conventional desktop Linux applications to Android. Similarly, Java applications that are written for Android can't run in regular Java virtual machine implementations or in standard Java ME environments. This makes Android a somewhat insular platform. Canonical is creating a specialized Android execution environment that could make it possible for Android applications to run on Ubuntu desktops in Xorg alongside regular Linux applications. The execution environment would function like a simulator, providing the infrastructure that is needed to make the applications run. Some technical details about the Android execution environment were presented by Canonical developer Michael Casadevall... They successfully compiled it against Ubuntu's libc instead of Android's custom libc and they are running it on a regular Ubuntu kernel."
Transportation

Freshman Representative Opposes "TSA Porn" 620

Posted by Soulskill from the things-we-really-really-don't-want-to-see dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Not content to simply follow the 'anything to protect American lives' mantra, freshman Representative Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) has introduced a bill to prohibit mandatory full body scans at airports. Chaffetz states, 'The images offer a disturbingly accurate view of a person's body underneath clothing ... Americans should not be required to expose their bodies in this manner in order to fly.' He goes on to note that the ACLU has expressed support for the bill. Maybe we don't need tin-foil sports coats to go with our tin-foil hats. For reference, the Daily Herald has a story featuring images from the millimeter wavelength imager, and we've talked about the scanners before."
The Media

The Guardian Shifts To Twitter After 188 Years of Ink 211

Posted by Soulskill from the save-the-trees dept.
teflon_king writes with news that renowned British newspaper The Guardian will be abandoning its paper-and-ink distribution scheme and publishing all articles and news as Tweets. Quoting: "A mammoth project is also under way to rewrite the whole of the newspaper's archive, stretching back to 1821, in the form of tweets. Major stories already completed include '1832 Reform Act gives voting rights to one in five adult males yay!!!;' 'OMG Hitler invades Poland, allies declare war see tinyurl.com/b5x6e for more;' and 'JFK assassin8d @ Dallas, def. heard second gunshot from grassy knoll WTF?' Sceptics have expressed concerns that 140 characters may be insufficient to capture the full breadth of meaningful human activity, but social media experts say the spread of Twitter encourages brevity, and that it ought to be possible to convey the gist of any message in a tweet. For example, Martin Luther King's legendary 1963 speech on the steps of the Lincoln memorial appears in the Guardian's Twitterised archive as 'I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by,' eliminating the waffle and bluster of the original."

Slashdot Top Deals

And it should be the law: If you use the word `paradigm' without knowing what the dictionary says it means, you go to jail. No exceptions. -- David Jones

Close