Ymerej - Slashdot User

Submission + - Should Cities Install Moving Sidewalks?

Submitted by theodp on Wednesday July 07, 2010 @08:01AM

theodp writes: 'The real problem nowadays is how to move crowds,' said the manager of the failed Trottoir Roulant Rapide high-speed (9 km/h) people mover project. 'They can travel fast over long distances with the TGV (high-speed train) or airplanes, but not over short distances (under 1 km).' Slate's Tom Vanderbilt explores whether moving walkways might be viable for urban transportation. The first moving sidewalks were unveiled at Chicago's 1893 Columbian Exposition, and at one point seemed destined to supplant some subways, but never took root in cities for a variety of reasons. Vanderbilt turns to science fiction for inspiration, where 30 mph walkways put today's tortoise-like speed ranges of .5-.83 m/s to shame. In the meantime, Jerry Seinfeld will just have to learn to live with 'the people who get onto the moving walkway and just stand there. Like it's a ride.'

Submission + - Amazon's original Kindle patent could spell troubl (crunchgear.com)

Submitted by eReaderBen on Tuesday July 06, 2010 @11:05PM

eReaderBen writes: A patent applied for by Amazon in 2006 has been made public today as a consequence of its being granted, and its language is rather more wide-ranging (and forward-thinking) than we might have expected. Depending on the interpretation, Amazon’s patent may be broad enough to justify a lawsuit over devices like the Nook

Submission + - 'Robin Sage' Duped Military, Security Pros (darkreading.com)

Submitted by ancientribe on Tuesday July 06, 2010 @10:39PM

ancientribe writes: A social networking experiment of a phony female military security professional known as"Robin Sage" (named after a U.S. Army Special Forces training exercise) worked way too well, fooling even the most security-savvy professionals on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. It also led to the leakage of sensitive military information after an Army Ranger accepted "Robin's" friend request on Facebook and his photos from Afghanistan exposed geolocation information accessible to "Robin." The researcher who conducted the experiment will show off his findings at the upcoming Black Hat USA conference in Las Vegas, where the real woman pictured in the profiles is scheduled to introduce him for his presentation.

Motorola Planning 2GHz Android Phone For Later This Year 183

Posted by Soulskill on Friday June 11, 2010 @01:17PM from the soon-we-can-expand-crysis-jokes-to-phones dept.

rocket97 writes "On Wednesday, at the Executives Club of Chicago, Motorola CEO Sanjay Jha reportedly decided to chat about the relatively near future of the mobile landscape as he sees it — which, in part, includes the ultimate demise of mobile computers in favor of highly-capable smartphones. This being his vision, Jha discussed Motorola's plans for a smartphone with a 2GHz processor — by the end of this year. While Jha did not want to divulge any further information, Conceivably Tech cites another anonymous Motorola executive who was a little more chatty, talking up a device intended to 'incorporate everything that is technologically possible in a smartphone today.'"

Submission + - Canon camera? Not so professional

Submitted by mbravo on Tuesday May 04, 2010 @10:35AM

mbravo writes: Turns out that every Canon prosumer and professional DSLR and even their professional video camcorder, the $8000 Canon XL-H1A, can only be used "for personal and non-commercial purposes". For everything else, you need a license from MPEG-LA and pay royalties, as detailed in an OSNEWS article by Eugenia Loli-Queru

Top 10 Things Hollywood Thinks Computers Can Do 874

Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday May 04, 2010 @10:15AM from the upload-a-virus-and-win dept.

An anonymous reader writes "From blowing up your keyboards to developing a malignant sentience, Expert Reviews rounds up the things that movie makers believe computers can do, even though they use the same technology every day to write scripts." I like the summary of how you crack a password in movies. I hate that this page splits into multiple pages. Very lame.

Submission + - Intel shows off first Light Peak laptop (pcpro.co.uk)

Submitted by Barence on Tuesday May 04, 2010 @10:13AM

Barence writes: Intel has provided the first hands-on demonstration of a laptop running its Light Peak technology — an optical interconnect that can transfer data at 10Gbit/sec in both directions — at the company's inaugural European research showcase here in Brussels. Intel has fitted Light Peak into a regular USB cable, with optical fibres running alongside the electrical cabling. Intel provided a visual demonstration of how data is passed through the cable, by shining a torch into one end of the cable, with two little dots of light visible to the naked eye at the other end. The demonstration laptop was sending two separate HD video streams to a nearby television screen, without any visible lag. The laptop includes a 12mm square chip that converts the optical light into electrical data that the computer understands.

An Animal That Lives Without Oxygen 166

Posted by timothy on Wednesday April 07, 2010 @03:25PM from the besides-me dept.

Julie188 writes "Scientists have found the first multicellular animals that apparently live entirely without oxygen. The creatures reside deep in one of the harshest environments on earth: the Mediterranean Ocean's L'Atalante basin, which contains salt brine so dense that it doesn't mix with the oxygen-containing waters above."

Indian Military Hopes to Weaponize the Searing "Ghost Pepper" 267

Posted by timothy on Wednesday March 24, 2010 @02:50PM from the there's-pepper-spray-and-pepper-spray dept.

coondoggie writes "The military in India is looking to weaponize the world's hottest chili, the bhut jolokia or 'ghost pepper,' according to a number of news outlets. The Bhut Jolokia chili pepper from Assam, India is no ordinary pepper. In tests first conducted by the New Mexico State University in 2008 and subsequently confirmed by Guinness World records and others, the Bhut Jolokia reached over one million Scoville heat units, while the next hottest, the Red Savina Habenero, clocks in at a mere 577,000. Scoville units are a universally accepted measure of chili hotness."

Athena's Free Firewall Browser 23

Posted by timothy on Friday March 19, 2010 @08:30PM from the should-you-choose-to-accept-it dept.

athenasec writes "Firewall Browser is a free configuration analyzer (download here), released by Athena Security, which works on Cisco, Check Point, and Netscreen firewalls for searching rulebases based on address or service ranges — the way change requests are actually made. The tool is available as a free download with no limitations, user license restrictions, or registration hurdles. Users can slice and dice any firewall-related question about the network, service objects, and security rules for a multi-vendor environment from a single flexible interface. There is also this how-to guide for applying the tool to day-to-day operational tasks."

Android 2.1 Finally Makes It To Droid 132

Posted by timothy on Wednesday March 17, 2010 @02:30PM from the for-all-your-robot-needs dept.

MrSmith0011000100110 writes "The lovely people over at AndroidCentral have broken the announcement that Android 2.1 is finally coming to the Motorola Droid, with actual proof on Verizon's Droid support page (PDF). I don't know about my Droid brethren, but I'm pretty excited to see the new series of Android ROMs for the Droid phone that are based on a stock Android 2.1. As most of us know, the existing 2.1 ROMs can be buggy as hell and either running vanilla 2.1 or a custom ROM; but this phone is still a tinkerer's best friend."

Simpler "Hello World" Demonstrated In C 582

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday March 16, 2010 @10:03PM from the non-obfuscated dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Wondering where all that bloat comes from, causing even the classic 'Hello world' to weigh in at 11 KB? An MIT programmer decided to make a Linux C program so simple, she could explain every byte of the assembly. She found that gcc was including libc even when you don't ask for it. The blog shows how to compile a much simpler 'Hello world,' using no libraries at all. This takes me back to the days of programming bare-metal on DOS!"

Submission + - TiVo introduces Premiere & Premiere XL DVRs (itworld.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 03, 2010 @12:17PM

An anonymous reader writes: TiVo is back in the news after it held a press event tonight introducing its new TiVo Series4 digital video recorders.

Two models were unveiled, the TiVo Premiere and Premiere XL. The Premiere lists for $299 and stores 45 hours of HD programming on a 320 gig drive. The $499 XL pushes the storage to 150 hours of programing on a terabyte of drive space, and adds THX certification. Both models feature an all-new interface, built in Flash, which opens the door to 3rd party apps. Flash games on our TV? Maybe. Both also support up to 1080P output. Other new features include an official 30-second scan and a capacity meter.

Submission + - Malware Analysis With Greg Hoglund (net-security.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 03, 2010 @10:39AM

An anonymous reader writes: In an interview with HNS, Greg Hoglund, the author one of the first network vulnerability scanners, discusses the challenges anti-malware vendors face in this rapidly evolving threat landscape. He explains how virtualization has changed the way how researchers analyze malware and offers insight into upcoming threats. Greg comments: "One of the greatest challenges is attribution: figuring out not only who wrote the malware, but also who bought and paid for it, and who is operating it. As a whole, the security industry needs to start focusing more on the human threat. The malware is just a tool — the real threat is the human who operates it."

Spectrum of Light Captured From Distant World 32

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday January 16, 2010 @12:40PM from the what-are-you-made-of dept.

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Cosmos: "Astronomers have made the first direct capture of a spectrum of light from a planet outside the Solar System and are deciphering its composition. The light was snared from a giant planet that orbits a bright young star called HR 8799 about 130 light-years from Earth, said the European Southern Observatory (ESO). ... The find is important, because hidden within a light spectrum are clues about the relative amounts of different elements in the planet's atmosphere. 'The features observed in the spectrum are not compatible with current theoretical models,' said co-author Wolfgang Brandner. 'We need to take into account a more detailed description of the atmospheric dust clouds, or accept that the atmosphere has a different chemical composition from that previously assumed.' The result represents a milestone in the search for life elsewhere in the universe, said the ESO. Until now, astronomers have been able to get only an indirect light sample from an exoplanet, as worlds beyond our Solar System are called. They do this by measuring the spectrum of a star twice — while an orbiting exoplanet passes near to the front of it, and again while the planet is directly behind it. The planet's spectrum is thus calculated by subtracting one light sample from another."

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