kgeiger - Slashdot User

Submission + - Winged Dragon Trains (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by kgeiger on Saturday October 20, 2012 @05:31PM

kgeiger writes: Reviving a 1980s Japanese idea, engineers at Beijing's Beihang University speculate about building an aero-levitation wheel-rail train (ALWR), Small wings mounted on carbon-fiber carriages loft the vehicle. Wheels serve as guides during cruising-speed "flight" and support the vehicle at low-speeds during station stops. The engineers also envision a low-drag sharkskin exterior to reduce drag. The design saves the expense of building and powering magnetic levitation tracks and has several built-in fail-soft features. Bonus: it looks cool, like a many-winged Chinese dragon snaking along the tracks. Better stay behind the yellow line on the boarding platform.

Comment No time to read now ... (Score 5, Funny) 311

by kgeiger on Wednesday August 29, 2012 @12:21AM (#41161723) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Is the Rise of Skeuomorphic User Interfaces a Problem?

and I cannot find the little floppy disk icon to save the item. Where'd it go?

Comment Omo" Omo" Omo" (Score 1) 133

by kgeiger on Monday August 27, 2012 @12:38PM (#41138033) Attached to: Stanford Researchers Discover the 'Anternet'

Call Al Gore! We need an on-ramp to the ant-formation superhighway.

Submission + - Satellite Uplinks for the Masses (ieee.org) 1

Submitted by kgeiger on Wednesday August 22, 2012 @07:01PM

kgeiger writes: Intellectual Ventures has spun out Kymeta to develop and mass-produce their mTenna product line. mTennas are based on metamaterials like the invisibility cloaks discussed on Slashdot and elsewhere. Metamaterials enable beam-steering that ensures an mTenna remains in contact with satellites even during motion. Kymeta will use 'established lithographic techniques' to make them.

IMHO, these antennas may be as big a leap for mobile computing and remote communications as the invention of fractal antennas was for mobile phones.

Submission + - No More Free Conference Calls (ieee.org)

Submitted by kgeiger on Saturday July 21, 2012 @12:24PM

kgeiger writes: The FCC is changing the call termination tariffs that subsidized rural wireline service and coincidentally free conference calls. Free conference call services had located their dial-in centers in rural areas to scoop up FCC tariffs from its Universal Service Fund. USF monies will go to broadband deployment instead. Be prepared to put more nickels in the box.

Comment Ronald Bailey summarizes (Score 1) 233

by kgeiger on Friday April 06, 2012 @11:20AM (#39597601) Attached to: Majority of Landmark Cancer Studies Cannot Be Replicated

and does a nice bit of back reasearch Reason http://reason.com/archives/2012/04/03/can-most-cancer-research-be-trusted

Comment Windows Task Scheduler... (Score 1) 1

by kgeiger on Tuesday February 28, 2012 @03:34PM (#39188267) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Replacement for Windows Task Scheduller

...is pretty full-featured. Consider enable task history, or wrapping the tasks in a script that logs start/stop time elsewhere. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc722006.aspx

Submission + - Domo Arigato, Football Roboto (ieee.org)

Submitted by kgeiger on Tuesday February 28, 2012 @03:15PM

kgeiger writes: Remember "electric football" from the '60s and '70s? Here's the 2012 Japanese robot version. These 'bots go mano a mano and it gets brutal — parts will fly. Part Rock 'em Sock 'em, all tech. The article's video is hilarious.

Submission + - Help With Homework, Hurt Your Child (wired.com)

Submitted by

garthsundem

on Tuesday February 28, 2012 @03:03PM

garthsundem writes: "Experts and studies agree: the best thing we can do as parents to help our kids' learning at home is to "support autonomy." In fact, playing the role of teacher while helping with homework is almost universally associated with decreased achievement.
This article at Wired represents the rabbit hole of experts I dove down after fabricating my son's kindergarten invention fair project, a powered K'nex conveyor belt designed to transport a picture of our aging Labrador, Gus, through a diorama of our living room.
The gist of this expert advice: explain the directions, carve out time, and then get the heck out of the room."

Submission + - Bill Gates on Insanity and Energy R&D (sciencemag.org) 1

Submitted by sciencehabit on Tuesday February 28, 2012 @02:08PM

sciencehabit writes: The U.S. government is "crazy" when it comes to funding for energy research and development, according to high-tech titan Bill Gates. "It's crazy how little we are funding this energy stuff," Gates today told an audience at a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) conference near Washington, D.C. "Funding for energy [research] in the U.S. is underfunded by a factor of two."

Submission + - DARPA researches 'Avatar' Surrogates (ieee.org) 1

Submitted by kgeiger on Friday February 17, 2012 @01:20PM

kgeiger writes: Feeling blue? DARPA is funding a program to investigate the feasibility of battlefield cyborg-surrogates:

"In its 2012 budget, DARPA has decided to pour US $7 million into the 'Avatar Project' whose goal is the following: 'develop interfaces and algorithms to enable a soldier to effectively partner with a semi-autonomous bi-pedal machine and allow it to act as the soldier’s surrogate.'"

Power and bandwidth constraints aside, what could go wrong? Chinese hackers swooping in and commandeering one's army? Gives new meaning to the question "Where's Waldo?"

Submission + - Finding the sweet spot between NoSQL and RBDMS (hyperdex.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 17, 2012 @12:32PM

An anonymous reader writes: Many people (myself included!) have found that moving from an RDBMS to a NoSQL solution in search of better performance is often a long and unrewarding exercise. Secondary index support is still hit and miss with most NoSQL systems. So unless you are willing to spend the time and effort to re-normalize your schemas the NoSQL way, you are unlikely to see any performance benefit from using NoSQL. Even if you do re-normalize, you still have to change your application to handle weak eventual consistency guarantees that is standard with NoSQL solutions.

A new system from Cornell is trying to bridge the performance/functionality gap between NoSQL and RDBMS. It is called HyperDex and it uses "hyperspace hashing" to allow efficient searches on secondary attributes without requiring explicit indices. It also provides strong consistency for most of its operations. The developers have posted some performance numbers that completely blow away Cassandra and MongoDB. Have we finally found the sweet spot in the NoSQL/RBDMS design space?

Comment Make a Library Analogy (Score 1) 1

by kgeiger on Monday January 30, 2012 @09:14PM (#38872261) Attached to: How do you inform a non-technical person about the

Preemptively taking a site down via DNS blocking for alleged copyright violation is like torching a library after alleging they have an illegal book. It nabs the offending material, but destroys all the other books as well.

Submission + - Graphene: The Ultimate Switch? (ieee.org)

Submitted by kgeiger on Monday January 30, 2012 @08:36PM

kgeiger writes: Graphene enables electrons to flow more like photons. Switching speeds of 500 MHz are envisioned in graphene transistors by 2013, and faster later. More, graphene switches are easy to program as FPGAs. This survey article by Chun-Yung Sung at IBM Yorktown Heights and Ji Ung Lee at SUNY Albany presents an overview of the current state of research.

Submission + - Building Your Own 3D Printer 1

Submitted by adeelarshad82 on Monday January 30, 2012 @03:09PM

adeelarshad82 writes: Following a tour of a 3D printer factory, analysts at PCMag wanted to explore the option of building a 3D printer themselves. With the help of a 3D printers manufacturer, Buildatron, they were able to compile a step by step guide on how to build a 3D printer.

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