strags - Slashdot User

Police Called Over 11-Year-Old's Science Project 687

Posted by samzenpus on Saturday January 16, 2010 @05:37PM from the duck-and-cover dept.

garg0yle writes "Police in San Diego were called to investigate an 11-year-old's science project, consisting of 'a motion detector made out of an empty Gatorade bottle and some electronics,' after the vice-principal came to the conclusion that it was a bomb. Charges aren't being laid against the youth, but it's being recommended that he and his family 'get counseling.' Apparently, the student violated school policies — I'm assuming these are policies against having any kind of independent thought?"

Own Your Own Fighter Jet 222

Posted by samzenpus on Saturday January 16, 2010 @03:02PM from the only-one-on-the-block dept.

gimmebeer writes "The Russian Sukhoi SU-27 has a top speed of Mach 1.8 (more than 1,300 mph) and has a thrust to weight ratio greater than 1 to 1. That means it can accelerate while climbing straight up. It was designed to fight against the best the US had to offer, and now it can be yours for the price of a mediocre used business jet."

Linux Kernel 2.6.32 Released 195

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday December 03, 2009 @11:04AM from the download-compile-reboot-repeat dept.

diegocg writes "Linus Torvalds has officially released the version 2.6.32 of the Linux kernel. New features include virtualization memory de-duplication, a rewrite of the writeback code faster and more scalable, many important Btrfs improvements and speedups, ATI R600/R700 3D and KMS support and other graphic improvements, a CFQ low latency mode, tracing improvements including a 'perf timechart' tool that tries to be a better bootchart, soft limits in the memory controller, support for the S+Core architecture, support for Intel Moorestown and its new firmware interface, run-time power management support, and many other improvements and new drivers. See the full changelog for more details."

Submission + - OpenSSH 5.3 Released (net-security.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 01, 2009 @06:25PM

An anonymous reader writes: OpenSSH is a 100% complete SSH protocol version 1.3, 1.5 and 2.0 implementation and includes sftp client and server support. It encrypts all traffic (including passwords) to effectively eliminate eavesdropping, connection hijacking, and other attacks. Additionally, OpenSSH provides secure tunneling capabilities and several authentication methods, and supports all SSH protocol versions. Version 5.3 marks the 10th anniversary of the OpenSSH project.

Comment Are the ROMs downloaded on the fly? (Score 2, Informative) 277

by strags on Sunday June 21, 2009 @02:57PM (#28412597) Attached to: Licensed C64 Emulator Rejected From App Store

Look - here's the relevant part of the agreement:

"3.3.2 An Application may not itself install or launch other executable code by any means, including without limitation through the use of a plug-in architecture, calling other frameworks, other APIs or otherwise. No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple's Published APIs and built-in interpreter(s)."

Particularly this part:
"No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application"

Does the emulator allow users to download ROMs over the internet? If so, then there's a problem. If not - ie. there are a number of licensed ROMs embedded in the application, then there should be no problem. Simple. He just needs to release each game-pack as a self-contained app - that's all.

Comment Mr. Show (Score 1) 376

by strags on Tuesday June 16, 2009 @11:38PM (#28357387) Attached to: NASA To Trigger Massive Explosion On the Moon In Search of Ice

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Csj7vMKy4EI

"Lookout Moon, America's gonna getcha -
gonna go kaboom - was nice to have met ya -
'cos ya don't mess around with God's America!"

Comment I love this stuff (Score 1) 187

by strags on Saturday May 30, 2009 @02:36PM (#28150965) Attached to: Developer Creates DIY 8-Bit CPU

Some time ago (nearly 10 years - wow!) I made a microcontroller-based homebrew MP3 player: http://codepuppies.com/~ben/sens/pic/mp3 . My big mess of wires was a tiny fraction of the size of his, and it caused me enough headaches - tracking down signal noise, random glitches, etc... Hats off to this guy.

I'd also recommend this book: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine to anyone who finds the Wired article of interest. It doesn't get too technical, but it describes the trials and tribulations of bringing a new machine to life, initially on wire-wrap boards - as well as some of the politics involved in a corporate environment.

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