hparker - Slashdot User

6 Homeless People Saved By the Internet 94

Posted by samzenpus on Friday January 07, 2011 @02:45PM from the power-of-farmville dept.

An anonymous reader writes "With Ted Williams's story (the homeless man with the golden voice, saved by the internet) blowing up online, and in the traditional media, we figured it was time to tell the stories of 5 other homeless people who've found success, be it financial or personal, through the wonderful use of this series of tubes we call The Internet."

DIY FireHero Project 27

Posted by samzenpus on Friday January 07, 2011 @12:26PM from the I'm-burning-for-you dept.

If you have a propane tank, an ultrasonic sensor, a copy of Guitar Hero and a touch of pyromania, this is the project for you. From the article: "For version 1 of FireHero, the player simply watches a video of the guitar hero chart and plays on the guitar accordingly. Version 2 of FireHero will have a much better system, with Autoplay functionality. I will be able to take a custom guitar hero chart, convert it into a MIDI file, and use Processing to analyze it and play FireHero to the track."

The Year In Robot News 38

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday December 16, 2010 @03:38AM from the everything-that's-fit-to-print dept.

itwbennett writes "Who loves robots? You may love them more or less after seeing what 2010 gave us, robot-wise. It's not the rise of the machines yet, but that teddy bear creeped us out."

Google Caffeine Drops MapReduce, Adds "Colossus" 65

Posted by samzenpus on Saturday September 11, 2010 @11:43PM from the time-to-upgrade dept.

An anonymous reader writes "With its new Caffeine search indexing system, Google has moved away from its MapReduce distributed number crunching platform in favor of a setup that mirrors database programming. The index is stored in Google's BigTable distributed database, and Caffeine allows for incremental changes to the database itself. The system also uses an update to the Google File System codenamed 'Colossus.'"

Comment Re:How pleasant (Score 4, Insightful) 178

by hparker on Saturday December 05, 2009 @10:17AM (#30334646) Attached to: FCC Inquires About Controversial Verizon Fees

No. Most businesses do that. You can substitute "companies" for "telcos". That's how the free market is supposed to work.
Competition keeps the prices down, not companies being reasonable.

So the question should be: Is the telco market perhaps too controlled and not free enough?

Submission + - Jaw-dropping Photosynth with Seadragon technology (ted.com)

Submitted by

hparker

on Friday June 22, 2007 @10:01AM

hparker writes: "This URL, http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/129, points to an amazing 7+ minute video demo from this year's TED Conference.
'Using photos of oft-snapped subjects (like Notre Dame) scraped from around the Web, Photosynth (based on Seadragon technology) creates breathtaking multidimensional spaces with zoom and navigation features that outstrip all expectation. Its architect, Blaise Aguera y Arcas, shows it off in this standing-ovation demo. Curious about that speck in corner? Dive into a freefall and watch as the speck becomes a gargoyle. ... "Perhaps the most amazing demo I've seen this year," wrote Ethan Zuckerman, after TED2007. Indeed, Photosynth might utterly transform the way we manipulate and experience digital images.'"

Submission + - If We Can't Give Up Cars - Try 16 Trillion Mirrors (wsj.com)

Submitted by

ElvaWSJ

on Friday June 22, 2007 @08:54AM

ElvaWSJ writes: "What if we wait too long to act on global warming? What if nothing we do is enough? Already, scientists are working up plans of last resort: stratospheric sprays of sulfur, trillions of orbiting mirrors and thousands of huge off-shore saltwater fountains. Each is designed to counteract global warming by deliberately deflecting sunlight, rather than by retooling the world's economy to eliminate carbon-rich oil, coal and natural gas...Climate researcher Tom Wigley at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., and Nobel Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany, last year proposed that an overheated planet could be safely cooled by an artificial haze of sulfur particles, which would reflect solar radiation."

Submission + - Should I Believe TD Waterhouse?

Submitted by

anorlunda

on Friday March 30, 2007 @04:24PM

anorlunda writes: "I'm retired and all my money is in an IRA account at TD Waterhouse. I access it online the only way I can, via public WiFi hotspots. Naturally, I'm very concerned about security. If someone hijacked my account I'm dead broke.

The TD Waterhouse home page has fields for logging in. However, IE6 does not show the SSL icon for the page on the status line. Firefox shows neither the SSL icon nor the signer's name on the status bar. However, near the login fields there is a padlock icon.

TD Waterhouse has a second page specifically for, client login, and that page shows the SSL icon and the signer's name in the Firefox status bar, as it should.

TD Waterhouse should be a trusted source, so I emailed them this question and got the following reply.

From: clientsupport@tdameritrade.com
Information entered on http://www.tdameritrade.com/welcome2.html in the sign-in box is transmitted through a secure server. Please notice the lock on the "Log on" button. This segment of the page is secure.
Mark C.
Client Support, TD AMERITRADE
Division of TD AMERITRADE, Inc.

Should I believe them? He seems to claim that a segment of a page can be secure even if the page itself is not secure. My instinct tells me to ignore any text or graphics in a web page's content that claims that it is secure, and to believe only my browser (if anything). After all, any old scam artist could put a padlock icon on his web page."

Submission + - Are eInk displays the future?

Submitted by on Thursday February 15, 2007 @05:33PM

An anonymous reader writes: This week a company called Polymer Vision, which used to be part of Philips, unveiled a fully functional and soon to be commercially available eInk display. What makes this display special, though, is its ability to be rolled up so that you can store it in a smaller package than current large screen handheld devices. The problem, however, with eInk displays is that they can only display greyscale at the moment and they don't support video either. This begs the question, will consumers be put off by non-colour screens that don't play video or will the extra battery life, small form factor and easy-to-read functionality prove too tempting an offer?

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