CoopersPale - Slashdot User

Submission + - Electro Magnetic aircraft launch system

Submitted by LifesRoadie on Tuesday January 06, 2009 @12:12AM

LifesRoadie writes: The new aircraft carriers currently being developed and built by both the US and UK governments are to include an Electro magnetic aircraft launch systems -'EMALS' replacing the steam / compression launchers, a technology used virtually unchanged for 40 — 50 years.

There is also a history of ship based aircraft launch systems.

Obesa Cantavit

Comment It depends on the complexity (Score 1) 171

by CoopersPale on Saturday January 03, 2009 @12:10PM (#26311919) Attached to: Balancing Performance and Convention

It really depends on the complexity of the problems you're trying to solve.
If you have complex business processes they won't be easily modelled by rails, or any other framework.
So horses for courses, really. It's a judgement call, and depends on the specifics of your application.

Submission + - Rosetta Disk Designed for 2,000 Years Archive

Submitted by

Hugh Pickens

on Sunday August 24, 2008 @09:46PM

Hugh Pickens writes: "Kevin Kelly has an interesting post about an archive designed with an estimated lifespan of 2,000 -10,000 years to serve future generations as a modern Rosetta Stone. The Rosetta disk contains analog "human-readable" scans of scripts, text, and diagrams using nickel deposited on an etched silicon disk and includes 15,000 microetched pages of language documentation in 1,500 different language versions of Genesis 1-3, a universal list of the words common for each language, and pronunciation guides. Produced by the Long Now Foundation, the plan is to replicate the disk promiscuously and distribute them around the world in nondescript locations so at least one will survive their 2,000-year lifespan. "This is one of the most fascinating objects on earth," says Oliver Wilke. "If we found one of these things 2,000 years ago, with all the languages of the time, it would be among our most priceless artifacts. I feel a high responsibility for preserving it for future generations.""

Submission + - Vista memory protections rendered useless (techtarget.com)

Submitted by Trailrunner7 on Thursday August 07, 2008 @05:25PM

Trailrunner7 writes: Two security researchers have developed a new technique that essentially bypasses all of the memory protection safeguards in the Windows Vista operating system, an advance that many in the security community say will have far-reaching implications not only for Microsoft, but also on how the entire technology industry thinks about attacks. In a presentation at the Black Hat briefings, Mark Dowd of IBM Internet Security Systems (ISS) and Alexander Sotirov, of VMware Inc. will discuss the new methods they've found to get around Vista protections such as Address Space Layout Randomization(ASLR), Data Execution Prevention (DEP) and others by using Java, ActiveX controls and .NET objects to load arbitrary content into Web browsers.

Submission + - Who thinks Firehose software is working right? 6

Submitted by

NewYorkCountryLawyer

on Wednesday May 07, 2008 @10:42AM

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: "I find the Firehose software to be infuriating. It seems to have no 'stickiness' but constantly reverts to other views and searches than what I was looking at. I'm about ready to give up on it unless they tell me they recognize it's dumb and are doing something to make it work right. Am I the only one who feels this way?"

Submission + - Right Whales Protected by Smart Warning Buoys

Submitted by

Pickens

on Monday April 28, 2008 @10:37PM

Pickens writes: "Endangered North Atlantic right whales are safer along Massachusetts Bay's busy shipping lanes this spring, thanks to a new system of smart buoys. The buoys recognize whales' distinctive calls and route the information to a public Web site and a marine warning system, giving ships the chance to avoid deadly collisions. The 10-buoy Right Whale Listening Network — developed at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution — is arriving barely in time for the beleaguered right whale. The species was hunted to the brink of extinction centuries ago, and now fewer than 400 of the 50-ton black giants remain. Collisions with ships are currently a leading cause of death. Each "auto-detection" buoy recognizes the right whale's call, automatically rings up recorders at the lab and uploads the sound. Analysts verify the call and then feed the signals to the listening network's Web site and to the Northeast U.S. Right Whale Sighting Advisory System. The network of buoys is strategically placed between inbound and outbound shipping lanes, and each buoy listens in a 5-mile radius, providing information on where collision risks are highest. To help protect whales when they are quiet, alerts remain in effect around a buoy for 24 hours after a call is detected."

Submission + - Ebony, Meet Irony [pic] (scienceblogs.com) 3

Submitted by

grrlscientist

on Monday December 10, 2007 @08:10PM

grrlscientist writes: "From the article: It turns out that 1962 Nobel laureate, James Watson, who recently made some disparaging comments about the intelligence of Africans, probably is of African descent himself."

Submission + - ASP.NET AJAX Extensions in The Wild (blogspot.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 02, 2007 @06:07AM

An anonymous reader writes: Lessons learned from using MS library for Ajax development "ASP.NET AJAX Extensions" in two production projects

Submission + - Torvalds on where Linux is headed in 2008

Submitted by Stony Stevenson on Sunday November 25, 2007 @08:59PM

Stony Stevenson writes: In this new interview, Linus Torvalds is excited about solid-state drives, expects progress in graphics and wireless networking, and says the operating system is strong in virtualisation despite his personal lack of interest in the area.

From the article: "To get some perspective on what lies ahead in 2008, we caught up with Linus Torvalds via email. His responses touched on the Linux development process, upcoming features, and whether he's concerned about potential patent litigation."

Torvalds on Linux biggest strength: "When you buy an OS from Microsoft, not only you can't fix it, but it has had years of being skewed by one single entity's sense of the market. It doesn't matter how competent Microsoft — or any individual company — is, it's going to reflect that fact. In contrast, look at where Linux is used. Everything from cellphones and other small embedded computers that people wouldn't even think of as computers, to the bulk of the biggest machines on the supercomputer Top-500 list. That is flexibility. And it stems directly from the fact that anybody who is interested can participate in the development, and no single entity ends up being in control of where it all goes.

Submission + - Surfer / physicist works out E8-based unification

Submitted by Doofus on Wednesday November 14, 2007 @04:58PM

Doofus writes: New Scientist and the UK's Daily Telegraph are reporting on the work of A. Garrett Lisi, a surfer, snowboarder, and theoretical physicist who has worked out a contender for a "fabulous" unification theory.

Lisi's work builds on the work of a large group of mathematicians who, earlier this year (see "Is this the fabric of the universe?, worked out the complete definition of E8. From today's Telegraph:

E8 encapsulates the symmetries of a geometric object that is 57-dimensional and is itself is 248-dimensional. Lisi says "I think our universe is this beautiful shape."

What makes E8 so exciting is that Nature also seems to have embedded it at the heart of many bits of physics. One interpretation of why we have such a quirky list of fundamental particles is because they all result from different facets of the strange symmetries of E8.

Lisi's breakthrough came when he noticed that some of the equations describing E8's structure matched his own. "My brain exploded with the implications and the beauty of the thing," he tells New Scientist. "I thought: 'Holy crap, that's it!'"

If Lisi's work holds up to extensive peer review, all of the string theorists will be looking for work soon, so look out.

Submission + - Prince threatens to sue b3ta

Submitted by chalkyj on Wednesday November 14, 2007 @03:22PM

chalkyj writes: "Prince is threatening to sue his fans for breach of copyright for using his image on fansites. So fire up Photoshop and give [him] something to complain about" was the parody image competition on b3ta.com until a few hours ago when Prince decided he would sue them too if they didn't remove all the images.

Apparently "fair use" isn't in Prince's vocabulary. I wonder if this will be seeing the Streisand effect here?

Submission + - The History of the Commodore 64 (gamasutra.com) 1

Submitted by

Matt Barton

on Wednesday October 24, 2007 @01:56PM

Matt Barton writes: "I thought Slashdotters might be interested in our History of the Commodore 64, the first in a set of six planned features on gaming platforms at Gamasutra. Bill Loguidice and I look at why the C-64 was so overwhelmingly popular, as both a personal computer and a brilliant gaming platform. We also give advice to modern gamers interested in emulating the platform and playing its games: "The 'Commie' is still the best personal computer ever to grace the living room.""

Submission + - Microsoft support for Functional Programming in F#

Submitted by mugnyte on Tuesday October 23, 2007 @07:23PM

mugnyte writes: Microsoft Watch and a bag of other writers are abuzz over Microsoft Research's F# (A functional language specification based on CAML) getting full support in an upcoming release of Visual Studio. F# was developed by Don Syme at the MS Research UK office. F# is one of many languages (like Comega, formerly X#, Xen and others) that Microsoft Research is exploring for it's .NET platform.

Submission + - FastCGI + CGICC for Visual Studio 2005 (storkyak.com)

Submitted by

tjstork

on Monday October 22, 2007 @08:54PM

tjstork writes: "A few days ago, there was a story about Microsoft making a driver for IIS for FastCGI. They did it to get php rolling, but, I took a look at this and fell in love with the technology immediately. I really like C++, but, didn't like that there wasn't a good universal API for server side stuff that was simple and common to both IIS and Apache. FastCGI fits the bill perfectly. So, now, with FastCGI, I could amuse myself with the heady though of writing my own kinds of database servers, game servers, map servers, whatever will keep me writing code until my hands rot off. I had to do something in FastCGI in C++. Now, what to do? C++ for Windows has been abandoned by Microsoft for the most part and I do want to ultimately have my servers ported to Linux. I went and grabbed a copy of the FastCGI API, and a copy of the CGICC. I found though, that from a Windows perspective, getting both together is a bit of a pain, and so, I went and grabbed both, stripped out a bunch of stuff, and put it into a Windows Visual Studio 2005 project. All of the porting work had already been done. The one thing I did was to put fastcgi and cgicc into the same project, making it easy to build off, and also, change it from producing a DLL to producing a static library. I tend to like to avoid introducing new DLLs on Windows... You can get it from my blog. http://www.storkyak.com./ Or, if I'm slashdotted, I'd be happy to email it to you."

Submission + - Why You Feel Like Less of a Man Once You Marry

Submitted by

theodp

on Thursday October 18, 2007 @10:38PM

theodp writes: "Just in case you haven't picked up this month's Current Anthropology, it's official — getting married saps your testosterone. After measuring testosterone in 205 Ariaal men in Kenya, researchers found that those with one wife had lower levels of the hormone than unmarried men, and men with more than one wife had the lowest levels of all. 'Testosterone levels are lower among married men probably because they are investing less in mating effort,' said Peter Gray of the UNLV. Ball Finder, anyone?"

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