Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Input Devices

Omnidirectional Treadmill: The Ultimate FPS Input Device? 292

MojoKid writes "The concept of gaming accessories may have just been taken to a whole new level. A company called Virtuix is developing the Omni, which is essentially a multidirectional treadmill that its creators call 'a natural motion interface for virtual reality applications.' The company posted a video showing someone playing Team Fortress 2 and using the Omni along with the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset. You can see in the video how much running and movement this fellow performs. With something like the Omni in your living room, you'd likely get into pretty good shape in no time. Instead of Doritos and Mountain Dew, folks might have to start slamming back Power Bars and Gatorade for all night gaming sessions."
Earth

Is Bitcoin Mining a Real-World Environmental Problem? 595

First time accepted submitter HeadOffice writes "Mark Gimein points out that Bitcoing mining uses a lot of power, enough that it is a real world problem: 'About 982 megawatt hours a day, to be exact. That’s enough to power roughly 31,000 US homes, or about half a Large Hadron Collider. If the dreams of Bitcoin proponents are realized, and the currency is adopted for widespread commerce, the power demands of bitcoin mines would rise dramatically. If that makes you think of the vast efforts devoted to the mining of precious metals in the centuries of gold- and silver-based economies, it should. One of the strangest aspects of the Bitcoin frenzy is that the Bitcoin economy replicates some of the most archaic features of the gold standard. Real-world mining of precious metals for currency was a resource-hungry and value-destroying process. Bitcoin mining is too.' However, not everyone is convinced that virtual mining is as bad for the environment as the real thing."

Comment uh-huh (Score 2) 112

And yet here is the other side of the story.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Australian_inventions

Wi-Fi being on that list.

CSIRO talks out of two sides of its mouth. It wants to take credit for Wi-Fi. They promote themselves this way, and you even see the Science Minister of Australia (Evans) stating "It's hard to imagine an Australian-invented technology that has had a greater impact on the way we live and work".

But then in technical circles where they face informed response, they play things down.

And no, CSIRO did not discuss with IEEE the use of the patent prior to its inclusion in the standard. The standard was published in 1997 and CSIRO didn't pipe up until later. They were not even on the 802.11 committee. This is standard submarine trolling.

And their FRAND terms? They wanted $4 per device. This would amount to more than the entire cost of a WiFi chip.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/04/how-the-aussie-government-invented-wifi-and-sued-its-way-to-430-million/

Comment this isn't a precedent (Score 1) 388

Brazil confiscated huge amounts of money 23 years ago.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-21876149

'In her first act, Zelia, as she was known, went on national television to tell the country that all bank accounts were being frozen and that no-one could access more than 50,000 new cruzados in the currency of the time (a sum then worth about $1,250).'

This isn't a new thing, you just didn't know about it before. It's not necessarily going to shake all confidence in the system just because you suddenly found out about confiscation.

Comment They'll monetize the world's problems... (Score 4, Insightful) 303

What is it they think SV CEOs and VCs really know how to do well actually?

It isn't solve the world's problems, it's monetize them.

It's more along the lines of turning what used to be a one-time $35 dollar product you purchase into a $8/month for-the-rest-of-your-life monthly service fee.

Cloud

A Glimpse of a Truly Elastic Cloud 201

New submitter cloudozer writes "Virtual servers in the future may stop using OSes entirely. As recently demonstrated OS-less platforms may change our understanding of how long does it take to bring a server up. A demo server gets created, booted up, configured, runs an application and shuts down in under 1 second. Radically lower startup latency means that the computing infrastructure may be woven strictly on demand, during the processing window allotted for a given request. Currently cloud providers round an instance uptime to the full hour when calculating charges. They might need to switch to per-second billing if OS-less instances get traction. The demo uses a new Erlang runtime system capable of running directly on Xen hypervisor."

Comment Re:Ahh, Pentium. (Score 1) 197

No, Slot 1 was to allow them to put the cache on the same board as the processor soldered down so they could sell you the cache RAM instead of empty sockets you could fill with cheaper SRAM from another company.

And yeah, once they moved the L2 cache RAM on-die, there was no advantage to slot 1 anymore and a ton of downside in the cost of it. So they dumped it.

Intel has frequently leveraged their CPU dominance to try to become the #1 seller for other items on the motherboard too. They did it with their special gigabit ethernet chips that attached to the FSB instead of PCI for example.

Comment Standardized DRM doesn't mean everyone will use it (Score 1) 351

Administering DRM is a hassle for the provider as well as the user. Companies aren't going to throw on DRM just for the heck of it.

Other content simply won't be provided on the web without DRM. It'll either come through your browser, a browser extension or a separate app. Adding DRM to the standard will give the best possible situation for this too.

Slashdot Top Deals

Never test for an error condition you don't know how to handle. -- Steinbach

Working...