cyrano.mac - Slashdot User

Submission + - AirPod, a car that runs on air is coming to India (gizmocrazed.com)

Submitted by Diggester on Sunday August 26, 2012 @04:34AM

Diggester writes: Tata Motors (an Indian car manufacturer) is changing things up with the first car to run on air, the Airpod.

The Airpod's technology was originally created in France at Motor Development International but has since been bought buy Tata in hopes to bring it to the Indian consumer car market. With virtually zero emissions and at the cost of about a penny per kilometer, it is definitely one of the most environmentally and economically friendly vehicles in the world. The tank holds about 175 liters of compressed air that can be filled at special stations or by activating the on-board electric motor to suck air in from the outside. Costing about $10,000, this car could beat out most smart cars from the market.

Submission + - Startup Installs Pipelines With Helicopter - Seriously (singularityhub.com)

Submitted by

kkleiner

on Saturday August 25, 2012 @04:59PM

kkleiner writes: "A major earthquake strikes a town leaving power plants damaged, water pipelines broken, and roads blocked. How will people get clean water? A new startup says it has the answer. TOHL, which stands for Tubing Operations for Humanitarian Logistics, has developed a simple method to deliver fresh water for emergency relief: install a really long plastic tube with a helicopter. And it works."

Submission + - World's First Linux Ultrabook Ships (pcworld.com)

Submitted by

Rozzin

on Saturday August 25, 2012 @02:08PM

Rozzin writes: ""It's one of my pet peeves that the world's most robust, high-end software is so often housed in low-end, unappealing machines or, worse, tweaked to work on machines that were built for Windows," says ZaReason CEO Cathy Malmrose; "Our goal is to build hardware that more aptly matches the high-end aspects of FOSS"."

Submission + - A modest proposal for sequestration of CO2 in the Antarctic (judithcurry.com)

Submitted by

Alienwise

on Friday August 24, 2012 @12:57PM

Alienwise writes: "Judith Curry reports a scientific concept of a atmosphere CO2 sequestration plant. It would be base on Antartic in order to profit from the cold weather, which would be facilitate to create CO2 snow, which would then be burried. The plant could be powered by windmills. There is much more in the original paper, whose abstract can be viewed at http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/JAMC-D-12-0110.1"

Comment Re:It Depends (Score 1) 504

by cyrano.mac on Saturday July 28, 2012 @11:46AM (#40801661) Attached to: Can a Regular Person Repair a Damaged Hard Drive?

And that 's THE reason to buy all drives at least in pairs...

Submission + - Senators ask feds to probe Facebook log-in requests (cnet.com)

Submitted by utkonos on Sunday March 25, 2012 @06:16PM

utkonos writes: "Democrats Richard Blumenthal and Charles Schumer ask Justice Department to investigate whether requesting job applicants' social network passwords is a violation of federal law."

Submission + - Tizen drops EFL for HTML5 (tizen.org) 1

Submitted by DustyMutant on Sunday March 25, 2012 @05:49PM

DustyMutant writes: According to one of Tizen's architects Carsten "Rasterman" Haitzler talking to user richrboo on the official project's IRC channel, there will be no option for native development in Tizen nor support for native apps in the application store. Rasterman is also co-author and benevolent dictator of the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL), customized by Samsung for the needs of its Linux platform that gave birth to Tizen in 2011. Tizen OS 1.0 is scheduled for the first quarter of 2012.

While Samsung never announced its roles in Tizen officially (or maybe because of that) Rasterman as Samsung's employee has been informally acting and the spokesperson or community manager for the project within the developer circles. Over a year ago he shared breaking news for open source enthusiasts: "Samsung is putting real resources behind EFL and using it to make a production-ready OS. The OS not only is Linux based, It uses all the other infrastructure from Linux [..] It is also going to be Open Source (GPL, LGPL etc.) and with Opensource upstream gaining contributions back from Samsung."

But last week Carsten admitted that he has already given up pushing EFL as the native GUI framework within Tizen and he does not care about that anymore. "I don't hear anything except 'the future is html5'. [..] So go make webapps and be happy as that is obviously the one and only true future. Go talk to the 'technical steering committee'." — he said apparently embittered.

This is second similar move in Tizen's history after notable removal of the Qt libraries and tools before reusing some other components from MeeGo late 2011. The move has polarized the communities and probably boosted creation of alternative projects such as Mer and Nemo. After the change EFL would be only used internally by some "system" applications like the system's web browser for the GUI. It was not disclosed how the OS will handle natively-running games that are not based on HTML5.

For open-source backers the project's reality is getting bitter every month. Tizen's upstream contributions are largely disputable because git history for the open source packages have never been published. And the fact that the SDK fueling Tizen is closed-source does not help to win more souls. It is not clear if the statement about merge of Tizen with the closed-source bada OS that hit the news in January was just a gossip. Now the state of Samsung's EFL contributions is uncertain. So if this is all true and Tizen goes full steam with Web-only approach, because of fundamental (not just technical) differences, it is hard to consider the project as a continuation of the MeeGo platform, contrary to what the sponsored Linux Foundation declares. But even more practical question can be: why is Tizen any better than other Web-based initiatives?

Submission + - Science Reveals Why Airplane Food Tastes So Bad

Submitted by

Hugh Pickens writes

on Sunday March 25, 2012 @12:57PM

Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Jad Mouawad writes that at low elevations, the 10,000 or so taste buds in the human mouth work pretty much as nature intended but step aboard a modern airliner, and the sense of taste loses its bearings. Even before a plane takes off, the atmosphere inside the cabin dries out the nose, as the plane ascends the change in air pressure numbs about a third of the taste buds, and at 35,000 feet with cabin humidity levels kept low by design to reduce the risk of fuselage corrosion, xerostomia or cotton mouth sets in. This explain why airlines tend to salt and spice food heavily. Without all that extra kick, food tastes bland. “Ice cream is about the only thing I can think of that tastes good on a plane,” says Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University. “Airlines have a problem with food on board. The packaging, freezing, drying and storage are hard on flavor at any altitude, let alone 30,000 feet.” Challenges abound. First food safety standards require all meals to be cooked first on the ground. After that, they are blast-chilled and refrigerated until they can be stacked on carts and loaded on planes. For safety, open-flame grills and ovens aren’t allowed on commercial aircraft so attendants must contend with convection ovens that blow hot, dry air over the food. “Getting any food to taste good on a plane is an elusive goal,” says Steve Gundrum, who runs a company that develops new products for the food industry."

Submission + - "Cyber Illusionist" Marco Tempest (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by bLanark on Sunday March 25, 2012 @11:03AM

bLanark writes: The BBC have a piece about illusionist Marco Tempest who uses technology to generate magical illusions. As he says in the interview unlike most magicians and illusionists he shares his techniques in an act that he calls "open sorcery." The techniques include using iPhone apps, and high-speed digital cameras. There is a growing band of people using and contributing to the field.

Submission + - Congress Probes iOS App Developers On Privacy (itproportal.com)

Submitted by hypnosec on Friday March 23, 2012 @05:19AM

hypnosec writes: Over in the US, Congress is gathering further information on iOS developers and how they deal with and implement privacy policies. The Next Web got hold of a letter from Congress which had been sent out to Tapbots, along with some 32 other iOS developers, including both Twitter and Facebook, and the devs of Path, SoundCloud, Foodspotting and Turntable.fm. The apps were picked due to the fact that they come under the social networking umbrella in the "essentials" area of the App Store. The letter begins: "We are writing to you because we want to better understand the information collection and use policies and practices of apps for Apple's mobile devices with a social element." What follows is a series of eight questions designed to gather more details regarding the popularity of the app in question, and the privacy policy it holds to (and how it's made known to users).

Comment Rtriever (Score 5, Informative) 104

by cyrano.mac on Monday March 05, 2012 @09:36AM (#39246681) Attached to: Microsoft Seeks Patent For "Search By Sketch"

Rtriever has been doing exactly the same thing since 2006. http://labs.systemone.at/retrievr/

Comment Wiki (Score 5, Informative) 290

by cyrano.mac on Wednesday February 29, 2012 @07:33AM (#39195603) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Best Practices For Leaving an IT Admin Position?

Build an internal Wiki. You won't be free from questions since you can 't cover everything in a one day training session. I'd make that two half days with a month or so in between.

Comment Re:Odd... I thought Sprint did this? (Score 1) 234

by cyrano.mac on Saturday December 03, 2011 @11:47PM (#38254774) Attached to: An Easy Way To Curb Smart-Phone Thieves, In Australia

It just takes a little while on any CDMA network to sniff a valid ESN and clone that. Of course, you 'd want to sniff in one part of the country and use the ESN in another part. As long as the ESN's don't show up on the same cell, there's no problem. If they show on the same cell, one of them gets kicked off...

Comment Re:Phone isn't bricked, its just blocked (Score 3, Informative) 234

by cyrano.mac on Saturday December 03, 2011 @11:43PM (#38254754) Attached to: An Easy Way To Curb Smart-Phone Thieves, In Australia

No it won't. When a cell phone is bricked, it becomes useless. You confuse operator block with anti-theft block. The first can be undone, the second one can't. In Europe, the system of bricking a stolen phone has been abandoned many years ago. The reason is not commercial, it's purely technical. To trace a stolen phone, the IMEI number is used. But since the IMEI can be easily changed, you risk bricking someone else's phone. That happened years ago to some 6.000 phones which had the same IMEI, cloned from a Danish phone. When the Danish phone got stolen, the Danish operator bricked it, resulting in 6.000 Spanish phones no longer operating. And since you can't undo it, they had to be replaced. The one responsible for cloning 6.000 phones with identical IMEI numbers was a Dutch phone trader. Anyways, there is no problem with cell phone theft over here, except people declaring their lost or broken phone stolen, just to get insurance to pay for it...

Comment Re:Can the summary get any more facts incorrect? (Score 1) 327

by cyrano.mac on Monday October 10, 2011 @09:52PM (#37674030) Attached to: Thunderbolt vs. SuperSpeed USB

The article is wrong about power too. First it states "SuperSpeed USB is optimized for power efficiency. It uses only 1.5 amps of power for charging devices, or about one-third of the power of its predecessor Hi-Speed USB (v2.0).", and in the following paragraph just the opposite ""We also deliver more power for faster charging". USB3 is 1.5 amps, or THREE TiMES the 0.5 amps of USB2. Real shoddy journalism. Or is that paid for propaganda?

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