AstroJetson - Slashdot User

Submission + - Google Calendar to drop SMS notifications

Submitted by united_notions on Friday May 29, 2015 @12:11PM

united_notions writes: According to an announcement emailed to all users of Google Calendar, and syndicated on their 'SMS Notifications' page, Google has decided to discontinue the option to receive reminders about your events by SMS, effective after June 27th. A sad day for all of us still stubbornly refusing to use mobile data.

Submission + - Alloy Deforms, Springs Back Into Shape Millions Of Times (acs.org)

Submitted by MTorrice on Friday May 29, 2015 @12:10PM

MTorrice writes: By adding a touch of cobalt to an alloy of titanium, nickel, and copper, an international team of researchers has come up with a shape-memory alloy film that can be deformed at least 10 million times and still snap back to its original shape. The finding represents a remarkable improvement on previous shape-memory alloys, which, at best, could withstand only a thousand deformations before succumbing to structural failure.

The current, top-of-class alloy is nickel titanium, which is used in stents to open blood vessels and as orthodontic wires.

South Park Creators Given Signed Photo of Saddam Hussein 1297

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday April 09, 2009 @12:55AM from the respect-my-authority dept.

Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the creators of South Park, were given a very special gift by US marines: a signed photo of Saddam Hussein. During his captivity, the marines forced Saddam to repeatedly watch the movie South Park: Bigger, Longer And Uncut, which shows him as the boyfriend of Satan. Stone said, "We're very proud of our signed Saddam picture and what it means. It's one of our biggest highlights."

Submission + - Researcher's death hampers TCP flaw fix

Submitted by linuxwrangler on Wednesday April 08, 2009 @03:36PM

linuxwrangler writes: Security researcher Jack Loius, who had discovered several serious security flaws in TCP software was killed in a fire on the ides of March dealing a blow to efforts to repair the problem. Although he kept good notes and had communicated with a number of vendors, he died before fixes could be created and prior to completing research on a number of additional vulnerabilities. Much of the work has been taken over by Louis' friend and long-time colleague Robert E. Lee. The flaws have been around for a long time and would allow a low-bandwidth "sockstress" attack to knock large machines off the net.

Submission + - Cracking the code of bacterial communication (ted.com)

Submitted by

TEDChris

on Wednesday April 08, 2009 @02:10PM

TEDChris writes: "It's not often you get leading-edge science shared in such a dynamic way. Microbiologist Bonnie Bassler here explains her discovery of "quorum sensing" — the amazing ability of bacteria to communicate with each other and coordinate attack strategies. By cracking the communication code, she has opened up potential for a new class of drugs tackling microbial diseases. The talk got a massive standing ovation at this year's TED and has just been posted. To quote one commenter: "This is by far the most inspiring, amazing, and far-reaching talk I've seen in a very long time. " Wd love Slashdot community's insight into implications of this work."

Submission + - Can Companies Really Afford Telepresence? (infoworld.com)

Submitted by

snydeq

on Wednesday April 08, 2009 @09:48AM

snydeq writes: "Telepresence has been championed as a sustainable-minded practice that can cut down significantly on travel expenditures, but for many organizations the technology simply remains out of reach. High monthly costs, management, and room setup continue to deter companies from deploying telepresence, which if rolled out in earnest stands to cut down significantly on the overall carbon footprint of business. 'The initial setup costs of a telepresence system in two locations equals about 350 one-night trips per room over the lifetime of the telepresence rooms, and the monthly fees equal about 20 one-night trips per month,' InfoWorld reports. Put in other terms, a telepresence system must be used 25 percent of the business day to justify its investment, analysts contend. But interoperability may be the chief hurdle to realizing the environmental upsides of telepresence, as major vendors' appear to be moving slow to standardize their systems to be interoperable with one another, and with the kind of commodity components that will make telepresence affordable on a wide scale."

Submission + - Unlock the iPhone with TurboSIM

Submitted by vertigoCiel on Tuesday August 14, 2007 @06:32PM

vertigoCiel writes: A Hacker at Simbunch.com's iPhone section has outlined a method to unlock the iPhone using only software tools, the original iPhone SIM, an alternate carrier's SIM card, and an $80 tool called TurboSIM, which is capable of cloning the AT&T SIM card. The important distinction between this and other iPhone unlocking methods is that it requires less hardware, and allows you to continue to use EDGE with the new SIM card.

Submission + - New technology has dramatic chip-cooling potential

Submitted by BillOfThePecosKind on Tuesday August 14, 2007 @05:25PM

BillOfThePecosKind writes: "Researchers have demonstrated a new technology using tiny "ionic wind engines" that might dramatically improve computer chip cooling, possibly addressing a looming threat to future advances in computers and electronics." Some researchers funded by Intel over at Purdue have improved the "heat-transfer coefficient" by some 250%. I never liked water cooled systems, and this sounds promising. However I wonder how much ozone one of these things produces, probably not much.

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