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Comment There is a battery movement that auto sets DST (Score 5, Informative) 291

by Chronos56 (#51696449) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Alternatives To "Atomic" Clocks?

Clockmaker here, fix things like this for a living.

There is a simple analog battery movement with a secondary clock inside that resets the clock for DST and back again. They work well, are reasonably accurate and inexpensive. Pretty much a "replace single AA battery one a year and ignore it" movement. I have replaced several of the old "Atomic" movements with these.

If you want digital, we call them cell phones these days. :)
It's funny. Laugh.

A Paper By Maggie Simpson and Edna Krabappel Was Accepted By Two Journals 100

Posted by samzenpus from the simpsons-already-did-it dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A scientific study by Maggie Simpson, Edna Krabappel, and Kim Jong Fun has been accepted by two journals. Of course, none of these fictional characters actually wrote the paper, titled "Fuzzy, Homogeneous Configurations." Rather, it's a nonsensical text, submitted by engineer Alex Smolyanitsky in an effort to expose scientific journals — the Journal of Computational Intelligence and Electronic Systems and the Aperito Journal of NanoScience Technology."

Comment This is also a way to reduce broadcast diversity (Score 2) 31

by Chronos56 (#48231065) Attached to: FCC Postpones Spectrum Auction Until 2016

The smaller Low power stations will likely lose their license or be forced to move to another frequency with no financial compensation. As far as the Low Power stations are concerned this auction is a very bad idea.

Its the LP stations that provide minority content.

The LP I engineer for provides Spanish and Haitian content to our communities, many LP stations around the country provide similar content.

As for cell phone users this is not that much spectrum and will make little difference.

This is just a big land grab by the big cell phone carriers, welcome to the 19th century.
Movies

New Riddick Movie Made Possible By Games? 160

Posted by Soulskill from the this-is-why-gamers-are-scarier-than-bikers dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Scott Harris writes on Moviefone that the economics of Hollywood are often baffling, as DVD sales, broadcast fees and merchandising tie-ins balance against advertising costs and pay-or-play deals to form an accounting maze. The latest example is the untitled sequel to The Chronicles of Riddick, released in 2004 to a slew of negative reviews and general viewer indifference. Despite its hefty $105 million budget, most of which was spent on special effects, the film topped out at a paltry $57 million domestically. So how can a sequel be made if the movie lost money? The answer has to do with ancillary profits from revenue streams outside the box office. While the combined $116 million worldwide probably still didn't cover distribution and advertising costs, it likely brought the film close to even, meaning DVD sales and profits from the tie-in video game franchise may have put the movie in the black. In addition, Riddick itself was a sequel to Pitch Black, a modestly budgeted ($23 million) success back in 2000. Extending the franchise to a third film may help boost ancillary profits by introducing the Pitch Black and Chronicles of Riddick DVDs and merchandise to new audiences, meaning that the new film may not even need to break even to eventually turn a profit for the studio."
Image

Dad Delivers Baby Using Wiki 249

Posted by samzenpus from the 9cm-edited dept.
sonamchauhan writes "A Londoner helped his wife deliver their baby by Googling 'how to deliver a baby' on his mobile phone. From the article: 'Today proud Mr Smith said: "The midwife had checked Emma earlier in the day but contractions started up again at about 8pm so we called the midwife to come back. But then everything happened so quickly I realized Emma was going to give birth. I wasn't sure what I was going to do so I just looked up the instructions on the internet using my BlackBerry."'"
Bug

Saboteur Launch Plagued By Problems With ATI Cards 230

Posted by Soulskill from the more-or-less-finished dept.
An anonymous reader writes "So far, there are over 35 pages of people posting about why EA released Pandemic Studios' final game, Saboteur, to first the EU on December 4th and then, after knowing full well it did not work properly, to the Americas on December 8th. They have been promising to work on a patch that is apparently now in the QA stage of testing. It is not a small bug; rather, if you have an ATI video card and either Windows 7 or Windows Vista, the majority (90%) of users have the game crash after the title screen. Since the marketshare for ATI is nearly equal to that of Nvidia, and the ATI logo is adorning the front page of the Saboteur website, it seems like quite a large mistake to release the game in its current state."
PlayStation (Games)

US Air Force Buying Another 2,200 PS3s 144

Posted by Soulskill from the quick-who-knows-a-good-ps3-flight-sim dept.
bleedingpegasus sends word that the US Air Force will be grabbing up 2,200 new PlayStation 3 consoles for research into supercomputing. They already have a cluster made from 336 of the old-style (non-Slim) consoles, which they've used for a variety of purposes, including "processing multiple radar images into higher resolution composite images (known as synthetic aperture radar image formation), high-def video processing, and 'neuromorphic computing.'" According to the Justification Review Document (DOC), "Once the hardware configuration is implemented, software code will be developed in-house for cluster implementation utilizing a Linux-based operating software."
The Courts

Court Rejects RIAA's Proposed Protective Order 197

Posted by kdawson from the protective-of-whom-exactly dept.
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "You may recall that a few weeks ago the Court rendered a detailed decision providing for safeguards in connection with the RIAA's proposed inspection of the defendant's hard drive in SONY BMG Music Entertainment v. Tenenbaum. The decision instructed the RIAA to submit a proposed protective order consistent with the Court's decision. The RIAA submitted a proposed protective order yesterday, which attracted some thoughtful commentary by readers of my blog, but today the Court rejected the RIAA's suggested order, explicitly rejecting many of the 'enhancements' included by the RIAA, including production of 'videos' and 'playlists' which might be found on the hard drive. Instead the Court entered an order the Court itself had drafted. The Court explained that 'the purpose of compelling inspection is to identify information reasonably calculated to provide evidence of any file-sharing of Plaintiffs' copyrighted music sound files conducted on the Defendant's computer. Once this data is identified by the computer forensic expert... any disclosure shall flow through the Defendant subject to his assertion of privilege and the Court's authority to compel production, just as disclosure would occur in any other pre-trial discovery setting... (1) As should have been clear from the Court's May 6, 2009 Order, although the Plaintiffs may select experts of their choosing, these individuals are not to be employees of the Plaintiffs or their counsel, but must be third-parties held to the strictest standards of confidentiality; (2) the inspection is limited to music sound files, metadata associated with music sound files, and information related to the file-sharing of music sound files — it shall not include music "playlists" or any other type of media file (e.g., video); (3) the Examining Expert shall be required to disclose both the methods employed to inspect the hard drive and any instruction or guidance received from the Plaintiffs.'"

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