Comment Re:Head of state? (Score 1) 486
Yah, I think they meant to say that he is the "de jure" head of state--by law, not the "de facto" head of state--by fact.
Palm Pre and WebOS Get Native Gaming 49
rboatright writes "WebOS developers have been waiting, and with the 1.3.5 release, Palm's open source page suddenly listed SDL. Members of the WebOS internals team took that as a challenge and within 24 hours had a working port of Doom running in SDL on the Pre, in a webOS card. 48 hours later, they not only had Quake running, but had found in the latest LunaSysMgr the requirements to launch a native app from the webOS app launcher from an icon just like any other app. At the same time, the team demonstrated openGL apps running. With full native code support, with I/O available via SDL, developers now have a preview into Palm's future intent with regard to native code SDK's, and a hint of what's coming."
End of the Road For NASA's Mars Rover? 181
An anonymous reader writes "NASA celebrated Mars rover Spirit's bountiful, six-year stint on the red planet on Sunday – way longer than its forecast three-month mission. But it all may soon come to an end, stuck as it is in Martian sand."
Comment Shade-Grown Train-Killed Solar-Grilled BBQ (Score 1) 416
Gee, I love the idea of the solar cells being "above the track". Wild animals from lizards on up are smart enough to seek out the shade, as are vagrant livestock. So, with the tracks in the shade for a good part of the day, I expect we could have a chain of Momma's Train-Killt Bar-B-Q stands all the way from Tucson to Phoenix (Cook them in solar ovens, come to think of it.) Or maybe DARPA could fund a next-generation cow catcher on the front of the engine, one that works at 200mph...
Comment Re:This use of goats may be fine (Score 2, Informative) 466
I wonder if you are thinking about sheep ("hooved locusts"?)
Comment Goats can do what mowers can't (Score 5, Informative) 466
There are lots of places in the Bay Area that do this. It's much more than a sop to carbon neutrality: the goats can "mow" slopes that are far too steep and uneven to wrestle a mower across. They also make short work of areas that are filled with rocks, brush and stumps and have no objection to a dessert course of poison oak (that's a good reason not to pat them on the head, though).
I used to watch them arrive at the Lawrence Hall of Science up in the Berkeley hills. Trailers pull up; the goat wranglers set out a low fence and then unload the goats and a few working dogs. Over the next few days the wranglers move the fenced area across the slope and the goats eat and fertilize their way across the landscape. A few days after they arrive the brush is gone and some very nasty terrain has become a fire break, with roots still in place to prevent land slides. What's not to love?
Comment It's not spanning tree's fault (Score 1) 388
A $30 switch and a patch cable will take down your spanning-tree enabled infrastructure very effectively. Loop the cable on your cheap switch: voila, a broadcast-storm generator. Plug it into the wall; plug your laptop into the switch and let it DHCP Discover, which is a broadcast. Your cheap switch now generates a stream of broadcasts as fast as it can, injecting them into the network. Your Spanning-Tree Enabled switches now repeat the broadcast faithfully. Network crashes*. STP prevents your switches from creating loops, NOT from propagating broadcast storms...
*unless you are throttling the ports based on broadcast traffic, which you now know is NOT a feature of Spanning Tree
Submission + - Monkeys and humans learn the same way (sciencedaily.com)
Lucas123 writes: "A new study from UCLA showed that monkeys, like humans, learn faster by being actively involved in the learning process rather than just having information placed before them, according to a story in ScienceDaily. In the study, two rhesus macaque monkeys learned to put up to 18 photos on an ATM-like touch screen in a row. 'The monkeys did much better on the first three days when they had the help than when they didn't, but on the test day, it completely reversed.'"
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The reason that every major university maintains a department of mathematics is that it's cheaper than institutionalizing all those people.
