GlenMac - Slashdot User

Submission + - America's Secret Space Plane To Land After A Year in Orbit (dailymail.co.uk)

Submitted by

SomePgmr

on Tuesday June 05, 2012 @12:05AM

SomePgmr writes: "The U.S Air Force's highly secret unmanned space plane will land in June — ending a year-long mission in orbit. The experimental Boeing X37-B has been circling Earth at 17,000 miles per hour and was due to land in California in December. It is now expected to land in mid to late June. And still, no one knows what the space drone has been doing up there all this time."

Comment Causation? (Score 2) 142

by GlenMac on Wednesday August 17, 2011 @09:35PM (#37125260) Attached to: Super Scrabble Players Have Unusual Brains

Is being a competitive scrabble player causing the brain to warp? Or is having this 'warped' brain a general advantage to becoming a competitive scrabble player?

Combining Two Kinects To Make Better 3D Video 106

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday November 30, 2010 @07:35AM from the this-is-what-happens-when-yo dept.

suraj.sun sends this quote from Engadget about improving the Kinect 3D video recordings we discussed recently: "[Oliver Kreylos is] blowing minds and demonstrating that two Kinects can be paired and their output meshed — one basically filling in the gaps of the other. He found that the two do create some interference, the dotted IR pattern of one causing some holes and blotches in the other, but when the two are combined they basically help each other out and the results are quite impressive."

MIT Unveils Portable, Solar-Powered Water Desalination System 117

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday October 19, 2010 @01:07AM from the water-the-chances dept.

An anonymous reader writes "A team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Field and Space Robotic Laboratory has designed a new solar-powered water desalination system to provide drinking water to disaster zones and disadvantaged parts of the planet. Desalination systems often require a lot of energy and a large infrastructure to support them, but MIT's compact system is able to cope due to its ingenious design. The system's photovoltaic panel is able to generate power for the pump, which in turn pushes undrinkable seawater through a permeable membrane. MIT's prototype can reportedly produce 80 gallons of drinking water per day, depending on weather conditions."

Submission + - Nissan turns to high-tech to stop drink driving

Submitted by StonyandCher on Friday August 03, 2007 @02:57AM

StonyandCher writes: As part of its drive to reduce road deaths and injuries, Nissan Motor has installed in a car three prototype high-tech systems designed to stop drink driving.

The first attempts to directly detect alcohol in the driver's sweat and gear shift lever. A second system in the car uses a camera mounted in front of the driver to monitor eye movement. If the driver is drowsy it triggers the seat belt to tighten and this movement will hopefully snap the driver out of their drowsiness or prompt them to take a rest. A third system monitors the path of the vehicle to ensure it's traveling in a straight line and not weaving about the road, as is common with a drunken driver.

Comment Fortify (Score 1) 398

by GlenMac on Thursday June 07, 2007 @03:24AM (#19420983) Attached to: Memory Checker Tools For C++?

I don't know if you've used or seen fortify but I found it a wonderful tool to not warn and resolve memory issues in C++.

It is very fast, compiles switches into nothing and incredibly helpful.

-- Snip
Fortify is a powerful C++ debugging aid. Detects and pinpoints memory related bugs. It supports alloc/calloc/realloc/strdup/free and new/delete. It traps memory leaks, writes beyond and before memory blocks, writes to freed memory, free twice, freeing memory never allocated, and removes all randomness from reading uninitialized or free memory.

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