Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror

Comment Re:Yeah, but when will they make a larger iPhone? (Score 4, Funny) 162

Having hands that one of my kids once told me resembled bear paws... oversized and clumsy, something about the same size as the Galaxy S3 would be ideal for my purposes, because I've always found the iPhone display to be unusably tiny for anything involving complex interactivity (such as texting, for instance).

Puny human iPhone make Hulk sad.
Science

Submission + - These 19th Century Postcards Predicted Our Future (singularityhub.com)

Submitted by
kkleiner
kkleiner writes: "Starting in 1899, a commercial artist named Jean-Marc Côté and other artists were hired to create a series of picture cards to depict how life in France would look in a century’s time. Sadly, they were never actually distributed. However, the only known set of cards to exist was discovered by Isaac Asimov, who wrote a book in 1986 called “Futuredays” in which he presented the illustrations with commentary. What’s amazing about this collection is how close their predictions were in a lot of cases, and how others are close at hand."

Submission + - File-Sharing for Personal Use Declared Legal in Portugal (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by M0j0_j0j0
M0j0_j0j0 writes: After receiving 2000 complaints regarding "illegal file sharing" from ACAPOR on P2P network the Portuguese justice refused to take the case into court on the premise that file sharing is not illegal on the territory, if, files are for personal and not commercial use. The court also stated that the complaints had as a sole evidence the IP address of users, and that it is a wrong statement to assume an IP address is directly related to one individual. Torrent freak has a piece in English with more details here and the original source in Portuguese here
NASA

Submission + - Could you hack into Mars rover Curiosity? (extremetech.com)

Submitted by
MrSeb
MrSeb writes: "NASA’s Curiosity rover has now been on the surface of Mars for just over a week. It hasn’t moved an inch after landing, instead focusing on orienting itself (and NASA’s scientists) by taking instrument readings and snapping images of its surroundings. The first beautiful full-color images of Gale Crater are starting to trickle in, and NASA has already picked out some interesting rock formations that it will investigate further in the next few days (pictures below). Over the weekend and continuing throughout today, however, Curiosity is attempting something very risky indeed: A firmware upgrade. This got me thinking: If NASA can transmit new software to a Mars rover that's hundreds of millions of miles away... why can't a hacker do the same thing? In short, there's no reason a hacker couldn't take control of Curiosity, or lock NASA out. All you would need is your own massive 230-foot dish antenna and a 400-kilowatt transmitter — or, perhaps more realistically, you could hack into NASA's computer systems, which is exactly what Chinese hackers did 13 times in 2011."
Education

Submission + - Creating a school computer lab with Ubuntu for $0 (ifixit.org) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Here is an interesting story of a school in Oakland that used old computers running Ubuntu and OpenOffice.org to provide a school computer lab for students.

Comment Re:Yeah, but how do you measure 'Quality' (Score 2) 349

by Reasonable Facsimile (#40921575) Attached to: Bad Software Runs the World

There are ways to determine quality. One pretty standard way is to count the number of bugs found during testing each phase of development (design, coding, unit test, product test, integration tests and after its in production).

Those can be valuable metrics, but finding and fixing a lot of bugs can't improve the innate quality of the item under development/test. In other words, you can't test quality into the product.

Slashdot Top Deals

In every non-trivial program there is at least one bug.

Close