awolbach - Slashdot User

Comment Re:And FTL, too (Score 1) 575

by awolbach on Tuesday November 24, 2009 @06:00PM (#30219396) Attached to: New Theory of Gravity Decouples Space & Time

I'd respectfully disagree and say it's pretty bad from the computer science side of things. There's plenty of experimental evidence that indirectly suggests FTL information propagation is impossible, if you consider that allowing it enables the efficient computation of NP-complete problems, for which I'll cite Prof. Aaronson at Shtetl-Optimized.

Laptop/Server Data Synchronization? 305

Posted by kdawson on Monday August 27, 2007 @11:47PM from the two-way-update dept.

gbr writes "I've been trying to automatically synchronize data between a laptop and a server. When the laptop is connected to the network, I want all writes to automatically propagate across to the server. When the laptop is disconnected I want the laptop user to continue working with the local data. When the laptop is reconnected, I want the data to automatically re-sync. The issue is, the data on the server may have changed as well, which needs to propagate back to the laptop. The data doesn't contain anything too special, no database tables etc. It does contain binary data such as executables and word processing documents. I've looked at ChironFS, Unison file sync, and drbd. ChironFS needs a manual rebuild if a connection fails, and the user needs to know which machine contains the correct data. Unison requires the user to initiate the synchronization process manually every time, and drbd is just not meant for the job at hand. How do you automatically, and invisibly to the user (except in the case of conflicts), synchronize between a laptop and a server?"

Comment Diamond (Score 2, Informative) 158

by awolbach on Tuesday December 19, 2006 @10:57PM (#17308646) Attached to: Face Search Engine Raises Privacy Concerns

An open source version of a content-based image search engine is already available in the Carnegie Mellon-Intel joint research project called Diamond. (http://diamond.cs.cmu.edu/) It has a facial recognition application called SnapFind which can already perform arbitrary face matching and other filtering (given the image data), and it is available for free. Disclaimer: I work on Diamond, which has many other applications than this, and thought it was appropriate to post.

Jurassic Marine Graveyard Yields 'Monster' Fossil 78

Posted by Zonk on Saturday October 07, 2006 @06:22AM from the allosaurs-as-snacks dept.

M00NIE writes "A 150 million year old giant fish-like reptile has been unearthed on an Arctic island off Norway, along with many other top marine predators. The find is 'one of the most important new sites for marine reptiles to have been discovered in the last several decades.'" From the article: "'One of them was this gigantic monster, with vertebrae the size of dinner plates and teeth the size of cucumbers,' Joern Hurum, an assistant professor at the University of Oslo, told Reuters on Thursday. 'We believe the skeleton is intact and that it's about 10 meters (33 feet) long,' he told Reuters of the pliosaur, a type of plesiosaur with a short neck and massive skull. The team dubbed the specimen 'The Monster.'"

Quasi the Intelligent Robot 104

Posted by kdawson on Sunday October 01, 2006 @01:30PM from the but-does-it-vacuum-floors? dept.

Jake David writes to tell us about a uniquely emotive robot — named Quasi — developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University. Quasi appears capable of holding intelligent conversations. Here is a a video of the robot in action. Note that the animatronic figure is little more than the emotive organ of the robot, whose entirety encompasses the display booth as well. From the CMU page: "Quasi has a number of features in addition to his eyelids for conveying emotion, the most prominent of which are Color Kinetics LED lighting fixtures for his eyes and antennae. These combine red, green, and blue LEDs... His antennae can move both forward and backward as well as in and out, giving them an expressive quality not unlike that of a dog's ears."

Space Elevator vs Wildlife 307

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday September 27, 2006 @08:29AM from the check-and-mate dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The longest test yet of the technology that might one day lead to space elevators has revealed some unusual problems. From the article: "There were several unexpected encounters with wildlife. More than a dozen insect egg colonies had been laid on the tether and curious bats flew around the balloons, apparently attracted by the sound made by the tether's vibrations. Late in the test, swallows were also seen swooping down on the balloons, possibly to sip the morning dew on their surfaces." Maybe all the critters just want to go to space too."

Cameroon Typo-Squats all of .com 402

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday August 07, 2006 @01:39AM from the can't-fault-them-for-the-idea dept.

wayne writes "As reported on CircleID, the nation of Cameroon, which controls the .cm top level domain, has typo-squatted all of the .com domain space. They have placed a wildcard DNS record to redirect all traffic to an ad-based search page. Unlike the earlier case of Verisign putting a wildcard in the real .com domain, ICANN has very little direct control over what a nation can do with their own TLD. Will the owners of .co and .om follow?"

Cracking the GPS Galileo Satellite 364

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Sunday July 09, 2006 @05:49AM from the giving-people-a-reason dept.

Glyn writes "Newswise is reporting the the encryption in the Galileo GPS signal has been broken. The pseudo random number generator used to obscure the information stored in the Galileo GPS signal has been broken. From the article: 'Members of Cornell's Global Positioning System (GPS) Laboratory have cracked the so-called pseudo random number (PRN) codes of Europe's first global navigation satellite, despite efforts to keep the codes secret. That means free access for consumers who use navigation devices -- including handheld receivers and systems installed in vehicles -- that need PRNs to listen to satellites.'"

Day of the Robotic Tentacle 199

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday May 08, 2006 @04:16PM from the of-course-they-will-do-a-sequel dept.

holy_calamity writes "New Scientist is reporting on a robotic tentacle developed thanks to funding from military agency DARPA. From the video it looks to have a lot of potential, I can almost feel it fastening around my ankle right now."

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