devhen - Slashdot User

Submission + - Comet ISON: The Comet that was suppose to be 1

Submitted by BugNuker on Tuesday November 26, 2013 @12:32PM

BugNuker writes: Comet ISON has been speeding towards the sun, and while doing so, it has been getting brighter. There was hope that ISON would be 'Comet of the Century' material, but its not looking good. Recently, ISON has undergone some outbursts, making it a near naked eye object. As ISON approaches perihelion, there are reports that it might be disintegrating. For now, we can keep watching the STEREO spacecraft images for more evidence, but in the meantime, what awaits Comet ISON?

Comment Re:One word: YES. (Score 1) 749

by devhen on Friday March 22, 2013 @03:24PM (#43250107) Attached to: Can You Really Hear the Difference Between Lossless, Lossy Audio?

Good point. I was scrolling through the comments looking for this to be brought up because I think its a very important starting point. Essentially, if you are using the earbuds that came with your phone or mp3 player, or something like Beats, you're likely not going to experience a difference between any of the formats. If you want to do ABX testing to find out if you can tell a difference you're going to need to use equipment that can actually reveal those differences. Those people who use stock earbuds or cheap (though not in price) celebrity endorsed headphones plugged directly into mobile devices and laptops etc. have no need for lossless files. However, if you are using a high quality DAC and proper headphones (High-end Sennheisers, Beyerdynamics, orthodynamics like Hifiman's or Audeze, electrostatics like Stax etc) you're more likely to be concerned with using the best quality music you can find and more likely to notice those differences. I've done ABX tests between 24/96 and 320k mp3 and have been able to consistently spot the difference although not 100% of the time.

Major Electronics Vendors Accused of Price Fixing 125

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday February 27, 2010 @11:17AM from the if-it-ain't-broke dept.

Lucas123 writes "After the DOJ launched an investigation last fall into price fixing by major optical disk drive manufacturers, a home electronics retail store filed a class-action lawsuit this week seeking triple damages for what it is claiming to be long-standing collusion among Sony, Samsung, Toshiba, LG Electronics and Hitachi to raise and fix prices on the drives. The suit claims the vendors used trade organization forums as meeting places to discuss the price fixing. 'These are big Asian smoke-stack industries where they're investing in big fabrication plants. You can't have a technology destroy the business,' said the attorney representing the plaintiff. 'If you fire up a big fab plant with CRT tubes, and the next generation technology destroys it, then you have a big fab plant manufacturing buggy whips. So they have to make sure the price points for these [newer] technologies ... don't destroy existing markets.'"

Arrington's CrunchPad Dies 175

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday November 30, 2009 @02:08PM from the hooray-for-greed dept.

adeelarshad82 writes "Michael Arrington announced the death of the CrunchPad on Monday morning in a blog post heavily spiced with angst and drama. According to Arrington, the Crunchpad, a 12-inch Web tablet expected to be priced at about $300, was just days away from launch. At the last minute, however, Arrington received an email from Chandra Rathakrishnan, the chief executive of manufacturing partner Fusion Garage, apparently trying to cut Arrington out of the product on the eve of the launch. Fusion Garage, according to Arrington, wanted to market the device itself under its own name; which obviously was the deal breaker. Arrington claims that the company had overcome obstacles at every stage in the business such as deals with Intel, retail launch, securing venture capital and angel investments. Interesting bit is that some were already speculating that the Crunchpad was not real."

KDE Rebrands, Introduces KDE Plasma Desktop 364

Posted by timothy on Wednesday November 25, 2009 @05:59PM from the postitioning-for-clarity dept.

Jiilik Oiolosse writes "The KDE community has killed the term K Desktop Environment (previously the Kool Desktop Environment). 'KDE' had previously ambiguously referred to both the community, and the complete set of programs and tools produced by the KDE community which together formed a desktop user interface. This set of tools, including the window manager, panels and configuration utilities, which KDE terms a 'workspace,' will now be shipped under the term 'KDE Plasma Desktop.' This allows KDE to ship a separate workspace called 'Plasma Netbook,' and independently market the various KDE applications as usable in any workspace, whether it be the Plasma Desktop, Windows, or XFCE."

Fujitsu's Latest Mobile Phone Splits In Two 140

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Friday November 13, 2009 @02:48PM from the i-lost-my-keyboard-now-what dept.

angry tapir writes with news of Fujitsu's new phone which is taking the sliding phone keyboard a step further by allowing it to detach completely. "The F-04B was announced as part of NTT DoCoMo's new line-up and is scheduled to hit Japanese shelves in March or April next year. At first glance it looks like a conventional slider cell phone: grab onto the bottom of the phone and a numeric keypad slides out. But decouple a catch and the entire back half of the phone can be pulled off."

Tired of Flash? HTML5 Viewer For YouTube 372

Posted by timothy on Sunday November 08, 2009 @03:32PM from the that-taste-great-together dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Instead of spending the next 10 years trying to find a Flash implementation for Linux or OS X that doesn't drain CPU cycles like there's no tomorrow, NeoSmart Technologies has made an HTML5 viewer for YouTube videos. It loads YouTube videos in an HTML5 video container and streams (with skip/skim/pause/resume) against an MP4 resource, and an (optional) userscript file can update YouTube pages with the HTML5 viewer. The latest versions of Firefox, Chrome, and Safari are supported. Personally, I can't wait until the major video sites default to HTML5 and we can finally say goodbye to Flash."

Microsoft Opening Outlook's PST Format 319

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday October 26, 2009 @06:33PM from the still-a-long-way-to-go dept.

protosage writes to tell us that Microsoft Interoperability is working towards opening up Outlook's .pst format under their Open Specification Promise. This should "allow anyone to implement the .pst file format on any platform and in any tool, without concerns about patents, and without the need to contact Microsoft in any way." "In order to facilitate interoperability and enable customers and vendors to access the data in .pst files on a variety of platforms, we will be releasing documentation for the .pst file format. This will allow developers to read, create, and interoperate with the data in .pst files in server and client scenarios using the programming language and platform of their choice. The technical documentation will detail how the data is stored, along with guidance for accessing that data from other software applications. It also will highlight the structure of the .pst file, provide details like how to navigate the folder hierarchy, and explain how to access the individual data objects and properties."

No Cheap Replacement For Hard Disks Before 2020 346

Posted by timothy on Saturday October 24, 2009 @04:52PM from the we'll-see-in-10-years-about-that dept.

siddesu writes with disappointing news to anyone who'd like to see solid-state storage dominate in the near-term future. "A new study of storage technology by the former CTO of Seagate predicts that hard disks will remain the cheapest storage technology in the next decade and probably beyond."

Comment Also seems to be blocking iTunes from start menu (Score 1) 570

by devhen on Thursday October 22, 2009 @12:56AM (#29831999) Attached to: Some Users Say Win7 Wants To Remove iTunes, Google Toolbar

This reminded me of something that has been puzzling me for weeks now since installing Windows 7... No matter how many times I click on iTunes from Start > All Programs it WILL NOT show up in the Start menu's main list of most commonly used programs. Its a constant reminder of M$'s evil ways as it takes several clicks to open iTunes...

Software To Diagnose Faulty PC Hardware? 274

Posted by timothy on Saturday October 10, 2009 @03:47PM from the diagnostics-are-underrated dept.

Etylowy writes "Over the years I have repaired my own PC and those belonging to family and friends many, many times. While in most cases it turned out to be restoring a system after malware/the user/Windows made a mess, or simple cases of 'follow the smell of smoke and molten plastic,' there were some nasty ones where the computer mostly works. By 'mostly,' I mean: you can boot it up, it might even work for a while, but will crash way too often to blame it all on Microsoft — what do you do then? Once you strip it of any extra hardware (which, with today's motherboards that have pretty much everything integrated, might not be an option) you are left with the CPU, motherboard, graphics card, RAM and HDD. You can test the HDD, you can run memtest86+ to check the RAM, but how do you go about testing the CPU, motherboard and graphics card trio to find which is to blame? Replacing them one by one isn't really an option. Do you know of any software that would help the way memtest helps with RAM?"

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 Released 110

Posted by timothy on Wednesday September 02, 2009 @04:07PM from the progress-continues dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The fourth update in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 family is released. From the press release — this version includes kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) virtualization, alongside of Xen virtualization technology. The scalability of the Red Hat virtualization solution has been incremented to support 192 CPUs and 1GB hugepages. Other updates including GCC 4.4 and a new malloc(), clustered, high-availability filesystem to support Microsoft Windows storage needs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This article covers the upgrade procedure for RHEL 5.4 from the previous version."

South Korea's First Rocket Fails To Reach Set Orbit 101

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday August 25, 2009 @04:49PM from the ground-control-to-major-tom dept.

Matt_dk writes "The first satellite launched by South Korea failed to reach its designated orbit pattern on Tuesday, the NY Times is reporting. The two-staged KSLV-1 rocket, built in cooperation with Russia, failed to deliver the 100-kilogram oceanic and atmospheric research satellite into its target orbit. The rocket was launched from the Naro Space Center, 300 miles south of the capital Seoul. 'The failure to push the satellite into its intended orbit was announced by Ahn Myong-man, the minister of education, science and technology, at a news conference. Mr. Ahn gave no further details. But South Korean news outlets, citing unidentified sources, said the satellite broke away from the rocket about 22 miles farther from the Earth than had been intended.'"

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday August 25, 2009 @08:09AM from the long-dark-teatime dept.

snydeq writes "A federal appeals court has overturned a 2007 decision that Novell owns the Unix code, clearing the way for SCO to pursue a $1 billion copyright infringement case against IBM. In a 54-page decision (PDF), the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals said it was reversing the 2007 summary judgment decision by Judge Dale Kimball of the US District Court for the District of Utah, which found that Novell was the owner of Unix and UnixWare copyrights. SCO CEO Darl McBride called the decision a 'huge validation for SCO.'" The case over who owns Unix will now go to trial in Utah.

"Gigantic Jets" Blast Electricity Into the Ionosphere 168

Posted by kdawson on Sunday August 23, 2009 @06:26PM from the more-things-in-heaven-and-earth dept.

New Scientist has an update on the so-called "gigantic jets" first discovered in 2003 — these are lightning bolts that reach from cloud tops upward into the ionosphere, as high as 90 kilometers. (There's a video at the link.) What's new is that researchers from Duke University have managed to measure the electrical discharge from a gigantic jet and confirm that they carry as much energy skyward as ordinary lightning strikes carry to the ground. According to the article, "Gigantic jets are one of a host of new atmospheric phenomena discovered in recent years. Other examples are sprites and blue jets."