Comment Are the Astros going to use these cameras? (Score 1) 75
Cameras in the stands what could possibly go wrong?
Comment Now I understand something on the LHC 2015 Schedul (Score 1) 233
For several months I have been checking on the on the official LHC schedule:
https://espace.cern.ch/be-dep/...
and had been wondering about the notation "leap second" on the Wednesday of week 27 of 2015. This posting now makes me understand what is going on. I can imagine lots of consequences for the both the machine (think of how far in the lab frame a 7.5 TeV proton goes in 1 s) and the enormous (at least enormous if you aren't Amazon, Apple, Google, or Microsoft) pile of HTC servers on 6 continents we use to reduce the data into Nobel prizes (hopefully prizes plural...).
Fred
https://espace.cern.ch/be-dep/...
and had been wondering about the notation "leap second" on the Wednesday of week 27 of 2015. This posting now makes me understand what is going on. I can imagine lots of consequences for the both the machine (think of how far in the lab frame a 7.5 TeV proton goes in 1 s) and the enormous (at least enormous if you aren't Amazon, Apple, Google, or Microsoft) pile of HTC servers on 6 continents we use to reduce the data into Nobel prizes (hopefully prizes plural...).
Fred
Comment PDP-8E (Score 1) 587
The first computer I used was DEC PDP-8E. It had 12k of 12 bit core. My high school had bought it for $40,000 in approximately 1974. It I/O system involved punched paper tape and teletypes. I guess this will not be the oldest system someone mentions but it's pretty old school. And technically I didn't own it. The first computer I owned was a Gateway first generation Pentium and that machine had 2 MB if I remember correctly.
Comment ps Timing at LHC Experiment (Score 1) 328
I marked the picometers entry but I was really using it to mean picoseconds (since the speed of light in a given medium is a constant the two are equivalent). I work on the TRT a subdetector of the ATLAS experiment at LHC. We are definitely sensitive to changes in the timing base for the time measurement made by the TRT when the LHC machine timing signal changes by ~100 ps. I think that a crazy good level of accuracy but than one of my friends pointed out that 100 Gbps network that we are now using to move around the ATLAS data has digits that are ~10 ps wide which implies a a few ps rise time for those digits in a 100 Gbps data stream. I don't about other slashdotters but having struggled to get ~100 ps timing stability, I find 10 ps wide digits with a few ps rise/fall time to be mind-blowing...
Play Tetris To Fix Your Lazy Eye 88
MightyMait writes "A study from a team at McGill University has found Tetris to be a good treatment for lazy eye. 'Armed with a special pair of video goggles they set up an experiment that would make both eyes work as a team. Nine volunteers with amblyopia were asked to wear the goggles for an hour a day over the next two weeks while playing Tetris, the falling building block video game. The goggles allowed one eye to see only the falling objects, while the other eye could see only the blocks that accumulate on the ground in the game. For comparison, another group of nine volunteers with amblyopia wore similar goggles but had their good eye covered, and watched the whole game through only their lazy eye. At the end of the two weeks, the group who used both eyes had more improvement in their vision than the patched group (abstract).' As someone born with crossed-eyes who underwent surgery as an infant and has lived with a lazy eye his whole life (without 3-D vision), the prospect of fixing my vision by playing Tetris is an enticing one."
100x Denser Chips Possible With Plasmonic Nanolithography 117
Roland Piquepaille writes "According to the semiconductor industry, maskless nanolithography is a flexible nanofabrication technique which suffers from low throughput. But now, engineers at the University of California at Berkeley have developed a new approach that involves 'flying' an array of plasmonic lenses just 20 nanometers above a rotating surface, it is possible to increase throughput by several orders of magnitude. The 'flying head' they've created looks like the stylus on the arm of an old-fashioned LP turntable. With this technique, the researchers were able to create line patterns only 80 nanometers wide at speeds up to 12 meters per second. The lead researcher said that by using 'this plasmonic nanolithography, we will be able to make current microprocessors more than 10 times smaller, but far more powerful' and that 'it could lead to ultra-high density disks that can hold 10 to 100 times more data than today's disks.'"
Browsing Frugally Without Wasting Bandwidth? 450
forrestm writes "At home, my internet connection is limited to 1GB / month before I have to pay extra. At my university, I'm charged around 2.5c per megabyte. I rarely download anything big, but I often go through a large amount of bandwidth by simply browsing around. For example, when I play a YouTube video, click a link, and then return to the video, the whole video reloads. When I read some websites, such as BoingBoing.net or Cnet.com, my status bar shows a whole lot of data being transferred through other domains. Some pages seem to send/receive data at certain intervals for the duration of my visit. When I begin to enter a search in Firefox's search bar, a list of suggestions is automatically downloaded. In addition to this, Firefox often requests internet access of its own accord, even though I have automatic updating turned off. All this is costing me! How do I stop unsolicited use of my internet connection? How do I go about not wasting bandwidth like this?"
This Headline Is Not for Sale 275
r.jimenezz writes "Adam Penenberg's latest article on Wired News discusses the growing trend of inserting ads more directly into online content, as publishers strive to keep readers clicking and to stretch advertising dollars, most of which go to a few big companies. He mentions the example of Vibrant Media, which links 'certain words in an article' directly to ads, and has been covered before on Slashdot, as have Penenberg's previous
articles."
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"I've got some amyls. We could either party later or, like, start his heart." -- "Cheech and Chong's Next Movie"
