ning - Slashdot User

Ultracapacitor Bus Recharges At Each Stop 419

Posted by kdawson on Monday October 19, 2009 @08:25PM from the fill-er-up-with-electrons dept.

TechReviewAl writes "A US company and its Chinese partner are piloting a bus powered by ultracapacitors in Washington DC. Ultracapacitors lack the capacity of regular batteries but are considerably cheaper and can be recharge completely in under a minute. Sinautec Automobile Technologies, based in Arlington, VA, and its Chinese partner, Shanghai Aowei Technology Development Company, have spent the past three years demonstrating the approach with 17 municipal buses on the outskirts of Shanghai. The executive director of Sinautec touts the energy efficiency of this approach: 'Even if you use the dirtiest coal plant on the planet [to charge an ultracapacitor], it generates a third of the carbon dioxide of diesel.'"

Comment Re:Paranoia, cha cha cha (Score 1) 392

by ning on Friday June 12, 2009 @05:50AM (#28305649) Attached to: I prefer to work ...

Get a mirror. You can get little ones designed to go on the back seat of your car. (They're for keeping an eye on small children that need to face backwards, if you're not a parent.) I like to face the window to relax my eyes occasionally (and talent spot :)), but like you I get freaked out by people 'creeping up' on me when I'm working. With a mirror by the side of my screen, they appear in my peripheral vision and I can relax :)

Comment Re:Try a pivoting monitor in "tallscreen" mode. (Score 1) 503

by ning on Friday April 24, 2009 @08:10AM (#27700145) Attached to: My primary computer has N screens, with N being ...

I second that. I have a tallscreen monitor (9:16) for reading portrait-form-factor documents, and a 4:3 monitor to the right for coding and other stuff. I also use Input Director and have my laptop underneath the right-hand screen for documentation and IM. My coworkers think it's a weird setup, but it works really well for me.

Twitter Leads Social Networks In Downtime 175

Posted by timothy on Wednesday February 18, 2009 @03:26PM from the great-to-be-top-of-the-list dept.

illectro writes "A study on site availability by monitoring service Pingdom shows that in 2008 Twitter greeted users with the 'Fail Whale' for more than 84 hours, almost twice as much as any other site. At the other end of the scale imeem and Xanga managed less than 4 hours of downtime for 99.95% uptime. Myspace, Facebook and Classmates.com were the only other sites studied which managed to stay up more than 99.9% of the time."

Power In Scotland From Tides and Whiskey 170

Posted by timothy on Friday January 30, 2009 @07:17AM from the plus-the-spinning-corpse-of-william-wallace dept.

tsamsoniw writes "Singapore-based Atlantis Resources Corporation, which brings to the table tidal-turbine technology, is partnering with Scotland-based datacenter developer Internet Villages International) to construct a tidal-powered 150MW 'Blue Datacenter,' InfoWorld reports. If all goes to plan, the facility will eventually be powered entirely by clean energy produced by tidal-current turbines in the Pentland Firth, the stretch of water between the far north Scottish mainland and Orkney. The firth's currents could generate 700 megawatts of electricity by 2020." And reader Mike writes "Here's something to raise a glass to: recently the Rothes consortium of whiskey and scotch distillers announced that they have partnered with Helius Energy to install a power plant fueled entirely by whiskey by-products. The completed plant will use biomass cogeneration to convert draff and pot ale from the distillery into 7.2 MW of electricity — enough to power 9,000 homes."

Beatles and iTunes At Last? 246

Posted by Zonk on Monday March 10, 2008 @06:45PM from the wearing-the-face-that-she-keeps-in-a-jar-by-the-door dept.

rjshirts writes "Ars Technica is reporting that the Beatles and Apple have signed a reported $400 million dollar deal to bring the entire Beatles Catalog to iTunes. From the article: 'As of today there is no time frame as to when the catalog will appear online, but it seems to just be a matter of time. McCartney himself even said in November that the catalog would be making its way onto the the store some time in 2008. While we have heard this sort of thing time and time again, this might just be the real deal. Prepare yourself — Beatlemania is coming to iTunes.'"

U.S. House Says the Internet is Terrorist Threat 457

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday November 28, 2007 @11:18AM from the so-is-my-chilli dept.

GayBliss writes "The U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill (H.R. 1955) last month, by a vote of 404 to 6, that says the Internet is a terrorist tool and that Congress needs to develop and implement methods to combat it."

eBay Pulls Google Ads Over Marketing Stunt 151

Posted by Zonk on Friday June 15, 2007 @08:39AM from the it's-just-business dept.

odoketa writes "According to the BBC, it seems Google scheduled a party to promote their payment system (Google Checkout) on the same day as a big eBay meeting, and this made eBay mad enough to pull their ads with Google. According to the story, eBay says it's merely an 'ongoing experiment' on their marketing. 'Google hoped to alert PayPal users who would have been in Boston attending the eBay Live annual seller event to its own service, according to market experts. It could also have been seen as part of an effort to get eBay to accept Google Checkout, currently banned on the online auctioneer's site. But in a contrite manner, Google cancelled its rival function a day before it was due to happen.'"

Comment Low power signal (Score 3, Interesting) 125

by ning on Friday November 24, 2006 @06:56AM (#16972678) Attached to: MP3 Transmitters Now Legal In the UK

Yup. I've tried tuning in outside the car - travelling in convoy, and instructing the other driver to tune his radio to mine - but unless you're really tailgating the car in front, there's no way you can pick up that signal. You can tell how low the power is because 'proper' stations interfere with it if you accidentally stumble on their frequency. So there's really no incentive to try to create a 'pirate' station - it just won't get picked up.

So it's great news - a new piece of legislation actually 'for the people'. Brilliant!

Incidentally, you should retract your aerial if you want to improve reception - or get an FM modulator (that's wired into your aerial) rather than a transmitter. Or get a head unit with a line-in port (although that's more expensive).

HSBC Online Banking Security Flaw Analyzed 178

Posted by timothy on Thursday August 10, 2006 @11:33AM from the roight-guv'nor-jes-sign-roight-here dept.

greenechidna writes "The BBC is reporting that a vulnerability has been found in the online banking service of HSBC by researchers at Cardiff University. According to the story the attack would allow an attacker to log on to an account within 9 attempts. The attack relies on a keylogger being installed on the victim's machine. The article doesn't have any further technical details." David Nicholson adds links to coverage at CNN and at the Guardian, writing "The attack revolves around the order that customers are requested to enter random security numbers on the site. The main news stories fail to detail the vulnerability but I have provided an analysis of it here."

What Can Mandriva Linux 2006 Mean for Home Users? 278

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday May 08, 2006 @05:32AM from the just-get-their-feet-wet dept.

sitor writes "What can Mandriva Linux 2006 mean for home users? is an article giving an extensive explanation about the pro's and con's of using a linux distribution such as Mandriva Linux 2006. It was written with people in mind that are in doubt whether linux might be something for them or not. It aims to inform them in a neutral way, understandable to newbies. Next time you have someone asking you questions about Linux not knowing whether they should try, you can just direct them to this article."

UC Berkeley Cleaning up its Security Act 79

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Tuesday April 25, 2006 @05:33AM from the case-studies-in-self-evaluation dept.

Bob Brown writes "UC Berkeley recently issued a scathing self-assessment of its IT department, which has been under fire in the wake of a couple of high profile security lapses at the school. NetworkWorld has a review of what the school's top networking guy says is being done to both secure and strengthen UC Berkeley's computer networks."

Next in Browser Development, High DPI Websites? 447

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Sunday April 23, 2006 @02:23AM from the more-dots dept.

Joost de Valk writes "In a post at the WebKit blog, Dave Hyatt raises interesting points about the future of web development and browsers. He says, that with screens getting more and more pixels, it is imperative website design takes the next step: High DPI Website rendering. This could mean that a CSS pixel (px) is rendered as a 2x2 pixelblock. In the article he also mentions WebKit will be providing possibilities to use SVG for all kinds of purposes, like backgrounds. He calls upon other browser developers to take part in the discussion so that 'concrete standards in this area can be hammered out.'"

Movie Downloads to Coincide with DVD release 313

Posted by Hemos on Monday April 03, 2006 @08:48AM from the starting-to-get-some-things dept.

gihan_ripper writes "The movie download firms Movielink and CinemaNow have made a deal with the big five studios to ensure that downloads will coincide with DVD releases at Blockbuster and WalMart. Unlike previous deals, these will be full purchase downloads, and not merely for a rental period. The move is aimed at stemming the rising tide of pirate downloads, and DRM will be in force to prevent copying the movies to DVD. The first batch of downloadable movies will include Brokeback Mountain, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, and King Kong."

The Real Purpose of DRM 235

Posted by CowboyNeal on Sunday April 02, 2006 @01:35PM from the man-keeping-us-down dept.

Roberto writes "Gorgeous nerd Annalee Newitz hacked a political interpretation to recent vacuum cleaner cockfights at O'Reilly's ETech: 'Hollywood corporations have finally admitted that the real reason they built digital restriction management (DRM) software into PVRs and DVD players was to stop geeks from turning their recording devices into back-alley combat machines. You haven't seen ugly until you've watched what a DVD player without DRM can do to a TiVo.' Don't try to even think of this at home."

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