73662383
submission
pev writes:
Working on an embedded project that will need to be maintainable for the next 25 years. This raises the interesting question of how this can be best supported. The obvious solution seems to be to use a VM that has a portable disk image that can be moved to any emulators in the future (the build environment is currently based around Ubuntu 14.04 LTS / x86_64) but how do you predict what vendors / hardware will be available in 25 years? Is anyone currently supporting software of a similar age that can share lessons learned from experience? Where do you choose to draw the line between handling likely issues and making things overly complicated?
44121845
submission
pev writes:
From The Guardian in the UK : European car manufacturers are rigging fuel efficiency tests by stripping down car interiors, over inflating tyres, taping over panel gaps and generally cheating. This overestimates the figures by 25% to 50%. One would have thought that a simple clause stating that cars have to be tested in the conditions that they are sold in would have been obvious?
40770437
submission
pev writes:
We've known for a while that Nokia have been working on their new map system and sending out vehicles with both cameras similar to Google's street view as well as LIDAR. The BBC have an interesting article with a bit more information about what they're up to as well as some great images showing the LIDAR data combined with the high resolution standard imagery. I do hope some of the high res stuff gets passed on to games makers to allow a new generation of interactive environments that are identical to the real world.
40010605
submission
pev writes:
After losing another laptop containing personal information, NASA wants to have all of its laptops encrypted within a months time with an intermediate ban of laptops containing sensitive information leaving its facilities. Between April 2009 and April 2011 it lost or had stolen 48 "mobile computing devices". I wonder how it will be before other large organisations start following suit as a sensible precaution?
39750339
submission
pev writes:
A new credit card released in singapore includes a screen and keyboard in order to generate one time passwords for your online banking. Lets hope they've put more thought into the implementation than with chip and pin
35853605
submission
pev writes:
RMS has voiced his opinion on Valves announcement that it plans to support its games on Linux. To be fair he summarises that the move is likely to do more harm than good but he greatly dislikes the idea of having DRM protected software on an open-source platform. We all know the (long running) arguments for and against but realistically, many companies must protect their IP and open platforms will surely benefit from having such mainstream software running. Can no-one come up with a practical compromise?
209167
submission
pev writes:
The Register reports : "A new 3G (European) version of the iPhone will be launched Monday in the UK by Apple — in a joint promotion with Vodafone, T-Mobile of Germany, and Carphone Warehouse. It should answer the disappointment with the US version of the iPhone which has been widely slammed for its poor performance as a phone." This is especially interesting as in an interview Steve Jobs is credited as having stated one of the reasons they havent used 3G yet is due to battery life and chipset (physical) size.
