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Submission + - Linux Controlling a Gasoline Engine with Machine Learning

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Here's a short (2 min) video of PREEMPT_RT Linux controlling a gasoline engine from one burn to the next using a Raspberry Pi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... It's using an adaptive machine learning algorithm that can predict near chaotic combustion in real-time. A paper about the algorithm is available at: http://arxiv.org/abs/1310.3567

Submission + - Comparing Cloud-Based Image Services for Developers (slashdot.org)

Submitted by Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: As Web applications grow in number and capability, storing large amounts of images can quickly become a problem. If you’re a Web developer and need to store your client images, do you just keep them on the same server hosting your Website? What if you have several gigabytes worth of images that need to be processed in some way? Today, many developers are looking for an easy but cost-effective solution whereby images can be stored in the cloud and even processed automatically, thus taking a huge load off one’s own servers, freeing up resources to focus on building applications. With that in mind, developer and editor Jeff Cogswell looks at a couple different cloud-based services for image storage and processing. At first glance, these services seem similar—but they’re actually very different. He examines Cloudinary and Blitline, and encourages developers to take a look at ImageResizer, an open-source package that does a lot of what proprietary services do (you just need to install the software on your own servers). "If you’re not a programmer but a web designer or blogger, Blitline won’t be of much use for you,"he writes. "If you are a developer, both Cloudinary and Blitline work well." What do you think?

Submission + - Is Earth Weighed Down by Dark Matter? (slashdot.org) 1

Submitted by Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: There may be a giant ring of dark matter invisibly encircling the Earth, increasing its mass and pulling much harder on orbiting satellites than anything invisible should pull, according to preliminary research from a scientist specializing the physics of GPS signaling and satellite engineering. The dark-matter belt around the Earth could represent the beginning of a radically new understanding of how dark matter works and how it affects the human universe, or it could be something perfectly valid but less exciting despite having been written up by New Scientist and spreading to the rest of the geek universe on the basis of a single oral presentation of preliminary research at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in December. The presentation came from telecom- and GPS satellite expert Ben Harris, an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of Texas- Arlington, who based his conclusion on nine months’ worth of data that could indicate Earth’s gravity was pulling harder on its ring of geostationary GPS satellites than the accepted mass of the Earth would normally allow. Since planets can’t gain weight over the holidays like the rest of us, Harris’ conclusion was that something else was adding to the mass and gravitational power of Earth – something that would have to be pretty massive but almost completely undetectable, which would sound crazy if predominant theories about the composition of the universe didn’t assume 80 percent of it was made up of invisible dark matter. Harris calculated that the increase in gravity could have come from dark matter, but would have had to be an unexpectedly thick collection of it – one ringing the earth in a band 120 miles thick and 45,000 miles wide. Making elaborate claims in oral presentations, without nailing down all the variables that could keep a set of results from being twisted into something more interesting than the truth is a red flag for any scientific presentation, let alone one making audacious claims about the way dark matter behaves or weight of the Earth, according to an exasperated counterargument from Matthew R. Francis, who earned a Ph.D. in physics and astronomy from Rutgers in 2005, held visiting and assistant professorships at several Northeastern universities and whose science writing has appeared in Ars Technica, The New Yorker, Nautilus, BBC Future and others including his own science blog at Galileo’s Pendulum.

Comment Worse error messages (Score 5, Interesting) 205

by sheetzam (#44249059) Attached to: How Do You Get Better Bug Reports From Users?

When writing error messages, don't have it spit out something sensible. Have it spit out something completely crazy but memorable, which you can then grep the code for. Something along the lines of "The Cake has hit the Fan" or "The Chickens are eating Pie". This improves the odds the user will remember it and report it correctly, giving you some hope of finding where the bug is in the code.

Comment Look Here (Score 1) 506

by sheetzam (#38984709) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Where Are the Open Source Jobs?

I'm one of the developers of StartUpHire. We use open source software, and I can tell you that many startups are using nothing but open source software. So, check out StartUpHire. As an example, here are a pile of jobs which need some Linux experience: http://www.startuphire.com/search/index.php?searchId=945ed9ccb0bc3f21fd7b5aad0f6ed1fd
Firefox

How Do Browsers Scale? 141

Posted by Soulskill from the depends-where-you-drag-your-mouse dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Benchmarking browsers is a somewhat silly exercise, since scores cannot be replicated on a variety of hardware, and it is not uncommon for even the same system to fail to replicate benchmarks scores, especially in JavaScript tests in two succeeding runs. The guys over at ConceivablyTech have an interesting approach, running browsers through multiple tests on different sets of hardware (including an Android smartphone), and showing the scaling differences between browsers when you are using a dual-core netbook on the low-end and a six-core desktop on the high-end. They also tested HTML5 on Firefox mobile and found the browser has better HTML5 support than the current Firefox 4 Beta 6."

Comment Clocking It (Score 4, Interesting) 428

by sheetzam (#30464378) Attached to: What Does Everyone Use For Task/Project Tracking?

http://www.clockingit.com/ Might be worth a look. Keeps track of stuff you need to do, and will let you keep track of time spent doing it as well. Definitely a help if you're looking to prove you need help some day. And yes, you can install a copy of it on a local server.
Heck, might be a good tool for others in your office, for that matter - this isn't a problem you're alone in having in your company.

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