simon_lambourn - Slashdot User

Comment Vertical farms instead of flammable cladding? (Score 1) 255

by simon_lambourn on Saturday April 14, 2018 @06:31PM (#56438569) Attached to: Can We Build Indoor 'Vertical Farms' Near The World's Major Cities?

Why not put them on the sides of tall buildings instead of all this cladding such as the kind that recently caused the Grenfell fire in London? plants would be good insulation and I'm pretty sure they wouldn't be as flammable.

Comment Re:Advantages vs disadvantages (Score 1) 255

by simon_lambourn on Saturday April 14, 2018 @06:29PM (#56438555) Attached to: Can We Build Indoor 'Vertical Farms' Near The World's Major Cities?

+ Plants consume CO2, near the place where the CO2 is produced. And some plants also reduce other airborne pollutants too (NOx etc I think).

Submission + - Debian 6.0 Released In Linux, FreeBSD Flavors (itworld.com) 1

Submitted by itwbennett on Saturday February 05, 2011 @09:24PM

itwbennett writes: After two years of work, the Debian Project has announced the release of Debian 6.0. 'There are many goodies in Debian 6.0 GNU/Linux, not the least of which is the new completely free-as-in-freedom Linux kernel, which no longer contains firmware modules that Debian developers found troublesome,' says blogger Brian Proffitt. And in addition to Debian GNU/Linux, Debian GNU/kFreeBSD is introduced as a technology preview. 'Debian GNU/kFreeBSD will port both a 32- and 64-bit PC version of the FreeBSD kernel into the Debian userspace, making them the first Debian release without a Linux kernel,' says Proffitt. 'The Debian Project is serious about the technology preview label, though: these FreeBSD-based versions will have limited advanced desktop features.' Installation images may be downloaded right now via bittorrent, jigdo, or HTTP.

Submission + - Google Censors 'Piracy Terms' From Instant Search (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by Chaonici on Wednesday January 26, 2011 @11:28PM

Chaonici writes: A few weeks ago, Google promised that, on behalf of the entertainment industries, they would begin filtering 'piracy related' terms from their search system. Now, TorrentFreak reports that Google has lived up to their promise, and certain keywords (such as 'bittorrent' and 'rapidshare') will no longer produce results with the Autocomplete or Instant Search features. The standard search feature, however, continues to display results as normal. Simon Morris of BitTorrent Inc., RapidShare, and Jamie King (the founder of Vodo) are critical of the change, pointing out the many legitimate uses of popular file-sharing technology.

Submission + - Domestic use of aerial drones by law enforcement (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by PatPending on Sunday January 23, 2011 @09:24PM

PatPending writes: In a prior Slashdot story, Honeywell To Sell Miami-Dade Police a Surveillance Drone, and this summary of Drones on The Home Front, drones are now used by the Texas Department of Public Safety; the Mesa County Sheriff's Office, Colorado; the Miami-Dade County, Florida, Police Department; and the Department of Homeland Security. But what about privacy concerns? "Drones raise the prospect of much more pervasive surveillance," said Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union's Speech, Privacy and Technology Project. "We are not against them, absolutely. They can be a valuable tool in certain kinds of operations. But what we don't want to see is their pervasive use to watch over the American people."

Submission + - Last Days For Central IP Address Pool (potaroo.net)

Submitted by jibjibjib on Friday January 21, 2011 @10:16PM

jibjibjib writes: According to projections by APNIC Chief Scientist Geoff Huston, IANA's central IPv4 address pool is expected to run out any day now, leaving the internet with a very limited remaining supply of addresses.

APNIC will probably request two /8s (33 million addresses) within the next few weeks. This will leave five /8s available, which will be immediately distributed to the five Regional Internet Registries in accordance with IANA policy.

It's expected that APNIC's own address pool will run low during 2011, making ISPs and businesses in the Asia-Pacific region the first to feel the effects of IPv4 exhaustion.

The long-term solution to IP address exhaustion is provided by IPv6, the next version of the Internet Protocol. IPv6 has been an internet standard for over a decade, but is still unsupported on many networks and makes up an almost negligible fraction of Internet traffic.

Unless ISPs dramatically accelerate the pace of IPv6 deployment, users in some regions will be stuck on IPv4-only connections while ISPs in other regions run out of public IPv4 addresses, leading to a fragmented Internet without the universal connectivity we've previously taken for granted.

Submission + - Euler's Partion Function Theory Finished (plos.org)

Submitted by universegeek on Thursday January 20, 2011 @04:45PM

universegeek writes: Mathematician Ken Ono, from Emory, has solved a 250 year old problem, how to exactly and explicitly generate partition numbers. Ono and colleagues were able to finally do this by realizing that the pattern of partition numbers is fractal. This pattern allowed them to find a finite, algebraic formula, which is like striking oil in mathematics.

Motorola Sticks To Guns On Locking Down Android 600

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday January 19, 2011 @09:37PM from the take-it-or-leave-it dept.

jeffmeden writes "'These aren't the droids you're looking for' proclaims Motorola, maker of the popular Android smartphones such as the Droid 2 and Droid X. At least, not if you have any intention of loading a customized operating system. According to Motorola's own YouTube channel, 'If you want to do custom roms, then buy elsewhere, we'll continue with our strategy that is working thanks.' The strategy they are referring to is a feature Motorola pioneered called 'e-fuse', the ability for the phone's CPU to stop working if it detects unauthorized software running."

ARM Powered OLPC XO-1.75 Laptop Is Faster Than X86 229

Posted by Soulskill on Monday January 17, 2011 @05:36PM from the hand-crank-technology dept.

Charbax writes "Not only is power consumption halved to less than two Watts and price of the motherboard reduced, the performance of the next generation OLPC Laptop is actually better for running full Fedora Linux compared to x86. Here's a video interviewing OLPC's CTO, Edward J. McNierney, where he explains how and why OLPC's world class engineers are making this change of CPU architecture. If OLPC XO-1 threatened Intel enough to start the netbook market and has reached two million poor kids in third-world countries thus far, XO-1.75 may help start the ARM-powered Linux laptop market. Do you think Fedora/Sugar will do, or should OLPC attract Chrome OS and Android solutions for education to get faster help from the big boys of Silicon Valley in bringing Linux software successfully to the next billion PC/laptop users?"

Graphic Map of Linux-2.6.36 25

Posted by timothy on Sunday January 16, 2011 @09:51PM from the under-the-hood dept.

conan.sh writes "The Interactive map of Linux Kernel was expanded and updated to the recent kernel linux-2.6.36. Now the map contains more than four hundred important source items (functions and structures) with links to source code and documentation."

Smartphone As Your Most Dangerous Possession 154

Posted by timothy on Sunday January 16, 2011 @11:40AM from the keep-that-thing-away-from-my-family dept.

Hugh Pickens writes "CNN reports that now that smartphones double as wallets and bank accounts — allowing users to manage their finances, transfer money, make payments, deposit checks and swipe their phones as credit cards — smartphones have become very lucrative scores for thieves and with 30% of phone subscribers owning iPhones, BlackBerrys and Droids, there are a lot of people at risk. Storing a password and keeping your phone locked is a good start, but it's not going to protect you from professional fraudsters. 'Don't think that having an initial password set on your phone can stop people from getting in there,' says Nikki Junker, a victim advisor at the Identity Theft Resource Center. 'It's a very low level of protection — you can even find 30-second videos on how to crack smartphone passwords on YouTube.'"

Goodbye Bifocals — Electronic Glasses Change Focus 166

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday January 12, 2011 @01:48PM from the see-what-i-see dept.

kkleiner writes "Move over Ben Franklin, we finally have a replacement for bifocals. Virginia-based Pixel Optics has developed a composite lens that can change the range of focus electronically. The emPower! glasses were created in cooperation with Panasonic Healthcare, and allow you to switch between long distance and short distance vision in a split second. Rather than having a lens divided into two sections, emPower! uses an LCD overlay that can change the focal length of the glasses via electric current. When the LCD layer is off, your lenses are good for intermediate/long distances. Turn the LCD layer on, and a section of the lens is suddenly magnifying close-up images – perfect for reading."

Sony Closing 18M CD/Month Plant 318

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday January 12, 2011 @11:42AM from the end-of-an-era dept.

coondoggie writes "Sony this week said it was shuttering one of its largest CD manufacturing plants — citing the impact of digital downloads and other economic issues. The plant, which has been in operation for some 50 years, first producing vinyl records, will close on March 31 and about 300 people will lose their jobs. The 500,000-square-foot warehouse began producing vinyl LPs in 1960 and moved to CD manufacturing in 1988. At its capacity, the plant was making 18 million CDs per month, according to its website."

Mind-Blowing Interfaces On Display At SIGGRAPH 2009 173

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday August 05, 2009 @11:45AM from the closing-in-on-that-holodeck dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Tech Review has a roundup of some cool, experimental new interfaces being shown at SIGGRAPH 2009, underway in New Orleans this week. They include an amazing 'touchable holograph' display, developed by a team in Japan, which uses an ultrasound device to simulate the sense of touch as the user grasps objects shown in 3D. The other ideas on display are Augmented Reality for Ordinary Toys, Hyper-Realistic Virtual Reality, 3D Teleconferencing and Scratchable Input Devices. If this is the future of computers, sign me up." The conference has also seen the release of OpenGL 3.2 by the Khronos Group.

Surface Plume On Betelgeuse Imaged 51

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday August 05, 2009 @09:10AM from the it-looks-hungry dept.

BJ_Covert_Action writes "Astronomy Now is running a piece regarding some new, exquisitely detailed pictures taken of Betelgeuse, a star in the constellation Orion. Betelgeuse is classified as a supergiant star, and its diameter is approximately 1,000 times that of the sun. Two teams of astronomers used ESO's 'Very large Telescope,' its NACO instruments, and an imaging technique known as 'Lucky Imaging' to take some of the most detailed pictures of Betelgeuse to date. The new pictures reveal a gas plume on Betelgeuse which extends from the surface of the star a distance greater than that between our sun and Neptune. The images also show several other 'boiling' spots on the surface of Betelgeuse, revealing the surface to be quite tumultuous. Currently, it is known that stars of Betelgeuse's size eject the equivalent mass of the Earth into space every year. This recent astronomy work will help researchers determine the mechanics behind such ejections." Update — 8/05 at 13:31 by SS: Here's the original press release from the European Southern Observatory, since the Astronomy Now page has slowed to a crawl.

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