skyfaller - Slashdot User

Falcon 9 Explodes On Pad (npr.org) 338

Posted by msmash on Thursday September 01, 2016 @09:50AM from the sad-news dept.

Reader Mysticalfruit writes: NPR is reporting that a Falcon9 carrying the AMOS-6 satellite that was supposed to launch on Sat exploded during it's scheduled static fire. No injuries are reported. They're reporting that this was going to be the first reflown first stage.
The Verge adds:SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, meant to launch a satellite this weekend, exploded on the launch pad at Cape Canaveral, Florida this morning. The explosion occurred during the preparation for the static fire test of the rocket's engines, NASA told the Associated Press. The blast reportedly shook buildings "several miles away." The company confirmed to The Verge the loss of the Falcon 9 an hour later: "SpaceX can confirm that in preparation for today's static fire, there was an anomaly on the pad resulting in the loss of the vehicle and its payload. Per standard procedure, the pad was clear and there were no injuries."

Submission + - Princeton Researchers Announce Open Source 25-core Chip (princeton.edu) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 25, 2016 @01:33PM

An anonymous reader writes: Researchers at Princeton announced at Hot Chips this week their 25-core Piton Processor (http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S47/19/67G69/?section=topstories). The processor was designed specifically to increase data center efficiency with novel architecture features enabling over 8,000 of these processors to be connected together to build a system with over 200,000 cores. Fabricated on IBM’s 32nm process and with over 460 Million transistors, Piton is one of the largest and most complex academic processors every built. The Princeton team has opened their design up and released all of the chip source code, tests, and infrastructure as open source in the OpenPiton (http://www.openpiton.org) project enabling others to build scalable manycore processors with potentially thousands of cores.

Video Game Adaptation In the Works For A Song of Fire and Ice 183

Posted by Soulskill on Thursday May 14, 2009 @04:52AM from the goons-everywhere-rejoice dept.

On Wednesday, French game development studio Cyanide announced that they will be working with George R. R. Martin to bring his popular fantasy series, A Song of Fire and Ice, to the realm of video games. The press release implies that there will be more than one game, and the games will come out for PCs and "next-gen consoles." Apparently an HBO television series is in the works as well, in addition to board and card games related to the books.

Comment Re:What are the non-enforcement uses? (Score 1) 77

by Hrodgare on Thursday October 25, 2007 @06:11PM (#21121163) Attached to: Software To Evaluate Facial Expressions Developed

As mentioned a few comments below, affect/emotion detection can be useful for people with autism. Rana El Kaliouby has been working on a system that does exactly this in the Affective Computing group at the Media Lab. My understanding is that they have built it into an appliance which is robust to poor lighting situations, which is pretty impressive. There is also a great deal of interest in this in the human-robot interaction and human-computer interaction communities in general, so that robots and computer systems can respond more naturally to people in social situations.

Comment Re:They missed a statistic (Score 1) 718

by CComMack on Tuesday June 27, 2006 @11:28AM (#15613380) Attached to: Interstate Highway System: 50th Anniversary

Sure. GP was clearly wrong.

But I think it's pretty incontrovertible that, at 40,000 deaths/year, if terrorists were killing people as fast as the cars, the President would be impeached. As his predecessor would have, and his, all the way back to Ike.

Review - Apple's MacBook Pro 108

Posted by Roblimo on Friday June 23, 2006 @11:11AM from the living-proof-that-hardware-reviews-are-subjective dept.

Provataki writes "OSNews posted a 2-editor review of Apple's MacBook Pro laptop. The whole review feels like a long conversation between the two editors with agreements and disagreements on several issues and topics. They both agree that the laptop is too hot, but there is disagreement on the screen quality for example."

Comment Don't lock people in (Score 1) 896

by skyfaller on Wednesday December 15, 2004 @12:36PM (#11093982) Attached to: Open Source on Windows - Boon or Bane for Linux?

I say definitely let people port things if they want to, although if people are asking you to port your program but nobody's stepping up to do it, your resources may be better spent improving your program on Linux instead. Ultimately, the more FLOSS, the better.
1. Good, working open source software can "pave the way" and convince people to try Linux. Many people don't know that open source exists, or don't believe that it can work, and proving them wrong without forcing them to change their entire OS is a very good idea.
2. Let people convert to open source software in stages. First switch to a free browser, then to free e-mail/IM clients, office suites, etc... And then, if you're not relying on any proprietary programs in Windows any more, why shouldn't you switch to a completely free OS? That was my reasoning for switching to Linux.
3. If a program is cross-platform, it can draw developers from all of those platforms, and improve more quickly.
4. Open source software should be about choice... Microsoft and other evil proprietary vendors try to get customer lock-in. We should never lock people into our platform if we can avoid it. People should be free to use free software no matter what platform they're running, and that's how we can show that we're better than Microsoft. Let's not sink to their level.

Slashdot Top Deals