xmunportelli - Slashdot User

World's First Molten-Salt Solar Plant Opens 316

Posted by timothy on Friday July 23, 2010 @01:49AM from the entire-mountain-is-covered-with-snow dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Sicily has just announced the opening of the world's first concentrated solar power (CSP) facility that uses molten salt as a heat collection medium. Since molten salt is able to reach very high temperatures (over 1000 degrees Fahrenheit) and can hold more heat than the synthetic oil used in other CSP plants, the plant is able to continue to produce electricity long after the sun has gone down. The Archimede plant has a capacity of 5 megawatts with a field of 30,000 square meters of mirrors and more than 3 miles of heat collecting piping for the molten salt. The cost for this initial plant was around 60 million Euros."

Open Source OCR That Makes Searchable PDFs 133

Posted by timothy on Thursday July 22, 2010 @03:21PM from the word-of-advice dept.

An anonymous reader writes "In my job all of our multifunction copiers scan to PDF but many of our users want and expect those PDFs to be text searchable. I looked around for software that would create text searchable pdfs but most are very expensive and I couldn't find any that were open source (free). I did find some open source packages like CuneiForm and Exactimage that could in theory do the job, but they were hard to install and difficult to set up and use over a network. Then I stumbled upon WatchOCR. This is a Live CD distro that can easily create a server on your network that provides an OCR service using watched folders. Now all my scanners scan to a watched folder, WatchOCR picks up those files and OCRs them, and then spits them out into another folder. It uses CuneiForm and ExactImage but it is all configured and ready to deploy. It can even be remotely managed via the Web interface. Hope this proves helpful to someone else who has this same situation."

Comment Not sure if this can be considered a joke... (Score 1) 631

by xmunportelli on Tuesday May 25, 2010 @04:05AM (#32333142) Attached to: Emergency Dispatcher Fired For Facebook Drug Joke

A Maltese 24 year-old author wrote what was considered to be a comment inciting hatred on a Facebook page against Pope Benedict XVI visiting Malta and was handed a €500 fine and suspended jail sentence. The debate right now in Malta is whether online media such as blogs and Facebook can be considered publications and as such, should posters be held accountable for what they write regardless of their intended audience.

Google Considers Taking Beta Tag Off Gmail 180

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday May 28, 2009 @09:25AM from the in-your-lifetime dept.

Barence writes "Google is considering removing the beta tag from Gmail — and other online services — a mere five years after it was first launched. Google has become somewhat synonymous with seemingly endless beta cycles. Many of the company's most famous services, including Gmail, Docs, and Calendar all still carry the beta tag. Google now admits the eternal beta cycles could be damaging consumer and business confidence in its online apps. 'It's a minor annoyance and something you'll see addressed in the not-too-distant future.'"

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