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+-   Electric Motorcycle Runs on Linux[->] on Saturday November 07, @10:04PM jrifkin

Submitted by jrifkin on Saturday November 07, @10:04PM
hardware
jrifkin writes "Finally, a motorcycle that runs on Linux."
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+-   The Pong Circuit, Commented for your Pleasure[->] on Friday November 06, @11:52PM

Submitted by on Friday November 06, @11:52PM
games
An anonymous reader writes "Some enterprising man has taken the schematics for Atari's classic game Pong and color-coded and commented them for all the budding engineers who couldn't follow the normal schematics. Interesting view for anyone who wants to see how the old game worked and maybe if they want to build their own or plug it into a simulator (64-core 8GHz liquid-nitrogen cooled computer required)."
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Comments: 1 +-   Ubiquiti RouterStation Challenge Winners[->] on Thursday November 05, @05:40PM Riskable

Submitted by Riskable on Thursday November 05, @05:40PM
money
Riskable writes "Remember that $200,000 Contest For a Better Open-WRT Wireless Router GUI? Today Ubiquiti posted the winning entries to their support wiki. The grand prize was a tie between PyCI (written by yours truly) and NETSHe with OpenNET as the runner up. Source code and firmware images for each entry are available for download on their respective wiki pages.

I'll be setting up a project page for PyCI (and l2sh) soon to make it a participatory open source product. Even if you don't have a RouterStation or don't care about OpenWRT there are numerous Python modules and tools inside of PyCI that could prove useful to other open source projects (e.g. iptables.py can read/interpret over 400 permutations of the iptables command). I'll also be checking the comments if anyone has any questions for me about PyCI or the contest in general.

BTW: I'd like to thank all the commenters in the original article that insinuated that the technical requirements were impossible and/or that making a GUI to configure such complex things is a waste of time. I read every one and I wouldn't have made it such an obsession otherwise! Also, thank you Slashdot for introducing me to the contest!"
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+-   Roomba Pac-Man[->] on Tuesday November 03, @03:34PM Anonymous Coward

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 03, @03:34PM
classicgames
An anonymous reader writes "The vacuum, long an instrument for chasing cats, has now been turned against its own. What better use for automatic home appliances than to have them chase each other in classic video game style? Videos and a detailed explanation about how three individuals turned their Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) management software into the backbone for Roomba Pac-Man are available on their site. Also available is the source code for the project, and a lengthy explanation of the capabilities of the UAS management software."
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+-   Progress on $555 Billion Sahara Solar Energy Belt[->] on Tuesday November 03, @12:53PM MikeChino

Submitted by MikeChino on Tuesday November 03, @12:53PM
earth
MikeChino writes "A big step has been made in what will be the world’s largest renewable energy project. While previously just a grand vision for the production of clean energy in the Saharan desert, the project now has a core group of backers and a signed agreement between 12 companies ready to move forward with the $555 billion solar energy belt. The DESERTEC Foundation vision is to install 100 GW of solar power throughout Northern Africa, with the goal of supplying 15% of Europe’s energy demand with clean renewable power."
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+-   Appeal for commuter GPS logs to aid electric cars[->] on Friday October 30, @12:35PM holy_calamity

Submitted by holy_calamity on Friday October 30, @12:35PM
hardware
holy_calamity writes "A team at Carnegie Mellon University have begun a project seeking to design a kit to cheaply convert second hand cars into cheap electric ones suitable for commuting, if little else. They hope to rely heavily on smart management software to extract as much efficiency as possible from regenerative breaking, and knowledge of terrain from GPS tracking. But they are hampered by a lack of public data on how commuters actually drive. Their solution is to appeal to GPS users to upload .gpx log files of their commute to the team's site. The data is plugged into a simulator that reveals how much cheaper an electric car could do your journey, and an anonymised public dataset will be created. A programming contest will award a production electric car to the coder who designs the best management algorithm using it."
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+-   Contest to hack Brazilian voting machines on Friday October 30, @05:47AM Anonymous Coward

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 30, @05:47AM
hardhack
An anonymous reader writes "Brazilian elections have gone electronic many years ago with very fast results but a few complaints from losers, of course. Next month 10 teams that accepted the challenge will have access to hardware and software for the time they asked for (from one hour to four days). Some will try to break the vote secrecy and some will try to throw in malicious code to change the entered votes without leaving traces. TFA (in portuguese) is here."
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+-   China to Build 600 MW Wind Farm in Texas on Thursday October 29, @09:56PM Hugh Pickens

Submitted by Hugh Pickens on Thursday October 29, @09:56PM
power
Hugh Pickens writes "The Wall Street Journal reports that Chinese banks will provide $1.5 billion to a consortium of Chinese and American companies to build a 600-megawatt wind farm in West Texas, using turbines made in China. “This wind farm project came about thanks to the openness of the United States for investments in the field of renewable energy,” says John S. Lin, chief operating officer of A-Power Energy Generation Systems, which is part of the consortium building the project. The wind farm will be built on 36,000 acres in West Texas, and will use 240 2.5-megawatt turbines providing enough power to meet the electrical needs of between 135,000 and 180,000 American homes. The wind farm will be the first instance of a Chinese manufacturer exporting wind turbines to the United States, says Yang Yazhou, vice mayor of the city of Shenyang, where the wind turbines will be manufactured. Cappy McGarr, managing partner of US Renewable Energy Group, a private-equity firm that is lead partner on the 600-megawatt development, says the partnership will seek tax credits and support from the federal stimulus package, which should amount to millions of dollars. McGarr says the project should create 2,800 jobs — of which 15% would be in the US and the rest in China, where Shenyang employs 800 people. The project a "win-win-win for everyone. We're two great countries and we need to work together," says McGarr. China aims to be the front runner in wind- and solar-power generation and Thomas Friedman writes that China's decision to go green "is the 21st-century equivalent of the Soviet Union's 1957 launch of Sputnik.""
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+-   USB 3.0 The Real Deal, SATA 6GB Not Yet[->] on Thursday October 29, @08:53PM MojoKid

Submitted by MojoKid on Thursday October 29, @08:53PM
hardware
MojoKid writes "HotHardware has posted a sneak peek at a new motherboard Asus has coming down the pipe with USB 3.0 and SATA 6G support. The Asus P7P55D-E Premium has a PLX PCI Express Gen 2 switch implementation that connects to NEC USB 3.0 and Marvell SATA 6G controller chips. With a USB 3.0 enabled external hard drive connected to a USB 2.0 port and then to the board's USB 3.0 port, there were some rather impressive gains to observe. When connected to a USB 3.0 port, the external hard drive was about 5 — 6x faster versus connecting over USB 2.0, with total throughput in excess of 130MB/sec. On the other hand, benchmarks with Seagate's new Barracuda XT SATA 6G drive show little performance difference but a burst rate that is off the charts. According to ATTO, there are slight overall performance benefits to be had connecting the drive to the SATA 6G controller, but the deltas were quite small; somewhere in the neighborhood of 5MB/s or so."
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+-   New improvements on the attacks on WPA/TKIP on Thursday October 29, @01:34PM olahau

Submitted by olahau on Thursday October 29, @01:34PM
security
olahau writes "Two weeks ago, improvements to the previously reported attack on WPA/TKIP, were presented at the NorSec Conference in Oslo, Norway. In their paper coined "An Improved Attack on TKIP", Finn Michael Halvorsen and Olav Haugen describes the improvements, which enables an attacker to inject larger maliciously crafted packets into a WPA/TKIP protected network, thus opening the probabilities for new and more sophisticated attacks against the well established wireless security protocol."
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+-   Intel pulls SSD firmware day after release[->] on Wednesday October 28, @01:01PM CWmike

Submitted by CWmike on Wednesday October 28, @01:01PM
storage
CWmike writes "Intel has pulled a firmware upgrade it released on Monday for its X25-M consumer solid-state drives after users complained that the software caused crashes. The company on Monday made available a software package called SSD Toolbox to monitor and manage the performance and health of X25-M SSDs on systems running Windows 7. The package included a firmware upgrade and software called SSD Optimizer that included diagnostic tools to help keep the Intel SSD running at high performance. "We have been contacted by users with issues with the 34-nanometer Intel SSD firmware upgrade and are investigating. We take all sightings and issues seriously and are working toward resolution. We have temporarily taken down the firmware link while we investigate," an Intel spokesman said in an e-mail. The spokesman declined to comment on when the company would issue updated firmware."
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+-   Latest Boston Dynamics robot is a biped[->] on Wednesday October 28, @12:31PM Beezlebub33

Submitted by Beezlebub33 on Wednesday October 28, @12:31PM
robot
Beezlebub33 writes "Boston Dynamics is probably best known for its BigDog (video). They have just release a video of their latest robot called PETMAN which is a bipedal robot, video here. It shows some of the same dynamics as BigDog, including reaction to perturbations (see video at 24 sec), though it's a push rather than a kick. Boston Dynamics says that the robot is for "testing chemical protection clothing". I'd like to know what it's really for."
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+-   ARM vs. Atom: Battle for the Next Digital Frontier[->] on Wednesday October 28, @10:10AM snydeq

Submitted by snydeq on Wednesday October 28, @10:10AM
intel
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Neil McAllister examines how the ongoing rise of netbooks, decline of desktops, and the smartphone explosion are reconfiguring the processor market, putting Intel's Atom processor on a clear collision course with ARM. And here, on the low end of computing, Intel may have finally met its match. Thanks to a unique licensing model, ARM will ship an estimated 90 chips per second this year, and the catalog of OSes and apps available for ARM has been growing for decades, including several complete Linux distributions such as Google's Android OS and Chrome OS when it ships. 'One thing ARM doesn't have, however, is Windows,' McAllister writes, something that could ultimately stymie ARM's plans to compete on the low end of the netbook market. And yet Intel's bet on Windows and its x86 compatibility appeal among developers could backfire, McAllister writes. In the end, it's all about performance. Thus far, Intel has yet to demonstrate a model with power characteristics comparable to those of the current generation of ARM chips, which are fast proving their ability to handle high-performance applications."
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+-   A Physics Rebel Shakes Up the Video Game World[->] on Tuesday October 27, @07:01PM waderoush

Submitted by waderoush on Tuesday October 27, @07:01PM
hardware
waderoush writes "Physicist Shahriar Afshar is famous as the designer of the 'Afshar Experiment,' a study first described in 2004 that called into question Neils Bohr's observation that it's impossible to observe light's wave-like properties and its particle-like properties at the same time. Not surprisingly, the idea met with widespread resistance in the physics community. While he waits for the controversy to settle down, Afshar himself is taking a detour into the video game world. He's now the president and CTO of Immerz, a Cambridge, MA-based startup building an 'acousto-haptic' interface that drapes over a gamer's shoulders and turns video game sound into (literally) chest-pounding vibrations. Xconomy was the first publication allowed to test the device, and has the full story behind Afshar's unusual journey and the company's hopes for enhancing PC and console gamers' experience of action/adventure/first-person-shooter titles."
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Comments: 1 +-   Toshiba's direct methanol fuel cell charger[->] on Tuesday October 27, @05:43PM angry tapir

Submitted by angry tapir on Tuesday October 27, @05:43PM
power
angry tapir writes "Toshiba will shortly begin shipping its first commercial direct methanol fuel cell (DMFC) charger, called the Dynario. The Dynario lets you charge gadgets like MP3 players, creating electricity from a reaction between methanol, water and air. Fuel cells can be replenished in a few seconds with a squirt of methanol and then are good to run for several hours. Their only by-products are a small amount of carbon dioxide and water vapor so they are suited to portable use. A refill bottle of methanol holds 50 milliliters so can refill the Dynario's internal 14ml tank just over 3.5 times. Toshiba estimates one refill is enough to charge a cell phone battery twice so a bottle should last about 7 charges."
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+-   Development Hardware Requirements on Tuesday October 27, @01:52PM Monkeedude1212

Submitted by Monkeedude1212 on Tuesday October 27, @01:52PM
programming
Monkeedude1212 writes "So after a handful of successful flash games our game development team has decided to kick it up a notch and produce something "Real" and "Possibly Profitable". We've settled on Valve's Source Engine not only because its free and open source, but it already has a distrubution method tied to it (Steam). The problem is that we are all running on some pretty old hardware, myself being on a laptop thats approaching 4 years old. If Any of you have ever tried to Recomplile Half Life 2 with 2 Gigs on Vista you'll know that it can take the better part of a day to finish. So its time for an upgrade.

Sadly, I am not a hardware junkie, nor do I know any, so I'm not 100% on exactly what's best to suit my needs for development. I will be running windows (Either XP or 7) and Visual Studio 2008. I had once worked on a Mac Pro, the 2x Quad Core with 32 gigs of Ram, and I found it to be a dream. So I want something comparable to that, but I want it cheaper. If I order parts from Tiger Direct I'm sure I could get a good rig going at a fraction of the price of buying one setup.

So I am opening it up to /. — Can it be done? The Price Range is anything below $3,300. Minor preference towards NVidia (but not necessary). Any suggestions on where else to order are also welcome."
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Comments: 1 +-   Intel adds TRIM and faster write speeds to SSDs[->] on Tuesday October 27, @12:05AM Vigile

Submitted by Vigile on Tuesday October 27, @12:05AM
storage
Vigile writes "Intel has released an update for existing solid state drives that should improve performance in quite a few circumstances. First, as promised by Intel upon their introduction, the "G2" 34nm flash X25-M is getting support for the TRIM command that enables the operating system and SSD to improve performance by keeping track of deleted flash blocks. This TRIM update will only be applied to the "G2" 34nm SSDs and½Â" users that bought the first Intel X25-Ms are out of luck. The other big news is a boost in write speeds on the X25-M G2 drives from 80 MB/s to 100 MB/s. There is one big caveat though — this speed boost ONLY applies to the 160GB model of the 34nm X25-M, not the 80GB model. There appears to be no technical reason for this differentiation as both drives use the same controller and flash memory. It's also interesting to note that Intel was able to "flip a switch" and boost write speeds on identical hardware: how much more headroom can they unlock on these SSDs?"
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Comments: 3 +-   Intel adds TRIM to SSDs, bumps write speeds[->] on Monday October 26, @10:24AM Vigile

Submitted by Vigile on Monday October 26, @10:24AM
storage
Vigile writes "Intel is releasing an update for some existing solid state drives that should improve performance in quite a few circumstances. First, as promised by Intel upon their introduction, the "G2" X25-M is getting support for the TRIM command that enables the operating system and SSD to improve performance by keeping track of deleted flash blocks. This TRIM update will only be applied to the "G2" 34nm SSDs — users that bought the first Intel X25-Ms are out of luck. The other big news is a boost in write speeds on the X25-M G2 drives — from 80 MB/s to 100 MB/s. There is one big caveat though — this speed boost ONLY applies to the 160GB model of the 34nm X25-M, not the 80GB model. There appears to be no technical reason for this differentiation as both drives use the same controller and flash memory but Intel obviously chose to force the market to lean towards the larger drive. It's also interesting to note that Intel was able to "flip a switch" and boost write speeds on identical hardware: how much more headroom can they unlock on these SSDs?"
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+-   Tilera to release 100-core processor[->] on Monday October 26, @12:49AM angry tapir

Submitted by angry tapir on Monday October 26, @12:49AM
hardware
angry tapir writes "Tilera has announced new general-purpose CPUs, including a 100-core chip. The two-year-old startup's Tile-GX series of chips are targeted at servers and appliances that execute Web-related functions such as indexing, Web search and video search. The Gx100 100-core chip will draw close to 55 watts of power at maximum performance."
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+-   Programming a "Haunted" Halloween Jack-o-Lantern on Sunday October 25, @06:59PM

Submitted by on Sunday October 25, @06:59PM
hardhack
An anonymous reader writes "NerdKits has just released a neat "haunted" Jack-O-Lantern video tutorial that glows when you reach your hand inside! The technology used for the sensor is the same as is used in laptop trackpads and smartphone touch screens but can be built with common materials: two pieces of aluminum foil, some paperclips, and a processor running C code at 14MHz. The sensor trips when a hand is nearby, and LEDs light up to surprise and scare the unsuspecting trick-or-treater. Download the source code and extend this idea for your home or office!"
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