ElOttoGrande - Slashdot User

Outlining a World Where Software Makers Are Liable For Flaws 508

Posted by timothy on Thursday September 29, 2011 @05:39PM from the mattress-has-a-pea-beneath dept.

CowboyRobot writes with this piece at the ACM Queue, in which "Poul-Henning Kamp makes the argument for software liability laws. 'We have to do something that actually works, as opposed to accepting a security circus in the form of virus or malware scanners and other mathematically proven insufficient and inefficient efforts. We are approaching the point where people and organizations are falling back to pen and paper for keeping important secrets, because they no longer trust their computers to keep them safe.'"

Mercury Turns Out To Be a Weird Little World 90

Posted by timothy on Thursday September 29, 2011 @04:52PM from the it's-certainly-mercurial dept.

sighted writes "The robotic spacecraft MESSENGER, now orbiting the first planet, has found new findings odd features on its surface, including unexplained, blueish 'hollows' that may be actively forming today. The findings will be published this week in Science. One scientist said, 'The conventional wisdom was that Mercury is just like the Moon. But from its vantage point in orbit, MESSENGER is showing us that Mercury is radically different from the Moon in just about every way we can measure.'" As you might expect, National Geographic has beautiful imagery to go along with the story.

Transformers Special Edition Chevy Camaro Unveiled 299

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday July 23, 2009 @03:28AM from the nerds-roll-out dept.

roelbj writes "Automotive stories are few and far between on Slashdot, but today's news from Chevrolet might just make a few readers' mouths water at the chance to own their own Bumblebee. Today at Comic-Con, General Motors officially announced the 2010 Chevy Camaro Transformers Special Edition. The $995 appearance package can be applied to LT (V6) and SS-trim Camaros in Rally Yellow with or without the optional RS package."

Small, High-Resolution LCD Monitors? 370

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday July 08, 2009 @07:55PM from the making-the-best-use-of-space dept.

An anonymous reader writes "I'm a veteran user of an old 17" Dell Trinitron CRT monitor. I run it at 1400x1050 with an 80Hz refresh rate — about as high as it goes before it'll go out of the monitor's scan range. More recently I've been looking to finally upgrade to an LCD monitor but found that, for the most part, every 17" monitor on the market runs natively at 1280x1024, as does every 19" monitor — I have to go for a 20" to go higher. Now yes, I know I'm complaining about just 120 pixels horizontal and 26 pixels vertical, but my laptop's 15" display runs natively at 1400x1050. Is there any standalone monitor on the market that'll natively do higher than 1280x1024 without killing my desk space?"

45-Year-Old Modem Used To Surf the Web 622

Posted by timothy on Thursday May 28, 2009 @02:33PM from the cool-wooden-case dept.

EdIII writes with this awesome snippet from Hack a Day: "'[phreakmonkey] got his hands on a great piece of old tech. It's a 1964 Livermore Data Systems Model A Acoustic Coupler Modem. He recieved it in 1989 and recently decided to see if it would actually work. It took some digging to find a proper D25 adapter and even then the original serial adapter wasn't working because the oscillator depends on the serial voltage. He dials in and connects at 300baud. Then logs into a remote system and fires up lynx to load Wikipedia. Lucky for [phreakmonkey] they managed to decide on a modulation standard in 1962. It's still amazing to see this machine working 45 years later.' Although impractical for surfing the Internet today, there is something truly cool about getting a 45-year old modem to work with modern technology. The question I have, is what is the oldest working piece of equipment fellow Slashdotters have out there? I'm afraid as far back as I can go is a Number Nine Imagine 128 Series 2 Graphics card on a server still in use at my house which only puts me at about 14 years."

Comment Re:YouTube will eventually die. (Score 1) 146

by ElOttoGrande on Monday April 10, 2006 @10:35AM (#15098794) Attached to: Top Video Sharing Sites Reviewed

>People like me who make their own videos hate YouTube because it recompresses the videos into FLV format at an extremely low bit rate.

Right on. It would be really nice if they offered better quality downloadable versions of the videos in addition to the quick streaming Flash/Shockwave/whatever crap. That's one reason i frequent archive.org's video collection moreso than anywhere else. If you first want to quickly see if something is any good you can download/stream heavily compressed realmedia or mpeg4. If you decide you like it (and maybe want to even add it to your media center or burn a disc) they have mpeg1 (vcd quality) and even mpeg2 (dvd quality) versions available of most things.

For another example take a look at Systm, the online technology show. They offer their episodes in H.264 Quicktime, Theora, Windows Media, XViD and even available over bit torrent to take the strain off their servers. IMHO, this is the kind of online programming that will endure. IMHO, the flash stuff is best suited for previews and short clips that are mildy amusing.

Maybe Youtube just wants to save on bandwidth, but for sites that are serious about delivering video content they should really step it up a notch. We're not on 56k modems with 640x480 15" CRT displays anymore.

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