Tag: funny

German Laser Destroys Targets More Than 1Km Away

kkleiner writes “A German company has brought us one step closer to the kinds of shootouts only seen in Sci-Fi films. Düsseldorf-based Rheinmetall Defense recently tested a 50kW, high-energy laser at their proving ground facility in Switzerland. First, the system sliced through a 15mm- (~0.6 inches) thick steel girder from a kilometer away. Then, from a distance of two kilometers, it shot down a handful of drones as they nose-dived toward the surface at 50 meters per second.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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German Laser Destroys Targets More Than 1Km Away

Netflix Open-Sources “Janitor Monkey” AWS Cleanup Tool

Nerval’s Lobster writes “Netflix has released ‘Janitor Monkey,’ an open-source tool for killing old Amazon Web Services (AWS) instances that began life as an in-house product. While those hosting a private data center will have little use for this scrubbin’ simian, those enterprises with a public cloud can add Janitor Monkey to their administrative bag of tricks. The premise behind the tool is a simple one: while AWS allows for easy (and cheap) experimentation, it’s easy for even the most diligent IT pro to rack up unnecessary costs when they forget to shut off a particular instance. While Netflix’s Asgard tool—open-sourced in June, because this is how the company rolls—allows administrators to delete unused resources, Janitor Monkey takes things one step further by allowing those instances to be automatically found so that Asgard can clean them up. Over the past year, Janitor Monkey has deleted more than 5,000 resources running in the Netflix production and test environments, the company said. Janitor Monkey detects AWS instances, EBS volumes, EBS volume snapshots, and auto-scaling group.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Netflix Open-Sources “Janitor Monkey” AWS Cleanup Tool

Toyota To Show Off Autonomous Prototype Car At CES Show

coondoggie writes “Toyota is going to show off its autonomous car/accident avoidance technology at the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas nest week. The 2013 Lexus LS uses what the car company calls its Intelligent Transport System and is fitted with on-board radar, video cameras and sensors to monitor the road, surroundings, and the driver all with the goal of preventing accidents and avoiding problems.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Toyota To Show Off Autonomous Prototype Car At CES Show

Free Software NVIDIA Driver Now Supports 3D Acceleration With All GeForce GPUs

aloniv writes “The reverse-engineered free/libre and open source driver for NVIDIA cards Nouveau has reached another milestone. ‘The Nouveau driver in the current Linux 3.8 development branch has recently acquired everything that’s necessary to support the 3D acceleration features of any GeForce graphics hardware. Together with a current version of libdrm and the Nouveau 3D driver in Mesa 3D 9.0, this allows Linux applications to use 3D acceleration even with the most recent GeForce graphics cards.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Free Software NVIDIA Driver Now Supports 3D Acceleration With All GeForce GPUs

John McAfee Explains How He Milked Information From Belize’s Elite

paysonwelch points out John McAfee’s latest blog post, which “details the complex spy network that he used to tap information from the highest echelons of the Belizean government. He might consider a new career as a movie producer — this blog post is enthralling. Here is an excerpt: ‘I purchased 75 cheap laptop computers and, with trusted help, intalled invisible keystroke logging software on all of them — the kind that calls home (to me) and disgorges the text files. I began giving these away as presents to select people — government employees, police officers, Cabinet Minister’s assistants, girlfriends of powerful men, boyfriends of powerful women.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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John McAfee Explains How He Milked Information From Belize’s Elite

Open-Hardware Licensed Handheld Software-Defined Radio In the Works

An anonymous reader writes “Chris Testa recently presented at TAPR Digital Communications Conference and annouced his development work on a hand-held software defined radio. Running uClinux on an ARM Corex-M3 coupled to a Flash-based FPGA, it will be capable of receiving and transmitting from 100MHz to 1GHz. Designed to be low power, Chris has designed the radio primarily with the Amateur 2m and 70cm bands in mind. Currently in early prototyping stage, Chris intends to release the design under the TAPR Open Hardware License.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Open-Hardware Licensed Handheld Software-Defined Radio In the Works

Quad-Core Stick PC Runs Ubuntu

New submitter asola writes with this cool piece of small (ha!) news from Liliputing: “This Freescale i.MX6-quad based stick will officially support Ubuntu in addition to Android. This is a first among the newfangled category of ARM-based stick PCs. This Ubuntu may very well have the hw accelerated Gstreamer plugins created by Freescale for the i.MX6 so full HD video playing will be available under Ubuntu as well.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Quad-Core Stick PC Runs Ubuntu

Campaign To Remove Paper From Offices

An anonymous reader writes “A campaign started by HelloFax, Google, Expensify, and others has challenged businesses to get rid of physical paper from their office environment in 2013. According to the EPA, the average office worker uses about 10,000 sheets of paper each year, and the Paperless 2013 project wants to move all of those documents online. HelloFax CEO Joseph Walla said, ‘The digital tools that are available today blow what we had even five years ago out of the water. For the first time, it’s easy to sign, fax, and store documents without ever printing a piece of paper. It’s finally fast and simple to complete paperwork and expense reports, to manage accounting, pay bills and invoice others. The paperless office is here – we just need to use it.’ The companies involved all have a pretty obvious dog in this fight, but I can’t say I’d mind getting rid of the stacks of paper HR sends me.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Campaign To Remove Paper From Offices

Ubuntu Phone OS Unveiled

Today Canonical announced Ubuntu for phones. The new operating system is designed to provide easier access to apps and content than is provided by current mobile OSes. They do this by relying on swipe gestures from the edges of the phone’s screen. “Every edge of the phone is used, letting you move faster between apps, settings and content. A short swipe from the left edge of the screen is all it takes to reveal your favourite apps. Page either left or right from the home screen to see the content you use most. A full left-to-right swipe reveals a screen showing all your open apps, while a swipe from the right brings you instantly to the last app you were using. … A swipe from the right edge takes you back to the last app you were using; another swipe takes you back to the app you used before that. It’s natural to keep many apps open at once, which is why Ubuntu was designed for multi-tasking. … Swiping up from the bottom edge of the phone reveals app controls.” The Ubuntu phone OS is built to work well on low-powered devices. Canonical will be at CES next week working on raising interest from manufacturers. As far as software goes, they have this to say: “Web apps are first class citizens on Ubuntu, with APIs that provide deep integration into the interface. HTML5 apps written for other platforms can be adapted to Ubuntu with ease, and we’re targeting standard cross-platform web app development frameworks like PhoneGap to make Ubuntu ‘just work’ for apps that use them.” (In the attached video, the phone OS discussion starts at about 6:37.) Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Ubuntu Phone OS Unveiled

TSMC Preparing To Manufacturer A6X Chip As Apple Looks to Ditch Samsung

An anonymous reader writes with reports that TSMC is preparing to do a first test run of Apple’s A6X chipset currently manufactured by Samsung. The TSMC manufactured chips will feature a process shrink from 32nm to 28nm, and there’s a good chance Apple will grant them the contract for the next generation A7 chip. From SlashGear: “The test will kick off in Q1 2013, The China Times reports, with TSMC producing a new, 28nm version of the existing 32nm A6X that Samsung has been producing for the full-sized iPad 4th-gen; the smaller chip, which will likely be more power efficient as well, will debut in a new iPad 5th-gen and iPad mini 2.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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TSMC Preparing To Manufacturer A6X Chip As Apple Looks to Ditch Samsung