Tag: twitter

Mattel Unveils $300 3D Printer

Lucas123 writes: Perhaps in an attempt to get out ahead of the consumer 3D printing market, which has allowed popular toys such as Legos to be replicated, Mattel today announced it would begin shipping its $300 fused filament fabricator machine in October. Mattel’s ThingMaker at-home toy-making device, reinvents the company’s iconic 1960s toy by the same name. The new ThingMaker allows users to upload design files via Mattel’s proprietary Design App, which works on Android or iOS devices. The 3D printer can then print single-part toys or print hundreds of different parts to be assembled into toys using ball-and-socket joints. Mattel’s ThingMaker Design App is based on Autodesk’s Spark, an open 3D printing platform that provides extensible APIs for each stage of the 3D printing workflow. Because it’s based on an open architecture, the ThingMaker Design App also works with other 3D printers; it is available now and free to download for iOS and Android devices. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Mattel Unveils $300 3D Printer

New Shape-Shifting Polymer Holds 1,000 Times Its Own Mass – Watch Out Plastic Man!

University of Rochester researchers have announced the development of a new polymer, capable of supporting 1, 000 times its own mass. Polymers that can change shape when heated have been developed in the past, yet this new polymer exhibits the rare quality of becoming flexible when exposed to body heat. This property, which can be used to change the shape of a device, could make the substance useful in medical applications. When the new polymer is removed from the heat source (such as human body), the material immediately returns to its original configuration. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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New Shape-Shifting Polymer Holds 1,000 Times Its Own Mass – Watch Out Plastic Man!

Sci-Hub, a Site With Open and Pirated Scientific Papers

lpress writes: Sci-Hub is a Russian site that seeks to remove barriers to science by providing access to pirated copies of scientific papers. It was established in 2011 by Russian neuroscientist Alexandra Elbakyan, who could not afford papers she needed for her research and it now claims to have links to 48 million pirated and open papers. I tried it out and found some papers and not others, but it provides an alternative for researchers who cannot afford access to paid journals. After visiting this site, one cannot help thinking of the case of Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide as a result of prosecution for his attempt to free scientific literature. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Sci-Hub, a Site With Open and Pirated Scientific Papers

Hertz Is Pulling a Disney

New submitter wcrowe writes: Hertz is laying off over 200 IT employees, outsourcing the work to IBM India Private Limited, which has filed paperwork for H1-B visas to bring in replacements from overseas. This sounds pretty similar to what Disney did a year ago. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Hertz Is Pulling a Disney

LibreOffice 5.1 Officially Released

prisoninmate writes: After being in development for the last three months or so, LibreOffice 5.1 comes today to a desktop environment near you with some of the most attractive features you’ve ever seen in an open-source office suite software product, no matter the operating system used. The release highlights of LibreOffice 5.1 include a redesigned user interface for improved ease of use, better interoperability with OOXML files, support for reading and writing files on cloud servers, enhanced support for the ODF 1.2 file format, as well as additional Spreadsheet functions and features. Yesterday, even with the previous version, I was able to successfully use a moderately complex docx template without a hitch — the kind of thing that would have been a pipe-dream not too long ago. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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LibreOffice 5.1 Officially Released

World’s Largest Solar Power Plant To Supply Enough Energy For 1.1 Million People

Lucas123 writes: The world’s largest solar power plant is now live and will eventually provide 1.1 million people in Morocco with power and cut carbon emissions by 760, 000 tons a year. Phase 1 of the Noor concentrated solar power (CSP) plant went live last week, providing 140 megawatts (MW) of power to Morocco. Phases 2 and 3 will be completed by 2018 when the plant is expected to generate more than 500MW of power. The Noor plant, located in south-central Morocco, will cover 6, 178 acres and produce so much energy, that Morocco may eventually start exporting the clean energy to the European market. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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World’s Largest Solar Power Plant To Supply Enough Energy For 1.1 Million People

China Just Made a Major Breakthrough In Nuclear Fusion Research

New submitter TechnoidNash writes: China announced last week a major breakthrough in the realm of nuclear fusion research. The Chinese Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), was able to heat hydrogen gas to a temperature of near 50 million degrees Celsius for an unprecedented 102 seconds. While this is nowhere near the hottest temperature that has ever been achieved in nuclear fusion research (that distinction belongs to the Large Hadron Collider which reached 4 trillion degrees Celsius), it is the longest amount of time one has been maintained. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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China Just Made a Major Breakthrough In Nuclear Fusion Research

Bethesda To Unleash the Hounds of Hell On May 13th: Doom Release Date Confirmed

MojoKid writes: Bethesda and id Software are in the process rebooting the Doom franchise and it seems like it’s been in development for ages. When we last visited the upcoming Doom remake, Bethesda had posted a giblet-filled trailer which showed some pretty impressive gameplay visuals, killer hand-to-hand combat and plenty of head stomping. However, Bethesda just clued gamers in on something that Doom fans have been anticipating for years, an actual release date. Mark your calendars for May 13th, because that’s when Doom will be available for Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and of course, the PC platform. Bethesda also dropped a new campaign trailer for you to ogle. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Bethesda To Unleash the Hounds of Hell On May 13th: Doom Release Date Confirmed

The Performance of Ubuntu Linux Over the Past 10 Years

An anonymous reader writes: Tests were carried out at Phoronix of all Ubuntu Long-Term Support releases from the 6.06 “Dapper Drake” release to 16.04 “Xenial Xerus, ” looking at the long-term performance of (Ubuntu) Linux using a dual-socket AMD Opteron server. Their benchmarks of Ubuntu’s LTS releases over 10 years found that the Radeon graphics performance improved substantially, the disk performance was similar while taking into account the switch from EXT3 to EXT4, and that the CPU performance had overall improved for many workloads thanks to the continued evolution of the GCC compiler. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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The Performance of Ubuntu Linux Over the Past 10 Years

Ask Slashdot: Why Are Major Companies Exiting the Spam Filtering Business?

broswell writes: For years we used Postini for spam filtering. Google bought Postini in 2007, operated it for 5 years and then began shutting it down. Then we moved to MX Logic. McAfee bought MX Logic, and McAfee was purchased by Intel. Now Intel is shutting down the service. Neither company chose to raise prices, or spin off the division. Anyone want to speculate on the reasons? Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Ask Slashdot: Why Are Major Companies Exiting the Spam Filtering Business?