JetLib News

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt: “Here are Photos/Pictures of my iPhone DSLR Prototype 1.0. This is my first attempt at putting together an iPhone DSLR. You might ask ‘Why pair an iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, or iPhone 4 with a DSLR lens?’ Why not!” Prototype or not, it’s a cool project.

Source: iPhone DSLR Prototype 1.0

Teppy writes “How’s this for a disruptive technology? Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer, network-based digital currency with no central bank, and no transaction fees. Using a proof-of-work concept, nodes burn CPU cycles searching for bundles of coins, broadcasting their findings to the network. Analysis of energy usage indicates that the market value of Bitcoins is already above the value of the energy needed to generate them, indicating healthy demand. The community is hopeful the currency will remain outside the reach of any government.” Here are the FAQ a paper describing Bitcoin in more technical detail (PDF), and the Wikipedia article. Note: a commercial service called BitCoin Ltd., in pre-alpha at bitcoin.com, bears no relation to the open source digital currency.

Source: Bitcoin Releases Version 0.3

An anonymous reader noted a report confirming the first ever exoplanet actually photographed from telescopes on earth. Every other exoplanet so far ‘observed’ has been done by measuring wobbles of stars pulled by planetary gravity. But this one is a photograph. And that’s just plain cool.

Source: First Direct Photo of Exoplanet Confirmed

Reader BWJones, who is a retinal scientist, sends in this detailed analysis of the iPhone 4′s “retinal display,” which includes photomicrographs of the display pixels of earlier generations of iPhone as well as the iPad. Well worth a read. “…as you can see from these images of the displays I captured under a microscope, these pixels are not square. Rather they are rectangular and while the short axis is 78m, the long axis on the iPhone 4 pixel is somewhere in the neighborhood of 102m. … While [an earlier analysis by] Dr. Soneira was partially correct with respect to the retina, Apple’s Retina Display adequately represents the resolution at which images fall upon our retina. … [I] find Apple’s claims stand up to what the human eye can perceive.”

Source: A Professional Perspective On Apple’s Retina Display

An anonymous reader noted a USC research project that is coming ever closer to bringing the classic Star Wars communication holograms from Tatooine to Earth. There’s nifty video and some high resolution pictures of Tie Fighters projected into 3-D. Still no clear way to project it from an astro mech droid, but I’m sure that’s coming.

Source: One Step Closer to Star Wars Holograms

Chinobi writes “Di Gao, an assistant professor at the Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh, has developed a method of separating oil from water within just seconds using a cotton cloth coated in a chemical polymer that makes it both hydrophilic (it bonds with the hydrogen molecules in water) and oleophobic (oil-repelling), making it absolutely perfect for blocking oil and letting water pass through. Gao tested his filter successfully on Gulf Oil water and oil and has an impressive video to demonstrate the results.” This is a laboratory demonstration; the technology hasn’t been tested at scale.

Source: Cloth Successfully Separates Oil From Gulf Water

Brian McCrary just bought a website to complain about a $90 speeding ticket he received from the Bluff City PD — the Bluff City Police Department site. The department let its domain expire and McCrary was quick to pick it up. From the article: “Brian McCrary found the perfect venue to gripe about a $90 speeding ticket when he went to the Bluff City Police Department’s website, saw that its domain name was about to expire, and bought it right out from under the city’s nose. Now that McCrary is the proud owner of the site, bluffcitypd.com, the Gray, Tenn., computer network designer has been using it to post links about speed cameras — like the one on U.S. Highway 11E that caught him — and how people don’t like them.”

Source: Anti-Speed Camera Activist Buys Police Department’s Web Domain

metasonix writes “While the rest of the industry has been babbling on about the iPad and imitations thereof, Qi Hardware is actually shipping a product that is completely open source and copyleft. Linux News reviews the Ben NanoNote (product page), a handheld computer apparently containing no proprietary technology. It uses a 366 MHz MIPS processor, 32MB RAM, 2 GB flash, a 320×240 pixel color display, and a Qwerty keyboard. No network built in, though it is claimed to accept SD-card WiFi or USB-Ethernet adapters. Included is a very simple Linux OS based on the OpenWrt distro installed in Linksys routers, with Busybox GUI. It’s apparently intended primarily for hardware and software hackers, not as a general-audience handheld. The price is right, though: $99.”

Source: New Handheld Computer Is 100% Open Source

scribblej writes “Many large companies use Microsoft’s Dynamics GP product for accounting, and many of these companies use it to store credit card numbers for billing customers. Turns out these numbers (and anything else in GP) are encrypted only by means of a simple substitution cipher. This includes the master system password, which can be easily selected and decrypted from the GP database by any user. Quoting: ‘[Y]ou DON’T HAVE TO GIVE ACCESS TO THE DYNAMICS DATABASE. What that means is if you create a base user in GP, that user can log into the SQL server and run a select statement on the table containing the “encrypted” GP System password. Not good.’”

Source: Microsoft Dynamics GP “Encrypted” Using Caesar Cipher

xt writes “The Boltzmann equation is old news. What’s news is that the 140-year-old equation has been solved, using mathematical techniques from the fields of partial differential equations and harmonic analysis, some as new as five years old. This solution provides a new understanding of the effects due to grazing collisions, when neighboring molecules just glance off one another rather than collide head on. We may not understand the theory, but we’ll sure love the applications!”

Source: Boltzmann Equation Solved, the New Way