The Daily Nerd (March 10th, 2014)
Table of Contents
The Daily Nerd (March 10th, 2014) #
Video Acceleration Takes The Backseat On Chrome For Linux
Due to notorious Linux graphics drivers, Google developers working on Chrome/Chromium aren’t looking to enable hardware video acceleration by default anytime soon. The problem ultimately comes down to poor Linux graphics drivers.
NASA Forgets How To Talk To ICE/ISEE-3 Spacecraft
The transmitters of the Deep Space Network, the hardware to send signals out to the fleet of NASA spacecraft in deep space, no longer includes the equipment needed to talk to ISEE-3. These old-fashioned transmitters were removed in 1999.’ Could new transmitters be built? Yes, but it would be at a price no one is willing to spend. ‘So ISEE-3 will pass by us, ready to talk with us, but in the 30 years since it departed Earth we’ve lost the ability to speak its language,’ concludes Lakdawalla. ‘I wonder if ham radio operators will be able to pick up its carrier signal — it’s meaningless, I guess, but it feels like an honorable thing to do, a kind of salute to the venerable ship as it passes by.
Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 makes it clear: we need to rethink black boxes
Your iPhone is more powerful than the evidence-collecting computers in the cockpit. Simple changes could mean faster answers for plane crashes
Why do we still rely on 1960s technology to rescue missing planes? In order to find and save flights like Malaysia Airlines’ Flight 370, we must send data out in real-time.
Indeed, after the disappearance of Flight 447, an exasperated French investigator held aloft a cylinder the size of a small flashlight and said “This is what we are trying to find…in the Atlantic.” In that case it was a sonar beacon intended to lead searchers to a wreck, not the actual flight recorder which is neither black nor a box but about the size of a carry-on duffel.