Month: March 2013

By Soulskill, Slashdot – March 01, 2013 at 05:06PM

An anonymous reader writes “Flash SSDs are non-volatile, right? So how could power failures screw with your data? Several ways, according to a ZDNet post that summarizes a paper (PDF) presented at last month’s FAST 13 conference. Researchers from Ohio State and HP Labs researchers tested 15 SSDs using an automated power fault injection testbed and found that 13 lost data. ‘Bit corruption hit 3 devices; 3 had shorn writes; 8 had serializability errors; one device lost 1/3 of its data; and 1 SSD bricked. The low-end hard drive had some unserializable writes, while the high-end drive had no power fault failures. The 2 SSDs that had no failures? Both were MLC 2012 model years with a mid-range ($1.17/GB) price.'”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

By John Biggs, TechCrunch – March 01, 2013 at 09:22AM

While I’m sure there’s some scientific reason for demonstrating how the quadrupedal Big Dog can pick up and throw cinder blocks across a workshop (“Ahem, urm, we’re showing how the mass of the brick has little or no direct effect on the quadruped’s center of gravity, allowing it to carry large objects in the field, ahrm.”), I think what we’re seeing here is the first example of a nascent new robotic sport, human tossing.

What’s really going on here are experiments involving using the legs of the robots to propel objects. “This sort of dynamic approach is routinely used by human athletes and is now improving the performance of robots,” writes Big Dog’s creators at Boston Dynamics. If they only knew.

Imagine a field full of Big Dogs and some of the finest convict athletes from the off-world colonies. Zarg fakes to the left but Big Dog lunges and grabs his suit, ripping off the helmet (and head) and throwing it across the end zone. Torgo grabs a cinder block to throw at Master Big Dog but two Minor Big Dogs grab it in mid-air and toss it back, crushing a group of spectators in the stands.

Naturally, the Big Dogs always win.

via Giz

By Thorin Klosowski, Lifehacker – March 01, 2013 at 09:00AM

If you have one of those stereos that was released in that awkward time between CDs and MP3 players, then it might be missing the now-standard auxiliary port for easy playback. Redditor Esplodies found themselves in this exact situation, and cleverly hacked together an auxiliary port for about $2.50 that works on some older CD players with a CD changer output.

This trick only works on CD players that don’t have an aux port, but it’s surprisingly easy to do. Esplodies used a CD-ROM audio cable and a resistor to plug into the rear CD changer port of the CD player. Then, they just wired that up to an auxiliary port, drilled a small hole in the front of the stereo, and that was it. It’ll only work on a few different models of stereos, but if yours doesn’t fit the bill, you can do it with a little solder, or go all out and add Bluetooth instead. Head over to Reddit for the full picture guide.

Saved myself $92.50 on an Aux port with a little DIY know how | Reddit via