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Comments: 93 +-   Oracle Drops Sun's Commitment To Accessibility on Monday February 08, @09:43PM

Posted by kdawson on Monday February 08, @09:43PM
from the don't-need-it-until-you-need-it dept.
gnome
An anonymous reader writes "What I feared has come true: after buying Sun, Oracle had a look at its accessibility group and made big cuts in it by firing the most important contributors to the Linux accessibility tools. This is a very sad day for disabled people, as it means we do not really have full-time developers any more." The coverage in OSTATIC has a few more details, including the caution: "This just shows that all too few companies are sponsoring a11y work. If one company laying off a couple of developers spells trouble for the project, then there were problems before that happened" (thanks to reader dave c-b for pointing this out).
Read More... 93 comments story

Comments: 35 +-   Virtualizing a Supercomputer on Monday February 08, @07:49PM

Posted by kdawson on Monday February 08, @07:49PM
from the slicing-up-the-pie dept.
os
bridges writes "The V3VEE project has announced the release of version 1.2 of the Palacios virtual machine monitor following the successful testing of Palacios on 4096 nodes of the Sandia Red Storm supercomputer, the 17th-fastest in the world. The added overhead of virtualization is often a show-stopper, but the researchers observed less than 5% overhead for two real, communication-intensive applications running in a virtual machine on Red Storm. Palacios 1.2 supports virtualization of both desktop x86 hardware and Cray XT supercomputers using either AMD SVM or Intel VT hardware virtualization extensions, and is an active open source OS research platform supporting projects at multiple institutions. Palacios is being jointly developed by researchers at Northwestern University, the University of New Mexico, and Sandia National Labs." The ACM's writeup has more details of the work at Sandia.
Read More... 35 comments story

Comments: 57 +-   Study Says OOXML Unsuitable For Norwegian Government on Monday February 08, @06:57PM

Posted by kdawson on Monday February 08, @06:57PM
from the party-like-it's-1997 dept.
government
angry tapir writes "Microsoft's XML-based office document format, OOXML, does not meet the requirements for governmental use, according to a new report published by the Norwegian Agency for Public Management and eGovernment (DIFI). The agency wants to start a debate over the report as part of its work on standards in the Norwegian government. (As we discussed a week ago, Denmark has already decided to choose ODF over OOXML)"
Read More... 57 comments story

Comments: 57 +-   Virus-Detecting "Lab On a Chip" Developed At BYU on Monday February 08, @06:05PM

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday February 08, @06:05PM
from the size-does-matter dept.
biotech
natharward writes "A new development in nano-level diagnostic tests has been applied as a lab on a chip that successfully screened viruses entirely by their size. The chip's traps are size-specific, which means even tiny concentrations of viruses or other particles won't escape detection. For medicine, this development is promising for future lab diagnostics that could detect viruses before symptoms kick in and damage begins, well ahead of when traditional lab tests are able to catch them. Aaron Hawkins, the BYU professor leading the work, says his team is now gearing up to make chips with multiple, progressively smaller slots, so that a single sample can be used to screen for particles of varying sizes. One could fairly simply determine which proteins or viruses are present based on which walls have particles stacked against them. After this is developed, Hawkins says, 'If we decided to make these things in high volume, I think within a year it could be ready.'"
Read More... 57 comments story

Comments: 135 +-   Google Shooting For Smartphone Universal Translator on Monday February 08, @05:12PM

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday February 08, @05:12PM
from the ford-why-is-this-fish-in-my-ear dept.
communications
nikki4 writes to tell us that in giving some major improvement tweaks to its existing voice recognition tool for the Smartphone, Google is aiming for new translator software that will provide instant translation of foreign languages. "The company has already created an automatic system for translating text on computers, which is being honed by scanning millions of multi-lingual websites and documents. So far it covers 52 languages, adding Haitian Creole last week. Google also has a voice recognition system that enables phone users to conduct web searches by speaking commands into their phones rather than typing them in. Now it is working on combining the two technologies to produce software capable of understanding a caller’s voice and translating it into a synthetic equivalent in a foreign language."
Read More... 135 comments story

Comments: 162 +-   New Material Transforms Car Bodies Into Batteries on Monday February 08, @04:31PM

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday February 08, @04:31PM
from the shocking-discoveries dept.
power
MikeChino writes "As battery manufacturers race to produce more efficient lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles, some scientists are looking to make the cars themselves a power source. Researchers are currently developing a new auto body material that can store and release electrical energy like a battery. Once perfected, scientists hope the substance will replace standard car bodies, making vehicles up to 15 percent lighter and significantly extending the range of electric vehicles."
Read More... 162 comments story

Comments: 530 +-   Verizon Blocking 4chan on Monday February 08, @03:49PM

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday February 08, @03:49PM
from the and-nothing-of-value-was-lost dept.
internet
An anonymous reader writes "According to 4chan's owner and administrator 'moot,' Verizon has explicitly blocked all traffic on their network from boards.4chan.org, where all of 4chan's boards are located. Moot explains that only traffic to and from port 80 is being dropped and they were able to confirm that it was intentional. 4chan's downtime for Verizon users has been in effect for at least 72 hours since Saturday, February 7."
Read More... 530 comments story

Comments: 277 +-   A Reflection On Sun Executive Payouts For Failure on Monday February 08, @03:05PM

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday February 08, @03:05PM
from the lavishly-rewarded-for-failure dept.
sun
With the Oracle/Sun merger finally completing at the end of January, one former Sun worker has taken the time to reflect a bit on the extravagant compensation and golden parachutes that the former executives at Sun are receiving for failing at their jobs. "I think it's fair to say that, for all the miscues that eventually led to its demise, the company created many products and technologies of value along the way, enough so that Oracle thought it was worth it to acquire them and try to keep them going. However, I think that it's equally fair to conclude that, after years of running losses, including about $2 billion in fiscal 2009, so that a buyout was necessary to avoid looming bankruptcy, Sun's executives did nothing to deserve lavish rewards, by any conceivable meaning of the word 'deserve.' But what actually happened is by now a familiar story. [...] And here's a prediction that I feel quite certain of: if, against expectations and my hopes, Ellison drops the ball and things start going south for Oracle, it's the employees who will suffer for it, and he'll be doing just fine."
Read More... 277 comments story

Comments: 109 +-   Turns Out You Actually Can Be Bored To Death on Monday February 08, @02:22PM

Posted by samzenpus on Monday February 08, @02:22PM
from the at-least-it's-cooler-than-this dept.
idle
A study conducted by researchers at University College London shows that boredom can kill you. The researchers found that people who reported feeling a great deal of boredom were 37 per cent more likely to have died by the end of the study. Martin Shipley, who co-wrote the report said, "The findings on heart disease show there was sufficient evidence to say there is a link with boredom."
View Picture... 109 comments story

Comments: 40 +-   Cacti 0.8 Network Monitoring on Monday February 08, @01:40PM

Posted by samzenpus on Monday February 08, @01:40PM
from the read-all-about-it dept.
books
GJdeBoer writes "The book is aimed at people who are managing a network and would like to get insight into the performance of that network. It covers the installation and configuration of the Cacti application. In the preface the book states that it's not necessary to be a Linux Guru to use the book and that exactly is the case. The book builds up your knowledge about Cacti and the necessary steps to configure it for your network, and it teaches you about Net-SNMP and RRDTool, the building blocks of Cacti." Read on for the rest of GJdeBoer's review.
View Picture... 40 comments story
 
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