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IOS

Shake-up at Apple: Forstall Out; iOS Executive Fired For Maps Debacle? 487

Posted by Soulskill from the should-have-called-it-artistic-license dept.
New submitter noh8rz10 writes "Apple's Scott Forstall, who grew iOS from its inception, is departing the company. Rumors say it's because of the Maps debacle, and problems with Siri as well. Jony Ive is taking a larger human interface role, which means he may kill the skeuomorphic interfaces he hates. John Browett, head of retail, is out as well; he never won the trust of the community. What does such a major shakeup say about Tim Cook's leadership?"
Businesses

Is Silicon Valley Morally Bankrupt and Toxic? 469

Posted by Soulskill from the only-in-the-nuclear-waste-district dept.
concealment sends this quote from a post about how the goals of many tech companies are at odds with what's good for consumers: "Since I've been out of the Silicon-Valley-centered tech industry, I've become increasingly convinced that it's morally bankrupt and essentially toxic to our society. Companies like Google and Facebook — in common with most public companies — have interests that are frequently in conflict with the well-being of — I was going to say their customers or their users, but I'll say 'people' in general, since it's wider than that. People who use their systems directly, people who don't — we're all affected by it, and although some of the outcomes are positive a disturbingly high number of them are negative: the erosion of privacy, of consumer rights, of the public domain and fair use, of meaningful connections between people and a sense of true community, of beauty and care taken in craftsmanship, of our very physical well-being. No amount of employee benefits or underfunded Google.org projects can counteract that. Over time, I've come to consider that this situation is irremediable, given our current capitalist system and all its inequalities. To fix it, we're going to need to work on social justice and rethinking how we live and work and relate to each other. Geek toys like self-driving cars and augmented reality sunglasses won't fix it. Social networks designed to identify you to corporations so they can sell you more stuff won't fix it. Better ad targeting or content matching algorithms definitely won't fix it."
Data Storage

Intel 335 Series SSD Equipped With 20-nm NAND 135

Posted by Soulskill from the that's-not-many-nanometers dept.
crookedvulture writes "The next generation of NAND has arrived. Intel's latest 335 Series SSD sports 20-nm flash chips that are 29% smaller than the previous, 25-nm generation. The NAND features a new planar cell structure with a floating, high-k/metal gate stack, a first for the flash industry. This cell structure purportedly helps the 20-nm NAND overcome cell-to-cell interference, allowing it to offer the same performance and reliability characteristics of the 25-nm stuff. The performance numbers back up that assertion, with the 335 Series matching other drives based on the same SandForce controller silicon. The 335 Series may end up costing less than the competition, though; Intel has set the suggested retail price at an aggressive $184 for the 240GB drive, which works out to just 77 cents per gigabyte."
Security

Want a Security Pro? Get Politically Incorrect and Learn Geek Culture 314

Posted by samzenpus from the fight-trolls-with-trolls dept.
coondoggie writes "While complaints can be heard far and wide that it's hard to find the right IT security experts to defend the nation's cyberspace, the real problem in hiring security professionals is the roadblocks put up by lawyers and human resources personnel and a complete lack of understanding of geek culture, says security consultant Winn Schwartau. Take Janet Napolitano, U.S. secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, who has said the country can't find the right people for network defense. The real problem is a misunderstanding of computer geeks, their personalities, habits and their backgrounds, said Schwartau today during his talk at the Hacker Halted information security conference."
Science

Brain Scans Show the Impact of Neglect On a Child's Brain Size 206

Posted by samzenpus from the cloth-mom-vs-wire-mom dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A shocking comparison of brain scans from two three-year-old children reveals new evidence of the remarkable impact a mother's love has on a child's brain development. The chilling images reveal that the left brain, which belongs to a normal 3-year-old, is significantly larger and contains fewer spots and dark 'fuzzy' areas than the right brain, which belongs to that of a 3-year-old who has suffered extreme neglect. Neurologists say that the latest images provide more evidence that the way children are treated in their early years is important not only for the child's emotional development, but also in determining the size of their brains. Experts say that the sizeable difference in the two brains is primarily caused by the difference in the way each child was treated by their mothers."
Science

Camera Technique Captures New View of Space & Time 75

Posted by samzenpus from the sll-at-one-time dept.
kkleiner writes "What if you could compress a video clip into a single image? That's what Jay Mark Johnson, an artist and visual effects director, has accomplished through the use of a special camera technique. He calls the images 'photographic timelines,' and his collected works offer quite a shift to conventional perception. Slices of photos are strung together in progression to make a single composite image of a sliver of space spread over an extended period of time."
Security

FBI Says They're Now Working 24/7 To Investigate Hackers and Network Attacks 74

Posted by samzenpus from the better-late-than-never dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is finally stepping up its game when it comes to hackers. Maybe it was Anonymous that did it or maybe it was statements from the US Secretary of Defense two weeks ago, but either way, the FBI is now hunting hackers 24/7." I'm happy that the FBI no longer has an investigation schedule when it comes to online crime, but I have to think that I'm not the only one who assumed they were doing this before.
News

26 Nuclear Power Plants In Hurricane Sandy's Path 392

Posted by samzenpus from the perfect-storm dept.
pigrabbitbear writes "Hurricane Sandy is about to ruin a bunch of people's Mondays. In New York City alone, the storm has already shut down public transportation, forced tens of thousands to relocate to higher ground and compelled even more office jockeys to work from home. (Okay, that last part might not be so bad, especially for the folks that don't actually have to work at all.) But if it knocks out power to any of the 26 nuclear power plants that lie directly in its path, the frankenstorm of the century will ruin Tuesday, too. Heck, a nuclear meltdown would be a much bigger problem."
Science

Ancient Tsunami Devastated Lake Geneva Shoreline 41

Posted by samzenpus from the five-feet-high-and-rising dept.
ananyo writes "In ad 563, more than a century after the Romans gave up control of what is now Geneva, Switzerland, a deadly tsunami on Lake Geneva poured over the city walls. Originating from a rock fall where the River Rhône enters at the opposite end of the lake to Geneva, the tsunami destroyed surrounding villages, people and livestock, according to two known historical accounts. Researchers now report the first geological evidence from the lake to support these ancient accounts. The findings suggest that the region would be wise to evaluate the risk today, with more than one million inhabitants living on the lake's shores, including 200,000 people in Geneva alone. The researchers cannot say exactly what created the tsunami (nothing suggests it was an earthquake), but they propose that the falling rock caused an accumulated heap of sediment in the Rhône delta to collapse. This would have launched the wave and carried the sediment from the delta to the center of the lake, where the researchers detected it. The researchers used the geological information gathered in the study to recreate how the wave might have behaved. Their model predicted that a 13-meter-high wave would have hit Lausanne 15 minutes after the rock fall, with an 8-meter-high wave reaching Geneva after 70 minutes."
Piracy

RIAA Failed To Disclose Expert's Lobbying History To "Six-Strikes" Partners 90

Posted by samzenpus from the home-team-experts dept.
concealment writes "A month before the controversial 'six strikes' anti-piracy plan goes live in the U.S., the responsible Center of Copyright Information (CCI) is dealing with a small crisis. As it turns out the RIAA failed to mention to its partners that the 'impartial and independent' technology expert they retained previously lobbied for the music industry group. In a response to the controversy, CCI is now considering whether it should hire another expert to evaluate the anti-piracy monitoring technology."
Hardware

Ask Slashdot: What To Do With Over 500 Used DIMMs? 291

Posted by samzenpus from the dimm-house dept.
An anonymous reader writes "My company is pursuing a RAM upgrade, resulting in 500+ used DDR3 4GB DIMMs. What could this be used for? Are there any cheap products on the market which can take a huge number of DIMMs? Is there a worthy cause we should donate the gear to?"
Android

Google Announces New Nexus Smartphone and Tablets 297

Posted by samzenpus from the brand-new dept.
TheBoat writes In with news that not even a hurricane can keep the Google product announcements away. "Surprise, surprise. It looks like Hurricane Sandy can't hold Google down, as the company has just gone ahead and unveiled the Nexus 4 smartphone and Nexus 10 tablet even though its press conference was canceled. Nexus 4 specs include a 4.7-inch True HD IPS Plus display with 1,280 x 768-pixel resolution, an 8-megapixel camera, a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro processor, 2GB of RAM and Android 4.2. The phone starts at a shockingly affordable $299 without any contract or subsidies, and it will launch in the United States on November 3rd. The Samsung-built Nexus 10 tablet sports a 2,560 x 1,600-pixel display with a pixel density of 300 PPI, a dual-core 1.7GHz Samsung Exynos chipset, 2GB of RAM, NFC and a 5-megapixel camera. Pricing starts at $399 with 16GB of storage and tops out at $499 for the 32GB model, and both will launch on November 3rd alongside the Nexus 4. Both devices will be available through the Google Play store."
Microsoft

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer: Forget the iPad, Surface Is the Tablet People Want 403

Posted by samzenpus from the flame-on dept.
zacharye writes "Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer undoubtedly knows that Apple has sold more than 100 million iPad tablets at this point, but according to the outspoken executive, that's not the tablet people really want. While speaking with CNBC, Ballmer said no company has built a tablet he believes customers want. 'You can go through the products from all those guys and none of them has a product that you can really use. Not Apple. Not Google. Not Amazon. Nobody has a product that lets you work and play that can be your tablet and your PC. Not at any price point,' he says."
Supercomputing

Titan Supercomputer Debuts for Open Scientific Research 87

Posted by samzenpus from the greased-lightning dept.
hypnosec writes "The Oak Ridge National Laboratory has unveiled a new supercomputer – Titan, which it claims is the world's most powerful supercomputer, capable of 20 petaflops of performance. The Cray XK7 supercomputer contains a total of 18,688 nodes and each node is based on a 16-core AMD Opteron 6274 processor and a Nvidia Tesla K20 Graphical Processing Unit (GPU). To be used for researching climate change and other data-intensive tasks, the supercomputer is equipped with more than 700 terabytes of memory."
Games

Valve: Linux Better Than Windows 8 for Gaming 768

Posted by samzenpus from the top-of-the-heap dept.
dartttt writes "In a presentation at Ubuntu Developer Summit currently going on in Denmark, Drew Bliss from Valve said that Linux is more viable than Windows 8 for gaming. Windows 8 ships with its own app store and it is not an open platform anymore and Linux has everything they need: good OpenGL, pulseaudio, OpenAL and input support."

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