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Microsoft

Submission + - Moore's Law is becoming irrelevant, says ARM's boss (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by holy_calamity
holy_calamity writes: PCs will inevitably shift over to ARM-based chips because efficiency now matters more than gains in raw performance, the CEO of chip designer ARM tells MIT Technology Review. He also claims that the greater competition in the ARM-chip will cause more companies to follow Microsoft in building PCs without x86, as it did with the Surface tablet, for cost reasons.
Republicans

Submission + - Project Orca: How an IT disaster destroyed Republicans get-out-the-vote effort (breitbart.com) 4

Submitted by cheesecake23
cheesecake23 writes: Many talking heads have attributed Obama's success to an unmatched "ground game". Now, inside reports from campaign volunteers suggest that Project Orca, a republican tech-based voter monitoring effort with 37000 volunteers in swing states, turned out to be an epic failure due to dismal IT. Problems ranged from state-wide incorrect PINs, to misleading and lately distributed information packets to volunteers, a server outage and missing redirection of secure URLs.
Security

Submission + - 35% Of Americans Would Wear "Electric Shock Bracelet" in Order to Fly (infowars.com) 1

Submitted by dryriver
dryriver writes: Infowars.com reports: 'A survey commissioned by Infowars and conducted by Harris Interactive has found that 35% of American adults would be willing to wear an electric shock bracelet in order to fly, another startling example of how many Americans are willing to give up their rights in the name of safety. The idea of mandating travelers to wear an electric shock bracelet sounds like something out of a dystopian sci-fi movie, but the proposal was seriously considered and very nearly implemented by the Department of Homeland Security back in 2008. As the linked Youtube video highlights, not only would the bracelets have been used to deliver incapacitating electric shocks to suspected terrorists, they would also have contained tracking technology to spy on the wearer.
Android

Submission + - Why You Can't Build Your Own Smarthphone: Patents (itworld.com)

Submitted by
jfruh
jfruh writes: "In the mid-00s, more and more people started learning about Android, a Linux-based smartphone OS. Open source advocates in particular thought they could be seeing the mobile equivalent of Linux — something you could download, tinker with, and sell. Today, though, the Android market is dominated by Google and the usual suspects in the handset business. The reason nobody's been able to launch an Android empire from the garage is fairly straightforward: the average smartphone is covered by over 250,000 patents."
Iphone

Submission + - An American-Made iPhone Won't Happen Now, Or Ever (vice.com)

Submitted by
pigrabbitbear
pigrabbitbear writes: "A hot iPhone rumor made its way around the Internet on Thursday. It wasn’t an Apple rumor, though. It was a Foxconn rumor. And it wasn’t about a worker riot or suicide pacts, it was a rumor that a new Foxconn plant in the U.S. would lead to an American-made iPhone.

According to a Digitimes report, Foxconn is planning on opening up plants in the United States. Foxconn makes a lot of stuff, but as it’s one of Apple primary manufacturing partners, lots of people jumped to the salacious conclusion that a U.S.-based Foxconn factory could finally produce an American-made iPhone.

Foxconn denied the Digitimes report today. A company spokeswoman told CNET that the company actually “already has multiple facilities based in the U.S.” but that “there are no current plans to expand our operations there at this time.” Foxconn doesn’t make iPhones in the existing factories, and they don’t plan to."
Microsoft

Submission + - Windows 8 Fights Off 85% Of Malware Detected In The Past Six Months

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Now that Windows 8 is on sale and has already been purchased by millions, expect very close scrutiny of Microsoft’s latest and greatest security features. 0-day vulnerabilities are already being claimed, but what about the malware that’s already out there? When tested against the top threats, Windows 8 is immune to 85 percent of them, and gets infected by 15 percent, according to tests run by BitDefender.
Science

Submission + - Scientists Study "Frictional Ageing" - Standing Objects Becoming Harder to Move (bbc.com) 1

Submitted by dryriver
dryriver writes: The BBC reports: 'Have you ever had the impression that heavy items of furniture start to take root – that after years standing in the same place, they’re harder to slide to a new position? Do your best wine glasses, after standing many months unused in the cabinet, seem slightly stuck to the shelf? Has the fine sand in the kids’ play tray set into a lump?

If so, you’re not just imagining it. The friction between two surfaces in contact with each other does slowly increase over time. But why? A paper by two materials scientists at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, USA, suggests that the surfaces could actually be slowly chemically bonding together.

There are already several other explanations for this so-called “frictional ageing” effect. One is simply that two surfaces get squashed closer together. But a curious thing about friction is that the frictional force opposing sliding doesn’t depend on the area of the contacting surfaces. You’d expect the opposite to be the case: more contact should create more friction. But in fact two surfaces in apparent contact are mostly not touching at all, because little bumps and irregularities, called asperities, prop them apart. That’s true even for apparently smooth surfaces like glass, which are still rough at the microscopic scale. It’s only the contacts between these asperities that cause friction.'
Censorship

Submission + - China Blocks Google.com, Gmail, Maps and more during 18th party Congress (ibtimes.co.uk)

Submitted by
DavidGilbert99
DavidGilbert99 writes: "In an extraordinary move, the Chinese authorities have blocked access to Google.com, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Docs, and many more Google services as the Communist Party of China holds the 18th Party Congress.

The blocking of these sites was reported by Chinese web monitoring site GreatFire.org, which said "Never before have so many people been affected by a decision to block a website."

The latest move in a long line of disputes between the Chinese government and Google, it is unclear yet whether this denial will be temporary (like a similar one in 2010) or permanent."
Facebook

Submission + - Facebook's Corona: When Hadoop MapReduce Wasn't Enough (slashdot.org)

Submitted by
Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: "Facebook’s engineers face a considerable challenge when it comes to managing the tidal wave of data flowing through the company’s infrastructure. Its data warehouse, which handles over half a petabyte of information each day, has expanded some 2500x in the past four years—and that growth isn’t going to end anytime soon.

Until early 2011, those engineers relied on a MapReduce implementation from Apache Hadoop as the foundation of Facebook’s data infrastructure. Still, despite Hadoop MapReduce’s ability to handle large datasets, Facebook’s scheduling framework (in which a large number of task trackers that handle duties assigned by a job tracker) began to reach its limits. So Facebook’s engineers went to the whiteboard and designed a new scheduling framework named “Corona.”"
IBM

Submission + - With All Due Respect: The Patent System's Not Broken (wired.com)

Submitted by TurinX
TurinX writes: Unsurprisingly, IBM's Chief Patent Counsel thinks the patent system’s not broken. "Patent disputes like this are a natural characteristic of a vigorously competitive industry.And they’re nothing new: Similar skirmishes have historically occurred in areas as diverse as sewing machines, winged flight, agriculture, and telegraph technology. Each marked the emergence of incredible technological advances, and each generated similar outcries about the patent system. We are actually witnessing fewer patent suits per patent issued today than the historical average."
Intel

Submission + - Intel's Details Eight-Core Poulson Itanium Processor (hothardware.com) 1

Submitted by
MojoKid
MojoKid writes: "Intel has unveiled details of their new Itanium 9500 family, codenamed Poulson, and the new CPU appears to be the most significant refresh Intel has ever done to the Itanium architecture. Moving from 65nm to 32nm technology substantially reduces power consumption and increases clock speeds, but Intel has also overhauled virtually every aspect of the CPU. Poulson can issue 11 instructions per cycle compared to the previous generation Intanium's six. It adds execution units and re-balances those units to favor server workloads over HPC and workstation capabilities. Its multi-threading capabilities have been overhauled and it uses faster QPI links between CPU cores. The L3 cache design has also changed. Previous Itanium 9300 processors had a dedicated L3 cache for each core. Poulson, in contrast, has a unified L3 that's attached to all its cores by a common ring bus. All told, the new architecture is claimed to offer more than twice the performance of the previous generation Itanium."
The Internet

Submission + - The Information Age: North Korean Style (thediplomat.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: It seems cell phones and the internet have come to the reclusive nation of North Korea — albeit in a manor that you might not expect. North Korea now sports over 1 million cell phones, although calls are not allowed outside of the country, text messages come daily from North Korean authorities sporting government propaganda. The internet is not the global internet of Twitter and Facebook, but a government crafted intranet that is restricted to just a tiny percentage of the population. The intranet is restricted to elites in North Korea with good standing. The intranet uses message boards, chat functions, and state sponsored messages; its use has also been encouraged among universities, technical professionals and scientists, and others to exchange info. An even smaller fraction can access the outside internet. All of this seems to be an effort to control the information revolution without loosing authority.
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft demos English-to-Chinese translator that keeps your voice and accent (extremetech.com)

Submitted by
MrSeb
MrSeb writes: "At an event in China, Microsoft Research chief Rick Rashid has demonstrated a real-time English-to-Mandarin speech-to-speech translation engine. Not only is the translation very accurate, but the software also preserves the user’s accent and intonation. We’re not just talking about a digitized, robotic translator here — this is firmly within the realms of Doctor Who or Star Trek universal translation. There is, of course, a lot of technological wizardry occurring behind the scenes. For a start, the software needs to be trained — both with a few hours of native, spoken Chinese, and an hour of Rick Rashid’s spoken English. From this, the software essentially breaks your speech down into the smallest components (phonemes), and then mushes them together with the Chinese equivalent, creating a big map of English to Mandarin sounds. Then, during the actual on-stage presentation, the software converts his speech into text, his text into Mandarin text, and then the Rashid/Chinese mash-up created during the training process is used to turn that text into spoken words. The end result definitely has a strong hint of digitized, robotic Microsoft Sam, but it’s surprising just how much of Rashid’s accent, timbre, and intonation is preserved."
Power

Submission + - Germany exports more power than ever despite phasing out nuclear enegery (google.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The german magazine "Der Spiegel" writes, that "the current export from Germany reached a record high this year — despite nuclear phase. Reason is the boom in green energy." Especially in the Netherlands power-plants are shut down because "electricity imported from Germany is cheaper." Is Germany an example of forward looking energy policy after all?
Your Rights Online

Submission + - Staff emails are not owned by firms, UK judge rules (computerworlduk.com)

Submitted by Qedward
Qedward writes: A high court judge has ruled that companies do not have a general claim of ownership of the content contained in staff emails.

The decision creates a potential legal minefield for the terms of staff contracts and an administrative nightmare for IT teams running email servers, back up and storage.

The judge ruled businesses do not have an "enforceable proprietary claim" to staff email content unless that content can be considered to be confidential information belonging to a business, unless business copyright applies to the content, or unless the business has a contractual right of ownership over the content.

Ruling in the case involving Fairstar Heavy Transport and its former chief executive, Justice Edwards-Stewart said: "I can find no practical basis for holding that there should be property in the content of an email, even if I thought that it was otherwise open to me to do so.

"To the extent that people require protection against the misuse of information contained in emails, in my judgment satisfactory protection is provided under English law either by the equitable jurisdiction to which I have referred in relation to confidential information (or by contract, where there is one) or, where applicable, the law of copyright.

"There are no compelling practical reasons that support the existence of a proprietary right — indeed, practical considerations militate against it."

Justice Edwards-Stuart added it was "quite impractical and unrealistic" to determine that ownership of the content of emails either belongs exclusively to the creator or the recipient of an email.
Apple

Submission + - Judge to review whether foreman in Apple v. Samsung hid info (cnet.com)

Submitted by thomst
thomst writes: Cnet's Greg Sandoval is reporting that Lucy Koh the Federal judge in the Apple v. Samsung patent infringement case is reviewing whether jury foreman Velvin Hogan failed to disclose his own patent suit v. Seagate during the jury selection process. Samsung, which lost the suit filed by Apple has complained that Hogan's failure to disclose his own status as a former patent case plaintiff constituted misconduct serious enough to invalidate the jury's verdict in the case.
The Military

Submission + - Bin Laden Unit Seal Team Six Punished Over Video Game Consulting (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by arisvega
arisvega writes: Seven US Navy Seals have been disciplined for revealing secrets during work as paid consultants on a video game, officials say.

They received reprimand letters and had half of their pay docked for two months for work on Medal of Honor: Warfighter.

The active-duty troops reportedly include one member of the team that killed Osama Bin Laden in 2011.

They were charged with violation of orders, misuse of command gear, dereliction of duty and disclosure of classified material.

The seven troops worked for two days during the spring and summer on the recently released video game, according to CBS News.

The game's maker has boasted that real commandos, both on active duty and retired, were involved with the process of designing the game to make it as realistic as possible.
Power

Submission + - Pee-Powered Generator Unveiled at Maker Faire Africa (paritynews.com) 1

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: Four Nigerian girls aged between 14 and 15 have unveiled their creation – a urine-powered generator that is capable of generating six hours of electricity using a liter of pee. Showcased at the fourth annual Maker Faire Africa in Lagos, Nigeria, the generator is an eco-friendly power source that generates electricity by separating hydrogen present in the excreted bodily fluids with an electrolytic cell. The design is more or less crude as of now and if enough attention and funding are made available, chances are that this pee-powered generator may very well be available at your local hardware store.

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