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Space

Submission + - Hubble and Spitzer Telescopes Find Most Distant Galaxy Yet (space.com)

Submitted by Penurious Penguin
Penurious Penguin writes: At a distance of 13.3 billion light-years from Earth and approximately 600 light-years wide, the MACS0647-JD is the most remote galaxy yet discovered. Combined application of the Hubble and Spitzer telescopes were able with the help of a natural "gravitational lens" (cluster of galaxies), to find what what would have otherwise been extremely unlikely. Space.com has an article on the subject along with a video locating the galaxy in the general direction of Ursa Major and Polaris.
BSD

Submission + - Copyright reform and FOSS licenses

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: With all the constant talk of copyright reform, people often think of music, books, and videos. Free software licenses rely on their copyright to enforce their license. What happens if the copyright term is limited to 14 years, and anything GPLed will become public domain after 14 years? Windows NT could be public domain. Unix could finally be free. What affect will copyright reform have on FOSS software?
Education

Submission + - Computer Science vs. Software Engineering 1

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Microsoft's promotion of Julie Larson-Green to lead all Windows software and hardware engineering in the wake of Steven Sinofsky's resignation is reopening the question of what is the difference between Computer Science and Software Engineering. According to their bios on Microsoft's website, Sinofsky has a master's degree in computer science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and an undergraduate degree with honors from Cornell University, while Larson-Green has a master's degree in software engineering from Seattle University and a bachelor's degree in business administration from Western Washington University. A comparison of the curricula at Sinofsky's and Larson-Green's alma maters shows there's a huge difference between UMass's MSCS program and Seattle U's MSE program. So, is one program inherently more compatible with Microsoft's new teamwork mantra?
Linux

Submission + - Valve's Big Picture Could Be A Linux Game Console (theverge.com) 1

Submitted by Penurious Penguin
Penurious Penguin writes: Via LXer, a hopeful article at The Verge persuasively suggests that through Valve, Linux could soon become a formidable contender in the gaming arena, capable of holding its own against such giants as Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and the Wii. With 50 million users, a growing Linux team, a caboodle of interesting experiments ("Steam Box" hardware baselines, etc.) and a strong conviction that more-open platforms are the way, Valve may actually see it through.
Data Storage

Submission + - Data storage highway robbery

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I just learnt that Salesforce charge $3000 per year for 1GB or extra data storage. That puts it in line with hardware storage costs from about 1993 (http://www.mkomo.com/cost-per-gigabyte).
We've all heard of telcos and ISPs charging ridiculous rates per MB when limits are reached — what's the most ridiculous rate that you've heard?
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft accuses webkit of breaking standards and becoming the next IE 6 (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Billly Gates
Billly Gates writes: In a bizaare, yet funny and ironic move, Microsoft warned web developers that using webkit stagnated open standards and innovation on the web. Microsoft is espcially concerned in the mobile market where many mobile sites only work with Android or IOS with -webkit specific extensions on its call to action in their Windows Phone Developer Blog. Their examples include W3C code such as radius-border, which are being written as -webkit-radius-border instead on websites. In the mobile market Webkit has a 90% marketshare, while website masters feel it is not worth the development effort to test against browsers such as IE. Microsoft's solution to the problem of course is to use IE 10 for standard compliancy and not use the proprietary (yet opensource) webkit. Is webkit in both Android, Chrome, and iOS really that proprietary is it all hot air from someone who fell from grace?
Politics

Submission + - GOP Brief Attacks Current Copyright Law (theamericanconservative.com)

Submitted by cervesaebraciator
cervesaebraciator writes: Regardless of how one feels about the GOP generally, it is always heartening to see current copyright and IP law questioned on a national stage. A Republican study committee, chaired by Ohio Representative Jim Jordan released a brief today entitled Three Myths about Copyright Law and Where to Start to Fix it . Among other things, the brief attacks current copyright law as hampering scientific inquiry, penalizing journalism, and retarding the potential of the internet to allow the dispersion of knowledge through e-readers. In the briefs words, "Current copyright law does not merely distort some markets – rather it destroys entire markets." Four potential policy solutions are proposed: statutory damage reform, expansion of fair use, punishing false copyright claims, and limiting copyright terms. There may yet be hope for a national debate on the current oppressive copyright system, if just a fool's hope.
IT

Submission + - US Justice Department sues eBay for anti-competitive hiring practices (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by McGruber
McGruber writes: The Associated Press (http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/justice-dept-sues-ebay-for-allegedly-agreeing-with-intuit-not-to-hire-each-others-employees/2012/11/16/4352fa4e-303a-11e2-af17-67abba0676e2_story.html) is reporting that the US Justice Department is suing eBay for allegedly agreeing with Intuit not to hire each other’s employees.

According to the article, "eBay’s agreement with Intuit hurt employees by lowering the salaries and benefits they might have received and deprived them of better job opportunities at the other company,” said acting Assistant Attorney General Joseph Wayland, who is in charge of the Justice Department’s antitrust division. The division “has consistently taken the position that these kinds of agreements are per se (on their face) unlawful under antitrust laws.”

Submission + - Book Review: Version Control with Git, 2nd Edition (oreilly.com)

Submitted by
kfogel
kfogel writes: "I'd like to submit a book review of "Version Control with Git" (2nd Edition, 2012, O'Reilly Media), by Jon Loeliger and Matthew McCullough. The review is mostly written, but http://slashdot.org/faq/submissions.shtml says to contact you (via this submissions form) for longer pieces like book reviews. So I am contacting you :-).

Please let me know if you'd consider running a review of this book. I'm happy to send the content of the review, of course; I'm just not sure what the best mechanism is, since it sounds like this form isn't it. Let me know.

Best,
-Karl Fogel (kfogel@red-bean.com)"

Submission + - 332 Months of Above Average Temperature in a Row (slate.com)

Submitted by NatasRevol
NatasRevol writes: If you're less than 28 years old, you've never experienced a colder than average month for the earth. When does correlation become causation? From grist.com

If you were born in or after April 1985, if you are right now 27 years old or younger, you have never lived through a month that was colder than average.

Submission + - Poll - Prepared for Retirement? 1

Submitted by careysb
careysb writes: Prepared for retirement?
I'm still in school
I'm still young, lots of partying to do
I have a college diploma but school loans to pay
I have my retirement accounts to take care of me
I have it invested in the market
I've received a large inheritance, so no worries
I have all my money in off-shore accounts
The government will take care of me
Are you kidding? On a McDonald's salary?
Power

Submission + - Old Electric-Car Batteries Put into Service for Home Energy Storage

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Josie Garthwaite writes that old electric car batteries degraded below acceptable performance levels for autos still have enough life to serve the grid for at least ten years with a prototype announced by GM and ABB lashing five Chevy Volt battery packs together in an array with a capacity of 10 kilowatt-hours — enough to provide electricity for three to five average houses for two hours. "In a car, you want immediate power, and you want a lot of it," says Alexandra Goodson. "We're discharging for two hours instead of immediately accelerating. It's not nearly as demanding on the system." Deployed on the grid, community energy storage devices could help utilities integrate highly variable renewables like solar and wind into the power supply, while absorbing spikes in demand from electric-car charging. "Wind, it's a nightmare for grid operators to manage," says Britta Gross, director of global energy systems and infrastructure commercialization for GM. "It's up, down, it doesn't blow for three days. It's very labor-intensive to manage." The batteries would allow for storage of power during inexpensive periods for use during expensive peak demand, or help make up for gaps in solar, wind or other renewable power generation. One final advantage of re-using electric car batteries is that the battery—the most expensive part of an electric car—remains an asset beyond its useful life in the vehicle. "If there is a market in stationary power for spent batteries, consumers could recognize this as an increased resale value at end of life, however small," says Kevin See."
Databases

Submission + - Cheap GPU Accelerated Database System Competes With Top TPC-H Scores (nvidia.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Alenka is an open source SQL-lite database system that leverages CUDA to offload all of the query processing to NVIDIA GPUs. Newly published results show that an $800 desktop system (with an NVIDIA GTX580, and 1 120GB SSD) outperforms the top10 ranked $55,000 HP server with 2 Quad Core (3Ghz) Xeons, 144GB of RAM, and 12 60GB SSDs running Microsoft SQL Server 2008 in one query, and offers comparable performance in another.

To achieve these results, the author (Anton) recently updated the code with a new version that includes a faster implementation of database JOIN. The code leverages the Thrust library for fast SORT, SELECT, and SET parallel algorithms. It also uses the CUDPP library to implement a parallel hash JOIN.

While the codebase is not a complete implementation of SQL, it can execute several queries from TPC-H (an industry standard data-warehousing benchmark). For Query 1 (SELECT, GROUP-BY) Alenka processes a 100GB dataset in 9.5 seconds, compared to 42.3 seconds on the HP system. For Query 3 (JOIN, GROUP-BY, SORT), Alenka takes 5.3 seconds, compared to 4.3 seconds for the HP system.

It will be interesting to see if Alenka can offer similar results for the entire TPC-H benchmark suite, or if other database implementations can be accelerated by GPUs.

The source code for the Alenka system is available on github.
IOS

Submission + - iOS 6 Streaming Bug Sends Data Usage Skyrocketing (hothardware.com)

Submitted by
MojoKid
MojoKid writes: "iOS 6, by all appearances, has a streaming problem. This is separate from the network issues that led Verizon to state that it wouldn't bill people for overages that were caused by spotty Wi-Fi connectivity. The issue has been detailed at PRX.org with information on how the team saw a huge spike in bandwidth usage after the release of iOS 6, and then carefully tested the behavior of devices and its own app to narrow the possible cause. In one case, the playback of a single 30MB episode caused the transfer of over 100MB of data. It is believed that the issue was solved with the release of iOS 6.0.1, but anecdotal evidence from readers points to continued incidents of high data usage, even after updating. If you own an iPhone 5 or upgraded to iOS 6 on an older device, it is strongly recommend to check your usage over the past two months, update to iOS 6.0.1, and girding up for a lengthy discussion with your carrier if it turns out your data use went through the roof."
Communications

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Any Ways to Send Private Messages that are Free from Intrusion? 3

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Are there any ways to exchange high-tech private messages that are secure from government intrusion? Recent news stories show that even powerful individuals are not immune to [sometimes warrantless] taps of their phone, SMS, email, or Dropbox-style messages. (Please don't say, "Yes there is a way, but if I told you I would have to kill you.")
Science

Submission + - Reading and calculating with your unconscious (medicalnewstoday.com)

Submitted by
lee1
lee1 writes: "Using special techniques that present information to one eye while hiding the information from the conscious mind (my masking it with more distracting imagery presented to the other eye), researchers have shown two new and very unexpected things: we can read and understand short sentences, and we can perform multi-step arithmetic problems, entirely unconsciously. The results of the reading and calculating are available to and influence the conscious mind, but we remain unaware of their existence. While we have known for some time that a great deal of sensory processing occurs below the surface and affects our deliberative behavior, it was widely believed until now that the subconscious was not able to actually do arithmetic or parse sentences."
NASA

Submission + - The downside of warp drives: Annihilating whole star systems when you arrive (extremetech.com)

Submitted by
MrSeb
MrSeb writes: "The dream of faster-than-light travel has been on the mind of humanity for generations. Until recently, though, it was restricted to the realm of pure science fiction. Theoretical mechanisms for warp drives have been posited by science, some of which actually jive quite nicely with what we know of physics. Of course, that doesn't mean they’re actually going to work, though. NASA researchers recently revisited the Alcubierre warp drive and concluded that its power requirements were not as impossible as once thought. However, a new analysis from the University of Sydney claims that using a warp drive of this design comes with a drawback. Specifically, it could cause cataclysmic explosions at your destination."
Microsoft

Submission + - German city says OpenOffice shortcomings are forcing it back to Microsoft (arnnet.com.au)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: "In the specific case of the use of OpenOffice, the hopes and expectations of the year 2007 are not fulfilled," the council wrote, adding that continuing use OpenOffice will lead to performance impairments and aggravation and frustration on the part of employees and external parties.

"Therefore, a new Microsoft Office license is essential for effective operations," they wrote. ...

"The divergence of the development community (LibreOffice on one hand Apache Office on the other) is crippling for the development for OpenOffice," the council wrote, adding that the development of Microsoft Office is far more stable. Looking at the options, a one-product strategy with Microsoft Office 2010 is the only viable one, according to the council.
Education

Submission + - Indian school textbook says meat-eaters lie and commit sex crimes (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by another random user
another random user writes: Meat-eaters "easily cheat, lie, forget promises and commit sex crimes", according to a controversial school textbook available in India.

New Healthway, a book on hygiene and health aimed at 11 and 12 year-olds, is printed by one of India's leading publishers.

"This is poisonous for children," Janaki Rajan of the Faculty of Education at Jamia Millia University in Delhi told the BBC. "The government has the power to take action, but they are washing their hands of it," she said.

"The strongest argument that meat is not essential food is the fact that the Creator of this Universe did not include meat in the original diet for Adam and Eve. He gave them fruits, nuts and vegetables," reads a chapter entitled Do We Need Flesh Food?

The chapter details the "benefits" of a vegetarian diet and goes on to list "some of the characteristics" found among non-vegetarians. "They easily cheat, tell lies, forget promises, they are dishonest and tell bad words, steal, fight and turn to violence and commit sex crimes," it says.

The chapter, full of factual inaccuracies, refers to Eskimos (Inuit) as "lazy, sluggish and short-lived", because they live on "a diet largely of meat". It adds: "The Arabs who helped in constructing the Suez Canal lived on wheat and dates and were superior to the beef-fed Englishmen engaged in the same work."

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