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AMD

Submission + - AMD Launches Radeon HD 7790, with New "Bonaire XT" GPU Core (hothardware.com)

Submitted by
MojoKid
MojoKid writes: "AMD unveiled a new mainstream graphics card this week, featuring a new GPU core. AMD's Radeon HD 7790 is a midrange graphics card designed to fill the gap between the Radeon HD 7770 and HD 7850, versus NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 650 Ti. The new GPU features more stream processors and texture units than the 7750 and 7770, double the geometry performance per clock and is clocked at 1GHz. Codenamed “Bonaire XT," this graphics processor is comprised of 2.08 billion transistors and is manufactured on TSMC’s 28nm process node, so performance-per-watt is more efficient as well. In the benchmarks, versus NVIDIA's current offerings, the Radeon HD 7790 typically offers higher performance than the GeForce GTX 650 Ti. Take one step up in NVIDIA's stack though, and the higher-priced GeForce GTX 660 offers significantly higher performance overall."

Feed + - Google News Sci Tech: West Virginia May Ban Google Glass-ing While Driving - All Things Digital (google.com)

From feed by feedfeeder

Daily Mail
West Virginia May Ban Google Glass-ing While Driving
All Things Digital
West Virginia legislators proposed a bill on Friday aimed at Google Glass that would ban using a wearable computer with a head-mounted display while driving a car. What's ironic is Google is building the device to try to distract people less than smartphones ...
West Virginia Introduces Legislation To Ban Google-Glassing-And-DrivingDrJays.com Live
Don't drive on glass! Lawmakers want to ban wearing Google Glass while on the ... Daily Mail

all 7 news articles

Education

Submission + - Vietnamese HS Students Excelling at CS (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A Google engineer visiting Vietnam discovered a large portion of Vietnamese high school students might be able to pass a Google interview. According to TFA and his blog students start learning computing as early as grade 2. According to the blogger and another senior engineer, about half of the students in an 11th grade class he visited would be able to make through their interview process. The blogger also mentioned US school boards blocking computer science education. The link he posted backing up his claim went to a Maryland Public Schools website describing No Child Left Behind technicalities. According to the link, computer science is not considered a core subject. While the blogger provided no substantial evidence of US school boards blocking computer science education, he claimed that students at Galileo Academy had difficulty with the HTML image tag. According to the school's wikipedia page, by California standards, Galileo seems to be one of the state's better secondary schools.
Google

Submission + - A Safer Harbor in Veoh's Shadow: Expanded DMCA Still Has Limits (techcrunch.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Last week, in a blow to the content industry, the Ninth Circuit granted Veoh a pyrrhic victory against Universal Music Group and clarified the scope of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s safe harbor provisions for online service providers. By adopting a position taken by the Second Circuit in Viacom v. YouTube , the decision harmonized the law in two intellectually influential jurisdictions and set the standard in New York and California, national hubs for content creation and technological innovation. Going forward, tech startups will have more room to innovate while facing decreased risk of crippling financial liability. An article by two IP lawyers published today in TechCrunch simplifies and explains the scope of safe harbor protection in light of these rulings:

Generally, these cases show that a platform that leaves content uploads to the discretion of its users, performs processing specifically related to the display of and access to that content, promptly abides by DMCA takedown requests, and does not close its eyes to specifically infringing works can probably take comfort from Section 512(c). . . .

That being said, a service provider is not allowed to simply sit back and wait for a takedown notice if it is aware of specifically infringing material. Some emails presented in the YouTube case suggested that the YouTube founders may have been aware that infringing material on the site yet elected to wait for a takedown notice before removing the material. This was one of the reasons the YouTube case was sent back to the trial court for further proceedings, whereas Veoh had obtained a summary judgment victory [the lesson here as always: bad evidence can rarely be covered up with legal doctrine].

As the article points out, however, there are still limits to the scope of DMCA protection: the Ninth Circuit just decided that even under this new standard, isoHunt could be saved by the safe harbor.
The Military

Submission + - VA Promises to Eliminate Huge Disability Case Backlog with Paperless Office

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Jared Serbu report that the Department of Veterans Affairs says it is determined to eliminate the backlog of nearly 630,000 disability claims and says the number will be down to zero by 2015, even though the current backlog includes 30,000 more cases than it did a year ago. "There are many people, including myself, who are losing patience as we continue to hear the same excuses from VA about increased workload and increased complexity of claims," says Rep. Jeff Miller, the chairman of the Veterans Affairs Committee. Members of Congress have zeroed in on figures that appear to show that despite an influx of new claims adjudication personnel, the number of cases handled per full-time equivalent staff member is declining. "The data I have says that in 1997, we were doing 136 claims per field employee. Today that number is 73," says Rep. Kevin McCarthy. The VA's Allison Hickey says the VA is now taking major steps it's never taken before to speed up the claims process and that technology will be a major contributor to changing the trajectory of the backlog. VA is currently in the process of deploying its Veterans Benefits Management System to its field offices throughout the country.that will allow all new claims be processed electronically. "[Veterans] can, today, go online and submit a claim in an interface that's a lot like TurboTax," says Hickey. "They can upload their own medical evidence, and it goes directly into our paperless IT system." In addition the Pentagon has agreed for the first time to provide VA with a verified, complete package of medical records when a service member is discharged from one of the military services. "They're certifying to me that they have all the service member's medical evidence in that one record so that I'm not doing what I'm doing now, which is exhaustively going out and searching for records that we don't own and never owned in the beginning.""
Games

Submission + - Video Game Industry Starting to Feel Heat on Gun Massacres

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In the 2003 film 'Daredevil', Ben Affleck's character says 'I'm not the bad guy here' twice — first as a statement, then as a question. While much of the scrutiny following the lone gunman-perpetrated massacres at Aurora, CO and Newtown, CT has fallen on the National Rifle Association and its lobbying efforts against gun control, the shooters in both of the aforementioned incidents seemed to have been encouraged (to say the least) by violence in movies and video games. The New York Daily News' Mike Lupica reported last week that investigators of the Newtown case found a huge spreadsheet in the Lanza home where 20-year old Adam Lanza had methodically charted hundreds of past gun massacres, including the number of people killed and the make and model of weapons used. A Connecticut policeman told Lupica 'it sounded like a doctoral thesis, that was the quality of the research', and added, '[Mass killers such as Lanza] don’t believe this was just a spreadsheet. They believe it was a score sheet. This was the work of a video gamer'. In response, the Entertainment Software Association and other lobbyists representing the video game industry have ramped up their Washington lobbying efforts. While still tiny in dollar terms next to the NRA's warchest, this effort seemed to help derail a proposal to fund a Justice Department study of the effects of video games on gun violence, offered as an amendment on the gun control bill by a Republican senator. A spokesman summarized the ESA's position: 'Extensive research has already been conducted and found no connection between media and real-life violence'.
The Internet

Submission + - Carna, a benign Internet census botnet

Submitted by
lpress
lpress writes: "All botnets are evil, right? Not Carna. It crawled the Internet ethically without doing harm and gathered a ton of interesting data. For example, Carna counted pingable IP addresses, those behind firewalls and those with reverse DNS records, for a total of 1.3 IP addresses in use. The anonymous author has also posted a description of the Carna methodology and results. There are also maps and dynamic graphics and all the data is available for download."
Programming

Submission + - SpaceX: Lessons Learned Developing Software for Space Vehicles (lwn.net)

Submitted by
jrepin
jrepin writes: "On day two of the 2013 Embedded Linux Conference, Robert Rose of SpaceX spoke about the "Lessons Learned Developing Software for Space Vehicles". In his talk, he discussed how SpaceX develops its Linux-based software for a wide variety of tasks needed to put spacecraft into orbit—and eventually beyond. Linux runs everywhere at SpaceX, he said, on everything from desktops to spacecraft."
KDE

Submission + - Too Perfect a Mirror (jefferai.org)

Submitted by Carewolf
Carewolf writes: Jeff Mitchell writes on his blog about what almost became "The Great KDE Disaster Of 2013". It all started as simple update of the root git server and ended up with a corrupt git repository automatically mirrored to every mirror and deleting every copy of most KDE repositories. It ends by discussing what the problem is with git --mirror and how you can avoid similar problems in the future.
Linux

Submission + - Matthew Garrett Gives Tips to Survive Bricked UEFI Samsung Laptops (paritynews.com)

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: UEFI guru Matthew Garrett who cleared the Linux kernel in Samsung laptop bricking issues has come to rescue beleaguered users by offering a survival guide enabling them to avoid similar issues in the future. According to Garrett, storage space constraints in UEFI storage variables is the reason Samsung laptops end up bricking themselves. Garrett said that if the storage space utilized by the UEFI firmware is more than 50 per cent full the laptop will refuse to start and end up being bricked. To prevent this from happening he has provided a Kernel patch that would ensure that Linux does not fill up more than 50 per cent of UEFI firmware's storage space.
Robotics

Submission + - Drone swarm creates Star Trek logo in London Sky (suasnews.com)

Submitted by
garymortimer
garymortimer writes: "As a harbinger for the Paramount film “Star Trek – Into Darkness”, starting in May in Europe’s cinemas, last night a swarm of 30 mini-helicopters equipped with the LED lights drew the Star Trek logo into the skies over London. The choreography for the show was developed by Ars Electronica Futurelab from Linz (Austria). Quadrocopter maker Ascending Technologies GmbH from Munich (Germany) provided the aircrafts."
Linux

Submission + - Longest running Linux distribution Slackware switching to the MariaDB database (slackware.com)

Submitted by
Gerardo Zamudio
Gerardo Zamudio writes: "The big news here is the removal of MySQL in favor of MariaDB. This shouldn't really be a surprise on any level. The poll on LQ showed a large majority of our users were in favor of the change. It's my belief that the MariaDB Foundation will do a better job with the code, be more responsive to security concerns, and be more willing to work with the open source community. And while I don't think there is currently any issue with MySQL's licensing of the community edition for commercial uses, several threads on LQ showed that there is confusion about this, whereas with MariaDB the freedom to use the software is quite clear. Thanks are due to Heinz Wiesinger for his work on transitioning the build script, testing, and getting us all behind this move. He's been working with MariaDB (and their developers) for several years now. Vincent Batts also had a hand in the early discussions here — he met Daniel Bartholomew of MariaDB on a train last year and got a copy of the source to play with to pass the time on the journey (ah, the miracle of thumbdrives :), and was impressed with not only MariaDB itself, but also with the welcome that Slackware was getting. We expect they'll be responsive to any concerns we have. In the vast majority of situations, MariaDB is entirely compatible with existing MySQL databases and will drop right in with no changes required. There's an article available outlining the areas in which MariaDB differs from MySQL that I'd recommend reading:
https://kb.askmonty.org/v/mariadb-versus-mysql-compatibility/
Thanks to the MariaDB Foundation! We look forward to working with you.

For more information about MariaDB, visit their website: http://mariadb.org/"
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - Two Outside Bids for Dell Threaten Founder's Buyout Plan

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Seven weeks ago, Dell announced a definitive agreement to be taken private by a group led by founder and CEO Michael Dell and the private equity firm Silver Lake Partners, assisted by a $2 billion loan from Microsoft and debt financing from a group of big banks. The deal was valued at $24.4 billion ($13.65 per share of Dell common stock), but allowed for a 45-day "go shop" period for alternative bids to be submitted to a special committee of Dell's board. Not all large shareholders were happy with the price, and early this month billionaire investor Carl Icahn threatened to tie up the buyout in court unless a large special dividend was paid to shareholders — without showing interest in buying the company himself. More recently, the private equity firm Blackstone Group jumped into the fray, and by Friday night's deadline both Blackstone and Icahn had submitted bids for Dell exceeding the original $13.65 per share agreement. Blackstone is said to be interested in installing Oracle's Mark Hurd as CEO, replacing Michael Dell. As Hurd was fired as Hewlett Packard's CEO in 2010 for alleged sexual misconduct involving an outside consultant named Jodie Fisher, he might have difficulty landing another CEO job at a publicly traded company; the Dell position could be an intriguing fit for both sides.
Government

Submission + - Lawmaker seeks 'virtual Congress' with telecommuting plan (thehill.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Rep. Steve Pearce (R-N.M.) wants to create a "virtual Congress," where lawmakers would leverage videoconferencing and other remote work technology to conduct their daily duties in Washington from their home districts.

Under a resolution Pearce introduced on Thursday, lawmakers would be able to hold hearings, debate and vote on legislation virtually from their district offices.

The big loser would be the DC area and K Street in particular. The change would also be a double-edged sword for security.
Bitcoin

Submission + - Canadian man to sell home for Bitcoin virtual currency (www.cbc.ca)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: "It's not often that Canadian real estate listings make international headlines, but a mid-sized Alberta bungalow has people around the world buzzing today after its owner declared that he would like to sell it — for Bitcoins. If successful, 22-year-old entrepreneur Taylor More would be the first person ever to accept the fast-rising virtual currency in exchange for property. "My home is being traded for Bitcoins!" reads the listing for More's "quaint" two bedroom home in Crowsnest Pass, Alberta. "Properties like this rarely come on the market and this one's priced to sell in one of the most sought after recreation areas of the Rockies." The property is listed for $405,000 CDN, but More writes that "the price can be reduced" if a buyer has some Bitcoins to spare." eh, -ZU

Submission + - Computer Simulations Yield Clues to How Cells Interact with Surroundings

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Your cells are social butterflies. They constantly interact with their surroundings, taking in cues on when to divide and where to anchor themselves, among other critical tasks. This networking is driven in part by proteins called integrin, which reside in a cell’s outer plasma membrane. Their job is to convert mechanical forces from outside the cell into internal chemical signals that tell the cell what to do. That is, when they work properly. When they misfire, integrins can cause diseases such as atherosclerosis and several types of cancer.
Android

Submission + - KDE's Calligra office suite for Android released (kde.org)

Submitted by
jrepin
jrepin writes: "Coffice is a new project that tries to make KDE's Calligra office suite available on mobile platforms like Android, Blackberry 10, Jolla SailfishOS and Ubuntu Phone. Calligra already has some presence on smartphones, since document viewer on Nokia N9 is based on it. The first release brings Calligra Words viewer for OpenDocument Text documents and is currently available for Android only. Plans for later releases include viewers for spredsheets and presentations. Editing and saving as well as support for proprietary Microsoft Office formats are coming later."

Submission + - 9th Circuit affirms IsoHunt decision, no DMCA safe harbor (uscourts.gov)

Submitted by
crankyspice
crankyspice writes: "The federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals recently affirmed, in Columbia Pictures Industries v. Fung (docket no. 10-55946), the summary judgment and injunctions against Gary Fung and his IsoHunt (and 3d2k-it) websites, finding liability for secondary copyright infringement for the sites' users' BitTorrent (and eDonkey) file sharing, under the 'inducement' theory (set forth by the Supreme Court in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, Inc. v. Grokster Ltd. , 545 U.S. 913 (2005)). The injunctions were left largely intact, with modifications required to make it more clear to the defendants what BitTorrent (etc) related activity they're enjoined from."
GNU is Not Unix

Submission + - 2012 Free Software Award Winners Announced (fsf.org)

Submitted by
jrepin
jrepin writes: "Free Software Foundation president Richard M. Stallman announced the winners of the FSF's annual Free Software Awards at a ceremony held during the LibrePlanet 2013 conference. The Award for the Advancement of Free Software is given annually to an individual who has made a great contribution to the progress and development of free software, through activities that accord with the spirit of free software. This year, it was given to Dr. Fernando Perez, the creator of IPython, a rich architecture for interactive computing. The Award for Projects of Social Benefit is presented to the project or team responsible for applying free software, or the ideas of the free software movement, in a project that intentionally and significantly benefits society in other aspects of life. This award stresses the use of free software in the service of humanity. This year, the award went to OpenMRS, a free software medical record system for developing countries."

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