Comment Re: Cry me a river... (Score 4, Funny) 216
I like this game.
US Insurer Hikes Tesla Premiums Due To 'Higher-Than-Average' Claim Rates (theverge.com) 125
An anonymous reader writes: "National insurer AAA is raising its prices for Tesla's Model S and Model X, citing higher-than-average claim rates and repair costs for the two cars," reports The Verge. "According to a report from Automotive News, AAA said it could raise its premiums by as much as 30 percent for the vehicles. Other large insurers including State Farm and Geico told the publication they couldn't say whether or not they would also increase prices, but noted that data about claim frequency is always used to calculate insurance premiums." Musk claims that AAA doesn't know what they are doing, but fails to be specific as to what is incorrect about their data or its usage. [The company says the AAA has made its decision based on faulty information from the Highway Loss Data Institute.]
Comment Re: Hmmm (Score 1) 205
Hmmm, low-digit Slashdot accounts just mean you've been a nerd for a very long time
Comment Re:Q: Why Are Scientists Still Using FORTRAN in 20 (Score 1) 634
Same sig since 2003....
Submission + - Heartbleed: Serious OpenSSL zero day vulnerability revealed (heartbleed.com) 1
An anonymous reader writes: ZDNet reports: New security holes are always showing up. The latest one, the so-called Heartbleed Bug in the OpenSSL cryptographic library, is an especially bad one. The flaw can potentially be used to reveal not just the contents of a secured-message, such as a credit-card transaction over HTTPS, but the primary and secondary SSL keys themselves. This data could then, in theory, be used as a skeleton keys to bypass secure servers without leaving a trace that a site had been hacked.
Submission + - OpenSSL bug allows attackers to read memory in 64k chunks (itnews.com.au)
Bismillah writes: A potentially very serious bug in OpenSSL 1.0.1 and 1.0.2 beta has been discovered that can leak just about any information, from keys to content.
Better yet, it appears to have been introduced in 2011, and known since March 2012.
Better yet, it appears to have been introduced in 2011, and known since March 2012.
Comment Re:EC2 is scriptable (Score 3, Interesting) 80
The OP needs lower-priced spot instances, which are intermittently available and designed exactly for this workflow.
Here's how to utilize lower-priced spot instances for scientific computing:
1. Set up one long-running, low-cost instance (a small is fine) that creates a distributed queue using Amazon's SQS, and adds jobs to the queue corresponding to each "unit" of the relevant computational problem of interest. New jobs can be added using a command line interface, or through a web interface.
2. Create a user start-up Bash script for the spot instances that runs your main program -- I prefer using Python and boto for simplicity. The main program should connect to the SQS queue, and begin an "infinite" while loop. Inside the loop, the next job off the queue is pulled, containing the input parameters that define the "unit" of the computational problem of interest. These input parameters are fed to the main algorithm, and the resulting output is uploaded to Amazon S3. The loop continues.
3. Any time the queue is empty or the spot instance remains idle for ~5 minutes, the spot instance then auto-terminates using EC2's command line interface.
4. Finally, just write a simple Python script to pull all the results off S3, combine & analyze them, and export to another useful format.
You'll also need to set up your spot instance price threshold, and make sure the queue has jobs to run. That's it, it's fairly simple.
Comment That OO-My-God Moment of Emergence (Score 1) 242
Emergent OOism -- that everything is an object, including the variable types -- can provide continual surprises of what is possible, even to veteran programmers in other languages. As you were developing and using Python, Guido, what was your favorite surprise? What was now easily possible using Python that would have been very difficult with another language (at the time, or even nowadays)?
Mine: a dictionary of lambda functions for parsing text, and writing a custom MapReduce capability for AWS in 372 lines.
Did the Spamhaus DDoS Really Slow Down Global Internet Access? 70
CowboyRobot writes "Despite the headlines, the big denial of service attack may not have slowed the Internet after all. The argument against the original claim include the fact that reports of Internet users seeing slowdowns came not from service providers, but the DDoS mitigation service CloudFlare, which signed up Spamhaus as a customer last week. Also, multiple service providers and Internet watchers have now publicly stated that while the DDoS attacks against Spamhaus could theoretically have led to slowdowns, they've seen no evidence that this occurred for general Internet users. And while some users may have noticed a slowdown, the undersea cable cuts discovered by Egyptian sailors had more of an impact than the DDoS."
Comment Re:Boo frickin' Hoo (Score 1) 140
That just means he's ignorant AND old.
Comment Re:Fortran is better. (Score 1) 793
I 100% agree.
And f2py is the perfect way to combine the advantages of Fortran + Python.
It beats SWIG any day.
I write lots of numerical codes for solving engineering problems, and most of the time I use Fortran, even though I have written some in C as well. Ultimately, the easier memory management and advanced array support is worth using a language considered by many to be strange and unusual. Of course, this is only for numerical analysis. Most other things I write in Python.
Comment Fortran is better. (Score 5, Funny) 793
Go ahead. Argue. I dare you.
v same sig since 2002. v
Comment Re:Python (Score 1) 525
I'll 4th that.
Wow, nigh universal consensus on Slashdot. Next, it'll be snowing in April in the Mid-Atlantic! (erp, nevermind)
Study Hints That Wi-Fi Near Testes Could Decrease Male Fertility 307
Pierre Bezukhov submits news of a report that "a laptop connected wirelessly to the internet on the lap near the testes may result in decreased male fertility," writing
"'[The scientists who conducted the research] placed healthy sperms under a laptop running a Wi-Fi connection. After four hours, the Wi-Fi exposed sperms showed 'a significant decrease in progressive sperm motility and an increase in sperm DNA fragmentation' compared to healthy sperms stored for the same time in the same temperature away from the computer. That is, the sperms exposed to Wi-Fi were less capable of moving towards an egg to fertilize it and less capable of passing on the male's DNA if it does fertilize an egg.' The scientists blamed the damage on non-thermal electromagnetic radiation generated by the Wi-Fi."
However, the experiment was based on sperm outside the body; the researchers (here's the abstract from their study) note that "Further in vitro and in vivo studies are needed to prove this contention."
Comment Road to Reality by Roger Penrose (Score 1) 358
The Road to Reality : A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe
by Roger Penrose
http://www.amazon.com/Road-Reality-Complete-Guide-Universe/dp/0679454438
Likely the most serious math book you will find in a retail, consumer bookstore. An excellent read and essential to truly understanding modern physics.
