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Submission + - Yahoo: We found sandwich.com and other brilliant domains in the back of the sofa (v3.co.uk)

Submitted by DW100
DW100 writes: Yahoo has found some rather wonderful old domains it forgot it owned and now doesn't have any need for as it goes about putting its house in order. Sandwich.com, webservers.com and av.com are just some of the domains now up for grabs and they are all worth a small fortune. In fact the firm could make a quick $4m from selling these dusty old domains and help some up-and-coming firm land a plumb piece of interest real estate.

Submission + - AMD Confirms Kaveri APU is A 512 GPU Core Integrated Processor (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: At APU13 today, AMD announced a full suite of new products and development tools as part of its push to improve HSA development. One of the most significant announcements to come out the sessions today-- albeit in a tacit, indirect fashion, is that Kaveri is going to pack a full 512 GPU cores. There's not much new to see on the CPU side of things — like Richland/Trinity, Steamroller is a pair of CPU modules with two cores per module. AMD also isn't talking about clock speeds yet, but the estimated 862 GFLOPS that the company is claiming for Kaveri points to GPU clock speeds between 700 — 800MHz. With 512 cores, Kaveri picks up a 33% boost over its predecessors, but memory bandwidth will be essential for the GPU to reach peak performance. For performance, AMD showed Kaveri up against the Intel 4770K running a low-end GeForce GT 630. In the intro scene to BF4's single-player campaign (1920x1080, Medium Details), the AMD Kaveri system (with no discrete GPU) consistently pushed frame rates in the 28-40 FPS range. The Intel system, in contrast, couldn't manage 15 FPS. Performance on that system was solidly in the 12-14 FPS range — meaning AMD is pulling 2x the frame rate, if not more.

Submission + - A Bit of Cream & Zeppelin May Increase Efficiency of Solar Panels (clickgreen.org.uk)

Submitted by ClockEndGooner
ClockEndGooner writes: Local solar panel farms in your area might be able to take music requests in the near future, as researchers at Queen Mary University of London and Imperial College London found that playing loud pop and rock music improves the performance of solar cells. According to the researchers, "The high frequencies and pitch found in pop and rock music cause vibrations that enhanced energy generation in solar cells containing a cluster of 'nanorods', leading to a 40 per cent increase in efficiency of the solar cells."

Submission + - Canonical Sends legal notice to EFF staffer who criticizes Privacy of Ubuntu

Submitted by sfcrazy
sfcrazy writes: Canonical has sent Micah. F.Lee, a staff technologist at EFF, a take-down notice for a website he started to educate people about fixing the privacy invasive feature Canonical has built in Ubuntu. Lee responed by legal letter from EFF and said/a, "Sending a (very polite, which I appreciate) takedown request isn’t very much in the spirit of open source. If you’d like to improve fixubuntu.com in a more productive way, then I suggest you submit a patch. The code for fixubuntu.com is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License, and the code is hosted on Github. Pull requests are welcome."

Submission + - A Plan to Fix Daylight Savings Time by Creating Two National Time Zones

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Allison Schrager writes in the Atlantic that losing another hour of evening daylight isn't just annoying. It's an economically harmful policy with minimal energy savings. "The actual energy savings are minimal, if they exist at all. Frequent and uncoordinated time changes cause confusion, undermining economic efficiency. There’s evidence that regularly changing sleep cycles, associated with daylight saving, lowers productivity and increases heart attacks." So here's Schrager's proposal. This year, Americans on Eastern Standard Time should set their clocks back one hour (like normal), Americans on Central and Rocky Mountain time do nothing, and Americans on Pacific time should set their clocks forward one hour. This will result in just two time zones for the continental United States and the east and west coasts will only be one hour apart. "America already functions on fewer than four time zones," says Schrager. "I spent the last three years commuting between New York and Austin, living on both Eastern and Central time. I found that in Austin, everyone did things at the same times they do them in New York, despite the difference in time zone. People got to work at 8 am instead of 9 am, restaurants were packed at 6 pm instead of 7 pm, and even the TV schedule was an hour earlier. " Research based on time use surveys found American’s schedules are already determined more by television than daylight suggesting, in effect, that Americans already live on two time zones. Schrager says that this strategy has already been proven to work in other parts of the world. China has been on one time zone since 1949, despite naturally spanning five time zones and in 1983, Alaska, which naturally spans four time zones, moved most of the state to a single time zone. "It sounds radical, but it really isn’t. The purpose of uniform time measures is coordination. How we measure time has always evolved with the needs of commerce.," concludes Schrager. "Time is already arbitrary, why not make it work in our favor?"

Submission + - DoD News Aggregation Service "The Early Bird" Dead After 65 Years (foreignpolicy.com)

Submitted by SanDogWeps
SanDogWeps writes: Periodically viewed as copyright infringement by the media, the Department of Defense's "Early Bird" has been delivering applicable headlines to the Armed Forces since 1948. It stopped updating on October 1st, along with a number of other government products, but when the lights turned back on, The Early Bird remained dark. A number of reasons have been floated, including applicability in the internet age, cost, and a lack of interest. Others claim The Early Bird was nothing more than a propaganda machine, by culling articles that painted DoD in a favorable light.

Submission + - Google now forcing Google+ on YouTube users

Submitted by NewtonsLaw
NewtonsLaw writes: Google have started rolling out their plan to force all non-passive YouTube users to join their GooglePlus service.

As of last night I noticed that I can no longer access the comments on my videos via their dedicated comments page and attempts to respond to comments posted by others simply by clicking on the "to reply, click here" link in the advisory email fail to show the comment concerned. This forces me to go to the actual video page each time and manually locate the comment within the hundreds that may be there.

For weeks, Google has been in nag-mode, constantly trying to coerce YouTube account holders link their channels to a G+ identity and now that this strategy has failed, they're basically saying that unless you do as they say, no more easy access to the comments on your videos. In fact they say this quite literally in a big red banner at the top of the screen when you log on which proclaims " Connect to Google+ to maintain access to new comments".

As an early adopter of YouTube and many other Google services I now find myself with a real mess on my hands. Most of my Google service accounts have different email addresses, therefore are different identities. To comply with Google's diktat, I will have to create several G+ accounts, meaning more logins, more passwords, more complexity!

I am not alone in this — users all over the Net (and on YouTube) are really annoyed that the "do no evil" company is forcing them to sign up to services they do not want and breaking stuff in the process.

The reason for YouTube's success is that it's relatively simple to use and focused. YouTube makes it easy to post videos and comment on them — full stop! If they start messing with that formula by adding the complexity and "features" of G+ then I fear they will pay a price.

In the past, one of the biggest benfits of Google was that it wasn't Facebook. It seems that is no longer the case (especially in light of their recent "we'll use your face and comments to promote products" initiative).

It would appear that Google is about to turn a silk purse into a sow's ear.

Aaaaarrgggh!

Submission + - US executions threaten supply of anaesthetic used for surgical procedures (nature.com) 2

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes: Allen Nicklasson has had a temporary reprieve. Scheduled to be executed by lethal injection in Missouri on 23 October, the convicted killer was given a stay of execution by the state’s governor, Jay Nixon, on 11 October — but not because his guilt was in doubt. Nicklasson will live a while longer because one of the drugs that was supposed to be used in his execution — a widely used anaesthetic called propofol — is at the centre of an international controversy that threatens millions of US patients, and affects the way that US states execute inmates.
Propofol, used up to 50 million times a year in US surgical procedures, has never been used in an execution. If the execution had gone ahead, US hospitals could have lost access to the drug because 90% of the US supply is made and exported by a German company subject to European Union (EU) regulations that restrict the export of medicines and devices that could be used for capital punishment or torture.
This is not the first time that the EU’s anti-death-penalty stance has affected the US supply of anaesthetics. Since 2011, a popular sedative called sodium thiopental has been unavailable in the United States.
“The European Union is serious,” says David Lubarsky, head of the anaesthesiology department at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine in Florida. “They’ve already shown that with thiopental. If we go down this road with propofol, a lot of good people who need anaesthesia are going to be harmed.”

Submission + - The internet is a "US colony" (pcpro.co.uk)

Submitted by nk497
nk497 writes: Web users are vulnerable to mass online spying because the US has too much power online, according to a leading security researcher. Discussing revelations of US spying at his LinuxCon keynote speech, F-Secure’s chief research officer Mikko Hypponen argued that the internet had "become a US colony", at the expense of democracy. "We’re back in the age of colonisation," he said. "We should think about the Americans as our masters."

Hypponen argued that its dominance over the web gave the US too much power over foreign countries, noting that while the majority of European politicians likely use US services every day, most US politicians and business leaders don’t, for example, use Swedish-based cloud services. "It’s an imbalanced situation," he said. "All the major services are based in the US."

Submission + - PHP.net Compromised

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The open source PHP project site was compromised earlier today. The site appears to have been compromised and had some of its javascript altered to exploit vulnerable systems visiting the website. Googles stop-badware system caught this as well and flagged php.net as distributing malware, warning users who’s browsers support it not to visit the site. The comment by a Google employee over the hacker news thread (official google webmaster forum thread) seems to suggest that php.net wasn't incorrectly flagged. So stay safe.

Submission + - How OS X 10.9 Mavericks Breaks Gmail (tidbits.com) 1

Submitted by jcenters
jcenters writes: Joe Kissell reports on the broken way Mail.app works with Gmail accounts in OS X 10.9 Mavericks. You now have to enable the "All Mail" IMAP inbox in Gmail, which forces Mail.app to re-download every message in the account. Seemingly a way to address Google's non-standard IMAP implementation, the new Mail.app seems to break AppleScripts, unread counts, and Smart Mailboxes as well.

Submission + - Mail in Mavericks Changes the Gmail Equation (tidbits.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Apple Mail in Mavericks takes a different approach to Gmail than any previous version did, and some users will find the implications frustrating — to the point of postponing a Mavericks upgrade, switching away from Gmail, or choosing a different email client. Over at TidBITS, Joe Kissell explains what’s different and what you can (and can’t) do about it.

Submission + - New York uses Zipcar scheduling to reduce fleet size

Submitted by DonaldGary
DonaldGary writes: The New York Post reports that New York City is using Zipcar's technology to "share" city vehicles among users. If I read this correctly, the improved scheduling may have allowed more than a 10% reduction in fleet size.

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