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Submission + - Killing Freemium Services will Increase Music Piracy, Not Sales or Signups (medium.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Killing freemium won’t make people magically pay $9.99 a month; it’ll make them seek out free music elsewhere. By blocking channels like YouTube and Soundcloud, the labels are sending a message that only music they approve of and want to monetize can be heard, and the door slams shut for many outsider artists. The last thing listeners want is a protectionist culture around the music they consume—every artist deserves a fair shot at being heard.

Submission + - Tuning up Rydberg atoms for Quantun Information applications (nanotechnologyworld.org)

Submitted by MateoC
MateoC writes: Tuning up Rydberg atoms for Quantun Information applications

Rydberg atoms, atoms whose outermost electrons are highly excited but not ionized, might be just the thing for processing quantum information. These outsized atoms can be sustained for a long time in a quantum superposition condition---a good thing for creating qubits---and they can interact strongly with other such atoms, making them useful for devising the kind of logic gates needed to process information. Scientists at JQI and at other labs are pursuing this promising research area.

One problem with Rydberg atoms is that in they are often difficult to handle. One approach is to search for special wavelengths---“magic wavelengths”—at which atoms can be trapped and excited into Rydberg states without disturbing them. A new JQI experiment bears out high-precision calculations predicting the existence of specific magic wavelengths.

Submission + - Gartner Predicts Open Source will Overtake Oracle and Others

Submitted by RaDag
RaDag writes: Read about the new Gartner study,The State of Open Source RDBMSs, 2015, that says as many as 80% of in-house application portfolios could be migrated onto open source and that by 2018, 70% of new apps will be deployed on open source and 50% of existing apps will be migrated. Gartner further urges companies to look for subscription models instead of costly up-front licenses.

Comment Re:How are they going to charge for this? (Score 1) 199

Since they're mostly going to be pushing updates/versions/whatever to phones, I expect that they'll do a deal with carriers to only download immense files, and to do so when you're roaming on 3G somewhere out of network. The carriers will make a mint on data overages and in exchange, they'll kick something back to MSFT. You won't like it, but what choice will you have?

Comment Re:Better absolute performance with WAAS? (Score 1) 63

by LeadSongDog (#49643007) Attached to: Centimeter-Resolution GPS For Smartphones, VR, Drones
It *IS* a cell phone, so there are normally at least 3 nearby fixed reference stations in local communication with the handset, no? All of those provide GPS-disciplined time signals. The only question is whether they actually provide reference offsets. They certainly could, if the software were present.

Submission + - Does AMD's Roadmap Go Far Enough Fast Enough? (theplatform.net)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: While everyone wants intense competition for compute in the datacenter, AMD will find the going a bit tougher this time around than back in 2003, when Intel left the glass house door wide open and AMD walked right in with its “SledgeHammer” processors. AMD did not have to break any glass to get in. Intel was trying to protect and grow its 64-bit Itanium processors and restricted the Xeons to 32-bit memory addressing. AMD had a decent core design, the HyperTransport interconnect for linking CPUs together, a plan to add multiple cores to a single die, and other innovations such as on-chip memory controllers.

But as soon as AMD hit a bug with its “Barcelona” Opterons just as the Great Recession was starting up and Intel was getting ready to smack back hard with its “Nehalem” Xeon designs – which made a Xeon look an awful lot like an Opteron, to put it bluntly – the game got a lot harder for AMD in the datacenter.

Submission + - Exherbo: The first Linux distro with native cross-compiling package management (exherbo.org)

Submitted by Somasis
Somasis writes:

On most distributions, cross-compilation is often handled by special-purpose tools, entirely separate from the distribution’s package manager. This presents a number of difficulties, including having to deal with how building a package for the target architecture may require additional tools on the host system – an obstacle that must be resolved manually. And, while the tool can resolve dependencies on the target and the package manager can do the same for the host, neither can interoperate with the other.

Exherbo’s new multi-arch strategy instead adds cross-compilation as a built-in feature of the package manager, enabling seamless handling of such issues. This permits a single host system to compile packages for any supported target architecture (which can also be incompatible), without requiring the user to provide manual intervention or custom-built toolchains.

Multi-arch has been worked on for about three years now and the final merge was prepared over the last month. Work continues towards converting packages to take full advantage of the new technology, and all contributions are welcome.

Submission + - Electron microscopes close to imaging individual atoms (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Today’s digital photos are far more vivid than just a few years ago, thanks to a steady stream of advances in optics, detectors, and software. Similar advances have also improved the ability of machines called cryo-electron microscopes (cryo-EMs) to see the Lilliputian world of atoms and molecules. Now, researchers report that they’ve created the highest ever resolution cryo-EM image, revealing a druglike molecule bound to its protein target at near atomic resolution. The resolution is so sharp that it rivals images produced by x-ray crystallography, long the gold standard for mapping the atomic contours of proteins. This newfound success is likely to dramatically help drugmakers design novel medicines for a wide variety of conditions.

Submission + - This $9 computer might be more useful than Raspberry Pi (networkworld.com)

Submitted by colinneagle
colinneagle writes: A small team of engineers and artists that make up Next Thing Co. launched a Kickstarter campaign today for Chip, their $9 single-board computer that boasts Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and a larger processor than Raspberry Pi's most powerful models.

The tiny device runs a 1 GHz R8 ARM processor, and comes with 512MB of RAM and 4GB of storage. In comparison, the Raspberry Pi B and B+ models feature a 900 MHz quad-core ARM Cortex 7 processor. The Chip comes with a built-in composite output to connect to monitors and supports adapters for VGA or HDMI. It runs Debian Linux and comes preloaded with the Scratch programming language for those who might be new to coding.

Most noteworthy, though, is the Pocket Chip – a small device with a crude-looking screen and hard-key keyboard that plugs into the Chip and makes for portable computing. It may not be an iPhone killer, but it's an impressively inexpensive mobile form factor.

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