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Networking

Utah Bill Would Prevent Regional Fiber Networks From Growing 111

symbolset writes "On the heels of the smackdown received by cable lobbyists in Kansas, Ars reports out of Utah that the cable companies aren't giving up hopes of preventing competition through legislation. The bill, called Interlocal Entity Service Prohibition, would prevent a regional fiber consortium from building infrastructure outside the boundaries of its member cities and towns — a direct attack on Google's work in Provo and the UTOPIA network. Utah is the third state to be involved in the Google Fiber rollout of gigabit fiber to the home."
Biotech

Amputee Has Prosthetic Hand Wired To Nerves 72

New submitter kalman5 writes "Dennis Aabo Sørensen is the first amputee in the world to feel sensory rich information — in real-time — with a prosthetic hand wired to nerves in his upper arm. Sørensen could grasp objects intuitively and identify what he was touching while blindfolded. The surgical team 'attached electrodes from a robotic hand to a 36-year-old volunteer's median and ulnar nerves. Those nerves carry sensations that correspond with the volunteer's index finger and thumb, and with his pinky finger and the edge of his hand, respectively. The volunteer controlled the prosthetic with small muscle movements detected by sEMG, a method that dates to the 1970s and measures electrical signals through the skin—unlike the electrodes attached to his nerves, sEMG is not invasive.' The results? 'The volunteer was able to complete the requested tasks with his prosthetic thumb and index finger 67 percent of the time the first day and 93 percent of the time by the seventh day of the experiment, Micera and colleagues report. He found the pinky finger harder to control: he was only able to accomplish the requested grip 83 percent of the time by the end of the experiment.'"
OS X

North Korea's Home-Grown Operating System Mimics OS X 252

CambodiaSam sends the latest on "Red Star OS," North Korea's attempt at a home-grown operating system. Previously, it had closely resembled Microsoft Windows, but a new update now strongly mimics Apple's OS X. "Despite living in a country very much shut off from the outside world, many people in North Korea do have access to technology - including mobile phones. However, devices are heavily restricted. Internet access, for instance, is locked down, with most users able to visit only a handful of sites mostly serving up state-sponsored news. The Red Star OS is peppered with North Korean propaganda, and its calendar tells users it is not 2014, but 103 — the number of years since the birth of former North Korean leader Kim Il-sung. An earlier version of Red Star OS was made available worldwide in 2010 after a Russian student posted it online. The latest version is believed to have been released some time in 2013."
Cloud

Fire Destroys Iron Mountain Data Warehouse, Argentina's Bank Records Lost 463

cagraham writes "A fire at Iron Mountain's data warehouse in Buenos Aires left the facility 'ruined' and killed nine first-responders, according to the Washington Post. The origin of the fire is unknown. The facility was supposedly equipped with sprinkler systems, fire control systems, and had a private emergency team on standby. Among the records destroyed are Argentina's bank archives, the loss of which could have some surprisingly far-reaching implications."
Transportation

Judge Says You Can Warn Others About Speed Traps 457

cartechboy writes "Speeding is against the law, and yes, even going 5 mph over the speed limit is breaking the law. But everyone does it, right? What about when you see a cop? Some cops are ticketing people for notifying fellow motorists about speed traps. In Florida, Ryan Kintner simply flashed his high-beams to warning oncoming cars that there was a cop ahead. He was given a ticket for doing so. He went to court to fight the ticket, and a judge ruled that flashing lights are the equivalent of free speech, thus he had every right to flash his lights to warn oncoming cars."
Verizon

Is Verizon Already Slowing Netflix Down? 298

hondo77 points out a blog post by Dave Raphael, who noticed some odd discrepancies between two different Verizon broadband connections he has access to. His personal residential plan and his company's business plan both went through the same Verizon routers, but his residential plan is getting unusably slow speeds to places like AWS. He suggests that Verizon is already waging a war on high-bandwidth services like Netflix after the recent court decision against net neutrality. His discussion with a Verizon service representative seems to confirm this, though it's uncertain whether such an employee would have access to that information.
Medicine

Video Former Red Hat COO Helps Health Care Providers Work Together (Video) 74

Do you remember the worries about getting different health care software systems to work with each other as health care providers starting moving away from paper? It's still a problem, but Joanne Rohde's company, Axial Exchange, is working to cure that problem not only as an entrepreneur but also because she has personal reasons to see health care providers communicate better with each other. In a 2012 interview for Huffington Post, she said, "While I was working for Red Hat, I got very sick... I ultimately had to go to 10 doctors to be diagnosed. Going from doctor to doctor, I could not believe I had to start over each time. No one actually talks to each other I became convinced that if I had had all the information, I probably would have been able to figure it out faster." In fact, Joanne got so sick that she quit her job as Red Hat COO after four years with the company. Once she started getting decent treatment for her Fybromyalgia and started getting better, she decided to apply open source principles to health care IT -- and to start a new company to do it. Opensource.com talked with Joanne in September 2013, and in January 2014 she talked with Health Care Finance News for an article titled Patients key to reducing readmissions. A phrase Joanne seems to be using a lot lately is "patient engagement," which has become a major part of Axial Exchange's work to improve communications not only between different health care providers but also between those providers and their patients. Update: 02/05 20:16 GMT by T : If you're seeing this post on beta.slashdot.org, note that we're still ironing out the details of video display here. You can view the video on tv.slashdot.org, instead. Please pardon our dust.

Comment Re: Should Everybody Learn Calculus? (Score 1) 387

I'm curious as to whether you were studying CS in a large, public engineering university, or a small liberal arts-type school (or somewhere in between). No doubt, there are lots of programs which cater solely to the theoretical side of work. I attended an engineering school where the math was certainly theoretical, but you could still see the potential for applications of the calculus program in fields like fluid dynamics, or thermodynamics, and the like.

But CS 101 was the reason I strayed far clear of computer science. I would have never appreciated what it means to be a good computer engineer with the way sorting algorithms and data structures were introduced. Concepts were never really taught from a 'how is this useful to me?' perspective. I can't really describe it better than that. I became a programmer/computer engineer later when my interest in the field developed as a result of real world applications and uses (like understanding how Python or the internet works). I figured that this might happen, hence why I felt comfortable forgoing the study in school ;-)

That said, there are still great computer engineering programs at large universities where the focus is on engineering and software development as opposed to the pure, theoretical science of software engineering (think Master's of Engineering programs, as opposed to Master's of Science). They dip into some concepts as well such as agile development and systems engineering (which are silly in my opinion) but nevertheless good to know, and helpful in the world of industrial software engineering.

Comment Re:Should Everybody Learn Calculus? (Score 4, Insightful) 387

Being able to do calculus helps you think critically and serves as a basis for study in many other important fields. There's a pattern of reasoning skills that you develop when you read a book, learn a method, apply it to solve a problem, verify your answer, and return to the problem to identify and correct errors.

Being able to solve the problem without having to look it up gives you an intuition for solving complex problems without having to resort to such means. If I tell you the derivative of a value is x^{-1}, you shouldn't need to look up that it varies logarithmically. And being able to solve the problem yourself is what gives you the faith in the solution being correct. You could always look up the wrong value from the table, or provide the wrong input to a compute engine (side rant: Mathematica syntax drives me bonkers). You should always have multiple ways of understanding and verifying your solutions because relying solely on existing tools to perform the work for you without understanding where they come from turns this process into a black box which you have to rely on purely out of faith; I would argue that this can be dangerous, especially for mission critical applications. For basic calculus, linear algebra and differential equations, which every college engineer is expected to understand, I don't think this is an unreasonable requirement.

Even while you yourself may have not been in a situation where you needed to understand these concepts, there are many fields in which being able to manipulate these equations is important: particle advection, comupter graphics and animation engines (manipulating ODEs and PDEs, linear algebra), or scientific and numerical computing and modeling (pretty much anything field of math). So I would say, if I were developing a comprehensive computer science program, I absolutely would have to include this in my curriculum, otherwise I would be shutting our students out of these fields. And if you're a mechanical, electrical, chemical, etc. engineer (or you're any other kind of engineer having to work with them), you need to understand these concepts to have faith in your results.

The purpose of your college program was not to cater its curriculum directly to you, but to give all the students enrolled a broad set of skills that they could apply in situations that might arise. And understand that your program can only expose you to the skills that you should learn, but it's up to you to find a practical use for them.

Microsoft

OneDrive Is Microsoft's Rebranded Name For SkyDrive 197

SmartAboutThings writes with news that Microsoft finally figured out what to rename SkyDrive, after losing rights to the trademark last year. From the article: "Microsoft has just announced that SkyDrive, their cloud storage service, will be renamed to OneDrive very soon. This follows the news of trademark infringement case filed by British Sky Broadcasting Group (BSkyB) last year over SkyDrive branding. Microsoft had initially hinted at fighting BSkyB's claims over SkyDrive branding, but then decided to step back and rebrand their cloud offering. The Redmond giant has registered onedrive.com and has also posted a promotional video on YouTube announcing the upcoming change."
Desktops (Apple)

Watch Steve Jobs Demo the Mac, In 1984 129

VentureBeat is one of the many outlets featuring recently surfaced video of Steve Jobs doing an early demo of the Macintosh, 30 years ago. I remember first seeing one of these Macs in 1984 at a tiny computer store in bustling downtown Westminster, Maryland, and mostly hogging it while other customers (or, I should say, actual customers) tapped their feet impatiently.
Microsoft

Windows 9 Already? Apparently, Yes. 1009

Nerval's Lobster writes "A little over a year after Microsoft released Windows 8, and a mere three months after it pushed out a major update with Windows 8.1, rumors abound that Windows 9 is already on its way. According to Paul Thurrott's Supersite for Windows, Microsoft will begin discussing the next version of Windows (codenamed 'Threshold,' at least for the moment) at April's BUILD conference. 'Threshold is more important than any specific updates, he wrote. 'Windows 8 is tanking harder than Microsoft is comfortable discussing in public, and the latest release, Windows 8.1, which is a substantial and free upgrade with major improvements over the original release, is in use on less than 25 million PCs at the moment.' Microsoft intends Threshold to clean up at least a portion of Windows 8's mess. Development on the latest operating system will supposedly begin in late April, which means developers who attend BUILD won't have access to an early alpha release—in fact, it could be quite some time before Microsoft locks down any new features, although it might double down on Windows 8's controversial 'Modern' (previously known as 'Metro') design interface. Yet if Thurrott's reporting proves correct, Microsoft isn't abandoning the new Windows interface that earned such a lackluster response—it's betting that the format, once tweaked, will somehow revive the operating system's fortunes. With Ballmer leaving the company and a major reorganization underway, it'll be the next Microsoft CEO's task to make sure that Windows 9 is a hit; in fact, considering that rumored 2015 release date, shepherding the OS could become that executive's first major test."

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