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IBM

Submission + - IBM's Watson surges to Jeopardy lead, retains tie (networkworld.com)

Submitted by jbrodkin
jbrodkin writes: IBM's Watson surged to a giant lead in the early minutes of the Jeopardy man-vs.-machine challenge, taking a $4,200 advantage into the first commercial break by dominating "Beatles People" and several other categories. But the massive supercomputer relinquished "his" lead and ended Day 1 of the three-day challenge in a tie at $5,000 with Jeopardy champion Brad Rutter. Ken Jennings finished the first day in third place at $2,000.

The first historic moment came when Watson buzzed in and said "What is shoe?" in response to a clue asking for a four-letter word describing both the iron fitting on a horse's hoof and a card-dealing box in a casino. That was Watson's first correct answer, with the computer started a major roll, taking $5,200 into the first commercial break, compared to $1,000 for Brad and $200 for Ken. But there were a few strange answers along the way. Alex Trebek called Watson "very bright, very fast, but he has some weird little moments once in a while."
Open Source

Linux 2.6.37 Released 135

Posted by samzenpus from the new-and-improved dept.
diegocg writes "Version 2.6.37 of the Linux kernel has been released. This version includes SMP scalability improvements for Ext4 and XFS, the removal of the Big Kernel Lock, support for per-cgroup IO throttling, a networking block device based on top of the Ceph clustered filesystem, several Btrfs improvements, more efficient static probes, perf support to probe modules, LZO compression in the hibernation image, PPP over IPv4 support, several networking microoptimizations and many other small changes, improvements and new drivers for devices like the Brocade BNA 10GB ethernet, Topcliff PCH gigabit, Atheros CARL9170, Atheros AR6003 and RealTek RTL8712U. The fanotify API has also been enabled. See the full changelog for more details."
NASA

Submission + - Final Launch for Discovery Postponed Again

Submitted by neo00
neo00 writes: NASA's latest launch delay for the space shuttle Discovery could push the spacecraft's final mission into the Christmas holiday, or even postpone it completely until February, agency officials said Wednesday. The final flight of Discovery has already been delayed by over a month due to technical and weather-related issues. As it stands, the mid-December launch window opens on Dec. 17 and runs through the Dec. 20. A Dec. 17 launch, if approved, would occur at 8:51 p.m. EST (0151 Dec. 18 GMT), NASA officials said.
Businesses

Submission + - Ballmer Sells $1.3B Worth of Microsoft Shares (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by Nethemas the Great
Nethemas the Great writes: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is reported to have sold $1.3B worth of Microsoft shares and expects to clear 25.7 million more for a total 75 million shares by year-end. Ballmer has stated it's for tax preparation and portfolio diversification however, this major sell off will certainly fuel the growing concern that Microsoft is falling behind and failing to adapt to new trends in computing.
The Internet

Submission + - Should NPR CEO in a Glass Website Throw Stones? 1

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Commenting on NPR's firing of Juan Williams after he remarked that he gets nervous when he sees people in Muslim garb on an airplane, NPR CEO Vivian Schiller said Williams should have kept his feelings between himself and 'his psychiatrist or his publicist.' Which is interesting, considering that NPR's own website has for years hosted stories like Worried Glances on the Flight Home ('The man across the aisle from me was dark-skinned, Arab-looking. He had an accent') and Profiling or Common Sense? ('I think it's fair to say that since 9/11, it's hard not to scrutinize your fellow passengers a shade more closely when you're on an airplane'). And an NPR News Blog item reported that 'the fear of FWA ('Flying While Arab') can make even Arabs suspicious of each other.' Williams said Friday that he believes NPR had been looking for a reason to fire him and used his comments as an excuse to do so. Williams also noted that NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg once remarked (1995 video) that if there is 'retributive justice,' former Republican North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms or one of his grandchildren will get AIDS from a transfusion (an NPR spokeswoman said Totenberg has repeatedly apologized for her comments).

Submission + - UK to track all browsing, email, phone calls (telegraph.co.uk)

Submitted by Sara Chan
Sara Chan writes: The UK government plans to introduce legislation that will allow the police to track every phone call, email, text message and website visit made by the public. The information will include who is contacting whom, when and where and which websites are visited, but not the content of the conversations or messages. Every communications provider will be required to store the information for at least a year. Full story in The Telegraph.
Education

Submission + - How Well Will Linux Handle Future Multicores? (mit.edu)

Submitted by eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: Multicore (think tens or hundreds of cores) will come at a price for current operating systems. A team at MIT found that as they approached 48 cores their operating system slowed down. After activating more and more cores in their simulation, a sort of memory leak occurred whereby data had to remain in memory as long as a core might need it in its calculations. But the good news is that in their paper (PDF), they showed that for at least several years Linux should be able to keep up with chip enhancements in the multicore realm. To handle multiple cores, Linux keeps a counter of which cores are working on the data. As a core starts to work on a piece of data, Linux increments the number. When the core is done, Linux decrements the number. As the core count approached 48, the amount of actual work decreased and Linux spent more time managing counters. But the team found that 'Slightly rewriting the Linux code so that each core kept a local count, which was only occasionally synchronized with those of the other cores, greatly improved the system's overall performance.' The researchers caution that as the number of cores skyrockets, operating systems will have to be completely redesigned to handle managing these cores and SMP. After reviewing the paper, one researcher is confident Linux will remain viable for five to eight years without need for a major redesign.

Comment Re:stupid (Score 1) 393

by neo00 (#32350708) Attached to: Scientist Infects Self With Computer Virus

It is quite scary actually. This proves many things.

1. Flesh is not a valid software firewall. We need upgrades.
2. The human body can't fight off computer viruses with our immune system.
3. His body didn't alert him of the virus. No fever or any symptom.

4. Stupidity has no limits.

Submission + - Touch Book, dual core netbooks, or an iPad?

Submitted by pjfontillas
pjfontillas writes: With Always Innovating always innovating — in case you didn't notice there's a blinking message stating that at the beginning of the summer they will release a new product — and news of dual core netbooks on the rise should I hold off on buying a new netbook? The iPad is somewhat old news and a bit of a problem due to its restrictions but I figured it's worth a mention.

I know the Touch Book is on a different level than dual core netbooks — in terms of power, how it's used, and how the Touch Book runs on customized software and a chip that supposedly doesn't support Windows (fine by me!) — but regardless, I'm currently looking to buy one or the other.

I just want to browse the web, view and edit some documents, and occasionally stream standard — don't care for HD — video/audio, and remote desktop/SSH. I don't think any of those require a lot of processing power. The Touch Book looks like it will provide an interesting experience while supposedly lasting somewhere around 10-12 hours, while dual core netbooks should provide more power but may drain battery life.

My questions may seem specific but this topic is really quite open. I'm simply interested in what /. has to say.

Thanks for your time, everyone. I appreciate it.
Education

Most Useful OS For High-School Science Education? 434

Posted by timothy from the why-in-my-day dept.
Clayperion writes "I teach at a high school program for gifted students which emphasizes math, science, and technology. Currently we have two computer labs for the students: A new programming lab (all Dell PCs running XP, MS Visual C++, Eclipse, and SolidWorks for programming and CAD) and an old general-purpose lab (all Macs running OS X 10.3, with software ranging from some legacy OS 9 science applications to MathCad). Most of our students eventually pursue graduate degrees in science and engineering, and we would like them to have experience with the tools they will find out in industry. As we look to replace the old machines, there has been a push to switch to PCs with XP so that there is only a single platform to support. There are over 5000 machines on the district's network and the IT department is very small (fewer than 10 people), so the fewer hardware and software differences between the machines, the better. Without opening a flame war as to which one is 'better,' I'd like to know what those of you in the science and engineering fields actually use more in your labs (hardware, OS, software), so that we can decide which platform to support. It will most likely have to be either XP or OS 10.6, with very restricted permissions to students and teachers, as that is the comfort level of IT and administration, but I'll push for whatever would benefit the students the most."
Wine

Wine 1.2 Release Candidate Announced 165

Posted by timothy from the vintage-2010 dept.
An anonymous reader writes "After evolving over 15 years to get to 1.0, a mere 2 years later and Wine 1.2 is just about here. There have been many many improvements and plenty of new features added. Listing just a few (doing no justice to the complete change set): many new toolbar icons; support for alpha blending in image lists; much more complete shader assembler; support for Arabic font shaping and joining, and a number of fixes for video rendering; font anti-aliasing configuration through fontconfig; and improved handling of desktop link files. Win64 support is the milestone that marks this release. Please test your favorite applications for problems and regressions and let the Wine team know so fixes can be made before the final release. Find the release candidate here."
Wine

Submission + - Wine 1.2 release candidate announced (winehq.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: After evolving over 15 years to get to 1.0, a mere 2 years later and Wine 1.2 is just about here.
There have been many many improvements and plenty of new features added. Listing just a few (doing no justice to the complete change set)
    — Many new toolbar icons.
    — Support for alpha blending in image lists.
    — Much more complete shader assembler.
    — Support for Arabic font shaping and joining.
    — A number of fixes for video rendering.
    — Font anti-aliasing configuration through fontconfig.
    — Improved handling of desktop link files.

Win64 support is the milestone that marks this release.

Please test your favorite applications for problems and regressions and let the Wine team know so fixes can be made before the final release. Find the release candidate here.
Social Networks

Submission + - Hackers Can Delete Facebook Friends (computerworld.com)

Submitted by CWmike
CWmike writes: A bug in Facebook's Web site lets hackers delete Facebook friends without permission. The flaw was reported on Wednesday by Steven Abbagnaro, a student at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York. But as of Friday morning, Pacific time, it had still not been patched, based on tests conducted by the IDG News Service on a reporter's Facebook friends list. The security researcher is not going to release the code used in his attack until after Facebook fixes the flaw, but he says that technically competent hackers could figure out how to pull off the attack. That's because Abbagnaro's code exploits the same underlying flaw that was first reported by M.J. Keith, a senior security analyst with Alert Logic. Last week, Keith discovered that Facebook's Web site was not properly checking code sent by users' browsers to ensure that they were authorized to make changes on the site. Facebook's security team has been under siege lately, with worm attacks and site flaws popping up on a regular basis. These security issues come as the social network has been hit with intense criticism for not adequately protecting users' privacy, and inappropriately sharing user data with advertisers. Users have been quitting the social network and a campaign proclaiming May 31 as Quit Facebook Day has gained some traction. According to the results a new Sophos poll, more than half of Facebook users are considering dumping the site because of privacy concerns.

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