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Submission + - Could your next HDTV roll up like a blind? (foxnews.com)

Submitted by Velcroman1
Velcroman1 writes: Japan's Shinoda Plasma Co. demonstrated a giant, flexible, plasma display at the Display Week 2013 conference last month in Vancouver, British Columbia, winning an award for “Best Prototype at Display Week.” It’s the latest effort to create the flexible gizmos of the future. The company calls its invention a “Luminous Array Film,” or LAFi; instead of being made from one large, flat sheet of glass, the display uses a thousand tiny glass tubes, each 1 mm in diameter and a bit more than 3 feet long. In spite of their tiny size, the tubes are hollow, and can hold the inert gas and phosphors required to make the light to create an image. Shinoda’s secret is that the display can only bend in one dimension. Consider a typical bamboo screen that you might use to cover a window, where a flexible fabric connects the relatively rigid bamboo sticks. You can roll up the screen so that all the bamboo pieces remain parallel to each other — forming a cylinder less than 4 inches across.

Submission + - Is Xbox One the 'future of PRISM'? (bgr.com)

Submitted by zacharye
zacharye writes: The Xbox One has been a public relations nightmare so far for Microsoft. The console’s debut was marred by unclear policies and misinformation, and gamers haven’t been shy in letting Microsoft know how they feel. But it’s not just the used game policy, game-sharing limitations and connectivity requirements that have people up in arms — some gamers are absolutely outraged at one of the Xbox One’s most innovative new features. Is Xbox One the future of PRISM?...

Submission + - Volvo's Electric Roads Concept Points to Battery-Free EV Future (gizmag.com)

Submitted by Zothecula
Zothecula writes: While quick charging technology installed at strategic points along a planned route might be a good fit for inner city buses, it's not going to be of much use to electric vehicles that stop infrequently. Volvo sees our future long-haul trucks and buses drawing the juice they need from the road itself, making large onboard batteries a thing of the past.

Submission + - Thousands companies share with NSA (bloomberg.com)

Submitted by da5idnetlimit.com
da5idnetlimit.com writes: Bloomberg is reporting that the recent NSA Prism scandal is just a tiny scratch on the privacy surface. Citing "four people familiar with the process", the agency claims that in fact thousands of technology, finance and manufacturing companies work with US national security.
Interestingly it explains, for instance, how Microsoft gives government agencies a heads-up when it comes to bug fixesâ"and two sources describe how the news is used to exploit vulnerabilities in software sold to foreign governments.

On a side note maybe we can thank the NSA for giving more steam to Linux on the desktop. And on servers. And routers 8)

Submission + - MS Office Finally Gets iOS App (independent.co.uk) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: After years of rumors and months of bickering with Apple over revenue splits, Microsoft has finally released an official iOS app for Office 365 subscribers, allowing people to use Word, Excel and PowerPoint on the iPhones. According to a hands-on report with the software, the offering has basic functionality, but is missing some key productivity features. "These include: font options, text alignment, bulleted lists and, again, more color choices, all of which you can find in, say, the Google Drive app." They say it's a fairly useful addition for current subscribers, but certainly not enough to make it worth the Office 365 subscription fee on its own. "We can't tell if Microsoft deliberately handicapped Office Mobile for iPhone, or if it's simply saving some features for a later update. (A company rep declined to comment on what we can expect from future versions.) We're willing to believe Microsoft still has some unfinished items on its to-do list, but even so, it's a shame that iPhone users waited this long for an Office app, only to get something with such a minimal feature set. All told, Office Mobile represents a good enough start for Microsoft, and in some ways it's better than Google Drive, particularly where spreadsheets are concerned. Still, it's miles behind other office apps for iOS, including Apple iWork."

Submission + - Cloud Computing Platform Using Lego And Rasberry Pis (gla.ac.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Glasgow University have developed a cloud computing platform using 56 Rasberry Pis and Lego bricks for £4000. The Rasberry Pis (the number of which can be scaled up/down) “sit in racks made from Lego, which mimic the modular design, as well as the function, of a cloud computing infrastructure.” and give “a very clear correspondence between the hardware and the software, and a physical setup which is very similar to how racks of servers work in real data centres”.

Submission + - EA Pisses of Players. Again. (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by DeathToBill
DeathToBill writes: EA has done it again, the BBC reports. After EA took over operation of the online Scrabble brand, it introduced a "new and improved" version. Improvements include requiring manual refreshes to see other players' turns, irretrievably wiping players' game history and a switch to the Collins dictionary that has proved deeply unpopular with Scrabble fanatics. "EA was unavailable for comment."

Submission + - Berlin will not migrate to open source but looks to open standards (cio.co.uk)

Submitted by Qedward
Qedward writes: Berlin will not migrate to open source software, but instead the parliament of the German city-state decided in principle to choose workplace IT based on open standards.

Berlin's Green party had proposed to have 25% of its standardised IT workplaces running open source software by 2018, according to the proposal that was voted down by the state parliament earlier this week.

It is the second time the opposition Greens had proposed switching Berlin's 68,000 workstations to open source software, and the second time they failed, said Thomas Birk, the party's spokesman for government modernization, on Wednesday. The earlier effort was in 2007.

Switching to open source can work, said Birk. By switching over 80% of its 15,500 desktops from Windows to its own Linux distribution, LiMux, and OpenOffice.org software, the city of Munich said it had saved over €11 million by November last year.

"Munich's example proves it is not witchcraft," to switch to open source, said Birk.

Submission + - Sharp develops the worlds most efficient solar cell

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Sharp has achieved the world’s highest solar cell conversion efficiency of 44.4%, using a concentrator triple-junction compound solar cell. These solar cells are used in a lens-based concentrator system that focuses sunlight on the cells to generate electricity. Sharp’s concentrator triple-junction compound solar cells use a proprietary technology that enables the efficient conversion of sunlight into electricity by means of a stack of three photo-absorption layers, the bottommost of which is made from InGaAs (indium gallium arsenide).

Submission + - Red Hat ditches MySQL, switches to MariaDB (itwire.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Red Hat will switch the default database in its enterprise distribution, RHEL, from MySQL to MariaDB, when version 7 is released.

Submission + - Security Researchers Find Flaws, Get Threatened With Lawsuit (webhostingtalk.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Two security researchers who have been uncovering tons of flaws lately in hosting software have encountered a developer from New Jersey who not only hasn't issued a patch for a root level exploit after two weeks, he is threatening to sue the researchers for all kinds of damages. The software in question is Zamfoo which is a popular package for reseller hosting providers.

Submission + - NSA leaker Snowden is lying, say leaders of House Intelligence Committee (thehill.com) 2

Submitted by cold fjord
cold fjord writes: New developments in the ongoing controversy engulfing the NSA as a result of the Snowden leaks. From The Hill: ""Emerging from a hearing with NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander, Reps. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), chairman of the Intelligence Committee, and Dutch Ruppersberger (Md.), the senior Democrat on the panel, said Edward Snowden simply wasn't in the position to access the content of the communications gathered under National Security Agency programs, as he's claimed. "He was lying," Rogers said. "He clearly has over-inflated his position, he has over-inflated his access and he's even over-inflated what the actually technology of the programs would allow one to do. It's impossible for him to do what he was saying he could do." "He's done tremendous damage to the country where he was born and raised and educated," Ruppersberger said." ... "It was clear that he attempted to go places that he was not authorized to go, which should raise questions for everyone," Rogers added."

Submission + - Arnold Schwarzenegger will be back as The Terminator

Submitted by sfcrazy
sfcrazy writes: Arnold Schwarzenegger returned to movies after his role as Governator of California and the legendary actor is all set to play the role of The Terminator once again — the character which turned him into an icon. Schwarzenegger told the fan site TheArnoldFans.com, "I'm very happy that the studios want me to be in Terminator 5 and to star as the Terminator."

Submission + - Facebook's Newest Datacenter Relies on Arctic Cooling (slashdot.org)

Submitted by Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: One year and seven months after beginning construction, Facebook has brought its first datacenter on foreign soil online. That soil is in Lulea, town of 75,000 people on northern Sweden’s east coast, just miles south of the boundary separating the Arctic Circle from the somewhat-less-frigid land below it. Lulea (also nicknamed The Node Pole for the number of datacenters in the area) is in the coldest area of Sweden and shares the same latitude as Fairbanks, Alaska, according to a local booster site. The constant, biting wind may have stunted the growth of Lulea’s tourism industry, but it has proven a big factor in luring big IT facilities into the area. Datacenters in Lulea are just as difficult to power and cool as any other concentrated mass of IT equipment, but their owners can slash the cost of cooling all those servers and storage units simply by opening a window: the temperature in Lulea hasn’t stayed at or above 86 degrees Fahrenheit for 24 hours since 1961, and the average temperature is a bracing 29.6 Fahrenheit. Air cooling might prove a partial substitute for powered environmental control, but Facebook’s datacenter still needed 120megawatts of steady power to keep the social servers humming. Sweden has among the lowest electricity costs in Europe, and the Lulea area reportedly has among the lowest power costs in Sweden. Low electricity prices are at least partly due to the area’s proximity to the powerful Lulea River and the line of hydroelectric dams that draw power from it.

Submission + - Researchers Discover New Layer to the Cornea (redorbit.com)

Submitted by puddingebola
puddingebola writes: From the article, "A previously undetected layer in the cornea, the clear window at the front of the human eye, has been discovered by scientists at The University of Nottingham. This new layer, called the Dua’s Layer after Professor Harminder Dua who discovered it, could help surgeons to dramatically improve outcomes for patients undergoing corneal grafts and transplants. This is a major discovery that will mean that ophthalmology textbooks will literally need to be re-written. Having identified this new and distinct layer deep in the tissue of the cornea, we can now exploit its presence to make operations much safer and simpler for patients,” said Dua, Professor of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences."

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