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Hardware

Submission + - Hadron Collider Spurs Use of Superconductive Cable (earthandindustry.com)

Submitted by sprinkletown
sprinkletown writes: They used over 7600 km of this superconductive cable in the LHC, weighing only about 1200 tons. The total length of the filaments used if laid end to end would stretch "5 times to the sun and back with enough left over for a few trips to the moon."

On top of material efficiency, these highly advanced super-conductive cables offer tremendous gains in energy efficiency, which will play a critical role in the greening of our energy grid.
The Internet

Submission + - Net Neutrality Study: Devastating Job Losses (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by WrongSizeGlass
WrongSizeGlass writes: Ars is reporting on the Armageddon version of net neutrality analysis released by New York Law School's Advanced Communications Law & Policy Institute. The assessment, titled Net Neutrality, Investment & Jobs [PDF], damns the FCC's proposed net neutrality rules. It claims the consequence of the FCC's rules could rob the US of 502,000 jobs with a $62 billion impact on its GDP. The question, of course, is how the study's authors came up with those half-a-million job-loss estimates.

Comment Usually in Finance/Corporate Services (Score 1) 243

by AutumnLeaf (#32601950) Attached to: Where Does IT Fall Within Your Organization?

IT is often perceived as a "support activity" akin to other services such as HR, Payroll, etc... A lot of that ends up bunched under the CFO for somewhat obvious reasons, though most CFO's wouldn't count themselves as IT managers.

Regardless of where you are on the org-chart, small-shop IT people - especially one-man shows - need to be engaging stakeholders and understanding the needs of the business and then provisioning solutions to meet those needs. All while keeping the systems up to date, answering questions about excel or whatever, managing hardware/software purchases/deployments, etc... If you're doing a good job, no one will care where you are in the org-chart - you're the IT guy/department, and you'll be perceived and engaged appropriately.

Submission + - Data Center Building Boom in Silicon Valley (datacenterknowledge.com)

Submitted by 1sockchuck
1sockchuck writes: Data center developers are building like mad in Silicon Valley, with seven active projects in Santa Clara alone. The building boom includes the resumption of several stalled projects that prompted concerns of a shortage of wholesale data center space in the Valley. The flurry of construction activity is different than the overbuilding binge during the dot-com boom, which was characterized by too much funding and too few customers. This time, industry experts say, the end of a funding drought has created a situation in which construction is struggling to stay ahead of demand from companies like Facebook, which just scarfed up an entire new data center in Santa Clara.

Submission + - SPAM: Google rolls out encrypted Web search option 1

Submitted by KirinMercury
KirinMercury writes: Google began offering an encrypted option for Web searchers on Friday and said it planned to roll it out for all of its services eventually.

People who want to use the more secure search option can type "[spam URL stripped]" into their browser, scrambling the connection so the words and phrases they search on, and the results that Google displays, will be protected from interception.
Link to Original Source
Science

Submission + - Fake Glaciers Help Farmers Beat Climate Change (change.org)

Submitted by separsons
separsons writes: Residents of Leh, a remote village in the Indian trans-Himalayas, rely predominately on melting snow and glaciers to water crops. But due to warming temperatures, villagers haven't seen glaciers in the past 15 years, and snowpack continues to retreat. Chewong Norphel, a retired civil engineer came up with an innovative solution: remodel the landscape to create "artificial glaciers." By building stone walls in slopes above the village, Norphel diverted run-off from melting snow and ice that otherwise would have flowed away from the village. A series of embankments slowed the icy water's flow long enough so it froze, forming an artificial glacier. Any water that escaped from that glacier ran into a storage resevoir, which froze and acted like a second glacier. All in all, Norphel's system of 10 artificial glaciers helped 10,000 villagers. The region's harvests increased three-fold, and villagers even grow enough wheat to sell the surplus.
Apple

Submission + - Protesters call for iPhone boycott over suicides (pcpro.co.uk)

Submitted by Barence
Barence writes: A workers’ group in Hong Kong is calling for a global boycott of the next iPhone following a spate of suicides in Foxconn factories, where workers make components for Apple and other electronics manufacturers. According to Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior (Sacom), a startling ten Foxconn employees in Shenzhen have tried to commit suicide since the beginning of the year. Eight died and the group cites poor working and living conditions as the reason for the suicide attempts. After staging a small protest outside the Foxconn office in Hong Kong, the group told PC Pro it was calling for improved working conditions for workers in Foxconn factories. For more information on the conditions suffered by workers, see PC Pro's feature, "The extreme — and violent — methods used to keep Apple's secrets".

Comment Cosmic Justice has been served. (Score 5, Insightful) 1204

by AutumnLeaf (#31989754) Attached to: Police Seize Computers From Gizmodo Editor

When the Gizmodo punks outed the name of the Apple Engineer who lost the phone for, as near as I could tell, no good reason other than to pile on, I lost all sympathy for them. This wasn't a whistle-blower story exposing corporate crime or government misdeeds. It was just a punk profiting off of another person's misfortune.

Enjoy your interactions with the Criminal Justice System, Mr. Chen.

Submission + - McAfee Reporting false positives with latest DAT (mcafee.com)

Submitted by wompa
wompa writes: From the KB entry: McAfee is aware of a w32/wecorl.a false positive with the 5958 DAT file that was released on April 21, 2010. Blue screen or DCOM error, followed by shutdown messages after updating to the 5958 DAT on April 21, 2010.

Comment Walled Gardens (Score 1) 483

by AutumnLeaf (#31418536) Attached to: Apple's iPhone Developer License Agreement Revealed

The iPhone is a walled garden. Specifically, Apple's walled garden. Want to enjoy Apple's garden and grow things in it? Want to pick fruit from the trees (make money off the user base) - again - agree to Apple's terms.

There may be gardens out there that look wall-free, but on closer inspection you'll find the walls are simply lower. Usually the walls are lower to entice people to enter the garden. Given enough consumers, the walls get higher and trap people inside. All of the vendors are playing the same game - trap the consumer, and take their money.
Social Networks

Game Distribution Platforms Becoming Annoyingly Common 349

Posted by Soulskill from the looking-at-you-games-for-windows-live dept.
The Escapist's Shamus Young recently posted an article complaining about the proliferation of distribution platforms and social networks for video games. None of the companies who make these are "quite sure how games will be sold and played ten years from now," he writes, "but they all know they want to be the ones running the community or selling the titles." Young continues, "Remember how these systems usually work: The program sets itself up to run when Windows starts, and it must be running if you want to play the game. If you follow this scheme to its logical conclusion, you'll see that the system tray of every gaming PC would eventually end up clogged with loaders, patchers, helpers, and monitors. Every publisher would have a program for serving up content, connecting players, managing digital licenses, performing patches, and (most importantly) selling stuff. Some people don't mind having 'just one more' program running in the background. But what happens when you have programs from Valve, Stardock, Activision, 2k Games, Take-Two, Codemasters, Microsoft, Eidos, and Ubisoft? Sure, you could disable them. But then when you fire the thing up to play a game, it will want to spend fifteen minutes patching itself and the game before it will let you in. And imagine how fun it would be juggling accounts for all of them."

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