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Space

Planck Mission Releases Images of Galactic Dust 40

Posted by Soulskill from the break-out-the-galactic-pledge dept.
davecl writes "The Planck satellite has released its first new science images, showing the large scale filamentary structure of cold dust in our own galaxy. This release coincides with the completion of its first survey of the entire sky a couple of weeks ago. There's lots more work to be done, and more observations to be made, before results are ready on the Big Bang, but these images demonstrate Planck's performance and capability. More information is available on the Planck mission blog (which I maintain)."
AMD

Making Sense of CPU and GPU Model Numbers? 555

Posted by kdawson from the drowning-in-a-sea-of-specs dept.
b4dc0d3r writes "How do you make sense of the various model numbers or naming schemes for CPUs, graphics cards, and the related chipsets? All I want is something that will run Oblivion and output full 1080 video to a TV. Last time I built my own computer I just went to Pricewatch, made a few easy choices, and everything came to my door. Do I really have to research the differences among Core i5, Core 2 Duo, Pentium 4, Pentium D, Sempron, Athlon, Phenom ...? And that's just the processor. Is there a reference somewhere? In short, how do you buy a computer these days?"
Piracy

Ubisoft's Authentication Servers Go Down 634

Posted by kdawson from the single-point-of-well-you-know dept.
ZuchinniOne writes "With Ubisoft's fantastically awful new DRM you must be online and logged in to their servers to play the games you buy. Not only was this DRM broken the very first day it was released, but now their authentication servers have failed so absolutely that no-one who legally bought their games can play them. 'At around 8am GMT, people began to complain in the Assassin's Creed 2 forum that they couldn't access the Ubisoft servers and were unable to play their games.' One can only hope that this utter failure will help to stem the tide of bad DRM."
Transportation

Submission + - Open public transport data? (sourceforge.net)

Submitted by ckotso
ckotso writes: After realizing that, contrary to my understanding so far, the data used by the excellent Metro mobile device software is proprietary, I thought it's probably a good idea to create an open database with information of that kind. I started a new project on SourceForge, in the hope that the community can create the data set, then developers will jump in to create great applications using it. Nevertheless, doing some online research after the fact, I realized that there are many suitable standards already (either de facto such as GTFS, or de jure such as NeTEx and IFOPT) and we only miss the process of providing and maintaining the open data. The GTFS Data Exchange is certainly a step to that direction (although the license is unclear), but the content is still too little. How about slashdot-ers writing an email to public transport authorities of their places of residence, and suggest provisioning of open GTFS-based data on this site or at the relevant GTFS page? Or, would it be reasonable to make a petition to Google to open up the GTFS-based data they already have, for more than 445 cities at the moment? Or, is it necessary eventually that the community steps up to create and maintain the data itself?

Submission + - Jury Rules All Table Saws are Unsafe (protoolreviews.com) 2

Submitted by SchlimpyChicken
SchlimpyChicken writes: An editorial over at ProToolReviews.com cites the first case in which a jury essentially ruled that all table saws should include flesh-detection systems. The verdict was in favor of a defendant who lacerated his hands — apparently due to his own misuse of the table saw. The problem is that they ruled negligence based on technology they felt the Ryobi table saw should have had. The similarity seems to open the door for a veritable onslaught of lawsuits like, for example, penalizing any vehicle manufacturer for accidents involving a car not equipped with anti-lock brakes. The article mentioned the now infamous SawStop technology, which was at the heart of the lawsuit and is no stranger to pushing its technology through the judicial system. If mandated, it would put millions of dollars in licensing fees into a single company and raise the price of every table saw — all but eliminating entry-level models.
Software

Submission + - software reveals what your nose says about you (dailymail.co.uk)

Submitted by Arvisp
Arvisp writes: Supersleuths have found a highly successful way of tracking down terrorists, illegal immigrants, fraudsters and identity thieves: by scanning their noses.
The technology uses computer software, called the PhotoFace, to analyse the nose then put it in one of six categories.
‘Noses are prominent facial features,’ says Dr Adrian Evans, one of the researchers involved in a study at the University of Bath. ‘They are easier to photograph and are harder to conceal, so a system that recognises noses would work better with an uncooperative subject or for covert surveillance.’
Experts believe the distinctive shape of your conk reveals fascinating facts about your personality.

Submission + - Ars technica blocks AdBlock users (arstechnica.com) 5

Submitted by qvatch
qvatch writes: Ars technica stops displaying articles for users browsing with AdBlock. No error is displayed, nor was any warning given.

  Clintology ( Developer / Proj. Manager )
            | tbradshaw wrote: I'm guessing that these responses mean that this is "behavior by design"?

Yes, its meant to annoy you into outing yourselves so I can guilt you ;)

If you're not willing to unblock our ads, we're fairly happy for you to not read the content we work very hard on, or to just stop visiting the site altogether.
Biotech

Printing Replacement Body Parts 101

Posted by kdawson from the portrait-mode dept.
Deep Penguin sends in a piece that appeared in The Economist a couple of weeks back about a developing technology to "print" body parts for transplant. "A US and an Australian company have developed the $200,000 machine, which works by depositing stem cells and a 'sugar-based hydrogel' scaffolding material. (The stem cells are harvested from a transplant patient's own fat and bone marrow, to avoid rejection down the line.) The companies are Organovo, from San Diego, specializing in regenerative medicine, and Invetech, an engineering and automation firm in Melbourne, Australia. The initial targets are skin, muscle, and 'short stretches of blood vessels,' which they hope to have available for human implantation within five years. Down the line, they expect the technology could even print directly into the body, bypassing the in-vitro portion of the current process."
Earth

Officials Sue Couple Who Removed Their Lawn 819

Posted by kdawson from the revenge-of-the-lawn dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "The LA Times reports that Orange County officials are locked in a legal battle with a couple accused of violating city ordinances for replacing the grass on their lawn with wood chips and drought-tolerant plants, reducing their water usage from 299,221 gallons in 2007 to 58,348 gallons in 2009. The dispute began two years ago, when Quan and Angelina Ha tore out the grass in their front yard. In drought-plagued Southern California, the couple said, the lush grass had been soaking up tens of thousands of gallons of water — and hundreds of dollars — each year. 'We've got a newborn, so we want to start worrying about her future,' said Quan Ha, an information technology manager for Kelley Blue Book. But city officials told the Has they were violating several city laws that require that 40% of residential yards to be landscaped predominantly with live plants. Last summer, the couple tried to appease the city by building a fence around the yard and planting drought-tolerant greenery — lavender, rosemary, horsetail, and pittosporum, among others. But according to the city, their landscaping still did not comply with city standards. At the end of January, the Has received a letter saying they had been charged with a misdemeanor violation and must appear in court. The couple could face a maximum penalty of six months in jail and a $1,000 fine for their grass-free, eco-friendly landscaping scheme. 'It's just funny that we pay our taxes to the city and the city is now prosecuting us with our own money,' says Quan Ha."

Submission + - 3 Questions You Must Ask About Your Neighbors Befo

Submitted by condojuice
condojuice writes: Buying a condo can be a magnificent way of realizing your dreams of home ownership. If you think you have found the perfect condo and are ready to commit to a purchase, it is imperative that you understand certain things about your future neighbors. Whether or not those neighbors are responsible ones can affect the manner in which your homeowner association is run. Many prospective condo buyers do not realize what a dramatic effect this can have on the value of their condo in the long run. Therefore, there are three important questions you must ask about your neighbors before making this important financial investment in your future.
Debian

Submission + - The most popular open source operating systems (rhyous.com)

Submitted by rhyous
rhyous writes: So on the main DistroWatch.com page, there is a report that will give you the average hits per day (hpd) that an open source distro’s web site gets. At the bottom there is a link to full popularity page of just these reports:
http://distrowatch.com/stats.php?section=popularity

So at first glance, you see Ubuntu is the best and Fedora is second and so on. I wanted to take the statistics a bit further. I wanted to know what main base distribution was the most used. What I mean by base distro is this: Ubuntu is #1. But Ubuntu is not a base distribution, instead it is based on Debian. Mint is #3 and is also based on Debian. Debian itself is #6 and it is a base distribution. Fedora is a base distribution.

QlikView can connect to this web page and consume this data. It was also able to loop through and click go to the link for each distribution where it was able to pull the “Based on” results. I did a few little tweaks to clean it up.

So I used QlikView to match each Distribution to its base distribution and built my report. I gathered the cumulative hits per day (hpd) of each base distro by summing the hpd from itself and its child distros. The results are staggering.
PHP

Eight PHP IDEs Compared 206

Posted by timothy from the colonic-extraction dept.
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Rick Grehen provides an in-depth comparative review of eight PHP IDEs: ActiveState's Komodo IDE, CodeLobster PHP Edition, Eclipse PHP Development Tools (PDT), MPSoftware's phpDesigner, NetBeans IDE for PHP, NuSphere's PhpED, WaterProof's PHPEdit, and Zend Studio. 'All of these PHP toolkits offer strong support for the other languages and environments (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SQL database) that a PHP developer encounters. The key differences we discovered were in the tools they provide (HTML inspector, SQL management system) for various tasks, the quality of their documentation, and general ease-of-use,' Grehen writes.'"

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One of the chief duties of the mathematician in acting as an advisor... is to discourage... from expecting too much from mathematics. -- N. Wiener

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