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Intel

Submission + - Intel to exit motherboard business after Haswell (extremetech.com)

Submitted by massivepanic
massivepanic writes: After 20 years, we’ve learned that Intel plans to exit the motherboard business. This announcement won’t impact Haswell — Intel motherboards will be available in normal volumes and quantities for the fourth generation Core i7 products. After that, Chipzilla will rely on boards from third parties like Asus, Gigabyte, and MSI. If you like Intel’s own motherboards, there’s no reason to avoid buying one for Haswell; Intel has confirmed that the next-generation boards will carry the same warranty and support for BIOS updates as previous hardware. On the manufacturing side, however, this announcement could shake up the entire motherboard business.
Linux

Submission + - Love Ubuntu, but looking for something faster? Go Lubuntu (networkworld.com)

Submitted by colinneagle
colinneagle writes: Here’s the basic overview of what Lubuntu is:

Take Ubuntu. Rip out the Unity user interface and drop in LXDE (aka the "Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment"). This frees up resources (both memory and CPU) and generally makes your systems a bit snappier.

Then take out LibreOffice and Firefox. Sub in Abiword, Gnumeric and Chromium. Lightweight, super-face office suite and web browser? Check.

Those sorts of tweaks, and software swaps, are common throughout the system — and almost invariably resulting in a system that is just that much leaner and peppier. They even opt to use Sylpheed for the email client (instead of the common Thunderbird). Seriously. Sylpheed. Who uses Sylpheed? Well, apparently people who want their systems to be crazy fast and stable.

In many ways, Lubuntu reminds me of Ubuntu of old — back when Gnome 2 was the bee’s knee’s. Lubuntu even comes packed with Synaptic Package Manager (the old graphical software installer from versions of Ubuntu more than a few years back) and full access to all of Ubuntu’s software repositories (it is an Ubuntu-derived system, after all, with close ties to the Ubuntu release cycle).
KDE

Submission + - The Road to KDE Frameworks 5 and Plasma 2 (vizzzion.org)

Submitted by
jrepin
jrepin writes: "KDE’s Next Generation user interfaces will run on top of Qt5, on Linux, they will run atop Wayland or Xorg as display server. The user interfaces move away from widget-based X11 rendering to OpenGL. Monolithic libraries are being split up, interdependencies removed and portability and dependencies cut by stronger modularization.

For users, this means higher quality graphics, more organic user interfaces and availability of applications on a wider range of devices.
Developers will find an extensive archive of high-quality, libraries and solutions on top of Qt. Complex problems and a high-level of integration between apps and the workspace allow easy creation of portable, high-quality applications.

The projects to achieve this goal are KDE Frameworks 5 and Plasma 2. In this article, you’ll learn about the reasons for this migration and the status of the individual steps to be taken."
Open Source

Submission + - LTSI Linux Kernel 3.4 Released (paritynews.com)

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: The Linux Foundation has announced the release of Linux 3.4 under its Long Term Support Initiative (LTSI) that will be maintained for next two years with back-ported features from newer Linux kernels. Based on Linux 3.4.25, the LTSI 3.4 is equipped with features such as Contiguous Memory Allocator (CMA) which is helpful for embedded devices with limited hardware resource availability; AF_BUS – a kernel-based implementation of the D-Bus protocol; CoDel (controlled delay) – a transmission algorithm meant for optimization of TCP/IP network buffer control. The LTSI is backed by the likes of Hitachi, LG Electronics, NEC.
Data Storage

Submission + - Kingston Announces World's First 1TB Thumb Drive (techgage.com) 2

Submitted by
Deathspawner
Deathspawner writes: "If there's one thing that each CES can bring, it's a handful or products that manage to drop jaws everywhere. Kingston's latest flash drive series, DataTraveler HyperX Predator 3.0, manages to be one of those. It's aimed at folks who actually need mass storage on the go at speeds that mechanical hard drives cannot offer. Available soon will be a 512GB model, followed by the 1TB later this quarter. The drive features read speeds of 240MB/s and write speeds of 160MB/s — not quite desktop SSD speeds, but much faster than a mechanical hard drive, and with vastly reduced latencies due to it being flash storage. Not surprisingly, pricing has not yet been discussed."
Open Source

Submission + - Netflix Open-Sources "Janitor Monkey" AWS Cleanup Tool (slashdot.org)

Submitted by
Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: "Netflix has released “Janitor Monkey,” an open-source tool for killing old Amazon Web Services (AWS) instances that began life as an in-house product. While those hosting a private data center will have little use for this scrubbin’ simian, those enterprises with a public cloud can add Janitor Monkey to their administrative bag of tricks. The premise behind the tool is a simple one: while AWS allows for easy (and cheap) experimentation, it’s easy for even the most diligent IT pro to rack up unnecessary costs when they forget to shut off a particular instance. While Netflix’s Asgard tool—open-sourced in June, because this is how the company rolls—allows administrators to delete unused resources, Janitor Monkey takes things one step further by allowing those instances to be automatically found so that Asgard can clean them up. Over the past year, Janitor Monkey has deleted more than 5,000 resources running in the Netflix production and test environments, the company said. Janitor Monkey detects AWS instances, EBS volumes, EBS volume snapshots, and auto-scaling group."
Hardware

Submission + - Nvidia Project Shield, hand held android game console (blogspot.ca)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Nvidia made a big announcement today at CES. They will be building their own game console backed by Android. Project Shield as it is named comes with Tegra 4 SOC, full controller, HDMI, micro USB and microSD, 5 inch touch screen at 720p, 10 hour battery life and the ability to output to a 4k display.
Programming

Submission + - C Beats Java As Number One Language (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: Every January it is traditional to compare the state of the languages as indicated by the TIOBE index. So what's up and what's down this year? There have been headlines that C# is the language of the year, but this is based on a new language index. What the TIOBE index shows is that Java is no longer number one as it has been beaten by C — yes C not C++ or even Objective C. TIOBE name Objective C as the language of the year but because it has grown most in popularity but this is mainly because of the growth of iOS — it is hardly used for anything else. No without a doubt the language of the year should be C for deposing Java.
Science

Submission + - America's Real Criminal Element: Lead (motherjones.com) 1

Submitted by 2muchcoffeeman
2muchcoffeeman writes: The cause of the great increase in violent crime that started in the 1960s and peaked in the 1990s may have been isolated: lead (chemical symbol Pb). This leads directly to the reason for the sharp decline in violent crime since then: lead abatement programs and especially the ban of tetraethyl lead as an anti-knock agent in gasoline starting in 1996.

There are three reasons why this makes sense. First, the statistics correlate almost perfectly. Second, it holds true worldwide with no exceptions. Every country studied has shown this same strong correlation between leaded gasoline and violent crime rates. Third, the chemistry and neuroscience of lead gives us good reason to believe the connection. Decades of research has shown that lead poisoning causes significant and probably irreversible damage to the brain. Not only does lead degrade cognitive abilities and lower intelligence, it also degrades a person’s ability to make decisions by damaging areas of the brain responsible for emotional regulation, impulse control, attention, verbal reasoning, and mental flexibility.

Another thing that stands out: if you overlay a map showing areas with higher incidence of violent crime with one showing lead contamination, there's a strikingly high correlation.

Submission + - Young woman gang-raped in India dies (cnn.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: An Indian woman whose gang-rape aboard a bus in New Delhi spawned mass protests has died, according to a doctor who was treating her at a Singapore hospital.
CNN Reports — She had suffered from severe organ failure following serious injuries to her body and brain. She was courageous in fighting for her life for so long against the odds, but the trauma to her body was too severe for her to overcome.
Read the mass outpouring of sympathy, anger, and frustration from Indians on the Times of India Live Blog.
Earth

Submission + - Death Valley Dethrones Impostor as Hottest Place on Earth

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Adam Nagourney reports that after a yearlong investigation a team of climate scientists announced that it is throwing out a reading of 136.4 degrees claimed by the city of Al Aziziyah, Libya on Sept. 13, 1922 making the 134-degree reading registered on July 10, 1913, at Greenland Ranch in Death Valley the official world record as the hottest place on earth. “It’s about time for science, but I think we all knew it was coming,” says Randy Banis. “You don’t underestimate Death Valley. Most of us enthusiasts are proud that the extremes that we have known about at Death Valley are indeed the most harsh on earth.” The final report by 13 climatologists appointed by the World Meteorological Organization, the climate agency of the United Nations, found five reasons to disqualify the Libya claim, including questionable instruments, an inexperienced observer who made the reading and the fact that the reading was anomalous for that region and in the context of other temperatures reported in Libya that day. “The more we looked at it, the more obvious it appeared to be an error,” says Christopher C. Burt, a meteorologist with Weather Underground who started the debate in a blog post in 2010. For the record, Burt says he also has issues with the Death Valley claim of 134 degrees, and suspects it may be wrong. “It’s anomalous, even for Death Valley,” Burt says. But no matter. Even if 134-Death Valley goes the way of 136.4-Libya, the temperature has most assuredly reached 129 degrees in Furnace Creek at least three times, and 129 is just as much a world record as 134. “Death Valley would still win, so to speak, even if the 134 was erroneous.""

Submission + - The Free Software Foundation Campaigning to Stop UEFI SecureBoot (paritynews.com)

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: The Free Software Foundation is on an offensive against restricted boot systems and is busy appealing for donations and pledge in the form of signatures in a bid to stop systems such as the UEFI SecureBoot from being adopted on a large-scale basis and becoming a norm in the future. The FSF, through an appeal on its website, is requesting users to sign a pledge titled "Stand up for your freedom to install free software" that they won’t be purchasing or recommending for purchase any such system that is SecureBoot enabled or some other form of restricted boot techniques. The FSF has managed to receive, as of this writing, over 41,000 signatures. Organizations like the Debian, Edoceo, Zando, Wreathe and many others have also showed their support for the campaign.
Privacy

Submission + - Who is afraid of the big bad Quantum Computer? (wavewatching.net)

Submitted by quax
quax writes: Whenever Quantum Computing is dragged out to get some mainstream exposure it is the same old story: If we finally get these powerful machines then the end of all encryption is here and the sky is falling.

This article makes the case that there is much more to Quantum Computing than that, and that all the hand-wringing is not only pre-mature but also rather silly. Current quantum computing devices cannot defeat our standard encryption yet, but are at a point where they can already be a valuable new computing resource. On the other hand when considering how modern cryptography works, and when taking into account the progress made on Quantum Cryptography, the often repeated threat from Quantum Computers to the privacy of a encrypted data appears to be completely overblown.

 
Android

Submission + - Android vs. iOS Mobile Web Usage Mystery (businessinsider.com)

Submitted by Titus Andronicus
Titus Andronicus writes: Android devices vastly outsell iOS devices. Yet mobile web usage statistics show massive iOS dominance. This discrepancy makes no sense, but the sales figures and mobile web usage statistics are thought to be accurate. What accounts for this mystery?

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