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Science

Submission + - Caves of the Moon (newscientist.com)

Submitted by jeno
jeno writes: A deep hole on the moon that could open into a vast underground tunnel has been found for the first time. The discovery strengthens evidence for subsurface, lava-carved channels that could shield future human colonists from space radiation and other hazards.
Graphics

Submission + - Conversion of video to brush strokes (blackpawn.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In his blog, blackpawn shows his latest result of recreating images with a small number of brush strokes. Using nVidia's CUDA programming language he's converted a Nine Inch Nails music video to an amazing loose painterly style.
Security

Submission + - 'Cartography Attacks' Against Cloud Computing (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by TechRev_AL
TechRev_AL writes: Researchers at MIT and the University of California, San Diego have discovered a potential vulnerability in the cloud computing infrastructure operated by Amazon and others. The researchers identify several ways to gain access to a virtual machine running on the same physical hardware as a would-be victim's virtual machine. Then, by monitoring the demand and a stresses placed on that server it may be possible to determine sensitive information about the victim's system via a side-channel attack. They tested the approach on Amazon's EC2 platform and show that it works. Eran Tromer, a postdoc at MIT speculates that this could extend to sniffing passwords, although this hasn't been proven in practice. The research will be presented at the ACM Cloud Computing Security Workshop in November.
Biotech

Submission + - A High-Res 3D Video of the Embryonic Heartbeat (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Researchers at the University of Houston, TX, adapted an imaging technique called optical coherence tomography to capture at 3D video of the mammalian heart as it forms. They used the method to image a mouse embryo just 8.5 days past conception and about a day after it starts to form. In the remarkable video a normal heartbeat is visible. Normally optical coherence tomography is used for clinical imaging of the retina. Having such a high-resolution, non-invasive way to image the developing heart could perhaps help doctors treat congenital heart disorders in human babies.

Submission + - Wall Street cheating proven impossible to detect (about.com)

Submitted by mrstrano
mrstrano writes: "A new paper by Princeton computer scientists and economists suggests that complex financial
derivatives are computationally intractable to detect: that is, once you have mixed together a bunch
  of weird-ass securities and derivatives, you literally can't tell if the resulting security is being
tampered with as it pays off (or doesn't)." A nice and simple explanation of the idea behind the paper is given by Richard J. Lipton.

Comment Jamming new? (Score 1) 177

by pontifier (#29801677) Attached to: iRobot Introduces Morphing Blob Robot
As far as I can tell, it has existed at least since 1938 when patent #2138974 describes electromagnetic "jamming" for the purposes of making a foot mold using a "magnetic box". Pneumatic "jamming" has existed since at least 1949 where patent #2472754 describes the effect... also for the purpose of making a foot mold.

Comment Re:Game Reset (Score 1) 81

by pontifier (#29499641) Attached to: <em>Monopoly</em> Uses Google Maps To Go Live Online
To anyone still interested in this, it has become an epic failure...
Millions of people played, cheaters took over, they reset the game, and it still sucks. The rents were increasing more than exponentialy, now they dropped the rents and pissed everyone off. It will be quite interesting to see what happens.
The blog is loaded with complaints.

Comment Story I read somewhere... (Score 1) 1127

by pontifier (#27583415) Attached to: Worst Working Conditions You Had To Write Code In?
This reminds me of a story I read once about a programmer who challenges the devil to a programming contest. they battle it out on archaic machines, the heroic programmer using every available bit of memory and hardware... even stores some bits in a temporary buffer in the air between the speaker and microphone in order to get the most out of it... has anyone here read that story?
Bug

Amazon Explains Why S3 Went Down 114

Posted by timothy from the not-mere-sluttiness dept.
Angostura writes "Amazon has provided a decent write-up of the problems that caused its S3 storage service to fail for around 8 hours last Sunday. It providers a timeline of events, the immediate action take to fix it (they pulled the big red switch) and what the company is doing to prevent re-occurrence. In summary: A random bit got flipped in one of the server state messages that the S3 machines continuously pass back and forth. There was no checksum on these messages, and the erroneous information was propagated across the cloud, causing so much inter-server chatter that no customer work got done."

First Details of Windows 7 Emerge 615

Posted by CowboyNeal from the scantilly-clad-screenshots dept.
Some small but significant details of the next major release of Windows have emerged via a presentation at the University of Illinois by Microsoft engineer Eric Traut. His presentation focuses on an internal project called "MinWin," designed to optimize the Windows kernel to a minimum footprint, and for which will be the basis for the Windows 7 kernel.
Communications

Submission + - Pulse Dialing or Touch Tone?

Submitted by highestregards
highestregards writes: 20 years ago when I moved into my house and ordered land line phone service from Bell Canada, I opted to go for the pulse line rather than touch tone. The reasoning back then was simple, I only had a rotary phone and the pulse service was cheaper. Flash forward to present day. Although the phone company no longer offers the choice of line for new activations, they haven't disconnected those with pulse service. I'm now the only person that I know who still has a pulse line.

All of the phones in the house are of the push-button variety, so they can be used to respond to interactive prompts, but the phones are set to pulse dial mode. Over the years, I have heard a variety of reasons why I should upgrade to a touch tone line, but I have yet to be convinced. Common arguments are that dial up modems don't work on a pulse line (they do, you usually just preface the dialing string with a "P") and that extra services like 3-way calling and call return don't work (they do, but there's usually a different sequence to dial since rotary phones don't have a "*").

Considering that now, 20 years later, the monthly line charge is still marginally more expensive for a touch tone line than for a pulse one, I have decided to stick with pulse. A couple of questions: do any of you still use a pulse line? For those who choose to pay more for a touch tone line, what are your reasons?

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