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Comment Re:I'd love to buy some sparc hardware (Score 3, Informative) 190

by davecb (#49041397) Attached to: Five Years After the Sun Merger, Oracle Says It's Fully Committed To SPARC

It should be: around the time of the acquisition the price performance ratio finally got back to where it was with the first SPARCs: ten times the price, 100 times the performance .

A 3U 4-socket T5 machine had about 128 full hardware threads (really: cores) the last time I looked seriously at it. The performance was a bit less than a 32-socket, 4-core-per -socket M9000, the machines I mostly worked with. In those days, I was a capacity planner and performance engineer at Sun Canada.

A lot, but not everything, is still available open-source from SPARC International.

--dave

Submission + - Researchers design bionic leaf capable of converting sunlight into liquid fuel (techienews.co.uk)

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: Artificial leaf created waves the moment it was announced by Daniel Nocera back in 2011 and his latest research, published in PNAS, involves utilising hydrogen from this artificial leaf, carbon dioxide from another source and feeding it to bacterium Ralstonia eutropha to create liquid fuel. The new system involves using the “artificial leaf” to split water into hydrogen and oxygen; carbon dioxide from another source and a bacterium Ralstonia eutropha engineered to convert carbon dioxide plus hydrogen into the liquid fuel isopropanol.

Submission + - Paramedics use Google Translate while Delivering Baby

Submitted by myatari
myatari writes: Maria Herlihy at the Corkman writes that Irish paramedics transporting a pregnant Congolese woman to a maternity hospital in Cork had to use some quick thinking when the mum-to-be went into labour en-route. The two paramedics (neither of whom had Swahili as a language) fired up Google Translate to communicate via English-Swahili and successfully delivered baby girl 'Brigid' (named after an Irish Saint no less!). The first page of the linked article is free, the rest are behind a paywall. Disclaimer: one of the paramedics is my brother.

Submission + - UK approves driverless car tests on public roads (v3.co.uk)

Submitted by DW100
DW100 writes: Look out! The UK has government has, in a remarkably forward-looking decision, agreed to let driverless car tests take place on public roads. The trials will take place in Greenwich, Bristol, Milton Keynes and Coventry with vehicles ranging from 2-seater 'pods' to shuttle services involved. A BAE wildcat jeep will also be tested, and it definitely looks the coolest of the three.

Submission + - Dating apps a potential corporate vulnerability in BYOD (thestack.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: IBM claims to have discovered exploitable vulnerabilities in 26 out of 41 smartphone dating apps available on Google’s Android mobile platform – and that 50 per cent of BYOD devices in the companies surveyed have dating apps installed on them. The report states that users have a higher level of trust in messages and interactions that take place on installed mobile apps than they would with similar communications over email, but that this level of confidence is not justified by the apps’ security performance. The threats identified are all in the ‘medium to high’ category of security risks, and include the potential to activate the end-user’s microphone remotely and leak GPS data, posing risks to private and corporate security.

Submission + - Mexican Political Family Has Close PRI Ties, and Homes in the U.S (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Parkerld
Parkerld writes: In the fall of 2013, one of Mexico’s top housing officials posted an item on Twitter about an advertising campaign promoting mortgages for low-income Mexicans. The campaign’s message was simple: “The most important thing in life is in your house.”

Submission + - Google to start highlighting accurate health facts in search results (thestack.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Google has announced that it will be displaying direct answers to health queries in related search results, adding further information to its Knowledge Graph. According to a post on its Official Blog, Google reported that one out of every 20 searches seeks medical and well-being information. The new feature is expected to launch this week through the Knowledge Graph which appears as information boxes and image cards at the top of the search screen. In this case, Google will directly serve up details on symptoms, treatments, and other related health facts such as how common an illness is and if it is contagious or critical. This addition is part of Google’s wider drive to provide its own answers to queries, instead of relying on links to other sites.

Submission + - Installing Update for Visual Studio 2010 Tools for Office is Freezing PCs

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: The latest Patch Tuesday comes with a little lemon. Microsoft has botched a rollup update for Visual Studio 2010 Tools for Office Runtime. There is an issue with KB3001652: many users are reporting that it is locking up their machines while trying to install it. It does not seem that this patch is doing any other damage though, such as bricking the operating system. These days Microsoft appears to be reacting quickly to this kind of news as it looks like the patch has already been pulled from Windows Update.

Submission + - Driving Force Behind Alkali Metal Explosions Discovered (nature.com) 1

Submitted by Kunedog
Kunedog writes: Years ago, Dr. Philip E. Mason (aka Thunderf00t on Youtube) found it puzzling that the supposedly "well-understood" explosive reaction of a lump of sodium (an alkali metal) dropped in water could happen at all, given such a limited contact area on which the reaction could take place. And indeed, sometimes an explosion did fail to reliably occur, the lump of metal instead fizzing around the water's surface on a pocket of hydrogen produced by the (slower than explosive) reaction, thus inhibiting any faster reaction of the alkali metal with the water. Mason's best hypothesis was that the (sometimes) explosive reactions must be triggered by a Coulomb explosion, which could result when sodium cations (positive ions) are produced from the reaction and expel each other further into the water.

This theory is now supported by photographic and mathematical evidence, published in the journal Nature Chemistry. In a laboratory at Braunschweig University of Technology in Germany, Mason and other chemists used a high-speed camera to capture the critical moment that makes an explosion inevitable: a liquid drop of sodium-potassium alloy shooting spikes into the water, dramatically increasing the reactive interface. They also developed a computer simulation to model this event, showing it is best explained by a Coulomb explosion.

The Youtube video chronicles the evolution the experimental apparatuses underwent over time, pursuant to keeping the explosions safe, contained, reliable, and visible.

Submission + - Microsoft Fixes Critical Remotely Exploitable Windows Root-Level Design Bug

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In this month's Patch Tuesday, Microsoft has released nine security bulletins to address 56 unique vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer, and Microsoft Server software. Of the nine security bulletins, three are rated Critical in severity, and among these three is one that addresses a years-old design flaw that can be exploited remotely to grant attackers administrator-level privileges to the targeted machine or device. An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could take complete control of an affected system. An attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights.

Submission + - Apple Invests $848 Million Into Solar Farm (reuters.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Apple is making a huge investment in solar energy, sending $848 million to First Solar’s California Flats Solar Project. The deal will supply Apple with energy for 25 years. Construction of the new 2,900-acre solar farm will start this summer and finish by the end of 2016. Apple's share of the energy produced will be about 130 megawatts, while another 150 MW will be sold to Pacific Gas & Electric. "The iPhone maker already powers all of its data centers with renewable energy. Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive officer, has advocated taking more steps to combat climate change."

Submission + - Has modern Linux lost its way? (complete.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Debian developer says that Linux is no longer "clean, logical, well put-together, and organized" after systemd.

Submission + - VLC Acquiring Lots of New Features

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: Two weekends ago an update on the VLC media player was shared during a presentation in Brussels at FOSDEM. Lead developer Jean-Baptiste Kempf covered VLC's continued vibrant development and features that are coming for VLC 2.2 along with VLC 3.0. VLC 2.2.0 will feature automatic, GPU-accelerated video rotation support, extension improvements, resume handling, support for new codecs/formats and rewrites to some of the existing formats, VDPAU GPU zero-copy support, x265 encoder support, etc. Further out is VLC 3.0.0, which is planned to have Wayland support, GPU zero-copy support for OpenMAX IL, ARIB subtitle support, HEVC / VP9 hardware decoding on Android, a rework of the MP4 and TS demuxers, and browsing improvements. The VLC FOSDEM 2015 presentation is available in PDF form. The VLC Git shortlog can be used to follow the development of the project.

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