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Submission + - U.K. Cabinet Office Adopts ODF as Exclusive Standard for Sharable Documents (consortiuminfo.org)

Submitted by Andy Updegrove
Andy Updegrove writes: The U.K. Cabinet Office accomplished today what the Commonwealth of Massachusetts set out (unsuccessfully) to achieve ten years ago: it formally required compliance with the Open Document Format (ODF) by software to be purchased in the future across all government bodies. Compliance with any of the existing versions of OOXML, the competing document format championed by Microsoft, is neither required nor relevant. The announcement was made today by The Minister for the Cabinet Office, Francis Maude. Henceforth, ODF compliance will be required for documents intended to be shared or subject to collaboration. PDF/A or HTML compliance will be required for viewable government documents. The decision follows a long process that invited, and received, very extensive public input – over 500 comments in all.
Linux

Ask Slashdot: Linux Login and Resource Management In a Computer Lab? 98

Posted by timothy from the explain-your-system dept.
New submitter rongten (756490) writes I am managing a computer lab composed of various kinds of Linux workstations, from small desktops to powerful workstations with plenty of RAM and cores. The users' $HOME is NFS mounted, and they either access via console (no user switch allowed), ssh or x2go. In the past, the powerful workstations were reserved to certain power users, but now even "regular" students may need to have access to high memory machines for some tasks. Is there a sort of resource management that would allow the following tasks? To forbid a same user to log graphically more than once (like UserLock); to limit the amount of ssh sessions (i.e. no user using distcc and spamming the rest of the machines, or even worse, running in parallel); to give priority to the console user (i.e. automatically renicing remote users jobs and restricting their memory usage); and to avoid swapping and waiting (i.e. all the users trying to log into the latest and greatest machine, so have a limited amount of logins proportional to the capacity of the machine). The system being put in place uses Fedora 20, and LDAP PAM authentication; it is Puppet-managed, and NFS based. In the past I tried to achieve similar functionality via cron jobs, login scripts, ssh and nx management, and queuing system — but it is not an elegant solution, and it is hacked a lot. Since I think these requirements should be pretty standard for a computer lab, I am surprised to see that I cannot find something already written for it. Do you know of a similar system, preferably open source? A commercial solution could be acceptable as well.

Comment Re:Wait, wait... (Score 1) 132

by gl4ss (#47509053) Attached to: Exodus Intelligence Details Zero-Day Vulnerabilities In Tails OS

but if I did it and sold it on the market on the country that I am in or their neighbouring countries then I would be unethical/criminal?

wtf? there's no "due time".

they could be just bullshitting too and just waiting for fixes to come in and then say "yeah those were the vulns".

furthermore, they would be vulnurabilities on the firefox code or the tor code which would count as news on their own. or perhaps they're just buggy drivers for wifi or ethernet. we don't know and now they're just doing two things, scaremongering and fishing for money from companies. they're using this as advertisement. "pay us or we'll sell exploits to your sw and not tell you" which is pretty much exactly what "black hat" exploit sellers are doing so does their work bother you? if not, ok.

Submission + - Oso disaster had its roots in earlier landslides (washington.edu)

Submitted by vinces99
vinces99 writes: The disastrous March 22 landslide that killed 43 people in the rural Washington state community of Oso involved the "remobilization" of a 2006 landslide on the same hillside, a new federally sponsored geological study concludes.

The research indicates the landslide, the deadliest in U.S. history, happened in two major stages. The first stage remobilized the 2006 slide, including part of an adjacent forested slope from an ancient slide, and was made up largely or entirely of deposits from previous landslides. The first stage ultimately moved more than six-tenths of a mile across the north fork of the Stillaguamish River and caused nearly all the destruction in the Steelhead Haven neighborhood. The second stage started several minutes later and consisted of ancient landslide and glacial deposits. That material moved into the space vacated by the first stage and moved rapidly until it reached the trailing edge of the first stage, the study found.

The report, released Tuesday on the four-month anniversary of the slide, details an investigation by a team from the Geotechnical Extreme Events Reconnaissance Association, or GEER. The scientists and engineers determined that intense rainfall in the three weeks before the slide likely was a major issue, but factors such as altered groundwater migration, weakened soil consistency because of previous landslides and changes in hillside stresses played key roles.

"Perhaps the most striking finding is that, while the Oso landslide was a rare geologic occurrence, it was not extraordinary," said Joseph Wartman, a University of Washington associate professor of civil and environmental engineering and a team leader for the study.

"We observed several other older but very similar long-runout landslides in the surrounding Stillaguamish River Valley. This tells us these may be prevalent in this setting over long time frames. Even the apparent trigger of the event – several weeks of intense rainfall – was not truly exceptional for the region," Wartman said.

Submission + - Why are the world's scientists continuing to take chances with smallpox? (thebulletin.org)

Submitted by Lasrick
Lasrick writes: MIT's Jeanne Guillemin looks at the recent blunders with smallpox and H5N1 at the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health to chronicle the fascinating history of smallpox eradication efforts and the attempts (thwarted by Western scientists) to destroy lab collections of the virus in order to make it truly extinct. 'In 1986, with no new smallpox cases reported, the World Health Assembly, the decision-making body of the WHO, resolved to destroy the strain collections and make the virus extinct. But there was resistance to this; American scientists in particular wanted to continue their research.' Within a few years, secret biological warfare programs were discovered in Moscow and in Iraq, and a new flurry of defensive research was funded. Nevertheless, Guillemin and others believe that changes in research methods, which no longer require the use of live viruses, mean that stocks of the live smallpox virus can and should finally be destroyed.

Submission + - Microsoft Is Testing Developer Biometrics To Predict Software Bugs 1

Submitted by rjmarvin
rjmarvin writes: Microsoft Research is testing a new method for catching errors and bugs in while developers code: biometrics
http://sdtimes.com/sd-times-bl.... By measuring a developer's eye movements, physical and mental characteristics as they code, the researchers measured alertness and stress levels to predict when a programmer will make a coding error. In a paper entitled "Using Psycho-Physiological Measures to Assess Task Difficulty in Software Development" http://research.microsoft.com/..., the researchers summarized their study of 15 developers where they strapped an eye tracker, an electrodermal sensor and an EEG sensor to developers as they programmed various tasks. The study found that biometrics predicted task difficulty for a new developer 64.99% of the time. For a new development task, the researchers found biometrics to be 84.38% accurate. The researchers did not, however, comment on the invasiveness of biometric sensors to developers.
Movies

Netflix Reduces Physical-Disc Processing, Keeps Prices the Same 354

Posted by timothy from the rising-overhead dept.
Nom du Keyboard writes: After seeing a drop in my DVD service from Netflix I got a customer service representative tonight to confirm that Netflix has ceased processing DVD returns on Saturdays nationwide. And that they did this without notifying their customers, or reducing prices to compensate for the reduced service. Given that the DVD selection still far outstrips their streaming selection, this may be news to others like myself who don't find streaming an adequate replacement for plastic discs. My experience up until recently, unlike Netflix's promise of a 1-3 day turnaround at their end which gives them lots of wiggle room to degrade service even further, had been of mailing in a DVD on day one, having them receive it and mail out my next selection on day two, and receiving it on day three. Now with them only working 5 days and many U.S. Post Office holidays, they're still getting the same money for significantly less. The Netflix shipping FAQ confirms the change, and a spokesperson said, "Saturdays have been low volume ship days for us."
Technology

MIT Combines Carbon Foam and Graphite Flakes For Efficient Solar Steam Generati 110

Posted by timothy from the science-fiction-future-awaits dept.
rtoz (2530056) writes Researchers at MIT have developed a new spongelike material structure which can use 85% of incoming solar energy for converting water into steam. This spongelike structure has a layer of graphite flakes and an underlying carbon foam. This structure has many small pores. It can float on the water, and it will act as an insulator for preventing heat from escaping to the underlying liquid. As sunlight hits the structure, it creates a hotspot in the graphite layer, generating a pressure gradient that draws water up through the carbon foam. As water seeps into the graphite layer, the heat concentrated in the graphite turns the water into steam. This structure works much like a sponge. It is a significant improvement over recent approaches to solar-powered steam generation. And, this setup loses very little heat in the process, and can produce steam at relatively low solar intensity. If scaled up, this setup will not require complex, costly systems to highly concentrate sunlight.

Submission + - Researchers fully 'delete' HIV from human cells for the first time

Submitted by mrspoonsi
mrspoonsi writes: So far, HIV has eluded a cure because it installs its genome into human DNA so insidiously that it's impossible for our immune system to clear it out. While current treatments are effective, a lifetime of toxic drugs are required to prevent its recurrence. But researchers from Temple University may have figured out a way to permanently excise it using a highly-engineered HIV "editor." Here's how it works: the team analyzed a part of our immune system that fights infection and built a "guide RNA" strand consisting of 20 nucleotides (RNA building blocks). Those strands were then injected into cells typically infected with HIV, like T-cells. There, they targeted the end parts of the virus's gene and snipped out all 9,709 nucleotides that made up its genome. Since the guide RNA strand contained no human DNA sequences, it left the host cell intact — but free from HIV.
The Media

Print Isn't Dead: How Linux Voice Crowdfunded a New Magazine 56

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the something-about-paper dept.
M-Saunders (706738) writes The death of print has been predicted for years, and many magazines and publishers have taken a big hit with the rise of eBooks and tablets. But not everyone has given up. Four geeks quit their job at an old Linux magazine to start Linux Voice, an independent GNU/Linux print and digital mag with a different publishing model: giving profits and content back to the community. Six months after a successful crowdfunding campaign, the magazine is going well, so here is the full story.

Comment Re:Yes, but... (Score 1) 454

by gl4ss (#47505399) Attached to: MIT's Ted Postol Presents More Evidence On Iron Dome Failures

but it is specifically one part of the system.

mostly it works because the rockets never get to hit it(due to being diy rockets of dubious quality), but it is morale booster.

and as morale booster it works. fuck, some tourists are tweeting from over there "good day on the beach thanks to the iron dome ha" which .. is fucking insane. could choose somewhere better, even cypros for fucks ake..

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