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Submission + - Transparent Solar Collectors May Replace Conventional Windows (gizmag.com) 1

Submitted by Zothecula
Zothecula writes: Researchers working at Michigan State University (MSU) have created a completely transparent solar collector which is so clear that it could replace conventional glass in windows. The new devices – dubbed transparent luminescent solar concentrators – have the potential to not only turn windows into solar electric generators, but the screens of smartphones, vehicle glazing, and almost anything else that has a see-through surface.

Submission + - Linus Torvalds is my hero, says 13 years old Zachary DuPont at LinuxCon (themukt.com)

Submitted by sfcrazy
sfcrazy writes: His school ran a project asking children to write a letter to their heroes, while most kids wrote to celebrities Zach wrote to the ‘real’ hero Linus Torvalds. As Linus said during LinxCon that since he works from home and doesn’t disclose his address, all letter go to the foundation and are then sent to him after scanning. When the foundation saw this letter, being as generous as they are, invited Zach to come to LinuxCon and meet his hero in real. Here is an interview with Zach....

Submission + - DoxBox: Open-Source disk encryption for Windows 1

Submitted by monkey999
monkey999 writes: A new disk encryption program for Windows has been released that is compatible with Linux encryption and — unlike Truecrypt — is fully maintained. From the announcement:

Features

  • Full transparent encryption, DoxBoxes appear as removable disks in Windows Explorer.
  • Explorer mode lets you access DoxBoxes when you don't have admin permissions.
  • Compatible with Linux encryption, Cryptoloop "losetup", dm-crypt, and LUKS. Linux shell scripts support deniable encryption on Linux.
  • Supports smartcards and security tokens.
  • Optional 'key files' let you use a thumb-drive as a key.
  • Portable mode doesn't need to be installed and leaves little trace on 3rd party PCs
  • Deniable encryption protects you from 'rubber hose cryptography'.

Submission + - Is our universe a quantum cellular automaton? (arxiv.org)

Submitted by St.Creed
St.Creed writes: Noble-prize winner Gerard van 't Hooft is best known for the work that enabled physicists to predict the mass of the top quark, w-boson and z-boson. But he has long been known for his rather "idiosyncratic" ideas on the nature of the universe as well. His theory on the holographic universe is by now fairly well known. However, he has taken it a step further in a 202-page article (or book) on Arxiv.org, where he claims that there may well be a system with classical properties underlying quantum mechanics.

Our models suggest that Einstein may still have been right, when he objected against the conclusions drawn by Bohr and Heisenberg. It may well be that, at its most basic level, there is no randomness in nature, no fundamentally statistical aspect to the laws of [quantum] evolution.

The ideas presented in the introduction are quite interesting to read even for non-physicists.

Submission + - Microsoft Admits Keeping $92B Offshore to Avoid Paying $29B in US Taxes (ibtimes.com) 3

Submitted by walterbyrd
walterbyrd writes: Microsoft Corp. is currently sitting on almost $29.6 billion it would owe in U.S. taxes if it repatriated the $92.9 billion of earnings it is keeping offshore, according to disclosures in the company’s most recent annual filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The amount of money that Microsoft is keeping offshore represents a significant spike from prior years, and the levies the company would owe amount to almost the entire two-year operating budget of the company’s home state of Washington.

Submission + - Android test automation tool (msys-tech.com)

Submitted by msystech
msystech writes: Quality testing of mobile apps across various operating systems and devices is necessary for their long-term success in this highly competitive app market.

There is a constant need for robust Android test automation tools to ensure software compatibility across various versions of the operating system. In case of Android, you have to also take care of the hardware diversity provided by many Android OEMs. Taking into account all of these issues and constraints, MSys has come up with Mobitaz, a test automation tool to manage the entire range of functionalities of an Android app before its market release.

Submission + - Tech Looks to Obama to Save Them From "Just Sort of OK" U.S. Workers

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Following up on news that the White House met with big biz on immigration earlier this month, Bloomberg sat down with Joe Green, the head of Mark Zuckerberg's Fwd.US PAC, to discuss possible executive actions President Obama might take on high tech immigration (video) in September. "Hey, Joe," asked interviewer Alix Steel. "All we keep hearing about this earnings season though from big tech is how they're actually cutting jobs. If you look at Microsoft, Cisco, IBM Hewlett-Packard, why do the tech companies then need more tech visas?" Green explained why tech may not want to settle for laid-off U.S. talent when the world is its oyster. "The difference between someone who's truly great and just sort of okay is really huge," Green said. "Culture in tech is a very meritocratic culture," he added. "The vast, vast majority of tech engineers that I talked to who are from the United States are very supportive of bringing in people from other countries because they want to work with the very best."

Submission + - States with faster Internet speeds have smarter people, study shows 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The numbers—first crunched by the Internet provider comparison site HSI—show a distinct trend between faster Internet and higher ACT test scores. On the high end, Massachusetts scores big with an average Internet speed of 13.1Mbps, and an average ACT test score of 24.1. Mississippi, on the other hand, has an average speed of just 7.6Mbps and an average score of 18.9.

In between those two states, the other 48 fall in a positive correlation that, while not perfect, is quite undeniable. According to HSI's Edwin Ivanauskas, the correlation is stronger than that between household income and test scores, which have long been considered to be firmly connected to each other. The ACT scores were gathered from ACT.org, which has the official rankings and averages for the 2013 test, and the speed ratings were taken from Internet analytics firm Akamai’s latest report.

Submission + - The star that exploded at the dawn of time (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: To probe the dawn of time, astronomers usually peer far away; but now they've made a notable discovery close to home. An ancient star a mere thousand light-years from Earth bears chemical elements that may have been forged by the death of a star that was both extremely massive and one of the first to arise after the big bang. If confirmed, the finding means that some of the universe’s first stars were so massive they died in exceptionally violent explosions that altered the growth of early galaxies.

Submission + - How Does Tesla Build A Supercharger Charging Site?

Submitted by cartechboy
cartechboy writes: Tesla's Superchargers are the talk of the electric car community. These charging stations can take a Model S battery pack from nearly empty to about 150 miles or range in around 30 minutes. That's crazy fast, and it's nothing short of impressive. But what does it take to actually build a Tesla Supercharger site? Apparently a lot of digging. A massive trench is created to run high-capacity electric cables before the charging stations themselves are even installed. A diagram and photos of the Electric Conduit Construction build out have surfaced on the Internet. The conduits connect the charging stations to a power distribution center, which in turn is connected to a transformer that provides the power for charging cars. It took 11 days to install the six charging stalls in Goodland, Kansas. If you thought it was a quick process to build a Supercharger station, you were clearly wrong. Now, what ever happened to those battery swapping stations?

Submission + - AMD Launches Radeon R7 Series Solid State Drives With OCZ (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: AMD is launching a new family of products today, but unless you follow the rumor mill closely, it's probably not something you'd expect. It's not a new CPU, APU, or GPU. Today, AMD is launching its first line of solid state drives (SSDs), targeted squarely at AMD enthusiasts. AMD is calling the new family of drives, the Radeon R7 Series SSD, similar to its popular mid-range line of graphics cards. The new Radeon R7 Series SSDs feature OCZ and Toshiba technology, but with a proprietary firmware geared towards write performance and high endurance. Open up one of AMD's new SSDs and you'll see OCZ's Indilinx Barefoot 3 M00 controller on board—the same controller used in the OCZ Vector 150, though it is clocked higher in these drives. That controller is paired to A19nm Toshiba MLC (Multi-Level Cell) NAND flash memory and a DDR3-1333MHz DRAM cache. The 120GB and 240GB drives sport 512MB of cache memory, while the 480GB model will be outfitted with 1GB. Interestingly enough, AMD Radeon R7 Series SSDs are some of the all-around, highest-performing SATA SSDs tested to date. IOPS performance is among the best seen in a consumer-class SSD, write throughput and access times are highly-competitive across the board, and the drive offered consistent performance regardless of the data type being transferred. Read performance is also strong, though not quite as stand-out as write performance.

Submission + - Ridiculous Patent Troll Gets Stomped By CAFC (techdirt.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: We've written a few times about Vringo, a patent troll (which got its name, and public stock status, from a reverse merger with a basically defunct public "video ringtone" company and a pure patent troll called I/P Engine). The company was using some very broad patents (6,314,420 and 6,775,664) to claim that Google and Microsoft were infringing based on how their search ad programs worked ..

The case took a slight detour into the bizarre when Microsoft not only settled with Vringo for $1 million — but also with a promise to pay 5% of whatever Google had to pay ..

Between February and now, however, something wonderful happened. That something wonderful was the Supreme Court's ruling in CLS Bank v. Alice. As we noted at the time, depending on how you read it, it certainly could be interpreted that nearly all software patents were invalid — even as the ruling itself insisted that wasn't the case. Still, the early returns are promising, with CAFC (apparently finally getting the message) starting to smack down software patents.

Submission + - Blackberry abandonning phone market.

Submitted by BarbaraHudson
BarbaraHudson writes: Now that Crackberries are more likely to be referred to as dingleberries, the CBC is reporting that Blackberry has made preparations to abandon the phone market. Blackberry has created Blackberry Technology Solutions

The unit ... includes QNX, the company that BlackBerry acquired and used to develop the operating system that became the platform for its new smartphones, and Certicom, a former independent Toronto-area company with advanced security software.

BTS will also include BlackBerry's Project Ion, which is an application platform focused on machine-to-machine Internet technology, Paratek antenna tuning technology and about 44,000 patents.

When you have less market share than Windows Phone, it's time to throw in the towel ... or as they say in the new "lets not admit we screwed up" venacular, "pivot to take advantage of new opportunities." Yet another tech company brought down by CEOs who rested to long on their laurels.

Submission + - Clippers Owner Steve Ballmer Goes Ape at Fan Festival, Gives Out Email Address (bleacherreport.com)

Submitted by mpicpp
mpicpp writes: teve Ballmer absolutely crushed his entrance at the Clippers Fan Festival on Monday afternoon.

The newly minted Los Angeles Clippers owner fired out of the tunnel at the Staples Center to Eminem's "Lose Yourself," punishing hands and working the crowd like a professional hype man.

ESPN’s Arash Markazi and Fox Sports’ Jovan Buha recorded Ballmer’s entrance for posterity and uploaded the footage to Instagram. Imagine Donald Sterling’s court-side manner, but the opposite.

Submission + - Munich reverses course, may ditch Linux for Microsoft (networkworld.com) 1

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: The German city of Munich, long one of the open-source community’s poster children for the institutional adoption of Linux, is close to performing a major about-face and returning to Microsoft products. Munich’s deputy mayor, Josef Schmid, told the Süddeutsche Zeitung http://www.sueddeutsche.de/mue... that user complaints had prompted a reconsideration of the city’s end-user software, which has been progressively converted from Microsoft to a custom Linux distribution – “LiMux” – in a process that dates back to 2003.

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