64602545
submission
alphadogg writes:
At Harvard University’s Sanders Theater this evening, a collection of the most off-the-wall, bizarre and lurid scientific efforts of the past year will be dubiously honored with an Ig Nobel Prize. The Ig Nobels are awarded annually by Improbable Research, an organization devoted to scientific education that publishes the Annals of Improbable Research magazine six times a year. Past honorees have included:*A study about homosexual necrophilia in ducks; Competitive analysis of breakfast cereal sogginess; The discovery that dung beetles can navigate using the Milky Way galaxy. The ceremony begins at 6 p.m. EST, and can be viewed online for free here.http://www.improbable.com/ig/2014/
64525703
submission
alphadogg writes:
Researchers from the United States and Sweden have launched free iOS and Android smartphone/tablet software that singles out which apps take the biggest toll on your device batteries and also illustrates fragmentation of Apple and Android mobile OSes. The NODES research group at the University of Helsinki's Department of Computer Science has joined forced with the University of California at Berkeley to deliver the Carat app and has published live stats http://carat.cs.berkeley.edu/s... based on some 2 terabytes of data extracted from Carat, which has been downloaded by about 750,000 users who employ more than 300,000 apps.
64407213
submission
alphadogg writes:
Engineers at Stanford University have developed a tiny radio that's about as big as an ant and that's cheap and small enough that it could help realize the "Internet of things" — the world of everyday objects that send and receive data via the Internet. The radio is built on a piece of silicon that measures just a few millimeters on each side. Several tens of them can fit on the top of a U.S. penny and the radio itself is expected to cost only a few pennies to manufacture in mass quantities. Part of the secret to the radio's size is its lack of a battery. Its power requirements are sufficiently frugal that it can harvest the energy it needs from nearby radio fields, such as those from a reader device when it's brought nearby.
64404011
submission
alphadogg writes:
Harvard College's CS50, the school's Introduction to Computer Science course for undergrads, has attracted about 1 in 8 students this fall — a new record for the school and yet another sign of just how hot this field is becoming for the job-hungry. Overall, 818 undergrads (or 12% of the student body) signed up for the challenging course http://docs.registrar.fas.harv... this semester, and nearly 900 students are registered when factoring in graduate and cross-registered students. Topics included in the syllabus include Linux, cryptography, HTML and JavaScript. David Malan, a Harvard CompSci grad, teaches the course.
64399429
submission
alphadogg writes:
An effort to free up some of the airwaves used by TV broadcasts and make them available for wireless broadband took a big step forward this week in the U.S. Two TV stations in Los Angeles, KLCS and KCET, have agreed to share a single frequency to deliver their programming, http://www.kcet.org/about/pres... freeing up a channel that can be auctioned off to wireless carriers next year. The change, which the Federal Communications Commission calls “repackaging,” is possible because digital TV broadcasts don’t need the full 6MHz of broadcast spectrum that was used for analog TV.
64376275
submission
alphadogg writes:
Brian Stevens, the former chief technology officer for Red Hat, is now managing Google Cloud. As Red Hat CTO, Stevens was instrumental in preparing the enterprise Linux software provider for the cloud, including its adoption of the OpenStack software for running cloud services. Stevens abruptly resigned from Red Hat last week. http://www.networkworld.com/ar...
64155091
submission
alphadogg writes:
Big name academic and vendor organizations have unveiled a consortium this week that's pushing Named Data Networking (NDN), an emerging Internet architecture designed to better accommodate data and application access in an increasingly mobile world. The Named Data Networking Consortium http://named-data.net/ members, which include universities such as UCLA and China's Tsinghua University as well as vendors such as Cisco and VeriSign, are meeting this week at a two-day workshop at UCLA to discuss NDN's promise for scientific research. Big data, eHealth and climate research are among the application areas on the table. The NDN effort has been backed in large part by the National Science Foundation, which has put more than $13.5 million into it since 2010.
64146949
submission
alphadogg writes:
Cisco this week revamped its UCS server line with systems designed to scale form the largest cloud deployment to those with only up to 15 servers. Together, the new products are intended to keep Cisco’s momentum going in the data center server market. Since introducing UCS in 2009 and literally disrupting the data center server market, Cisco – citing IDC figures – says it has gained the No. 1 position in revenue share for x86 blades in the Americas, topping the likes of HP, IBM and Dell.
64095477
submission
alphadogg writes:
In the case of the private cloud, understanding where the actual servers it is based on reside is pretty simple — they’re in your own data center. For the public cloud, however, the question is a lot more complex, and the answer is hazy. Network World takes a look at where the biggest US public cloud providers, Amazon Web Services, Google and Microsoft, support their customers and map it out. It turns out locations are largely about minimizing cost.
63923197
submission
alphadogg writes:
Netflix has released three internal tools it uses to catch hints on the Web that hackers might target its services.
“Many security teams need to stay on the lookout for Internet-based discussions, posts and other bits that may be of impact to the organizations they are protecting,” wrote Andy Hoernecke and Scott Behrens of Netflix’s Cloud Security Team. http://techblog.netflix.com/20... One of the tools, called Scumblr, can be used to create custom searches of Google sites, Twitter and Facebook for users or keywords.
63894959
submission
alphadogg writes:
Smartphones sold in California will soon be required to have a kill switch that lets users remotely lock them and wipe them of data in the event they are lost or stolen. The demand is the result of a new law, http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/pub/... into effect on Monday, that applies to phones manufactured after July 1, 2015, and sold in the state. While its legal reach does not extend beyond the state’s borders, the inefficiency of producing phones solely for California means the kill switch is expected to be adopted by phone makers on handsets sold across the U.S. and around the world.
63754047
submission
alphadogg writes:
The depletion of Internet addresses would seem to spell relief for aged routers that are struggling to deal with the Internet’s growth, but the complicated interplay between those trends might cause even more problems. Last Wednesday, some older routers and switches stumbled when the Internet’s table of routes surpassed 512,000 entries, the maximum they could hold in a special form of memory called TCAM. The event drew widespread attention, though it was actually the third time in this young century that the Internet had broken through such a threshold. Devices that don’t have room for all the routes may reboot themselves or fail to route some traffic, but the affected gear was fairly old. Another danger remains, and it comes from the address depletion itself. With fewer IPv4 addresses at hand, users or service providers may want to split them up into smaller routes.
63706677
submission
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.
63608641
submission
alphadogg writes:
Challenges among top tech execs to dump ice water on their heads to raise awareness for dreaded disease ALS have been escalating this week. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Apple SVP Phil Schiller are among those taking the challenge. Meanwhile, Bill Gates, Google CEO Larry Page and Apple CEO Tim Cook have been challenged. Open source outfits such as Cloudera, Black Duck and Red Hat have also joined in the awareness campaign that has swept across social media networks over the past few weeks.
63593055
submission
alphadogg writes:
Cisco Systems will cut as many as 6,000 jobs over the next 12 months, saying it needs to shift resources to growing businesses such as cloud, software and security. The move will be a reorganization rather than a net reduction, the company said. It needs to cut jobs because the product categories where it sees the strongest growth, such as security, require special skills, so it needs to make room for workers in those areas, it said. “If we don’t have the courage to change, if we don’t lead the change, we will be left behind,” Chairman and CEO John Chambers said on a conference call.
