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Music

Submission + - Study: Downloading benefits musician

Submitted by lhuiz
lhuiz writes: A study by two students of the Norwegian School of Management BI in Oslo have found that on average the income of musicians has increased by 66% sinds 1999, despite the musicians claiming to feel the negative effects of downloading in their wallets as well as falling CD sales. The only losers the study could identify was the record industry.

http://www.espen.com/archives/2010/10/record_companies_lose_artists_gain.html
NASA

Submission + - NASA, Harvard beam up virtual software lab (networkworld.com)

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes: NASA has teamed with Harvard University to set up a virtual lab where software programmers can compete with each other to create NASA system applications.
According to NASA, the NASA Tournament Lab (NTL) will let software developers compete to create a winning application, as measured by internal code quality, performance against benchmarks, and the ability to be integrated into NASA systems.
Power

Submission + - Glass Roof Tiles Let the Sunshine In (gizmag.com)

Submitted by Zothecula
Zothecula writes: Swedish company, Soltech Energy, recently received the gold medal for this year’s hottest new material at the Nordbygg 2010 trade fair in Stockholm, Sweden. The award was fitting because it was for the company’s home heating system that features roof tiles made out of glass. The tiles, which are made from ordinary glass, weigh about the same as the clay roof tiles they replace but allow the sun to heat air that is then used to heat the house and cut energy bills.
Government

Submission + - Western governments will use botnets in cyber wars (techeye.net)

Submitted by bossanovalithium
bossanovalithium writes: Cameron has announced Whitehall will spend £1 billion on "cyber defence". A Home Security spokesman in the US has said that it needs to wise up the cyber threat. We've been talking to some cyber security experts, anonymous and with either direct access to, or access to those with direct access to, top level government agencies in both the United States and the UK. Guess what? Defence don't mean defence.

Meetings have been going on and continue about the possibilities of using cyber attacks as weapons. We're not just talking Stuxnet, which is believed by many to have come from Israel, China or the US to sabotage Iranian and/or Indian infrastructure, but botnets too. "Defence" agents don't just want to know how to neutralise a threat, but how to gain access to and control the world's largest botnets to point at who they need to.

"You would be a fool," one source suggested to us this week, "to think that governments are not considering the applications for cyber warfare."
Earlier on in the week someone else close to the matter, who also wished to be anonymous — you'd be mad not to remain anonymous — told us that attacks on hospitals and power grids are "likely". In fact attacks on hospitals are happening already. All of this must be kept under wraps — if attackers know they're causing trouble that's cause for celebr

Submission + - Average teen sends 3,339 texts per month (cnn.com)

Submitted by SpuriousLogic
SpuriousLogic writes: If you needed more proof that texting is on the rise, here's a stat for you: the average teenager sends over 3,000 texts per month. That's more than six texts per waking hour.

According to a new study from Nielsen, our society has gone mad with texting, data usage and app downloads. Nielsen analyzed the mobile data habits of over 60,000 mobile subscribers and surveyed over 3,000 teens during April, May and June of this year. The numbers they came up with are astounding.

The number of texts being sent is on the rise, especially among teenagers age 13 to 17. According to Nielsen, the average teenager now sends 3,339 texts per month.

There's more, though: teen females send an incredible 4,050 text per month, while teen males send an average of 2,539 texts. Teens are sending 8 percent more texts than they were this time last year.

Other age groups don't even come close, either; the average 18 to 24-year-old sends "only" 1,630 texts per month. The average only drops with other age groups. However, in every age bracket, the number of texts sent has increased when compared to last year. Texting is a more important means of communication than ever.
Security

Submission + - Exploit Hub-iTunes for Exploits-Goes Live Monday (threatpost.com)

Submitted by chicksdaddy
chicksdaddy writes: It's been tried before, but NSS Labs founder Rick Moy says his company's new Exploit Hub — a store front for exploit code — can work.The site will open its doors on Monday and, in an interview with Threatpost.com, Moy explains why the current market for exploits doesn't work for the good guys, and why selling zero day exploits won't help anyone.
NASA

Submission + - How to Deflect an Asteroid with Today's Technology

Submitted by Matt_dk
Matt_dk writes: Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart is among an international group of people championing the need for the human race to prepare for what will certainly happen one day: an asteroid threat to Earth. Schweickart said the technology is available today to send a mission to an asteroid in an attempt to move it, or change its orbit so that an asteroid that threatens to hit Earth will pass by harmlessly. What would such a mission entail?
Earth

Submission + - New Fish Discovered 4.5 Miles Under the Ocean (ouramazingplanet.com)

Submitted by eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: The University of Aberdeen's Oceanlab (a partner in the recent census of marine life) has discovered a new snailfish. Might not be very exciting unless you consider that its habitat is an impressive four and a half miles below the ocean's surface. If my calculations are correct that's over ten and a half thousand PSI or about seventy-three million Pascals. The videos and pictures are a couple years old as the team has traveled around Japan, South America and New Zealand to ascertain the biodiversity of these depths. The group hopes to eventually bring specimens to the surface. It seems that the deepest depths of the ocean, once thought to be devoid of life are actually home to some organisms. As researchers build better technology for underwater exploration, tales of yore containing unimaginable monsters seem a little more realistic than before.
Security

Submission + - DDoS - How to ruin your competitors (techeye.net)

Submitted by bossanovalithium
bossanovalithium writes: Recently TechEye was hit by a particularly nasty DDOS. At first we, deluded as always, thought our servers were getting a thumping from Slashdot. The attackers will be happy to know that it took us time, effort and yes, dosh, to scramble around trying to fix it. WebScreen, which as far as we are aware is the only outfit offering thorough DDOS protection in the UK, jumped to our rescue. Thank you WebScreen. Anyway — TechEye decided it would be a good idea to have a chat with Paul Bristow, Chief Operating Officer.

"All DDOS attacks in the early days were from organised crime to put rivals in online gaming or pornography out of business, or to extort money," Bristow tells TechEye "but the whole thing has moved on now."

There are websites you can go onto where you provide your credit card details and that will let you hire a botnet for an hour. It's fact, says Webscreen, that you can even take a three minute try before you buy — just to show you that it works. These services play in their own back yard, employing the capabilities of attackers in the places you'd expect — China, Russia, India. But the services themselves are sold to target local businesses.
Businesses

Convincing Your Employer To Go With FOSS? 369

Posted by timothy from the ask-him-his-favorite-browser dept.
mark72005 writes "My employer is currently looking at adopting a content management system for use by our technical support staff (primarily first-line end user support, but hopefully it will include deeper levels of support personnel eventually). The candidates are currently Plone (OSS) and Confluence (proprietary, closed-source). For those with experience in each, what arguments in favor of Plone could be made to managers more interested in pragmatism than idealism?"
Open Source

Grad Student Looking To Contribute To Open Source 283

Posted by Soulskill from the bring-the-donuts dept.
An anonymous reader writes "I'm an Applied Math grad student who knows a bit of Mathematics and a bit of programming. C++ is my first programming language — I am decent at it. I wish to start contributing to a numerical library with two purposes — contribute to open source and develop my C++ skills at the same time. I looked at the Boost libraries and joined the developer list. However, I have no idea on how to start contributing. I'm not an expert in template programming, having written only toy programs to understand that concept. I've used some of the OOP constructs like inheritance,but only for very small projects. Do you have any tips on how to get started on contribution? Are there any other emerging numerical libraries to which I can contribute? Are there any other avenues where I can contribute to open source and improve programming skills?"
Canada

First Human-Powered Ornithopter 250

Posted by samzenpus from the don't-stop-pedaling dept.
spasm writes "A University of Toronto engineering graduate student has made and successfully flown a human-powered flapping-wing aircraft. From the article: 'Todd Reichert, a PhD candidate at the university's Institute of Aerospace Studies, piloted the wing-flapping aircraft, sustaining both altitude and airspeed for 19.3 seconds and covering a distance of 145 metres at an average speed of 25.6 kilometres per hour.'"

Comment The future prove eMail format is MIME (Score 1) 385

by NotesSensei (#33489596) Attached to: Best Way To Archive Emails For Later Searching?
You want to store all your messages in MIME format. MIME is reasonably well defines, your messages when arriving from the Internet are most likely MIME. It can be opened with any text editor or displayed on the command line (cat somefile.mime). It can contain attachments (you need to take care of attachments -- the binary format might outdate). Some suggested solutions (maildir) use native MIME files and then any fulltext indexer will do. Looks like mairix might be good for listing inbox style your messages. Good luck!

Comment IMAP is a protocol, not a file format (Score 1) 385

by NotesSensei (#33489536) Attached to: Best Way To Archive Emails For Later Searching?
IMAP is a messaging protocol. You can't store things in IMAP. What you can do: upload eMail messages to a mail server which then stores it in [insert-mail-server-specifics-here]. The format you are looking for is MIME. MIME is complete and keeps all the header information. Every message is one file that can be read on any platform. You could opt for MIME messages in a directory structure and use some fulltext index software (Google desktop, Apache Lucene etc.) You can probably find software that creates index lists (like by sender / subject / date)

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