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Space

Submission + - What Drugs Do Astronauts Take? (discovery.com)

Submitted by astroengine
astroengine writes: Science fiction is stuffed full of examples of pill-popping space explorers and aliens enjoying psychedelic highs. After all, space is big, it can get boring/scary/crazy up there. It's little wonder, then, that our current space explorers consume a cocktail of uppers, downers, tranquilizers and alcohol to get the job done. Robert Lamb on tranquilizers in the space station: "Sure, it hardly makes for a civilized evening aboard ISS, but it beats someone blowing the hatch because they think they saw a something crawling on one of the solar panels."

Comment Re:Can someone explain... (Score 5, Informative) 82

by SanguineV (#30200366) Attached to: Australia's CSIRO To Launch CPU-GPU Supercomputer

Can someone explain exactly what the benefits/drawbacks of using GPUs for processing?

GPUs are massively parallel handling hundreds of cores and tens of thousands of threads. The drawbacks are they have limited instruction sets and don't support a lot of the arbitrary jumping, memory loading, etc. that CPUs do.

It would also be nice if someone could give a quick run down of what sort of applications GPUs are good at.

Anything that is massively parallelisable and processing intensive. The usual bottle neck with GPU programming in normal computers is the overhead of loading from RAM to GPU-RAM. Remove this bottleneck in a custom system and you can have enormous speed ups in parallel applications once you compile the code down to GPU instructions.

Greater detail I will leave to the experts...
Idle

Submission + - SPAM: William Gibson's Neuromancer staged with porn star

Submitted by destinyland
destinyland writes: Sunday night saw a reading of the William Gibson's classic cyberpunk novel featuring porn star Sasha Grey at a New York art museum, along with sculpture-props simulating virtual reality. Artist Brody Condon promised to combine "Gibson's 1980s dystopian techno-fetishism with early twentieth-century abstraction," but the editor of H+ magazine challenges that description. "In a 1993 interview, Gibson himself told me:'I think my world looks dystopian if you're a middle class white guy doing reasonably well in 1993... There are so many places in the world today that are so much crappier than anything I'm writing about.'" And earlier this month William Gibson shared his response to a blog post about the event. "Gol' dang! It's news to me!"
Link to Original Source
Apple

Submission + - Apple Voids Smokers' Warranties (consumerist.com) 4

Submitted by Mr2001
Mr2001 writes: Consumerist reports that Apple is refusing to work on computers that have been used in smoking households. "The Apple store called and informed me that due to the computer having been used in a house where there was smoking, that has voided the warranty and they refuse to work on the machine, due to 'health risks of second hand smoke'," wrote one customer. Another said, "When I asked for an explanation, she said [the owner of the iMac is] a smoker and it's contaminated with cigarette smoke which they consider a bio-hazard! I checked my Applecare warranty and it says nothing about not honoring warranties if the owner is a smoker."

Apple claims that honoring the warranty would be an OSHA violation. (Remember when they claimed enabling 802.11n for free would be a Sarbanes-Oxley violation?)
Windows

Submission + - win7 runs better than XP.....just barely (extremetech.com)

Submitted by
gadget junkie
gadget junkie writes: "An interesting Article by Extremetech does a quick and dirty comparison between Windows 7, Vista, and good ole Windows XP. none of the tests are real life tests, and the hardware was dated, but "[...]For the most part, these tests don't show Windows 7 soundly trouncing XP. But for an operating system that's far richer in features and more advanced in interface, Windows 7 is quite close to the older OS and tops it in several tests. Most impressive among Windows 7's wins were its JavaScript and shutdown time results."
One phrase was rather defensive, tough:"For gamers, the results are pretty much a wash between XP and Windows 7. In any case, power gamers are far more likely to be buying for a new high-end machines and not upgrading an old XP system."
Now, I am not a big geek, but I DO play games .My quad core intel runs on XP, and you'll have to pry it from my cold dead fingers; and many other people I know choose hardware sellers on one big service they offer: they do the downgrade from Vista or Win 7 to XP.
I do not have the time and resources to buy a win7 machine for inhouse testing, expecially the user experience: what's the score for slashdotters on this one?"

Submission + - Relative's DNA used to catch thief (thedenverchannel.com)

Submitted by bongey
bongey writes: DNA recovered from a car break-in was used to find suspects with similar DNA. The software used to analyze the DNA would present people with similar DNA,but in this case his brothers DNA was one of the near matches. The near DNA matches created for investigators eventually lead to an arrest and a guilty plea.
Security

Submission + - SPAM: Smartphones on Wi-Fi vulnerable to security attack

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: A new report from a mobile security vendor details how the most popular smartphones, including the iPhone, are very vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks, carried out via public Wi-Fi connections. According to the report by SMobile Systems, smartphone users connecting to unencrypted Wi-Fi hotspots can be easily compromised by knowledgeable attackers using an array of existing tools. The authors of the study [spam URL stripped] used those tools to intercept username/password combinations sent from several different smartphones. The tests used a laptop with software tools to intercept communications between smartphones connecting to a Wi-Fi access point, and then to bypass SSL. That information was then used to access a variety of e-mail accounts. The same information could be used to access an online banking account or other information.
Link to Original Source
Security

Submission + - Firefox 3.6 locks out rogue add-ons (computerworld.com)

Submitted by CWmike
CWmike writes: Mozilla will add a new lockdown feature to Firefox 3.6 that will prevent developers from sneaking add-ons into the program, the company said. Dubbed "component directory lockdown," the feature will bar access to Firefox's "components" directory, where most of the browser's own code is stored. Mozilla has billed the move as a way to boost the stability of its browser. "We're doing this for stability and user control [reasons]," said Johnathan Nightingale, manager of the Firefox front-end development team. "Dropping raw components in this way was never an officially supported way of doing things, which means it lacks things like a way to specify compatibility. When a new version of Firefox comes out that these components aren't compatible with, the result can be a real pain for our shared users ... Now that those components will be packaged like regular add-ons, they will specify the versions they are compatible with, and Firefox can disable any that it knows are likely to cause problems."

Submission + - Climate change damaging the deep sea (cosmosmagazine.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Warming is affecting ecosystems 4,000 metres down, a study has found, overturning the idea that deep sea abyssal plains are immune to surface changes.
Privacy

Submission + - Apple patent forces ads on Mac users (pcpro.co.uk)

Submitted by Barence
Barence writes: Apple has filed a patent for an operating system that effectively freezes a computer and forces the user to watch adverts. The patent, which could apply to devices such as the iPhone as well as laptop and desktop computers, describes a system where the "advertisement presentation can in effect 'take over the system' in relevant aspects for a limited time". Apple is investigating various methods of presenting the ads, including as a pane on top of any other pane in the user interface, in a "designated area of a background", or even through the device's speakers. And don't think you can ignore the ads either, because Apple plans to check if you've been watching. "The method can further include determining whether a user pays attention to the advertisement," the patent states.

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