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Submission + - Speculation around Higgs boson confirmation (dailymail.co.uk)

Submitted by Acapulco
Acapulco writes: Five leading theoretical physicists have been invited to a CERN press conference this Wednesday, where it is believed scientists from the LHC will announce the discovery of the Higgs boson with 99.99% accuracy. Peter Higgs, the phycisist after which the particle is named, is invited.

The Dailymail reports: "Tom Kibble, 79, the emeritus professor of physics at Imperial College London, has also been invited but is unable to attend. He told the Sunday Times: 'My guess is that is must be a pretty positive result for them to be asking us out there.'
Tom Kibble, 79, the emeritus professor of physics at Imperial College London, has also been invited but is unable to attend. He told the Sunday Times: 'My guess is that is must be a pretty positive result for them to be asking us out there.'

So, what do you think? could this finally it?

Submission + - Full-Color Holograms Send Geeks Running to Kickstarter (stuff.tv)

Submitted by
paulonline3d
paulonline3d writes: "Few things can elicit an uncontrollable "happy giggle" from geek-types like the talk of holograms. That's why a DIY Full-Color Hologram Kit project on Kickstarter has Stuff Magazine reporting: "Our geek senses are tingling, and our wallets are begging to be opened. That's right, another geek-worthy Kickstarter project has been picked up by our gadget radars." The successfully funded Kickstarter hologram project will provide the crucial hologram-quality lasers that are necessary for red, green, and blue holograms, taking advantage of the latest laser diode developments from pico projectors. A $235 pledge gets you one of the complete full-color hologram kits."
Cloud

Submission + - Cisco's cloud vision: Mandatory, monetized, and killed at their discretion (extremetech.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Last week, a number of Cisco customers began reporting problems with three specific Linksys-branded routers. When owners of the E2700, E3500, are E4500 attempted to log in to their devices, they were asked to login/register using their “Cisco Connect Cloud” account information. The story that’s emerged from this unexpected “upgrade” is a perfect example of how buzzword fixation can lead to extremely poor decisions.

Submission + - Caffeine Linked to Lower Skin Cancer Risk (go.com)

Submitted by THE_WELL_HUNG_OYSTER
THE_WELL_HUNG_OYSTER writes: The curative effects of coffee continue to be discovered as the Harvard School of Public Health and Boston's Brigham & Women's Hospital published a new study today that links caffeine consumption with reduced skin cancer rates. Quoting:

    The study of nearly 113,000 men and women found those who drank three or more cups of coffee a day had a 20 percent lower risk of basal cell carcinoma than those who said no to Joe.

Caffeine in non-coffee substances was found equally effective. The cause is speculated to be related to caffeine's ability to "kill off damaged skin cells," said Dr. Josh Zeichner, assistant professor of dermatology at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York. "If you get rid of these cells that are damaged, then they don't have the opportunity to grow and form cancers."
Android

Submission + - Prototype clickjacking rootkit developed for Android (ncsu.edu)

Submitted by ShipLives
ShipLives writes: Mobile security researchers have identified an aspect of Android 4.0.4 (Ice Cream Sandwich) and earlier models that clickjacking rootkits could exploit. As part of an effort to identify potential weaknesses in smartphone platforms, the team was able to develop a proof-of-concept prototype rootkit that attacks the Android framework, rather than the underlying operating system kernel. Video demonstration here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxpMPrqnxC0

Comment Re:What happens to the "obsolete" supercomputers? (Score 1) 132

by Acapulco (#40359845) Attached to: US Regains Supercomputing Crown, Besting China and Japan

Wow, so they keep adding space to their facilities to add more and more supercomputers? it figures that they use it at least that long, and of course i would guess that lower priority projects get moved to the "obsolete" machines, as the big guns are moved to the newest and latest, but at some point you have to discard them. SO are they absolutely of no use after 10 years or so?

Thanks for the answer AC, I really had no idea about the life span of one of these monsters.

Comment What happens to the "obsolete" supercomputers? (Score 2) 132

by Acapulco (#40359493) Attached to: US Regains Supercomputing Crown, Besting China and Japan

Seriously, if they are migrating to new supercomputers, what, each year or two, what are they doing with the "scraps"? Do they refurbish them to be used elsewhere? do they sell them as "used goods" to other companies?

I can imagine taking quite a bit of time to install/uninstall such installations, so if its going to stay 2 years and it takes 3 months to setup/remove, are the installation/uninstallation crews constantly on site? or maybe it takes much less time to do so?

does anyone has any idea on this? I mean, that's a lot of stuff to "just" throw away when upgrading. Something useful must be done with the "obsolete" equipment, no?
Twitter

Submission + - Twitter plans to give control of their patents to their engineers (twitter.com)

Submitted by Acapulco
Acapulco writes: "With the IPA (Innovator's Patent Agreement) employees can be assured that their patents will only be used as a shield rather than as a weapon." Said Twitter's Engineering VP.

In the blog he also said "Like many companies, we apply for patents on a bunch of these inventions. However, we also think a lot about how those patents may be used in the future; we sometimes worry that they may be used to impede the innovation of others. For that reason, we are publishing a draft of the Innovator’s Patent Agreement, which we informally call the “IPA”."

The BBC has other details on the story.

Comment Re:If you think open source is not the way to go.. (Score 1) 203

by Acapulco (#39729767) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Viable Open Source Models For Early Startups?

Point well taken. But how about (and I have absolutely no idea if these companies you mentioned tried anything liked thir or not), releasing "version lines", so you actively maintain and fix bugs for v1 line, and sell v2. Or maybe as another poster said, which I know would amount to crippleware to some extent, but that's another discussion, have some "freemium" approach in that v1 is the same as v2 bugs-wise, but not feature-wise. So you backport to v1 all the bug fixes you...uhmm..fix.. in v2, except of course those which have something to do with an unsupported feature.

Of course this means solving a host of other problems, considering you have to keep two similar-yet-different codebases, still, I'm interested in what you think of this. Maybe as you say, him alone could not handle it, but may be a small team could?

I mean, there *must* be some way of satisfying both needs of what I would say is a big group of developers, wanting to contribute their grain of salt but not completely ready to embrace full-blown oper-source models. Or are we coming to a point where you basically have no real choice (regarding successful penetration in the market) between going RH style open source or traditional closed source? is there really no other viable way of doing this? (and I ask sincerely, no sacarsm intended)
Facebook

Submission + - Zuckerberg Made Instagram Deal by Himself

Submitted by benfrog
benfrog writes: According to the Wall Street Journal, Facebook's Board of Directors was all but out of the picture when Mark Zuckerberg struck the $1 billion deal to purchase Instagram, the yet-profitless photo-sharing service. This enforces the fact that Facebook is still essentially a one-man show.
Hardware

Submission + - Physicists detect elusive orbiton by 'splitting' electron (nature.com)

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes: Condensed-matter physicists have managed to detect the third constituent of an electron — its 'orbiton'.
Isolated electrons cannot be split into smaller components, earning them the designation of a fundamental particle. But in the 1980s, physicists predicted that electrons in a one-dimensional chain of atoms could be split into three quasiparticles: a ‘holon’ carrying the electron’s charge, a ‘spinon’ carrying its spin and an ‘orbiton’ carrying its orbital location.
In 1996, physicists split an electron into a holon and spinon. Now, van den Brink and his colleagues have broken an electron into an orbiton and a spinon (abstract).
Orbitons could also aid the quest to build a quantum computer — one stumbling block has been that quantum effects are typically destroyed before calculations can be performed. But as orbital transitions are extremely fast, encoding information in orbitons could be one way to overcome that hurdle.

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