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Power

Submission + - Worldwide support for nuclear power drops (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by ProbablyJoe
ProbablyJoe writes: A poll for the BBC shows that worldwide support for nuclear power has dropped significantly in the past 6 years.

However, while support has dropped in most countries, the UK has defied the trend, where 37% of the public support building new reactors. Unsurprisingly, support in Japan has dropped significantly, with only 6% supporting new reactors. The USA remains the country with the highest public opinion of nuclear power, though support has dropped slightly.

Much of the decline in opinion has been attributed to the events in Fukushima earlier in the year, although a recent Slashdot poll indicated that many readers opinions had not been affected by the events, and an even split between those who found the technology more or less safe since the events.

With reports on the long lasting effects in Fukushima still conflicted, is nuclear power still a viable solution to the world's energy problems?
Encryption

Submission + - $350 Hardware Cracks HDMI Copy Protection (ruhr-uni-bochum.de)

Submitted by LBeee
LBeee writes: German Researchers at the Ruhr University Bochum built a FPGA board based mand-in-the-middle attack against the HDCP copy protection used in HDMI connections.

After a leak of a HDCP master key in 2010, Intel proclaimed that the copy protection is still secure, as it would be too expensive to build a system that could conduct a real-time decryption of the data stream.

It is now proven, that a system can be built for around $350 (200 Euros), that can do the task. It is however, of no great practical use for pirates. It can be easily be used to burn films from Blu-ray discs, but receivers which can deliver HDTV recordings are already available — and they provide the data in compressed form. In contrast, recording directly from an HDMI port results in a large amount of data.
Businesses

Submission + - Book Review: The Economics of Software Quality (benlinders.com)

Submitted by
BenLinders
BenLinders writes: "The book The Economics of Software Quality provides solutions to quantify Software Quality, helping you to manage software development and maintenance. It contains software quality data that you can use to build a business case to improve the quality of your software, and decide upon processes and techniques that can help to implement the needed improvements in your organization.

Quantifying software quality is not an easy thing. Several measurements exist, for instance estimating and tracking the number of defects that are found (both within development/maintenance and from customers), measuring software quality with static analysis tools (complexity, fan in/fan out), or measuring the effectiveness of software development methods and techniques (like inspections, test, and Cost of Poor Quality). This book covers Software Quality Factors that influence the quality of software products as perceived (and believed!) by customers. An extensive list of factors is provided, where the authors have selected those factors that they consider most significant to achieve quality.

Many software development processes and techniques are covered in this book, from a quality and economic point of view. This also includes agile methods, where a body of data is available about the effects of agile techniques like user stories, Test Driven Design, Scrum Sessions, Measuring Technical Debt, and Pair Programming. For instance, about agile user stories the book states “... the user story method seems to be concise and fairly trouble-free, User stories average below 0.5 pages per function point and seem to contain fewer than 0.5 defects per function point`. This kind of information can be very helpful to build a business case for using agile methods in your organization.

Most of the data on software quality that the book provides is in “Defects per Function Point”. A backfiring table is also provided, to translate language statements/lines to function points. So if you are not using function point, but programming in Java, Ruby, C++ or any other popular programming language, the data can still be used.

There is a full chapter covering defect prevention. Methods like Reuse, Formal Inspections and Quality Function Deployment are the most effective in preventing defects, and also techniques like Root Cause Analysis and PSP/TSP are claimed to be very effective. Given that the top ten techniques reduce defects with 40% — 85%, makes it interesting for many organizations to investigate the business case to improve the quality of their products, using these methods and techniques.

Additional information is provided on how to measure the effects on quality from a given method or technique. The book also provides warning for quality measurements that can be unreliable. An example is measuring cost-per-defect. When the quality of your development activities increases, for instance by improving requirements practices and implementing defect prevention for design and coding, the number of defects that testing finds will go down. Since test case preparation is a fixed cost, the cost per defect for testing will go up when the software has fewer defects. This makes such a measurement potentially unreliable. I believe that the main benefits will come when you can reduce your testing activities, based upon measurements that quantify the quality of your products before testing starts. Techniques like risk based testing can also reduce your testing hours, thus saving time and money on tests that are not needed.

Defects measurements and tracking are used in more then 55% of the military and defense software applications (using CMMI, TSP, QFD, etc), but in less then 15% of IT, commercial, web or embedded applications. Given their prevention effectiveness of -35%, and removal effectiveness of 25%, it is still surprising to me that this is not used more often. The data needed for these kinds of measurements is usually available in the defect management systems, though some addition effort is needed to classify defects and to do Root Cause Analysis. The benefits of using these kinds of measurements, combined with estimations of the expected quality at release, to decide and steer software development and prevent defects during the development and before release are significant.

The book also gets into methods to quantify structural quality issues that are not exactly “defects” but have an important impact – “Technical Debt” being one of these methods of quantification. These kind of measurements help to manage the quality of your code base, being able to see the impact on quality from changes, and take action to get quality back on the desired level when needed.

Reviews and inspections are very effective ways to remove defects before testing. Several techniques are described, both informal and formal techniques. Several of them are also usable within agile methods, supporting teams in developing better quality software. Applying these techniques effectively requires training, and arrangements within your company that enable employees to use them. The book makes clear that if you want to reduce post release defects and lower your maintenance costs, the work needs to start with early software development activities, like using better techniques for managing requirements, software modeling and design, reviews and inspections, and automatic code analysis. Testing alone is not sufficient to improve quality, and is also very costly.

The relationship between quality and risks is also explored. Many major software problems are related to the quality of the software products, e.g. outages, data loss, security issues or regulatory non compliances. Investigating such issues, for instance with Audit or Root Cause Analyses, and taking action to prevent similar problems in the future can be essential for your business. Measuring the losses and estimating potential benefits from preventive actions helps you to select the right improvements, and acquire commitment and funding to implement them.

The capabilities and skills of the staff that develops the software have significant impact on the quality. The benefits of training, skill development, and sharing of experiences to develop a learning organization can be huge. Software methods like Agile and RUP include mechanisms to continuously evaluate, learn and improve the capabilities of your staff. E.g. using retrospectives and scrum boards, to identify and follow up with improvement actions.

Overall the book covers the economic perspective of quality. The information provided can be overwhelming for some readers. If you need to improve your product quality, and are limited in time and money to do it, this book helps you to select effective quality methods and techniques, and to measure and track your progress when implementing improvements.

Ben Linders is a specialist in quality, process improvement and organizational development."

Comment Re:Products in the pipeline? (Score 1) 226

by ProbablyJoe (#38148024) Attached to: HP's Strange Obsession With WebOS For Printers

This seems likely. I remember when HP bought out Palm, they were talking about using WebOS in printers, and having integration between phones/tablets/printers/every device running WebOS. This made some amount of sense when there were devices to integrate with, but now they're basically giving up on WebOS in mobile devices, there's not much point.
Android

Submission + - Facebook developing phone with HTC (allthingsd.com)

Submitted by ProbablyJoe
ProbablyJoe writes: AllThingsD is running a series of stories this week about a possible new Facebook phone, codenamed 'Buffy'.

The phone is said to be in development by HTC, who collaborated with Facebook earlier this year for the Salsa and ChaCha/Status phones, which both had physical Facebook buttons, and a degree of integration with the social network.

While these rumours have been going around for quite a while, the article contains some new information, and neither Facebook or HTC are denying the rumours.

The phone will be based on Android, but like Amazon's Kindle Fire, will be heavily modified to integrate with Facebook, potentially using Facebook's HTML5 platform.

While we're unlikely to see any official announcements or releases any time soon, Facebook are eager to compete with Google and Apple, and are likely to want a phone of their own on shelves as soon as possible.
Displays

Submission + - Wireless, contact lens display now a reality (extremetech.com) 5

Submitted by
MrSeb
MrSeb writes: "It has finally been done: A team of US and Finnish bioengineers have embedded an antenna, radio receiver, control circuitry, and LED into a wearable contact lens. The team, led by Babak Praviz of the University of Washington, Seattle, has successfully displayed a single, remotely-controlled pixel onto a contact lens worn by a rabbit. Power from an external battery is transmitted via RF to an antenna that runs around the edge of the contact lens (the gold ring that you see in the image below), so that the wearer’s vision isn’t obstructed. An integrated circuit harvests the energy, and then powers an LED (which emits a nice blue light, incidentally, and is focused by way of the entire contact lens being a Fresnel lens). The IC doesn’t do much else at the moment — it’s basically just a 450 picofarad storage capacitor built with a 130nm CMOS processor — but this is enough to discretely control an on-lens pixel from a remote radio source. The next step is a multi-pixel display (using an array of micro-Fresnel lenses), and human testing. The bionic, Terminator-like HUD is finally here."
Linux

Submission + - The Many Names of Linux Kernels (ubuntuvibes.com)

Submitted by dartttt
dartttt writes: Not many people know that Kernel releases have their codenames. Most of the Linux 2.6 and 3.x kernels include a name in the Makefile of their source trees, which can be found in the git repository. They are not publicized as such but some of them are really hilarious. How does 'Pink Farting Weasel' sounds?
Science

Submission + - Engineers developing 'Bionic contact lens' (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by ProbablyJoe
ProbablyJoe writes: The BBC reports that researchers at Washington University have made a breakthrough in developing a contact lens that will be able to overlay text and images on top human vision.

The research is still in early stages, so far just being able to light one LED on the lens, and requiring a battery no more than 1cm away. But researchers claim the main problem has already been overcome — getting the human eye to focus on an image generated on its surface.

While a long way from completion, the team hopes to soon increase the display to hundreds of pixels, and overlay text on the lens. The technology could eventually be used in future augmented reality applications, allowing futuristic 'Terminator' style vision.
United States

Submission + - Hackers 'hit' US water treatment systems (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by FBeans
FBeans writes: The BBC reports:
"Hackers are alleged to have destroyed a pump used to pipe water to thousands of homes in a US city in Illinois."

"Hackers with access to the utility's network are thought to have broken the pump by turning it on and off quickly."

"The comments by the DHS prompted a hacker using the handle "pr0f" to claim he had access to the control systems for a second US water utility.

In an interview with the Threat Post website, Pr0f said the hack of the South Houston network barely deserved the name because only a three-character password had been used to protect the system."

Pr0f's evidence that he has access to the second Water utility can be found on pastebin here
Science

Submission + - Scientists Invent Lightest Material On Earth (latimes.com)

Submitted by ProbablyJoe
ProbablyJoe writes: The LA Times reports on a new ultra lightweight material developed by scientists at UC Irvine, HRL Laboratories and Caltech.

"Ultralight metallic microlattice" is said to be 100 times lighter than styrofoam. It's so light, that it can supposedly be balanced on top of a delicate dandelion plant without crushing the seeds.

The material has been made from hollow, interconnected tubes of nickel, which are 1000 times thinner than a human hair. Possible applications include "impact protection, uses in the aerospace industry, acoustic dampening and maybe some battery applications."

The full scientific details can be found in the paper, published in the (paywalled) Science magazine
Intel

Submission + - Intel, 40 years of the 4004 (theinquirer.net)

Submitted by souperfly
souperfly writes: The INQUIRER has gone big on its coverage of the anniversary of Intel's 4004 chips, and in two articles has discussed the history of the microprocessor and some of its landmark events.

“To call Intel's 4004 just a microprocessor is to do the microelectronics world a great disservice,” says the first. “Not only was the Intel 4004 the first commercial microprocessor, shattering what people thought of computers, it signaled Intel's shift away from manufacturing memory and into what was going to become the industry that changed the world forever.”

From its humble beginnings, when no one would really call it powerful, but in the chip Faggin, Hoff and Shima created the ability to commoditise computing by adding the micro in microprocessors.

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/feature/2124781/microprocessor-development
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/feature/2124944/intel-marks-4004-microprocessor

Submission + - Adobe donates Flex SDK to Open Source community (infoq.com)

Submitted by ProbablyJoe
ProbablyJoe writes: InfoQ reports that Adobe is to donate it's web application SDK, Flex, to an "an established open source foundation" — suspected to either be the Open Spoon Foundation (who have been working on an open source fork of Flex), or the more established Apache Foundation

Adobe has stated on it's blog that they consider HTML5 to be a better technology for the future than it's own Flex platform, causing frustration among developers who have used the platform for enterprise applications

Is this a generous contribution to the open source community, or just Adobe offloading another failing technology?

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