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Submission + - SageMathCloud's new Storage Architecture (blogspot.co.at)

Submitted by phatsphere
phatsphere writes: William Stein summarizes his experience of creating a highly scalable, continuously backuped and replicated storage infrastructure for SMC, based on ZFS, bup, rsync & co:

Consistency and availability are competing requirements. It is trivial to keep the files in a SageMathCloud project consistent if we store it in exactly one place; however, when the machine that project is on goes down for any reason, the project stops working, [...]. By making many copies of the files in a project, it's fairly easy to ensure that the project is always available, even if network switches in multiple data centers completely fail, etc. Unfortunately, if there are too many users and the synchronization itself puts too heavy of a load on the overall system, then machines will fail more frequently, and though projects are available, files do not stay consistent and data is lost to the user.

and boldly summarizes

The architecture that we have built could scale up to a million users.

Submission + - Astronomers Solve Puzzle of the Mountains That Fell From Space 1

Submitted by KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: Iapetus, Saturn’s third largest moon, was first photographed by the Cassini spacecraft on 31 December 2004. The images created something of a stir. Clearly visible was a narrow, steep ridge of mountains that stretch almost halfway around the moon’s equator. The question that has since puzzled astronomers is how this mountain range got there. Now evidence is mounting that this mountain range is not the result of tectonic or volcanic activity, like mountain ranges on other planets. Instead, astronomers are increasingly convinced that this mountain range fell from space. The latest evidence is a study of the shape of the mountains using 3-D images generated from Cassini data. They show that the angle of the mountainsides is close to the angle of repose, that’s the greatest angle that a granular material can form before it landslides. That’s not proof but it certainly consistent with this exotic formation theory. So how might this have happened? Astronomers think that early in its life, Iapetus must have been hit by another moon, sending huge volumes of ejecta into orbit. Some of this condensed into a new moon that escaped into space. However, the rest formed an unstable ring that gradually spiralled in towards the moon, eventually depositing the material in a narrow ridge around the equator. Cassini’s next encounter with Iapetus will be in 2015 which should give astronomers another chance to study the strangest mountain range in the Solar System.

Submission + - Google Chrome drops DOM Level 2 support (google.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The latest version of Chrome silently dropped DOM Level 2 support and removed the createAttributeNS and setAttributeNodeNS. While they are arguing this is based on usage counter data and these methods are only used in 1 of a million pageviews, after all standards is what makes the web possible. It is not that it was necessary to fix some security issue, but they had working code for this functionality and dropped it although they know this is still used.

Submission + - Understanding Aereo (ssrn.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: On April 22, 2014 the Supreme Court will hear argument in American Broadcasting Companies, Inc. v. Aereo, Inc. The question before the Court is whether Aereo Inc.'s business of streaming live broadcast television over the internet violates the Copyright Act. A new Article in the New York University Law Review explains Aereo's legal argument, and how the company has managed to make a plausible claim that by using tens of thousands of tiny antennas, one per subscribe, its service does not technically violate the Copyright Act.

Submission + - IRS: give us machine-readable tax formulas

Submitted by johndoe42
johndoe42 writes: Now that tax day is almost over, it's time to ask the IRS to make it less painful. All of the commercial tax software is awful, overpriced, and incompatible with everything else. Some people have tried to do better: OpenTaxSolver and a rather large Excel spreadsheet are tedious manual translations of the IRS's forms. I'm sure that many programmers would try to make much friendlier tax software if they didn't have to deal with translating all of the IRS instructions. Let's petition the IRS to publish computerized formulas so that this can happen.

Submission + - Utah cops warrantlessly search prescription drug records (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Advocatus Diaboli
Advocatus Diaboli writes: The warrantless search of Utah's database chronicling every controlled substance dispensed by a pharmacist resulted in charges against one paramedic that have nothing to do with the original investigation. Instead, the authorities discovered an employee whose records exhibited "the appearance of Opioid dependence" and lodged prescription fraud charges against paramedic Ryan Pyle. Now Pyle faces a maximum five-year prison sentence if convicted of the felony. "To me, it's outrageous government conduct," Pyle's attorney, Rebecca Skordas, said in a telephone interview Monday.

Submission + - PowerVR "Wizard" GPU Is First Mobile Gaming GPU With Hardware Ray Tracing (imgtec.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Imagination Technologies, the people who make the PowerVR line of mobile GPUs, have unveiled a new mobile gaming GPU ("Wizard") that does realtime ray tracing in hardware, at gaming frame rates. It has long been predicted that 3D games would eventually begin to employ true ray tracing to create computationally expensive visual effects like realistic reflections, refractions, shadows and lighting in realtime games. The PowerVR "Wizard" GPU is the first mobile GPU that can do just that in hardware. It remains to be seen how many commercial game engines, game development studios and mobile games will decide to make use of this new interesting new hardware capability. The question whether rival GPU manufacturers like Nvidia or AMD will also jump on the ray tracing bandwagon and put hardware ray tracing units in their future GPUs is also open at this point. If the hardware ray tracing trend catches on, however, and the hardware needed for it becomes mainstream, and more powerful in time, it could make for interesting virtual experiences like "true photoreal VR" when used in conjunction with a VR headset like the Oculus Rift for example.

Submission + - OpenBSD Team Cleaning Up OpenSSL

Submitted by Iarwain Ben-adar
Iarwain Ben-adar writes: The OpenBSD has started a cleanup of their in-tree OpenSSL library. Improvements include removing "exploit mitigation countermeasures", fixing bugs, removal of questionable entropy additions, and many more. If you support the effort of these guys who are responsible for the venerable OpenSSH library, consider a donation to the OpenBSD Foundation. Maybe someday we'll see a "portable" version of this new OpenSSL fork. Or not.
 

Submission + - This is Amazon's smartphone: First photos ever of the Kindle phone (bgr.com)

Submitted by zacharye
zacharye writes: BGR has spoken with multiple trusted sources and confirmed much of what has been reported thus far. We have also exclusively learned many new details surrounding Amazon’s upcoming smartphone, which is set to debut in the coming months. Finally, we have obtained exclusive photos of a prototype of the unreleased device, giving the world its first look at Amazon’s hotly anticipated phone...
The Media

Guardian and WaPo Receive Pulitzers For Snowden Coverage 78

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the pulitzer-prize-board-added-to-terrorist-organization-list dept.
Late Yesterday, the Pulitzer Prize board announced (PDF) the 2014 Pulitzer Prize winners. The public service prize was awarded to the Guardian and the Washington Post. The Washington Post was given the award for its role in revealing widespread surveillance by the NSA, "...marked by authoritative and insightful reports that helped the public understand how the disclosures fit into the larger framework of national security," and the Guardian for sparking "...a debate about the relationship between the government and the public over issues of security and privacy." Snowden released a statement praising the Pulitzer board: "Today's decision is a vindication for everyone who believes that the public has a role in government. We owe it to the efforts of the brave reporters and their colleagues who kept working in the face of extraordinary intimidation, including the forced destruction of journalistic materials, the inappropriate use of terrorism laws, and so many other means of pressure to get them to stop what the world now recognizes was work of vital public importance. This decision reminds us that what no individual conscience can change, a free press can. "
Technology

This 1981 BYTE Magazine Cover Explains Why We're So Bad At Tech Predictions 276

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the futuristic-but-not-too-futuristic dept.
harrymcc (1641347) writes "If you remember the golden age of BYTE magazine, you remember Robert Tinney's wonderful cover paintings. BYTE's April 1981 cover featured an amazing Tinney image of a smartwatch with a tiny text-oriented interface, QWERTY keyboard, and floppy drive. It's hilarious — but 33 years later, it's also a smart visual explanation of why the future of technology so often bears so little resemblance to anyone's predictions. I wrote about this over at TIME.com. 'Back then, a pundit who started talking about gigabytes of storage or high-resolution color screens or instant access to computers around the world or built-in cameras and music players would have been accused of indulging in science fiction.'"
Medicine

U.S. Biomedical Research 'Unsustainable' Prominent Researchers Warn 135

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the phd-researcher-deathmatch dept.
sciencehabit (1205606) writes "The U.S. biomedical science system 'is on an unsustainable path' and needs major reform, four prominent researchers say. Researchers should 'confront the dangers at hand,' the authors write, and 'rethink' how academic research is funded, staffed, and organized. Among other issues, the team suggests that the system may be producing too many new researchers and forcing them to compete for a stagnating pool of funding."
Windows

Microsoft Confirms It Is Dropping Windows 8.1 Support 575

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the little-orphan-windows dept.
snydeq (1272828) writes "Microsoft TechNet blog makes clear that Windows 8.1 will not be patched, and that users must get Windows 8.1 Update if they want security patches, InfoWorld's Woody Leonhard reports. 'In what is surely the most customer-antagonistic move of the new Windows regime, Steve Thomas at Microsoft posted a TechNet article on Saturday stating categorically that Microsoft will no longer issue security patches for Windows 8.1, starting in May,' Leonhard writes. 'Never mind that Windows 8.1 customers are still having multiple problems with errors when trying to install the Update. At this point, there are 300 posts on the Microsoft Answers forum thread 'Windows 8.1 Update 1 Failing to Install with errors 0x80070020, 80073712 and 800F081F.' The Answers forum is peppered with similar complaints and a wide range of errors, from 800F0092 to 80070003, for which there are no solutions from Microsoft. Never mind that Microsoft itself yanked Windows 8.1 Update from the corporate WSUS update server chute almost a week ago and still hasn't offered a replacement.'"

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