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Earth

MIT Unveils Portable, Solar-Powered Water Desalination System 117

Posted by Soulskill from the water-the-chances dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Field and Space Robotic Laboratory has designed a new solar-powered water desalination system to provide drinking water to disaster zones and disadvantaged parts of the planet. Desalination systems often require a lot of energy and a large infrastructure to support them, but MIT's compact system is able to cope due to its ingenious design. The system's photovoltaic panel is able to generate power for the pump, which in turn pushes undrinkable seawater through a permeable membrane. MIT's prototype can reportedly produce 80 gallons of drinking water per day, depending on weather conditions."
Science

Colliding Particles Can Make Black Holes After All 269

Posted by Soulskill from the act-now-while-supplies-last dept.
cremeglace writes with this excerpt from ScienceNOW: "You've heard the controversy. Particle physicists predict the world's new highest-energy atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland, might create tiny black holes, which they say would be a fantastic discovery. Some doomsayers fear those black holes might gobble up the Earth — physicists say that's impossible — and have petitioned the United Nations to stop the $5.5 billion LHC. Curiously, though, nobody had ever shown that the prevailing theory of gravity, Einstein's theory of general relativity, actually predicts that a black hole can be made this way. Now a computer model shows conclusively for the first time that a particle collision really can make a black hole." That said, they estimate the required energy for creating a black hole this way to be roughly "a quintillion times higher than the LHC's maximum"; though if one of the theories requiring compact extra dimensions is true, the energy could be lower.
Networking

Nmap 5.20 Released 36

Posted by Soulskill from the more-and-better dept.
ruphus13 writes "Nmap has a new release out, and it's a major one. It includes a GUI front-end called Zenmap, and, according to the post, 'Network admins will no doubt be excited to learn that Nmap is now ready to identify Snow Leopard systems, Android Linux smartphones, and Chumbies, among other OSes that Nmap can now identify. This release also brings an additional 31 Nmap Scripting Engine scripts, bringing the total collection up to 80 pre-written scripts for Nmap. The scripts include X11 access checks to see if X.org on a system allows remote access, a script to retrieve and print an SSL certificate, and a script designed to see whether a host is serving malware. Nmap also comes with netcat and Ndiff. Source code and binaries are available from the Nmap site, including RPMs for x86 and x86_64 systems, and binaries for Windows and Mac OS X. '"
Image

Own Your Own Fighter Jet 222

Posted by samzenpus from the only-one-on-the-block dept.
gimmebeer writes "The Russian Sukhoi SU-27 has a top speed of Mach 1.8 (more than 1,300 mph) and has a thrust to weight ratio greater than 1 to 1. That means it can accelerate while climbing straight up. It was designed to fight against the best the US had to offer, and now it can be yours for the price of a mediocre used business jet."
Image

Artist Wins £20,000 Grant To Study Women's Butts 202

Posted by samzenpus from the been-doing-a-lot-of-extra-credit-lately dept.
Sue Williams has been awarded a £20,000 grant by the Arts Council of Wales, to "explore cultural attitudes towards female buttocks." Sue plans to examine racial attitudes towards bottoms in Europe and Africa and create plaster casts of women's behinds to try to understand their place in contemporary culture. And here I've been studying the issue all these years for free like a sucker!
Privacy

Out of Business, Clear May Sell Customer Data 77

Posted by kdawson from the but-don't-worry-it's-perfectly-safe dept.
narramissic writes "Earlier this week, the Clear airport security screening service ceased operations, leaving many to wonder what would become of the personal information, including credit card numbers, fingerprints, and iris scans, of Clear's customers. And now we know. The information could be sold to the provider of a similar service. Until then, Clear has erased PC hard drives at its airport screening kiosks and is wiping employee computers, but the information is retained on its central databases (managed by Lockheed Martin). Clear customer David Maynor, who is CTO with Errata Security in Atlanta, wants Clear to delete his information but that isn't happening, the company said in a note posted to its Web site Thursday. 'They had your social security information, credit information, where you lived, employment history, fingerprint information,' said Maynor. 'They should be the only ones who have access to that information.'"

Comment Results from Ask Slashdot...inconclusive.. (Score 1) 834

by tallpaul (#27961761) Attached to: Go For a Masters, Or Not?

The responses I'm reading rather evenly fall on both sides for the same reasons!

* Get your Masters you will:
    * be hired more readily - companies look for people with degrees.
    * be paid more when you are hired for a net $ win

* Don't get your Masters, get a job you will:
    * be hired more readily - companies assume people with Masters want to be paid more and screen them out.
    * make 2 years of income which will more than offset the cost of grad school plus any increase in pay you might get

This isn't terribly surprising - any one person on /. has only worked for or been exposed to the hiring practices of a relatively small number of companies, even if they've been changing jobs for at the average tech rate (?) of 3 years or something.

The conclusion you should draw from this is:
  * when you go to work, either way apply to lots of companies! Some might screen you out because you have a Masters or because you don't!
  * salary probably has a lot more to do with your negotation skills, location, job market etc.

I have some other things for you to consider, given how open you left the question: "which is better?"

Obviously your professors think you should stay in school. After all - they all did, didn't they? It worked out for them. And they might have some non-obvious stake in you sticking around too.

Well, what do you mean by better? This is a pretty personal decision. Perhaps "make more money (immediately or in total)" isn't your deciding factor.

How much do you like your field? Many responses seemed to assume that you wanted to get a career as a sysadmin/network admin, which wouldn't match your degree (not that it matches any degrees really). Do you want to get a fair bit more depth in a more narrow subject area in your field of study? If you are unsure about your field, you should probably get out and work!

Consider that once you are working full time, it will be a LOT harder to go back to school even part time, even if you work for a company that pays for all of it. This will get even harder if you get married or have kids.

Maybe you are already in a serious relationship or have kids? That should drive you pretty solidly towards "get a job."

How much do you care about -where- you work? Do you want to work for a specific company or range of companies? Maybe do a straw poll of the company or companies you are interested in, and see if THEY prefer an advanced degree. In computer engineering you might want to go work for HP, Intel, AMD or IBM - in which case a PhD might not be out of the question. And you might even get paid accordingly.

How much did you pay for your undergrad? If you got a fancy degree from Caltech or MIT at $50k/yr you are going to have a hard time "upping" that with a Masters. On the other hand if you went to a "low end" school (this is by your field mind you! An affordable state school could have an excellent rep for your field) AND you have excellent grades it might be wise to try for an MIT Masters to top it off.

What is your funding situation? Would you be paying your way (or would someone else pay it for you?) or would you need to be a TA/RA? Obviously if you've got someone lined up to pay it for you that weighs pretty heavily in the "yes do it" side!

Interested in starting your own business? How does the degree factor into that? Timing - would a 2 year delay help or hurt? Funding - would the money you spend on your degree impact your ability to start the business? Or are you one of "those" people who find grad school the perfect environment in which to start a startup?

Some mentioned teaching - but I didn't see much mention of mention teaching college. I'm guessing since you didn't mention it that teaching high school is not under consideration or you'd be looking at the well-covered Education degree. Teaching college doesn't necessarily mean full time. Increasingly colleges are hiring adjunct faculty and it can be one way to supplement income. Generally a Masters is required (but a Doctorate may not be). I tried this out and can't personally recommend it, but I suspect it depends a great deal on the situation.

Does money really matter to you? Get more accurate data than a straw poll of /. As a sysadmin I go to the USENIX/SAGE annual salary survey which is pretty comprehensive. I imagine IEEE does something like it perhaps for computer engineers? Remember to do your math carefully and correctly - raises are typically applied as a percentage of salary! There are also some pretty tough variables in the "total $" equation - do you happen to have enough for a down payment on a house (in a location where you want to live?). Now might be a good time to buy a house and get in on that game. Or not. And even 2 years can make a difference there beyond paying off 2 years of your mortgage ie: the market may shift (for better or worse)

Is there a specific Masters program you are interested in? Faculty you want to work with or be your advisor? Some specific locality perhaps (2 years in Hawaii doesn't sound all bad when you've spent the last 4 in Michigan)?

In summary - do a fair bit more research outside of this /. question (which wasn't a bad idea!) - after all if you get your Masters you'll be doing a great deal more research. And try to ask yourself a lot more specific and personal questions than these responses even generated as they were generally focused on "better" and "people with work experience."

Speaking as someone who has plenty of work experience, in a field (sysadmin) where a Masters (CS) would be useless, I still wouldn't mind getting my Masters part time if I worked for a company that paid for it. And I wouldn't have regretted it if I'd chosen to stay in school and still ended up a sysadmin where it made no difference. I like my field a lot and I'm always interested in it - I just happen to like -working- in a different one. In which I'm also interested and if somewhere offered a "Masters in Sysadmin" I'd consider it.

But that is obviously highly personal to me and with no consideration for the $ value.
AMD

AMD's Showcases Quad-Core Barcelona CPU 190

Posted by Zonk from the four-times-the-fun dept.
Gr8Apes writes "AMD has showcased their new 65nm Barcelona quad-core CPU. It is labeled a quad-core Opteron, but according to Infoworld's Tom Yeager, is really a redefinition of x86. Each core has a new vector math processing unit (SSE128), separate integer and floating point schedulers, and new nested paging tables (to vastly improve hardware virtualization). According to AMD, the new vector math units alone should improve floating point operation by 80%. Some analysts are skeptical, waiting for benchmarks. Will AMD dethrone Intel again? Only time will tell."
Networking

Submission + - MIT scientists reach fiber-optic breakthrough

Submitted by kcurtis
kcurtis writes: The AP (via boston.com) has a story about how MIT scientists have detailed a breakthrough in optics that could lead to cheaper, more efficient optic communications. From the story: "Like polarizing sunglasses that block light waves oriented in different directions, the MIT researchers created a clever device that splits the light beams as they pass through a circuit. The device then rotates one of the polarized beams, before both beams are rejoined on their way out of the circuit, retaining the signals' strength. But it's not just that device that the researchers are touting. They're also trumpeting the innovative method they devised to integrate the optical circuitry with electronic circuitry on the same silicon chip."

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