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Submission + - FreeDOS is 20 years old

Submitted by Jim Hall
Jim Hall writes: In a June 29, 1994 post in comp.os.msdos.apps on USENET, a physics student announced an effort to create a completely free version of DOS that everyone could use. That project turned into FreeDOS, 20 years ago! Originally intended as a free replacement for MS-DOS, FreeDOS has since advanced what DOS could do, adding new functionality and making DOS easier to use. And today in 2014, people continue to use FreeDOS to support embedded systems, to run business software, and to play classic DOS games!

Submission + - Cambridge team breaks superconductor world record

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: University of Cambridge scientists have broken a decade-old superconducting record by packing a 17.6 Tesla magnetic field into a golf ball-sized hunk of crystal — equivalent to about three tons of force. From the Cambridge announcement: "A world record that has stood for more than a decade has been broken by a team led by University of Cambridge engineers, harnessing the equivalent of three tonnes of force inside a golf ball-sized sample of material that is normally as brittle as fine china. The Cambridge researchers managed to ‘trap’ a magnetic field with a strength of 17.6 Tesla — roughly 100 times stronger than the field generated by a typical fridge magnet — in a high temperature gadolinium barium copper oxide (GdBCO) superconductor, beating the previous record by 0.4 Tesla."

Submission + - Korean government switches to open source by 2020 (etnews.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: As the support for the Microsoft (MS) Windows XP service is terminated this year, the government will try and invigorate open source software in order to solve the problem of dependency on certain software. By 2020 when the support of the Windows 7 service is terminated, it is planning to switch to open OS and minimize damages. Industry insiders pointed out that the standard e-document format must be established and shared as an open source before open source software is invigorated.

Submission + - Researchers Find "Achilles Heel" of Drug Resistant Bacteria

Submitted by Rambo Tribble
Rambo Tribble writes: Researchers in Britain are reporting that they have found a way to prevent bacteria from forming the "wall" that prevents antibiotics from attacking them. "At the heart of the breakthrough is the way 'gram negative' bacterial cells transport the carrier's molecular 'bricks' to the surface of the cell and form a wall." "The number of superbugs are increasing at an unexpected rate. This research provides the platform for urgently-needed new generation drugs."

Submission + - Mt. Gox CEO Returns to Twitter, Enrages Burned Investors

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Mark Karpeles doesn't seem to understand how much anger and trouble the $400 million Mt. Gox fiasco caused his customers. According to Wired: "After a long absence, the Mt Gox CEO has returned to Twitter with a bizarre string of tone-deaf tweets that were either written by a Turing test chat bot, or by a man completely oblivious to the economic chaos he has wrought. His first message after losing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of bitcoins? 'What would we do without busybox?'—a reference to a slimmed-down Linux operating system used on devices such as routers. He’s also Tweeted about a noodle dish called yakisoba and Japanese transportation systems." Andreas Antonopoulos, the CSO with Blockchain says, "He continues to be oblivious about his own failure and the pain he has caused others. He is confirming that he is a self-absorbed narcissist with an inflated sense of self-confidence who has no remorse.”

Submission + - Quantum or not, controversial computer runs no faster than a normal one (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: The D-Wave computer, marketed as a groundbreaking quantum machine that runs circles around conventional computers, solves problems no faster than an ordinary rival, a new test shows. Some researchers call the test of the controversial device, described online today in Science, the fairest comparison yet. But D-Wave argues that the computations used in the study were too easy to show what its novel chips can do.

Submission + - Svitla Ruby Conference 2014 summary (rubyc.eu)

Submitted by Svitla Systems
Svitla Systems writes: On May 31 — June 1, 2014 the second conference about Ruby and Ruby on Rails – Rubyc took place in Kiev. More than 250 rubyists gathered to hear talks from the best developers on Ruby from Ukraine, USA, Brazil, Spain, UK, Germany and Russia. Organizers, Svitla Systems company, expresses gratitude to all participants of the conference, General Sponsor — SoftServe, Ruby-sponsors: DataArt and Global Logic, as well as all media-partners. Together we managed to hold one of the brightest Ruby events in Ukraine.

Traditionally, video presentations RubyC all speakers are available on the conference website http://rubyc.eu/posts/14

Submission + - Rare materials hold promise for non-volatile magnetic RAM, or MRAM (zdnet.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Scientists in New Zealand and France are finding commercial applications for materials called rare earth nitrides (RENs) that could revolutionize computer memory and storage. The materials could be used to create non-volatile magnetic RAM, MRAM, that retains its storage even when a device is turned off. This would be ideal, the researchers say, for cloud data storage spanning multiple servers and would enable faster computers that use less energy.

Submission + - Teaching Creationism As Science Now Banned In Britain's Schools (www.gov.uk) 2

Submitted by sandbagger
sandbagger writes: The UK has banned the teaching of creationism as science in all schools receiving public money. The new regulations were published last week with little to-do, state the 'requirement for every academy and free school to provide a broad and balanced curriculum in any case prevents the teaching of creationism as evidence based theory in any academy or free school.'

Submission + - New "Silk Road Clone" Mobile App Lets You Anonymously Buy Goods With Bitcoin (ibtimes.co.uk)

Submitted by concertina226
concertina226 writes: A developer is working on a new mobile app that allows users to anonymously trade goods and services from other users nearby, using bitcoins – essentially an anonymous equivalent of Gumtree or Craigslist.

Reddit user CiniCraft has posted the link to BitCraft, a new "Silk Road Clone" for mobile that is now in beta mode for users to test out.

Currently only accessible in a web browser, users can sign up for an account, which includes a public profile, a wallet they can add bitcoins to, a private inbox, and a public chat message board for their local region.

Users of the app can also locate users providing services and goods they want on an interactive map, provided using the Google Maps API.

Submission + - HUGO Winning Author Daniel Keyes has died. (locusmag.com)

Submitted by camperdave
camperdave writes: Author Daniel Keyes, 86, died June 15, 2014.

KKeyes is best known for his Hugo Award winning classic SF story “Flowers for Algernon” (F&SF, 1959), the Nebula Award winning and bestselling 1966 novel expansion, and the film version Charly (1968).

Keyes was born August 9, 1927 in New York. He worked variously as an editor, comics writer, fashion photographer, and teacher before joining the faculty of Ohio University in 1966, where he taught as a professor of English and creative writing, becoming professor emeritus in 2000. He married Aurea Georgina Vaquez in 1952, who predeceased him in 2013; they had two daughters.

Submission + - Duverger's law in political science predicts exactly two Bitcoin mining giants (economics.com.au)

Submitted by purnima
purnima writes: It's not every day that the old area of Political Science can help us think in a new way about technology. The linked article tells us that Bitcoin is different sort of technology: it has a democratic system built into the protocol. So when recently, the mining pool GHASH.IO achieved 54% of computational power amongst all Bitcoin miner there was a great deal of `weeping and gnashing of teeth’ in the Bitcoin community. You see, anyone controlling more than 50% of mining power exercises complete control over the recording of Bitcoin transactions. But all is not lost, “Duverger’s law” in political science predicts that the eventual stable market structure for Bitcoin mining will be two large mining pools of equal size. Equal size means two mining consortiums that will each frequently cross the 50% computational power line and have temporary control of the recording of Bitcoin transactions. And that, unlike a persistent monopoly, need not be a bad thing for the longevity of the currency.

Submission + - Was 'Watch Dogs' for PC Handicapped on Purpose? (metafilter.com)

Submitted by Advocatus Diaboli
Advocatus Diaboli writes: Many PC gamers were disappointed that Ubisoft's latest AAA game Watch_Dogs did not look as nice as when displayed at E3 in 2012. But this week a modder discovered that code to improve the game on PC is still buried within the released game, and can be turned back on without difficulty or performance hits. Ubisoft has yet to answer whether (or why) their PC release was deliberately handicapped.

Submission + - Ask for the resignation of Tom Wheeler (Head of the FCC) (whitehouse.gov)

Submitted by walterbyrd
walterbyrd writes: It is now clear that Tom Wheeler is not a representative of the people, but corporations. Previously to taking his current position Wheeler was the former head of 2 different lobbying organizations, which represented companies like Verizon, Comcast, and At&t. His actions helped turn them into the monopolies that they are today.

Submission + - Endurance experiment writes one petabyte to six consumer SSDs

Submitted by crookedvulture
crookedvulture writes: Last year, we kicked off an SSD endurance experiment to see how much data could be written to six consumer drives. One petabyte later, half of them are still going. Their performance hasn't really suffered, either. The casualties slowed down a little toward the very end, and they died in different ways. The Intel 335 Series and Kingston HyperX 3K provided plenty of warning of their imminent demise, though both still ended up completely unresponsive at the very end. The Samsung 840 Series, which uses more fragile TLC NAND, perished unexpectedly. It also suffered a rash of cell failures and multiple bouts of uncorrectable errors during its life. While the sample size is far too small to draw any definitive conclusions, all six SSDs exceeded their rated lifespans by hundreds of terabytes. The fact that all of them wrote over 700TB is a testament to the endurance of modern SSDs.

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