xebecv - Slashdot User

WISE Discovers 95 New Near-Earth Asteroids 112

Posted by timothy on Saturday July 17, 2010 @11:33PM from the are-you-sure-you-want-to-know? dept.

astroengine writes "NASA's Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) has turned up 25,000 new asteroid discoveries, 95 of which are near-Earth objects (NEOs). This mission is as fascinating as it is frightening. Capable of spotting any cosmic object glowing in infrared wavelengths, WISE has become an expert asteroid hunter, seeing these interplanetary vagabonds, some of which get uncomfortably close to our planet."

C Programming Language Back At Number 1 535

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday April 06, 2010 @11:13PM from the doin'-what-we-always-did dept.

derrida writes "After more than 4 years C is back at position number 1 in the TIOBE index. The scores for C have been pretty constant through the years, varying between the 15% and 20% market share for almost 10 years. So the main reason for C's number 1 position is not C's uprise, but the decline of its competitor Java. Java has a long-term downward trend. It is losing ground to other languages running on the JVM. An example of such a language is JavaFX, which is now approaching the top 20."

Ksplice Offers Rebootless Updates For Ubuntu Systems 211

Posted by timothy on Sunday June 28, 2009 @01:50AM from the uptime-preserver dept.

sdasher writes "Ksplice has started offering Ksplice Uptrack for Ubuntu Jaunty, a free service that delivers rebootless versions of all the latest Ubuntu kernel security updates. It's currently available for both the 32 and 64-bit generic kernel, and they plan to add support for the virtual and server kernels by the end of the month, according to their FAQ. This makes Ubuntu the first OS that doesn't need to be rebooted for security updates. (We covered Ksplice's underlying technology when it was first announced a year ago.)"

Ocean Currents Proposed As Cause of Magnetic Field 333

Posted by kdawson on Sunday June 14, 2009 @06:03PM from the round-and-round-and-round-in-the-circle-game dept.

pjt33 notes a recently published paper proposing that ocean currents could account for Earth's magnetic field. The wrteup appears on the Institute of Physics site; the IOP is co-owner, with the German Physical Society, of the open-access journal in which the paper appears. This reader adds, "The currently predominant theory is that the cause of Earth's magnetic field is molten iron flowing in the outer core. There is at present no direct evidence for either theory." "Professor Gregory Ryskin from the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University in Illinois, US, has defied the long-standing convention by applying equations from magnetohydrodynamics to our oceans' salt water (which conducts electricity) and found that the long-term changes (the secular variation) in the Earth's main magnetic field are possibly induced by our oceans' circulation."

Comment Re:from an attacker with physical access (Score 1) 398

by xebecv on Thursday February 21, 2008 @02:53PM (#22505868) Attached to: Cold Reboot Attacks on Disk Encryption

You mean if somebody has physical access to your hardware on day-to-day basis? We are not talking about that. As several posters mentioned before - stolen laptop is the main concern here. If the disk is encrypted with a good key, this cold-DRAM-reading is the only viable and relatively easy method of stealing sensitive data from it. The best solutions I've read so far today about: 1. Getting rid of the somehow marked sensitive information from memory, while switching to sleep mode or to locked mode. This method will need lots of code change and full cooperation of OS and application developers. 2. Using capacitor based backup power on motherboard to wipe memory clean at the moment of power loss. This method is easier to implement but less reliable, since you can pop RAM from the motherboard while it is still on, or just destroy that capacitor before power off.

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