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Comment News With a Bullet (Score 5, Insightful) 217

by Zanadou (#48217389) Attached to: Mark Zuckerberg Speaks Mandarin At Tsinghua University In Beijing

Wow. [White] Anglo guy come to China and speaks Mandarin ("Holly Shit! Look, THE DOG'S DOING CALCULUS!!11"), but a Chinese tech CEO (Jack Ma? Charles Chao? Robin Li? pick one) coming to The USA and speaking English in a meeting... well, obviously that's not news-report worthy. Hell, everyone important in the world speaks English without question, right? And, if not - what's their excuse??

Holly crap Anglo world, get over yourselves, will you? Of course Mark Zuckerburg speaks Chinese... in China. What would we expect him to speak, French?? Notice how everybody focusing on how he spoke, rather than what he said.

Submission + - Ubuntu Turns 10 Today (netsplit.com)

Submitted by Zanadou
Zanadou writes: Ten years ago today on October 20, 2004, Mark Shuttleworth's first Ubuntu offering 4.10 "Warty Warthog" was released on to the world. Since then, riding countless Window Manger swaps and Kernel updates, Ubuntu has become—arguably!—one of the most popular and successful Linux distros of all time. Scott James Remnant gives a detailed account of some of the almost eight month's work that went into bringing the first release of Ubuntu to existence.

Comment Big Caveat: not a drop-in replacement forTrueCrypt (Score 3, Informative) 220

by Zanadou (#48136015) Attached to: VeraCrypt Is the New TrueCrypt -- and It's Better

Note that VeraCrypt can't open existing TrueCrypt container files, nor can it create new container files that are backward compatible with TrueCrypt. Instead it suggests you do a clumsy, "un-enecrypt, copy over, re-enecrypt" lock-in process in order to "upgrade". At least the others (truecrypt.ch, Ciphershed, Tcplay / Zulucrypt, et. al.) allow you to keep working with existing TC container files.

Why this isn't in screaming bold text at the top of the VeraCrypt page (which is here, btw), is beyond me.

Submission + - South Koreans Flee from KakaoTalk to Telegram Messenger due to Surveillance (theverge.com)

Submitted by Zanadou
Zanadou writes: At the beginning of October, KakaoTalk users in South Korea got an unpleasant surprise: President Park Geun-Hye announced a crackdown on any internet messages deemed as insulting to her or generally "rumor-mongering" — including private messages sent through KakaoTalk service. The South Korean Goverment began actively monitoring the service for violations, promising punishment for anyone spreading inappropriate content. In response to the crackdown, South Koreans have voted with their feet, heading en masse to encrypted chat programs hosted outside the country, particularly an app called Telegram known for its encryption features.

Comment The spec wars are over (Score 1) 554

by Zanadou (#48061795) Attached to: Lost Opportunity? Windows 10 Has the Same Minimum PC Requirements As Vista

This. The desktop PC CPU spec wars were over about 5+ years ago. With the benefit of hindsight, it seemed to hit this point with the release of the Intel Wolfdale Core2 Duo / AMD K10 Deneb cpus.

After that, there seemed to be little new CPU technology that made desktop computers "seem faster" in great multiple leaps, except for hard-core gamers and other edge cases. However, having 2 or more gig (ideally 4+ gig) of ram seems to be important. For example, I got an Intel E8500 Core2 Duo (what's that... circa 2009?) and maxed it out to 8 gig of ram (motherboard/slot limit).... the thing hardly breaks out in a sweat in Windows 8.1. I don't think I could tell the difference between it and some new i7 thing if they were sitting next to each other doing the same (non-gaming) tasks.

Naturally hard-core gamers want more CPU power, but a lot of the needed grunt comes from the newer and greatest GPUs. For those in an office and/or just internet surfing, anything beyond a RAM-maxed Wolfdale/Deneb is just overkill - reflected in Microsoft's almost static system requirements for Windows Vista, 7, 8, 8.1 and beyond.

Submission + - NZ government denies 'mass domestic spying' (bbc.com)

Submitted by Kittenman
Kittenman writes: The BBC and several domestic NZ sources are covering the latest revelations raised by Kim Dotcom, who is funding a political party in NZ as it heads to a general election on the 20th. Dotcom flew in a US journalist, Glenn Greenwald, and arranged for satellite links to Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, in their respective hideouts, at a 'disclosure' presentation in Auckland.

The NZ Prime Minister (John Key) has denied all claims. No-one making the claims can actually come up with a plausible reason why the NZ government would want to spy on its citizens.

Submission + - Sci-Fi Authors and Scientists Predict an Optimistic Future (bbc.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A few years ago, author Neal Stephenson argued that sci-fi had forgotten how to inspire people to do great things. Indeed, much of recent science fiction has been pessimistic and skeptical, focusing on all the ways our inventions could go wrong, and how hostile the universe is to humankind. Now, a group of scientists, engineers, and authors (including Stephenson himself) is trying to change that. Arizona State University recently launched Project Heiroglyph, a hub for ideas that will influence science fiction to be optimistic and accurate, and to focus on the great things humanity is capable of doing. For example, in the development of a short story, Stephenson wanted to know if it's possible to build a tower that's 20 kilometers tall. Keith Hjelmsad, an expert in structural stability and computational mechanics, wrote a detailed response about the challenge involved in building such a tower. Other authors are contributing questions as well, and researchers are chiming in with fascinating, science-based replies. Roboticist Srikanth Saripalli makes this interesting point: "If the government has to decide what to fund and what not to fund, they are going to get their ideas and decisions mostly from science fiction rather than what's being published in technical papers."

Submission + - Schizophrenia Is Not a Single Disease (wustl.edu)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: New research from Washington University has found that the condition known as schizophrenia is not just a single disease, but instead a collection of eight different disorders. For years, researchers struggled to understand the genetic basis of schizophrenia, but this new method was able to isolate and separate all of the different conditions, each with its own symptoms, which are classified the same way (abstract, full text). "In some patients with hallucinations or delusions, for example, the researchers matched distinct genetic features to patients’ symptoms, demonstrating that specific genetic variations interacted to create a 95 percent certainty of schizophrenia. In another group, they found that disorganized speech and behavior were specifically associated with a set of DNA variations that carried a 100 percent risk of schizophrenia." According to one of the study's authors, "By identifying groups of genetic variations and matching them to symptoms in individual patients, it soon may be possible to target treatments to specific pathways that cause problems."

Submission + - The Growing Illusion of Single Player (giantbomb.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Multiplayer modes used to be an extra part of most games — an optional addition that the developers could build (or not) as they saw fit. These days, it's different: many games are marketed under the illusion of being single-player, when their focus has shifted to an almost mandatory multiplayer mode. (Think always-online DRM, and games as services.) It's not that this is necessarily bad for gameplay — it's that design patterns are shifting, and if you don't like multiplayer, you're going to have a harder time finding games you do like. The article's author uses a couple recent major titles as backdrop for the discussion: "With both Diablo III and Destiny, I'm not sure where and how to attribute my enjoyment. Yes, the mechanics of both are sound, but given the resounding emptiness felt when played solo, perhaps the co-op element is compensating. I'd go so far as to argue games can be less mechanically compelling, so long as the multiplayer element is engaging. The thrill of barking orders at friends can, in a way, cover design flaws. I hem and haw on the quality of each game's mechanics because the co-op aspect literally distracted me from engaging with them to some degree."

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