DrBubba - Slashdot User

Submission + - Survey Claims 25% of PC Owners May Switch to Other Devices (ngohq.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 21, 2012 @11:43AM

An anonymous reader writes: 25% of computer owners say they may not replace their PC when their current machine becomes unusable, signaling a possible trend of consumers becoming PC-less because they switch to a tablet or a similar device, according to a national survey conducted by the Center for the Digital Future in collaboration with market research and strategy firm Bovitz.

"We are seeing a major change in how a large percentage of Americans view their computing needs," said Jeffrey I. Cole, director of the Center for the Digital Future at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

Submission + - Stabuniq malware found on servers at U.S. financial institutions (networkworld.com)

Submitted by alphadogg on Friday December 21, 2012 @11:29AM

alphadogg writes: Security researchers from Symantec have identified an information-stealing Trojan program that was used to infect computer servers belonging to various U.S. financial institutions. Dubbed Stabuniq, the Trojan program was found on mail servers, firewalls, proxy servers, and gateways belonging to U.S. financial institutions, including banking firms and credit unions, according to a Symantec software engineer. "Approximately half of unique IP addresses found with Trojan.Stabuniq belong to home users," the engineer wrote in a blog post. http://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/trojanstabuniq-found-financial-institution-servers "Another 11 percent belong to companies that deal with Internet security (due, perhaps, to these companies performing analysis of the threat). A staggering 39 percent, however, belong to financial institutions."

Submission + - Secret location of Minneapolis police license plate readers (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by

zophy

on Friday December 21, 2012 @11:18AM

zophy writes: "Here is some revealing information about government monitoring of United States citizens.
Car license plate readers are rapidly growing around the country. High-speed optical character recognition can compare observed plates against a "hot list" of wanted vehicles at 60 plates per second
A Minneapolis-based data scientist requested and received 2.1 million plates that were photographed in 90 days.
His data analysis reveals yet more information about your personal movements that the government permanently stores."

Submission + - ACTA gets death certificate in Europe (ffii.org)

Submitted by Seeteufel on Thursday December 20, 2012 @08:35AM

Seeteufel writes: The controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement is now officially pronounced dead in the E.U. The European Parliament broadly rejected the Anti-Counterfeiting Agreement a while ago, but there was still a court case pending at the European Court of Justice about the legality of ACTA. The Commission was open about its intent to reintroduce ACTA raticication to the Parliament after a positive Court decision. Now we learn the Commission has withdrawn its questions to the Court.

Submission + - Research Discovery Could Revolutionalize Semiconductor Manufacture (lunduniversity.lu.se)

Submitted by arobatino on Wednesday November 28, 2012 @06:08PM

arobatino writes: A new method of manufacturing semiconductors which eliminates the substrate (in other words, no wafer) could be much faster and cheaper. From the article:

'A completely new method of manufacturing the smallest structures in electronics could make their manufacture thousands of times quicker, allowing for cheaper semiconductors. The findings have been published in the latest issue of Nature.

Instead of starting from a silicon wafer or other substrate, as is usual today, researchers have made it possible for the structures to grow from freely suspended nanoparticles of gold in a flowing gas.'

Submission + - Bitcoin mining rewards drop to 25 bitcoin (mineforeman.com)

Submitted by

ASDFnz

on Wednesday November 28, 2012 @04:05PM

ASDFnz writes: "At 15:24:38 28th of Novemeber 2012 GMT the 210,000th bitcoin block was mined by laughingbear at Slush’s pool https://mining.bitcoin.cz/ .

From now on the reward will only be 25 bitcoins or less. As mentioned in a Slashdot Article http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/11/25/2124236/bitcoin-mining-reward-about-to-halve earlier this week this is a very important milestone in the development of bitcoin, one that may either make or break it."

Submission + - Scientific American's Fred Guterl explores the real threats posed by technology (thebulletin.org)

Submitted by Lasrick on Wednesday November 28, 2012 @02:54PM

Lasrick writes: Fred Guterl is the executive editor of Scientific American, and in this piece he explores various real threats posed by technology that modern civilization relies on. Discusses West African and Indian monsoons, infectious diseases, computer hacking. Here's a quote: "Today the technologies that pose some of the biggest problems are not so much military as commercial. They come from biology, energy production, and the information sciences — and are the very technologies that have fueled our prodigious growth as a species. They are far more seductive than nuclear weapons, and more difficult to extricate ourselves from. The technologies we worry about today form the basis of our global civilization and are essential to our survival."

Submission + - Splashtop For Linux Claims 10~15% Advantage Over VNC (phoronix.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 28, 2012 @01:10PM

An anonymous reader writes: The Splashtop remote desktop application software has been ported to Ubuntu Linux. In the port that was announced today, the company claims Splashtop is 10~15% faster than VNC, the commonly used graphical desktop sharing system. The superior performance is attributed to "an efficient protocol, algorithms and optimizations." While non-free proprietary software, the Linux Foundation is also promoting Splashtop coming to Linux.

Submission + - Elon Musk outlines SpaceX's Mars settlement plans (space.com)

Submitted by McGruber on Wednesday November 28, 2012 @11:06AM

McGruber writes: Space.com (http://www.space.com/18596-mars-colony-spacex-elon-musk.html) has the news of Alon Musk's November 16 talk at the Royal Aeronautical Society in London. Musk outlined SpaceX's plans to establish a Mars colony of up to 80,000 people by staring with a pioneering group of fewer than 10 people.

Submission + - In the midst of privacy scandal, Facebook creates another scandal (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by

muon1183

on Wednesday November 28, 2012 @10:52AM

muon1183 writes: "Facebook says it is investigating a fault which has seen some of its members re-registered to groups that they had quit. This is especially disturbing for 'secret' groups, as it can result in people gaining access to data they should not have."

Submission + - Caltech and UVic set 339Gbps internet speed record (extremetech.com) 1

Submitted by

MrSeb

on Wednesday November 28, 2012 @09:52AM

MrSeb writes: "Engineers at Caltech and the University of Victoria in Canada have smashed their own internet speed records, achieving a memory-to-memory transfer rate of 339 gigabits per second (5.3GB/s), 187Gbps (2.9GB/s) over a single duplex 100-gigabit connection, and a max disk-to-disk transfer speed of 96Gbps (1.5GB/s). At a sustained rate of 339Gbps, such a network could transfer four million gigabytes (4PB) of data per day — or around 200,000 Blu-ray movie rips. These speed records are all very impressive, but what’s the point? Put simply, the scientific world deals with vasts amount of data — and that data needs to be moved around the world quickly. The most obvious example of this is CERN’s Large Hadron Collider; in the past year, the high-speed academic networks connecting CERN to the outside world have transferred more than 100 petabytes of data. It is because of these networks that we can discover new particles, such as the Higgs boson. In essence, Caltech and the University of Victoria have taken it upon themselves to ride the bleeding edge of high-speed networks so that science can continue to prosper."

Submission + - Using nanoparticles to boil water for less £ (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by

vswee

on Wednesday November 28, 2012 @09:51AM

vswee writes: "Generating steam, typically requires vast amounts of energy to heat and eventually boil water or another fluid. Now researchers at Rice University have found a shortcut. Using light-absorbing nanoparticles suspended in water, the group was able to turn the water molecules surrounding the nanoparticles into steam while scarcely raising the temperature of the remaining water. The trick could dramatically reduce the cost of many steam-reliant processes."

Submission + - Curiosity may have found precursor of life on Mars (lagazzettadelmezzogiorno.it)

Submitted by

concealment

on Wednesday November 28, 2012 @09:28AM

concealment writes: "NASA's Curiosity rover may have found a precursor to life on Mars, the director of the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said Wednesday.
"Perhaps Curiosity has found simple organic molecules," Charles Elachi said at the fringes of a conference at Rome's La Sapienza University.
"It's preliminary data that must be checked (on) organic, not biological, molecules"."

Submission + - BP and Executive Facing Criminal Charges (chron.com) 1

Submitted by SleazyRidr on Wednesday November 28, 2012 @09:07AM

SleazyRidr writes: Finally some news that will please a lot of the Slashdot crowd: A company has been charged with Manslaughter! BP has been charged with manslaughter following the Macondo Incident. Two of the rig supervisors and a BP executive are also facing jail time. Is this the start of companies being forced to take responsibility for their actions?

Submission + - Why Coding at Fifty May be Nifty 4

Submitted by theodp on Saturday November 03, 2012 @08:10PM

theodp writes: Enough with the dadgum naysayers. Google's Vivek Haldar lists some good reasons for why you would want to program at fifty (or any other age). Haldar's list would probably get a thumbs-up from billionaire SAS CEO Jim Goodnight, who had this to say about coding when interviewed at age 56: 'I would be happy if I just stayed in my office and programmed all day, to tell you the truth. That is my one real love in life is programming. Programming is sort of like getting to work a puzzle all day long. I actually enjoy it. It's a lot of fun. It's not even work to me. It's just enjoyable. You get to shut out all your other thoughts and just concentrate on this little thing you're trying to do, to make work it. It's nice, very enjoyable.'

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