Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Cloud

Submission + - Where Are the Smart Grid's Solid State Transformers? (silicon-news.com)

An anonymous reader writes: In the early 1900s, Nikola Tesla pioneered the concept of applying Faraday’s law of inductance to alternating current electric power transmission/distribution through the use of iron-core transformers. The year is 2012 and despite the many advances in silicon-based power conversion, even going so far as to put direct current back on the grid via silicon-powered long distance HVDC lines, iron core transformers still form the backbone of the "smart" power grid.

Even with all the hype of a "smart grid" that self-regulates and even carries data, these ancient and outdated behemoths glare in the face of Siemens and General Electric’s research into the subject. So why aren’t switched-mode power supplies used on the grid at the distribution-level? Let’s analyze this in-depth.

Idle

Submission + - The Amazing Complexities of Light Bulbs' Flickering (silicon-news.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Incandescent light bulb flicker is an amazingly more complex subject than most might think: everything from electric power distribution anomalies to quantum effects of tungsten filaments and alternating current harmonics can cause lights to flicker, along with just external forces shaking them of course. This page goes in-depth with all the numerous possibilities of light flickering, described for anyone of any background in Science to understand more about a common-yet-complex everyday observation.
Cloud

Submission + - The State of the "Smart Grid" (silicon-news.com)

be new here writes: The "smart grid" has been hyped for years, with talks of everything from utility frequency changes and better energy management. But what is the current state of the smart grid, and what changes are imminent in the immediate future? This article analyzes the smart grid in terms of the consumer/business end and the utility companies' end (the micro- and macro-side, respectively) as to what makes the grid "smart" now, as well as what we can expect within the next year or so. Also interesting is Cisco's involvement in the grid with their new "rugged" FAR grid routers, featured in the R&D stage in the article's video.
Cloud

Submission + - SSDs in the Enterprise and the Software Driving Them (silicon-news.com)

Anthony_Cargile writes: Solid state disks are being rapidly deployed in the datacenter by numerous big names, and with their physical deployment comes an interesting paradigm shift in the software that runs atop them: a modernized return of the mainframe era's single level store coupled with XIP (eXecute in place) technology to remove layers of costly abstraction between database software and physical media for better optimized performance to meet cloud demand. Top 10 enterprises are already making this a reality, and open source movements are following in their footsteps.
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft Releases Tablet: Microsoft Surface (silicon-news.com)

Anthony_Cargile writes: Microsoft's Steve Ballmer just released Microsoft's tablet, Microsoft Surface (the name of an existing technology being extended by Windows 8 to the mobile market). It does not include any collaboration by Barnes and Noble, quelling those rumors, and is Windows 8-based running software very similar to what existing Microsoft Surface products have been running in restaurants for over a year now.
Power

Submission + - Wireless Power and Why AC Cords Aren't Disappearing (silicon-news.com)

be new here writes: Chances are, you've seen the wireless charging mats built for smartphones in the aisles at stores, where one can place a phone on a mat and charge it without interconnecting wires. With near-field wireless power via induction becoming prevalent around us, why isn't the AC power cord disappearing altogether? The answer may surprise you.
Power

Submission + - The State of the Smart Grid (silicon-news.com)

be new here writes: The "smart grid" has been hyped for years, with talks of everything from utility frequency changes and better energy management. But what is the current state of the smart grid, and what changes are imminent in the immediate future? This article analyzes the smart grid in terms of the consumer/business end and the utility companies' end (the micro- and macro-side, respectively) as to what makes the grid "smart" now, as well as what we can expect within the next year or so. Also interesting is Cisco's involvement in the grid with their new "rugged" grid routers, featured in the R&D stage in the article's video.

Submission + - Fidelity of women determined by gene compatibility with mate (ucsd.edu) 1

dsinc writes: Preferences for mates that possess genes dissimilar to one’s own at the major histocompatibility complex (MHC), a polymorphic group of loci associated with the immune system, have been found in mice, birds, sh,
and humans. As the proportion of MHC alleles couples shared increased, women’s sexual responsivity to their partners decreased, their number of extrapair sexual partners increased, and their attraction to men other than their primary partners increased, particularly during the fertile phase of their cycles.

Google

Submission + - How Steve Jobs Changed Google Plus (silicon-news.com)

Anthony_Cargile writes: Everyone thinks of Google Plus as a social networking website competing with Facebook, but that is no longer the case — even Google recognizes its failure in that regard. But in a meeting with Sergey Brin and Larry Page shortly before his death, Steve Jobs gave key advice as to what direction to take their company with regards to Google Plus, as is evidenced by their controversial new "umbrella" privacy policy that went in effect this year. Privacy advocates beware, as the problem is almost certainly worse than ever anticipated.
Linux

Submission + - Linus Torvalds publicly slams Nvidia, gives them the bird on camera. (youtube.com)

An anonymous reader writes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MShbP3OpASA&hd=1 (The moneyshot itself is at ~ 49:59)

"Aalto Talk with Linus Torvalds, hosted by Aalto Center for Entrepreneurship (ACE) in Otaniemi on June 14, 2012. Linus was interviewed by Will Cardwell and followed with a Q&A session with the audience. Enjoy!"

a few mentions in the finnish media:
http://www.mtv3.fi/uutiset/it.shtml/2012/06/1567345/linus-torvalds-raivostui-jattifirmalle---painukaa-vn
http://www.iltalehti.fi/uutiset/2012061715717196_uu.shtml

Comment Re:Idiot (Score 2) 179

Don't confuse "specification" with "implementation." Nowhere in the article is Mono mentioned, as it is a non-Microsoft application of the CLI specification. I was specifically referring to Microsoft-published software, and as mentioned above in a separate thread, I was correct in referring to the bytecode (CIL) with respect to how it can be interpreted by a Microsoft VM on either architecture. Obvious by my confusion with the command-line, I wasn't even aware there was an approved specification for .NET's VM (or any Microsoft product, for that matter). But regardless of whether it's standardized for all to use or not, the article focuses on Microsoft. Even if it were not standardized they could continue to publish VMs on their own platform as far as I'm aware.

I hate Slashdot sometimes.

Comment Re:Idiot (Score 1) 179

Nowhere in the article did I say that CIL executes anything. Every instance of CIL was meant to refer to the intermediate bytecode itself, which can be JIT compiled by a virtual machine (the CLR everyone here who clearly did not comprehend the article thinks I'm confusing it for). Re-read the article carefully, keeping this in mind, and I might not appear as stupid as everyone here believes me to be regarding a subject that they themselves must not completely understand.

Comment Re:Idiot (Score 5, Interesting) 179

This guy is a complete moron. First, it's called the CLI, not the CIL. Second, it's called the Windows Runtime or WinRT and it runs .NET apps and HTML5/js apps. This is all quite plain to anyone that has even a tiny understanding of the system. This architecture diagram has been posted for quite some time, and clearly shows C# and VB as well as C/C++ apps running under WinRT/Metro.

Hi, I'm the "complete moron" who wrote the article. I most definitely meant CIL and not CLI, as I was referring to the Common Intermediate Language, and not the Command Line Interface. One is used to interact with an operating system through mostly text (curses and cursor-based terminal graphics being a stark exception), and the other allows multiple human-written programming languages to be compiled to a common bytecode form for interpretation by a .NET virtual machine runtime, and the basis of this article was that the same VM can be ported to Windows 8 on ARM in place of Metro apps. And your diagram does not clearly note anywhere that it is valid for Windows 8 on ARM as it is for x86/x86-64. Next time, don't be so quick to jump to conclusions and throw the words "moron" and "idiot" around. Thank you in advance.

Windows

Submission + - Windows 8: .NET versus HTML5 Metro app development (silicon-news.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Will Microsoft take advantage of .NET's Java-like CIL and allow .NET code to run on Windows 8, or force developers to switch to HTML5 Metro apps instead for porting apps to Windows 8? This article brings up important insights into both paradigm's advantages and disadvantages, and even correlates the options with Microsoft Windows's past NT-era support of MIPS and PPC, as well as Windows CE's way of supporting embedded architectures.

Comment Re:It isn't just licensing costs... (Score 4, Informative) 863

Did you even read the Secunia links you posted? Both unpatched vulnerabilities require usage of Apache's mod_ftp module, which I've honestly never even seen used as most hosts and general servers use external (and hardened) FTP software like ProFTPd:

Successful exploitation requires that a threaded Multi-Processing Module is used and that the mod_proxy_ftp module is enabled. (...) An error in the included APR-util library can be exploited to trigger hangs in the prefork and event MPMs on Solaris.

And the second (first in order on the site) unpatched vulnerability deals strictly with a mod_ftp input validation issue. Again, I rarely even see mod_ftp even used as opposed to an entirely seperate FTP server daemon but disabling the faulty module is simple enough in environments requiring absolute security.

And input validation issues are usually patched fairly quickly anyways, I mean come on, this is 2009 and there are too many developers for the project that wouldn't let this sort of thing continue for this amount of time. Not to mention the fact that these unpatched vulnerabilities are nothing compared to the olde IIS Webdav exploit of a few years ago - too bad there wasn't a community aware of it sooner other than the underground black hats already using it to their advantage by the time it was brought to the attention of MS.

Slashdot Top Deals

No man is an island if he's on at least one mailing list.

Working...