Comment Re:Riiiiight. (Score 1) 233
One of the reasons you would need a realtime os is Active Noise Control.
Comment Santiago (Score 3, Informative) 135
I am currently working in Santiago and did feel last nights shaking. It is not the first I have felt in the last year but it is definately the strongest. I haven't heard of any problems in Santiago but Valpariso is much closer and a portion of the city was recently damaged in a large fire so this might complicate the recovery efforts there.
Comment Polycom (Score 1) 194
Take a look at Polycom's RealPresence CloudAXIS Suite. It is supposed to be an interface between their dedicated video conference boxes and Skype, Google Talk Video, etc. I haven't used it myself.
Comment 2001 (Score 1) 238
Build a monolith covered withthe stuff. Sounds about how it is described in the books.
Foxconn Replacing Workers With Robots 530
redletterdave (2493036) writes The largest private employer in all of China and one of the biggest supply chain manufacturers in the world, Foxconn announced it will soon start using robots to help assemble devices at its several sprawling factories across China. Apple, one of Foxconn's biggest partners to help assemble its iPhones, iPads, will be the first company to use the new service. Foxconn said its new "Foxbots" will cost roughly $20,000 to $25,000 to make, but individually be able to build an average of 30,000 devices. According to Foxconn CEO Terry Gou, the company will deploy 10,000 robots to its factories before expanding the rollout any further. He said the robots are currently in their "final testing phase."
Former FCC Head: "We Should Be Ashamed of Ourselves" For State of Broadband 118
An anonymous reader writes A group of internet industry executives and politicians came together to look back on the Telecommunications Act of 1996, and to do a little crystal-ball gazing about the future of broadband regulation in the United States. Former FCC commissioner Michael Copps was among the presenters, and he had sharp words for the audience about the "insanity" of the current wave of merger mania in the telecom field and the looming threats of losing net neutrality regulation.
You Are What You're Tricked Into Eating 499
Rambo Tribble (1273454) writes "Two prominent nutrition experts have put forth the theory that the current obesity epidemic is, in large part, the result of processed foods tricking our appetite control mechanisms. They argue that evolution has given humans a delicately balanced system that balances appetite with metabolic needs, and that processed foods trick that system by making foods high in fats and carbohydrates have the gustatory qualities of proteins. As the researchers put it, 'Many people eat far too much fat and carbohydrate in their attempt to consume enough protein.'"
Comment Anti-Vax home schoolers (Score 3, Informative) 747
My wife and I home school our two daughters. There is a home school support group in our area that is frequented by several anti-vaccine families. My daughters are up to date on their vaccines and we don't associate with the anti-vax nut jobs. Please don't assume that all home schoolers are anti-vax.
Image Lifted From Twitter Leads to $1.2M Payout For Haitian Photog 242
magic maverick writes "A U.S. federal jury has ordered Agence France-Presse and Getty Images to pay $1.2 million to a Daniel Morel, Haitian photographer, for their unauthorized use of photographs, from the 2010 Haiti earthquake. The images, posted to Twitter, were taken by an editor at AFP and then provided to Getty. A number of other organizations had already settled out of court with the photographer."
Comment How Many Lines (Score 1) 277
If ever asked "How many lines of code do you write a week?" The only possible correct answer is "As few as possible".
Comment Re:Oh... (Score 1) 123
Fail.
I believe you tried to refer to "The Seldon Plan" from Asimov's Fondation series.
Submission + - MySQL analysis with AnalyzeMySQL (xenji.com)
Mario Mueller writes: I recently joined the scalability team at trivago and my first job was to get into the actual MySQL schema to discover which parts can be improved regarding performance and space consumption.
trivago's database consists of about 230 tables, many of them having a history of more than four years, some of them up to 7 years. A few of them do have some historic flaws, like having a signed bigint as primary key (because nobody could imagine what space will be needed in a few years), others do have indexes that are not longer used, etc. There are many tasks to do until you get to know the database scheme very well.
I wrote a tool to support me on my tasks. Read on, if you are interested in getting more information about it.
trivago's database consists of about 230 tables, many of them having a history of more than four years, some of them up to 7 years. A few of them do have some historic flaws, like having a signed bigint as primary key (because nobody could imagine what space will be needed in a few years), others do have indexes that are not longer used, etc. There are many tasks to do until you get to know the database scheme very well.
I wrote a tool to support me on my tasks. Read on, if you are interested in getting more information about it.
Submission + - The mechanical joke maker (humansinvent.com)
An anonymous reader writes: "There is a more artful side to this form of vintage hacking, however, as can be seen by the extraordinary and strange work of Falmouth based automata maker, Paul Spooner. Over the years, Spooner has made some true oddities, including the cat who drinks poisoned milk, dies, comes back alive and does it all over again; the women who swallows the day and leaves the night behind; and the man who produces a pipe from his head."
Submission + - Discovering and Using Helium (scienceray.com)
qutubjeer writes: Helium is the second most abundant element in the universe, just after hydrogen. While we know its use in balloons, certain inflatable ads, blimps, and scuba gear, helium has several natural properties—inertness, the lowest boiling point of any known substance—that make it an important element used outside the realm of inflatable product replicas. However, despite its abundance throughout the universe, there is a finite amount of it on our planet, and researchers predict a public shortage of helium within the next few years.
Submission + - Google Uses Reputation to Detect Malicious Downloads (darkreading.com)
CowboyRobot writes: Using data about Web sites, IP addresses and domains, researchers find that they can detect 99 percent of malicious executables downloaded by users, outperforming antivirus and URL-reputation services. The system, known as Content-Agnostic Malware Protection or CAMP, triages up to 70 percent of executable files on a user's system, sending attributes of the remaining files that are not known to be benign or malicious to an online service for analysis, according to a paper (pdf) presented at the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) in February. While the system uses a blacklist and whitelist on the user's computer to initially detect known good or bad files, the CAMP service utilizes a number of other characteristics, including the download URL, the Internet address of the server providing the download, the referrer URL, and any certificates attached to the download.
