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Comment Sound advice I was given (Score 2) 246

by tyggna (#47589905) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: IT Personnel As Ostriches?
Just keep the guy who does your yearly reviews happy and make him look good. Also, make his boss look good. If you're like me and have multiple bosses, develop your relationship with the one you think will hold that position longest. Don't burn any bridges unless you have to in order to keep your job. Every company has different standards of security, and an even wider variation of enforcement. Don't intentionally be a butt-head to anyone, and if you see anything that's off policy or could get someone fired, just politely point it out to the individual so they can correct it.
As for dealing with sensitive information, I usually ignore it. You'll see lots of stuff you probably shouldn't as the only IT guy. Just file it away and don't bring it up again--even if it seems like a good idea or a neutral situation to do so. You don't want upper management finding out the IT guy knows more about the company than they do, or they'll (often unintentionally) make your life miserable.
IT can be likable, but there will be a lot of people who will make your job harder because of their ignorance. Just do you best to educate them in a friendly way so you can work on more important things than dealing with office dunce's all the time.

Submission + - MIT system will make oxygen on next NASA Mars mission (networkworld.com)

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes: MIT researchers this week found out that a system they have developed to produce oxygen on Mars will be making the next NASA trip to the Red Planet. MIT’s Mars OXygen In situ resource utilization Experiment or MOXIE will be just one of the seven instruments that will travel on the Mars 2020, mission which will feature a large rover similar to the Mars Curiosity rover currently looking around on Mars.

Submission + - "Word Record" as Single Laser and Fibre Optic Cable Delivers 43 Tbps

Submitted by Mark.JUK
Mark.JUK writes: A research group working out of the Technical University of Denmark claims to have broken "another world record" in fibre optic data transfers after they were able to demonstrate speeds of 43 Terabits per second over a single laser and fibre optic cable (67km long), which is theoretically much closer to real-world connections than most other lab tests where multiple lasers and cables can be used.

Professor Leif Oxenløwe of DTU Fotonik said that his team had "used all the known, neat tricks that exist nowadays to make data in five dimensions: time, frequency, polarization, quadrature and space”. However one such "neat trick" is the decision not to use a traditional single core cable and to instead adopt a 7 core (glass threads) design from Japanese telecoms firm NNT.

Admittedly the new fibre optic cable does not take up any more space than the standard single-core version, but it's still a new cable and thus perhaps the "world record" claims aren't quite comparing apples to apples.

Submission + - NASA Scientists Use Intelligent, Autonomous, Aircraft to Fight Fires in Californ (youtube.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: NASA Scientists are using intelligent drones capable of monitoring their own health, and responding to failures and dangerous situations safely, to fight fires and monitor environmental hazards in the state of California. Given all the recent bad press for drones, it's great to see NASA using them for good, rather than evil.

FTA:

Safety is NASA's top priority! The search for innovative new ways to validate and verify is vital for the development of safety-critical systems. Such techniques have been successfully used to assure systems for air traffic control, airplane separation assurance, autopilots, logic designs, medical devices, and other functions that ensure human safety. Safety is important to ensure at all stages of a system's lifetime, from design time to run time.

We take a look at an exciting recent advancement in run time System Health Management (SHM) for totally autonomous Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) tasked with important missions like wild-fire surveillance and earthquake response.

Submission + - Student Uses Oculus Rift and Kinect to Create Cool Body Swap Illusion (singularityhub.com)

Submitted by kkleiner
kkleiner writes: Using an Oculus Rift virtual reality headset, Microsoft Kinect, a camera, and a handful of electrical stimulators, a London student's virtual reality system is showing users what it's like to swap bodies. Looking down, they see someone else's arms and legs; looking out, it's someone else's point of view; and when they move their limbs, the body they see does the same (those electrical stimulators mildly shock muscles to force a friend to mirror the user's movements). It's an imperfect system, but a fascinating example of the power of virtual reality. What else might we use VR systems for? Perhaps they'll prove useful in training or therapeutic situations? Or what about with robots, which would be easier to inhabit and control than another human? The virtual body swap may never fully catch on, but generally, virtual reality will likely prove useful for more than just gaming and entertainment.

Submission + - Why TCP/IP is on the way out (networkworld.com)

Submitted by jcatcw
jcatcw writes: Researchers at Aalborg University in Denmark, in association with MIT and Caltech, reckon that the Internet can be made faster, and more secure, by abandoning the whole concept of packets and error correction. Error correction slows down traffic because the chunks of data, in many cases, have to be sent more than once.
The researchers are using a mathematical equation instead. The formula figures out which parts of the data didn't make the hop. They say it works in lieu of the packet-resend.

Comment To what end? (Score 3, Insightful) 86

Is this supposed to get me to buy through gamestop? Is this their effort to claw at a dwindling physical-medium retail space?

No amount of douche-baggery will cause me to give up my preferred method of spending money. If I want the release-night environment and other anonymous gamers to talk to while waiting for my copy, then gamestop it is. If I want to forego putting on pants, I'll go with a digital distributor, and no amount of virtual clothing tweaks or outlet-specific items can make me put on my pants!

Submission + - WebRTC: The Future Of In-Browser Real-Time Communication

Submitted by rjmarvin
rjmarvin writes: WebRTC, an open project enabling real-time communication in web browsers,brings real-time audio and video communication to the browser for instantaneous connection and data exchange http://sdt.bz/71475. The standard. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the standards organization working to stabilize the Web standard by rectifying competing API specifications and HTML5 video codecs, and a year after being heralded "the future of enterprise communication" http://sdt.bz/61943, WebRTC is enabled in most major browsers and inching toward wider developer and user adoption. WebRTC Working Group staff contact Dominique Hazaël-Massieux talks progress, what obstacles WebRTC and the W3C still face, and the future of the real-time communication API definition.

Submission + - DPAPI Vulnerability Allows Intruders To Decrypt Personal Data

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Passcape Software has discovered a DPAPI vulnerability that could potentially lead to unauthorized decryption of personal data and passwords of interactive domain users. The vulnerability is present in all Windows Server operating systems. DPAPI, first introduced in Windows 2000, is a technology to protect user and application data on the computer. DPAPI on later operating systems including Windows 2003, Windows Server 2008, and Windows Server 2012 while modified is still compatible with that of Windows 2K. Normally, the API encrypts data using the Master Key derived from the user logon password. However, under certain conditions user data can be decrypted without knowing the corresponding logon password.

Submission + - Radical Dual Tilting Blade Helicopter Design Targets Speeds of Over 270mph (gizmag.com)

Submitted by Zothecula
Zothecula writes: As one of the contenders in the race to win a $100 billion contract from the US government for the next generation of attack helicopter in the Army’s Joint Multi-Role Technology Demonstrator (JMR-TD) program, AVX Aircraft Company has conceived a futuristic machine kitted out with coaxial rotors, ducted fans and a retractable undercarriage that could hit speeds of over 270 mph (435 km/h).

Submission + - Physicists spot potential source of 'Oh-My-God' particles (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: For decades, physicists have sought the sources of the most energetic subatomic particles in the universe—cosmic rays that strike the atmosphere with as much energy as well-thrown baseballs. Now, a team working with the Telescope Array, a collection of 507 particle detectors covering 700 square kilometers of desert in Utah, has observed a broad "hotspot" in the sky in which such cosmic rays seem to originate. Although not definitive, the observation suggests the cosmic rays emanate from a distinct source near our galaxy and not from sources spread all over the universe.

Submission + - Collaborative Algorithm Lets Autonomous Robots Team Up And Learn From Each Other (popsci.com)

Submitted by malachiorion
malachiorion writes: Autonomous robots are about to get a lot more autonomous, thanks to an algorithm from MIT that turns teams of bots into collaborative learners. This was covered in other places, but I'm not sure why no one's digging into the real implications of this (admittedly somewhat obscure) breakthrough. The algorithm, called AMPS, lets autonomous systems quickly compare notes about what they’ve observed in their respective travels, and come up with a combined worldview. The goal, according to the algorithm's creators, is to achieve "semantic symmetry," which would allow for "lifelong learning" for robots, making them more self-sufficient, and less reliant on constantly pestering humans to explain why the more surprising aspects of the unstructured world they're operating within don't line up with what programmers have prepped them for. Here's my story for Popular Science.

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Thus spake the master programmer: "After three days without programming, life becomes meaningless." -- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"

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