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Google

Eric Schmidt: To Avoid NSA Spying, Keep Your Data In Google's Services 281

Posted by samzenpus from the no-snooping-zone dept.
jfruh writes Google Chairman Eric Schmidt told a conference on surveillance at the Cato Institute that Edward Snowden's revelations on NSA spying shocked the company's engineers — who then immediately started working on making the company's servers and services more secure. Now, after a year and a half of work, Schmidt says that Google's services are the safest place to store your sensitive data.

Comment Re:Meh. (Score 1) 175

by hackertourist (#48595367) Attached to: 3D Printer?

Same with 3D printers. Have you seen the list of materials Shapeways can print in?

I'm not arguing a machine shop isn't useful. Just saying there are greater barriers to entry than with 3D printing.

Comment Re:Meh. (Score 1) 175

by hackertourist (#48594109) Attached to: 3D Printer?

Then you haven't been paying much attention wrt creativity. 3D printing is transforming my hobby (building scale models).
The drawback of the traditional machine shop is the long learning curve. I've had a lathe for about 2 years now, and I still feel I've barely scratched the surface of what it can do. This is caused by fear: getting it wrong means potentially wrecking the machine. And lack of time (to go on a metalworking course, for instance).
The same thing has held me back from buying a CNC mill: it'd take years before I could do much with it.
I've had a much easier time getting into 3D printing. Now part of that is the fact I can outsource the actual printing (Shapeways) so all I have to do is learn how to draw in a 3D CAD program. I haven't found places that offer one-off CNC jobs in the same vein.

Comment Re:bring back the green IBM 3270 (Score 1) 241

by hackertourist (#48588489) Attached to: Is Enterprise IT More Difficult To Manage Now Than Ever?

This drivel is scored +5, Insightful?
A text-only terminal is barely adequate for basic data entry, and useless at anything else. Guess what, basic data entry's about 1% of what office workers need to do these days. On an average day I write documents, create and edit drawings, and I create programs and scripts. All of which benefit from having 24" pixel-addressable screens and a decent GUI. Force me to work on a fucking terminal and my productivity goes through the floor.

Your job is to SUPPORT the users, not hinder them at every turn.

Comment Why is 3D NAND better? (Score 4, Informative) 127

by hackertourist (#48549627) Attached to: Samsung SSD 850 EVO 32-Layer 3D V-NAND-Based SSD Tested

TFA says:

The move to 32-layer 3D VNAND 3-bit MLC flash brings pricing down to the .50 to .60 per GiB range, but doesn't adversely affect endurance because the cell structure doesn't suffer from the same inherent limitations of planar NAND, since the cells are stacked vertically with the 3D VNAND.

which didn't make sense to me. Luckily Anandtech has a non-gibberish explanation:

Rather than increasing density by shrinking cell size, Samsung's V-NAND takes a few steps back in process technology and instead stacks multiple layers of NAND cells on top of one another. ...In the floating gate MOSFET, electrons are stored on the gate itself - a conductor. Defects in the transistor (e.g. from repeated writes) can cause a short between the gate and channel, depleting any stored charge in the gate. If the gate is no longer able to reliably store a charge, then the cell is bad and can no longer be written to. Ultimately this is what happens when you wear out an SSD.

With V-NAND, Samsung abandons the floating gate MOSFET and instead turns to its own Charge Trap Flash (CTF) design. An individual cell looks quite similar, but charge is stored on an insulating layer instead of a conductor. This seemingly small change comes with a bunch of benefits, including higher endurance and a reduction in overall cell size. That's just part of the story though.

V-NAND takes this CTF architecture, and reorganizes it into a non-planar design. The insulator surrounds the channel, and the control gate surrounds it. The 3D/non-planar design increases the physical area that can hold a charge, which in turn improves performance and endurance.

The final piece of the V-NAND puzzle is to stack multiple layers of these 3D CTF NAND cells. Since Samsung is building density vertically, there's not as much pressure to shrink transistor sizes. With relaxed planar space constraints, Samsung turned to an older manufacturing process (30nm class, so somewhere between 30 and 39nm) as the basis of V-NAND.

By going with an older process, Samsung inherently benefits from higher endurance and interference between cells is less of an issue. Combine those benefits with the inherent endurance advantages of CTF and you end up with a very reliable solution. Whereas present day 19/20nm 2-bit-per-cell MLC NAND is good for around 3000 program/erase cycles, Samsung's 30nm-class V-NAND could withstand over 10x that (35K p/e cycles).
Stats

'Moneyball' Approach Reduces Crime In New York City 218

Posted by timothy from the precrime-works-citizens dept.
HughPickens.com writes The NYT reports that NY County District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr.'s most significant initiative has been to transform, through the use of data, the way district attorneys fight crime. "The question I had when I came in was, Do we sit on our hands waiting for crime to tick up, or can we do something to drive crime lower?" says Vance. "I wanted to develop what I call intelligence-driven prosecution." When Vance became DA in 2009, it was glaringly evident that assistant D.A.s fielding the 105,000-plus cases a year in Manhattan seldom had enough information to make nuanced decisions about bail, charges, pleas or sentences. They were narrowly focused on the facts of cases in front of them, not on the people committing the crimes. They couldn't quickly sort minor delinquents from irredeemably bad apples. They didn't know what havoc defendants might be wreaking in other boroughs.
Space

Who Needs NASA? Exoplanet Detected Using a DSLR 108

Posted by timothy from the small-cheap-everywhere dept.
Iddo Genuth writes Until 20 years ago even the best telescopes in the world could not detect a planet outside our solar system. Now, with the aid of a basic DSLR, low cost lens and some DIY magic, you just might be able to "see" ET's home planet for yourself. Your DSLR can do much more than just take a few nice portraits or the occasional vacation photos – if you have some DIY experience (O.K. a bit more than just "some"), you might be able to repeat what David Schneider was recently been able to do — that is, building his own planet finder using only inexpensive photo gear, low cost electronics, the right kind of software and a lot of patience. Although Schneider was "only" able to rediscover an already known exsoplanet (some 63 light-years away from us), what he did — and more importantly how he did it — might allow planet hunting to become closer to SETI@home than NASA's 550,000 million dollar Kepler space telescope project.
Medicine

WHO Timeline for Ebola Containment Proves Hard To Meet 78

Posted by timothy from the mythical-doctor-month dept.
The Associated Press, as carried by Salon, reports that the World Health Organization's intended timeline for limiting the spread of Ebola in the several West African countries where it has claimed thousands of lives has proved to be too optimistic. According to the article, Two months ago, the World Health Organization launched an ambitious plan to stop the deadly Ebola outbreak in West Africa, aiming to isolate 70 percent of the sick and safely Ebola 70 percent of the victims in the three hardest-hit countries — Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone — by December 1. Only Guinea is on track to meet the December 1 goal, according to an update from WHO. In Liberia, only 23 percent of cases are isolated and 26 percent of the needed burial teams are in place. In Sierra Leone, about 40 percent of cases are isolated while 27 percent of burial teams are operational.

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