Comment "Undead"? Exactly. (Score 2, Insightful) 283
Most of the scripts/programs that I still use that are written in perl, truly are 'zombie processes', waiting to be put out of their misery.
Over 300,000 Servers Remain Vulnerable To Heartbleed 74
An anonymous reader writes Even though it's been a couple months since the Heartbleed bug was discovered, many servers remain unpatched and vulnerable. "Two months ago, security experts and web users panicked when a Google engineer discovered a major bug — known as Heartbleed — that put over a million web servers at risk. The bug doesn't make the news much anymore, but that doesn't mean the problem's solved. Security researcher Robert David Graham has found that at least 309,197 servers are still vulnerable to the exploit. Immediately after the announcement, Graham found some 600,000 servers were exposed by Heartbleed. One month after the bug was announced, that number dropped down to 318,239. In the past month, however, only 9,042 of those servers have been patched to block Heartbleed. That's cause for concern, because it means that smaller sites aren't making the effort to implement a fix."
Comment Re:Self-balancing -- finally! (Score 2) 218
This is incredible, really: motorcycles are much easier to balance at higher speeds. They made the most difficult part of riding a bike trivial.
I'm curious how much mass they had to add to the bike to make it self-balance like that, and how well it balance with a 200lb rider (driver? I guess it'd be driver, since it's got a cage). And on corners, as well - presumably the gyros/inclinometer or whatever feeds the steering data.
I want one of these without the cage and a gas motor, personally. 50mpg+ for a road trip would not be bad: 200 miles on a run is not good. 200 miles is almost tethered.
Comment Re:I'll upgrade my flash player (Score 1) 76
I'd install Flash in a VM for £20 ...
Comment Re:Krita: alternative for Mac (Score 1) 39
That's a paint package where as Photoshop encompasses pretty much everything including digital painting. The only alternative to Photoshop has been GIMP, but when compared to even much older versions of Photoshop, it's not that good; and CS2 is available from Adobe online for free now days.
Comment Re:Adobe is incredibly trustworthy. (Score 1) 39
All styluses on the iPad still require touch( capacitive ) to track their position. The ones that have pressure-sensitivity built in, like Wacom's option, use Bluetooth to send the pressure data. And I think the parent post was referring to Adobe's iPad apps as being the problem and not properly supporting pressure-sensitivity.
Comment Re:Adobe is incredibly trustworthy. (Score 1) 39
This is not true. You can develop Flash/AIR without paying a cent to Adobe and you don't even need to join their bullshit cloud service to do so.
You don't need to use Adobe Flash Builder -- which is bloated vomit now days -- to develop for Flash/AIR. Alternate IDEs like Flash Develop on PC are free and way better, or the best option by far is InteliJ IDEA, which is one of the best IDEs on the market IMO -- I use it for all of my development work web, AIR, etc..
And the SDK for AIR and Flash are completely free and there are open source versions available under Flex. Adobe also funds open source frameworks like Starling and Away3D that make development easier. You can download everything but Adobe Scout -- which is a profiler -- outside of their Cloud-vomit. But it is worth it to be part of their free cloud-service to gain access to Scout if you're doing development.
And I'm not a fan of Adobe now days, but don't blame them if some fuck is using Flash to deliver spyware, whatever, because that same fuck will do so using whatever avenue is available -- like the tons of background scripts that bloat up any site on load.
You don't need to use Adobe Flash Builder -- which is bloated vomit now days -- to develop for Flash/AIR. Alternate IDEs like Flash Develop on PC are free and way better, or the best option by far is InteliJ IDEA, which is one of the best IDEs on the market IMO -- I use it for all of my development work web, AIR, etc..
And the SDK for AIR and Flash are completely free and there are open source versions available under Flex. Adobe also funds open source frameworks like Starling and Away3D that make development easier. You can download everything but Adobe Scout -- which is a profiler -- outside of their Cloud-vomit. But it is worth it to be part of their free cloud-service to gain access to Scout if you're doing development.
And I'm not a fan of Adobe now days, but don't blame them if some fuck is using Flash to deliver spyware, whatever, because that same fuck will do so using whatever avenue is available -- like the tons of background scripts that bloat up any site on load.
Teaching Creationism As Science Now Banned In Britain's Schools 649
sandbagger sends this news from io9:
In what's being heralded as a secular triumph, the U.K. government has banned the teaching of creationism as science in all existing and future academies and free schools. The new clauses, which arrived with very little fanfare last week, state that the "requirement for every academy and free school to provide a broad and balanced curriculum in any case prevents the teaching of creationism as evidence based theory in any academy or free school." So, if an academy or free school teaches creationism as scientifically valid, it's breaking the funding agreement to provide a "broad and balanced curriculum." ... In addition to the new clauses, the UK government clarified the meaning of creationism, reminding everyone that it's a minority view even within the Church of England and the Catholic Church.
Comment Re:I can't think of a better argument... (Score 1) 387
Or for in-house networks.
Pretty trivial to just pull the cable when your kit has been compromised and you're facing extortion.
Comment Re:Philip K Dick called it (Score 3, Interesting) 127
So the "Empathy Box" from "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" is real? And now?
Ok, you just blew my mind.
I remember never quite getting the whole "empathy box" idea in the book. It seemed unlikely and quite foreign. But you're right: that's what Facebook is. People sharing their good and bad news in order to participate in some group emotion. And, just like Rick's wife was "addicted" to it, lots of people were addicted to checking Facebook (at least for a while, the interest in Facebook seems to have waned). So Philip K. Dick was prescient about that after all.
Emotional Contagion Spread Through Facebook 127
Daniel_Stuckey sends this quote from Motherboard:
It hopefully doesn't come as a surprise that your friends shape who you are. But we tend to think of that on a micro level: If your close circle of friends tends to have tattoos, wear polo shirts, or say "chill" a lot, it's quite possible that you'll emulate them over time — and they'll emulate you too. But what happens on a macro scale, when your friend circle doesn't just include the dozen people you actually hang out with regularly, but also the hundreds or thousands of acquaintances you have online? All of those feeds may seem filled with frivolities from random people (and they are!) but that steady stream of life updates — photos, rants, slang — are probably shaping you more than you think. A massive Facebook study recently published in PNAS found solid evidence of so-called emotional contagion—emotional states spreading socially, like a virus made of emoji—on the social network.
4K Monitors: Not Now, But Soon 186
An anonymous reader writes 4K monitor prices have fallen into the range where mainstream consumers are starting to consider them for work and for play. There are enough models that we can compare and contrast, and figure out which are the best of the ones available. But this report at The Wirecutter makes the case that absent a pressing need for 8.29 million pixels, you should just wait before buying one. They say, "The current version of the HDMI specification (1.4a) can only output a 4096×2160 resolution at a refresh rate of 24 Hz or 3840×2160 at 30 Hz—the latter, half that of what we're used to on TVs and monitors. Connect up a 4K monitor at 30 Hz via HDMI and you'll see choppier animations and transitions in your OS. You might also encounter some visible motion stuttering during normal use, and you'll be locked to a maximum of 30 frames per second for your games—it's playable, but not that smooth. ... Most people don't own a system that's good enough for gaming on a 4K display—at least, not at highest-quality settings. You'll be better off if you just plan to surf the Web in 4K: Nvidia cards starting in the 600 series and AMD Radeon HD 6000 and 7000-series GPUs can handle 4K, as can systems built with integrated Intel HD 4000 graphics or AMD Trinity APUs. ... There's a light on the horizon. OS support will strengthen, connection types will be able to handle 4K displays sans digital tricks, and prices will drop as more 4K displays hit the market. By then, there will even be more digital content to play on a 4K display (if gaming or multitasking isn't your thing), and 4K monitors will even start to pull in fancier display technology like Nvidia's G-Sync for even smoother digital shootouts."
Huawei, Vodafone Test Out Hybrid System That Combines LTE and GSM 46
alphadogg (971356) writes "In the hunt for more spectrum to speed up mobile networks, Vodafone and Huawei Technologies have successfully tested a technology that lets LTE and GSM share the same frequencies. The speed of future mobile networks will depend on the amount of spectrum mobile operators can get their hands on. The more they get, the wider the roads they can build. One thing they can do to get more space is to reuse frequencies that are currently used for older technologies such as GSM and 3G. But that isn't as easy as sounds, as operators still have a lot of voice and messaging traffic in those older networks. However, using a technology called GL DSS (GSM-LTE Dynamic Spectrum Sharing) Vodafone and Huawei have shown a way to allow GSM and LTE to coexist."
Comment Re:What happens if (Score 3, Informative) 281
There are a whole host of reasons why what you are saying is impossible. First off, no matter how much CPU power you accumulated, you wouldn't be able to rival the hashes per second being put out by the custom hardware. If you rooted and botnetted every CPU on earth you would still only be a fraction of the hashes per second of the Bitcoin network. CPUs for Bitcoin mining were obsoleted by GPUs long ago, and both CPUs and GPUs are now way-obsoleted by ASIC.
Also, even if you were able to control a majority of the hash power on the Bitcoin network, you would still not be able to spend somebody else's Bitcoin. To do that you would have to crack the private key for the account containing the Bitcoin. Doing that is a totally different math problem from what Bitcoin mining hardware is doing, and there are a lot of visuals out there illustrating that it would likely take longer than the projected life of the universe to crack these keys using currently available methods. If you had a majority of hashpower on the network, you could alter the blockchain, which is the ledger showing in what order transactions occurred. This would allow you to double-spend your own Bitcoin and cheat somebody, but would not allow you to spend somebody else's.
How To Make Espresso In Space 192
In a story that's sure to bring to the surface the long-debunked myth of an over-elaborate NASA quest to create a pen to operate in space, Wired reports that the coffee situation aboard the International Space Station is about to improve: the station will be getting a 20kg, custom designed Lavazza espresso machine, to be delivered along with Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti. Among other differences from terrestrial espresso machines: the resulting beverage must be pumped into a straw-friendly bag rather than a demitasse. I wonder if there could be some way to adapt a (much lighter) Aeropress for space purposes, as a backup.
