nyan.kitty256 - Slashdot User

Submission + - Bitcoin breaks $100 USD (examiner.com)

Submitted by jeremy85mai on Wednesday April 03, 2013 @12:57AM

jeremy85mai writes: "Yesterday, while a number of banks were closed, bitcoin decided to break another major psychological barrier, and is now trading at above $100 USD per coin. At the moment, Bitcoin is trading at $118 USD/BTC. There is very little resistance to further price increases, so expect the price of bitcoin to rise very rapidly over the next few weeks. These are also record highs for the currency. "

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: What Happened to the GPL?

Submitted by returnofjdub on Wednesday April 03, 2013 @12:37AM

returnofjdub writes: It seems like for every hip new web framework, Rails plugin, or Javascript library, the Apache license has completely taken over. Is there a reason that the GPL seems to be so wildly unpopular with web app developers? Or is it just that my world view is completely skewed toward a certain type of development? Is there any particular genre of software with lots of people creating new projects under the GPL? What are some more recent examples of new GPL projects that have taken off (across all types of software)?

Submission + - An orbital solar death ray idea from WWII (google.com.au)

Submitted by ceview on Tuesday April 02, 2013 @11:43PM

ceview writes: So from an old forgotten article in Life Magazine that as reported in news.com.au " US Army technical experts came up with the astonishing fact that German scientists had seriously planned to build a “sun gun".
A giant orbital mirror that would focus light on targets below and burn or boil away whatever was in the way.

Submission + - Let Them Eat Teslas

Submitted by theodp on Tuesday April 02, 2013 @11:01PM

theodp writes: If you're a bright kid who wants to prepare for the 21st century workforce (pdf) by studying engineering at Purdue, the government will help your parents pay the $100,000 or so tuition tab with a 7.9% interest loan (plus 4% fees) that's likely to be non-dischargeable in bankruptcy and paid back with after-tax money. If, on the other hand, you want to buy a tricked-out $100,000 Model S, Tesla has teamed up with the government, Wells Fargo, and U.S. Bank on what it calls a 'Revolutionary New Finance Product' that enables those who play the game right to avoid paying sales tax, get the government to pick up the first $15,000 (no down payment needed!), and also receive a 2.95% bankruptcy-dischargeable loan for the balance, the payments for which could be tax-deductible. Yep, 'Revolutionary' may be about right!

Submission + - Yahoo and Dropbox put an end to file size restrictions. (vator.tv)

Submitted by RougeFemme on Tuesday April 02, 2013 @10:41PM

RougeFemme writes: Thanks to Dropbox, file size limitations will no longer be as much of an issue for Yahoo email users. "Users can now access Dropbox from within YahooMail and add files from Dropbox to emails."

Submission + - Free Windows 8 Offer for Mac Developers Lasts About 30 Minutes (adtmag.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 02, 2013 @05:37PM

An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft today offered (nearly) free Windows 8 USB sticks to Mac developers, but "sold out" just over 30 minutes after the offer was posted. No word on just how many sticks were available total, or if the offer will be restarted at some point.

Submission + - Bitcoin crosses 1 billion USD market value threshold (examiner.com)

Submitted by jeremy85mai on Thursday March 28, 2013 @02:57PM

jeremy85mai writes: From the article:
"Today, Bitcoin crossed an important milestone for the decentralized currency, in that the net worth of all bitcoins currently minted now exceeds 1 billion US dollars. At the moment, bitcoin is trading around $94, which makes the current net market value 1.03 billion USD. This is a significant milestone, since many consider this to be the point at which bitcoin should be taken as a serious currency."

Submission + - Open DNS Resolvers Center Stage in Massive DDoS Attacks (threatpost.com)

Submitted by msm1267 on Thursday March 28, 2013 @02:37PM

msm1267 writes: While the big traffic numbers and the spat between Spamhaus and illicit webhost Cyberbunker are grabbing big headlines, the underlying and percolating issue at play here has to do with the open DNS resolvers being used to DDoS the spam-fighters from Switzerland. Open resolvers do not authenticate a packet-sender’s IP address before a DNS reply is sent back. Therefore, an attacker that is able to spoof a victim’s IP address can have a DNS request bombard the victim with a 100-to-1 ratio of traffic coming back to them versus what was requested. DNS amplification attacks such as these have been used lately by hacktivists, extortionists and blacklisted webhosts to great success.

Submission + - United States begins stealth bombing runs over South Korea. (nytimes.com)

Submitted by skade88 on Thursday March 28, 2013 @02:01PM

skade88 writes: The New York Times is reporting that the United States of America has started flying B-2 Stealth Bomber runs over South Korea as a show of force to North Korea during raised tensions in the region. The bombers flew 6,500 miles to bomb a South Korean island with mock explosives. Earlier this month the US Military ran mock B-52 bombing runs over the same South Korean island. The US Military says it shows that it can execute precision bombing runs at will with little notice needed. The US also reaffirmed their commitment to protecting it's allies in the region.

The North Koreans have been making threats to turn South Korea into a sea of fire. North Korea has also made threats claiming they will nuke the United States' main land.

Submission + - WSJ Covers Tor outside Firewall (wsj.com)

Submitted by

retroworks

on Monday December 17, 2012 @10:11PM

retroworks writes: "Geoffrey Fowler of the Wall Street Journal does a mostly sympathetic portrayal of the Tor browser, despite leading with a cautionary allegory. William Weber of Austria allowed his computer to be used as a Tor server, and was arrested on November 28 for possession of child pornography — evidently streamed through his PC by another TOR user."

Submission + - Open Hardware & Software Laptop

Submitted by mihai.todor85 on Monday December 17, 2012 @06:07PM

mihai.todor85 writes: It looks like Andrew "bunnie" Huang has been quite busy lately, developing a nice open hardware laptop. He was even kind enough to provide all the schematics without NDA. For anybody interested in owning such a device, he says that he "might be convinced to try a Kickstarter campaign in several months, once the design is stable and tested" if enough people are interested.

Submission + - AMD reveals 8000M series of GPU's (examiner.com)

Submitted by nyan.kitty256 on Monday December 17, 2012 @05:30PM

nyan.kitty256 writes: From the article:
"
Today, AMD took the wraps off of it's latest line of graphics cards for the notebook market, the 8000M series. Specifically, the flavors of the cards that they announced was the 8800M, 8700M, 8600M, and 8500M lines. These lines have the engineering name 'Solar', compared to the current generation(the 7000M series) name, 'London'. The first laptop announced with this new line of cards has already been announced as the Asus Vivoook U38DT. All of these cards support DirectX 11.1, as well as(most likely) at least OpenGL 4.2, but AMD did not unveil details about their OpenGL compatibility with these cards.
"

Submission + - Gmail drops support for connecting to pop3 servers with self signed certs (google.com) 2

Submitted by DECula on Monday December 17, 2012 @04:30PM

DECula writes: In a move not communicated to it's users before hand, Google's Gmail servers were reconfigured to not connect to remote pop3 servers that have self-signed certificates, leaving folks with unencrypted connections, or no service when getting email from other services.
Not good for for the small folks. One suggestion was to allow placing the public keys on Googles side in the user configuration. That would be a heck of a lot better than just dropping users into never never land.

Submission + - HTML5 vs. Native apps: Developers offended by Zuckerberg knock on HTML5 make app (networkworld.com)

Submitted by

BButlerNWW

on Monday December 17, 2012 @03:55PM

BButlerNWW writes: "A team of mobile app developers offended by Facebook czar Mark Zuckerberg dissing HTML5 have created a Facebook app that they say works better than native versions because of the HTML5 coding.

Zuckerberg famously knocked HTML5 in an interview this fall when he said relying too much on it instead of developing native mobile apps was "the biggest mistake we made as a company."

"When Mark Zuckerberg said HTML5 wasn't ready, we took a little offense to the comment," wrote developers at Sencha, a mobile app company that focuses on HMTL5 development.

Sencha Monday released Fastbook, a mobile app that performs almost the exact same functions as native Facebook apps for smartphones, but is built on an HMTL5 framework. The HTML5 version has faster load times, more responsive formatting and increased ability to toggle between different views without needing to reload information compared to the iOS and Android native Facebook apps, the developers claim. "We set out to show that you can build the challenging parts of the native Facbeook app in HTML5 and we built a framework that makes that possible," says Jamie Avins, an engineering manager at Sencha. "We believe HTML5 is the technology and it's ready right now.""

Submission + - Early Therapy for Kids With Autism Normalize Brain Activity, Improve Social Skil

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 26, 2012 @11:09PM

An anonymous reader writes: The Early Start Denver Model has been found to reduce the symptoms of autism spectrum disorder, improve children's social skills, and most impressively normalize brain activity.

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