Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Submission + - Developers angry as New Zealand folds on software patent ban (zdnet.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement negotiations could put paid to New Zealand's newly-minted ban on software patents. Open Source Association leader Dave Lane is 'livid' that negotiators have sold the interests of developers down the river.

"It's a huge threat to the entire open source ecosystem," Lane said. "But all software development and all software developers are threatened by software patents regardless of their size or their business models."

Submission + - MH370: Found Airplane Debris is believed to be from missing Malaysian 777

Submitted by McGruber
McGruber writes: Air crash investigators have 'a high degree of confidence' that a piece of wreckage found on the Indian Ocean island of La Reunion is from a Boeing 777 — the same model as the doomed MH370 which disappeared in March 2014. Investigators will need to examine closely the wreckage to link it to MH370, but MH370 was the only Boeing 777 over lost over water.

NOTE: The Daily Mail article I'm submitting has the best pictures of the debris that I've been able to find.

Submission + - The First Monolithic Semiconductor White Laser (nature.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Scientists and engineers at Arizona State University, in Tempe, have created the first lasers that can shine light over the full spectrum of visible colors. The device’s inventors suggest the laser could find use in video displays, solid-state lighting, and a laser-based version of Wi-Fi.

Although previous research has created red, blue, green and other lasers, each of these lasers usually only emitted one color of light. Creating a monolithic structure capable of emitting red, green, and blue all at once has proven difficult because it requires combining very different semiconductors. Growing such mismatched crystals right next to each other often results in fatal defects throughout each of these materials.

But now scientists say they’ve overcome that problem. The heart of the new device is a sheet only nanometers thick made of a semiconducting alloy of zinc, cadmium, sulfur, and selenium. The sheet is divided into different segments. When excited with a pulse of light, the segments rich in cadmium and selenium gave off red light; those rich in cadmium and sulfur emitted green light; and those rich in zinc and sulfur glowed blue.

Submission + - Industrial networks are vulnerable to devastating cyberattack, new research says (dailydot.com)

Submitted by Patrick O'Neill
Patrick O'Neill writes: New research into Industrial Ethernet Switches reveals a wide host of vulnerabilities that leave critical infrastructure facilities open to attackers. Many of the vulnerabilities reveal fundamental weaknesses: Widespread use of default passwords, hardcoded encryption keys, a lack of proper authentication for firmware updates, a lack of encrypted connections, and more. Combined with a lack of network monitoring, researchers say the situation showcases "a massive lack of security awareness in the industrial control systems community.”

Submission + - Beyond safety: Is robotic surgery sustainable? (robohub.org)

Submitted by Hallie Siegel
Hallie Siegel writes: The release last week of the study on adverse events in robotic surgery led to much discussion on the safety and effectiveness of robotic surgical procedures. MIT Sloane's Matt Beane argues that while the hope is that this dialogue will mean safer and more effective robotic procedures in the future, the intense focus on safety and effectiveness has compromised training opportunities for new robotic surgeons, who require many hours of “live” surgical practice time to develop their skills. Beane says that robotic surgery will likely continue to expand in proportion to other methods, given that it allows fewer surgeons to perform surgery with less trauma to the patient, but no matter how safe we make robotic surgical procedures, they will become a luxury available to a very few if we fail to address the sustainability of the practice.

Submission + - Zion Harvey Makes History as First Pediatric Dual Hand Transplant Recipient (3dprint.com)

Submitted by ErnieKey
ErnieKey writes: While there have been several hand transplants that have successfully taken place over the past decade or so, a little boy in Maryland, named Zion Harvey has become the first successful pediatric dual hand transplant recipient. After losing both hands and feet due to infection when he was 2 years old, doctors were able to successfully transplant new hands onto the little boy, thanks in part to modern-day 3d printing technology

Submission + - How Developers Can Fight Creeping Mediocrity (dice.com)

Submitted by Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: As the Slashdot community well knows, chasing features has never worked out for any software company. "Once management decides that’s where the company is going to live, it’s pretty simple to start counting down to the moment that company will eventually die," software engineer Zachary Forrest y Salazar writes in a new posting (Dice link). But how does any developer overcome the management and deadlines that drive a lot of development straight into mediocrity, if not outright ruination? He suggests a damn-the-torpedoes approach: "It’s taking the code into your own hands, building or applying tools to help you ship faster, and prototyping ideas," whether or not you really have the internal support. But given the management issues and bureaucracy confronting many companies, is this approach feasible?

Comment Re:Probably about 6 months (Score 2) 272

by Zocalo (#50204847) Attached to: Will You Be Installing Windows 10?
For a value of "beta testing" that has already been shown to have missed a number of fairly obvious issues that were picked up within the first day of general release, sure, it's been "tested" for 6 months. Not that Microsoft is special in that regard - it's usually the same as nearly every other instance of early access code releases; the set of users that actually take advantage of the option and install the code don't seem to have a significant overlap with the set of users that actually notice when the code is broken or incomplete, or even take the time to actually test it.

The free upgrade offer is good for a year, so there's no need to rush. The prudent move is probably to at least wait for the "Feature Update" that Microsoft has claimed will be out in a few months time, and possibly even the one after that.

Submission + - Replacing Silicon With Gallium Nitrade In Chips Could Reduce Energy Use By 20%

Submitted by Mickeycaskill
Mickeycaskill writes: Cambridge Electronics Inc (CEI), formed of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), claim semiconductors made of gallium nitride (GaN) could reduce the power consumption of data centres and consumer electronics by 20 percent by 2025.

CEI has revealed a range of GaN transistors and power electronic circuits that have just one tenth of the resistance of silicon, resulting in much higher energy efficiency.

The company claims to have overcome previous barriers to adoption such as safety concerns and expense through new manufacturing techniques.

“Basically, we are fabricating our advanced GaN transistors and circuits in conventional silicon foundries, at the cost of silicon. The cost is the same, but the performance of the new devices is 100 times better,” Cambridge Electronics researcher Bin Lu said.

Submission + - Genetically modified rice makes more food, less greenhouse gas (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Applehu Akbar
Applehu Akbar writes: A team of researchers at the Swedish University of AgriculturalSciences has engineered a barley gene into rice, producing a variety that yields 50% more grain while producing 90% less of the powerful greenhouse gas methane. The new rice pulls off this trick by putting more of its energy into top growth. In countries which depend on rice as a staple, this would add up to a really large amount of increased rice and foregone methane.

Submission + - Sun Tzu 2.0: Is Cyberwar The New Warfare?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Cyberwar and its ramifications have been debated for some time and the issue has been wrought with controversy. Few would argue that cyber-attacks are not prevalent in cyberspace. However, does it amount to a type of warfare? Let’s break this down by drawing parallels from a treatise by 6th century military general, Sun Tzu, who authored one of the most definitive handbooks on warfare, “The Art of War.” His writings have been studied throughout the ages by professional militaries and can used to not only answer the question of whether or not we are in a cyberwar, but how one can fight a cyber-battle.

Submission + - Hacking a 'Smart' Sniper Rifle (wired.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: It was inevitable: as soon as we heard about the computer-aimed rifles, we knew somebody would find a way to compromise their security. At the upcoming Black Hat security conference, researchers Runa Sandvik and Michael Auger will present their techniques for doing just that. "Their tricks can change variables in the scope’s calculations that make the rifle inexplicably miss its target, permanently disable the scope’s computer, or even prevent the gun from firing." In one demonstration they were able to tweak the rifle's ballistic calculations by making it think a piece of ammunition weighed 72 lbs instead of 0.4 ounces. After changing this value, the gun tries to automatically adjust for the weight, and shoots significantly to the left. Fortunately, they couldn't find a way to make the gun fire without physically pulling the trigger.

Submission + - Does your company have a gag order on resignations?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I am a developer at an undisclosed software company. You've heard of it. We have had several developers leave lately, and yesterday, we got a gag order not to talk about whom is leaving. Used to be, they would say, "Bob is leaving the company for personal and private reasons...blah, blah". Now, management says nothing, people just vanish overnight, and you hear about it a week or so later. Is that the new normal? I guess?

Submission + - Hayabusa-2 probe uses 64-bit MIPS CPU to explore the origins of the solar system (imgtec.com)

Submitted by alexvoica
alexvoica writes: After the success of New Horizons flyby of Pluto, another important space mission called Hayabusa-2 is currently on track to reach a rare asteroid called (162173) 1999 JU3. The probe is also programmed to analyze and report on the origin and evolution of the solar system.

Hayabusa-2 is a spacecraft operated by JAXA (the Japanese equivalent of NASA) and features technologies worthy of a Star Trek movie, including ion propulsion engines, upgraded guidance and navigation systems, high-precision antennas, and infrared cameras.

The NEC Corporation of Tokyo built the electronics systems of the 590 kg spacecraft and JAXA successfully launched the probe in December 2014. Many remember NEC for the revolutionary engineering work on the 64-bit MIPS-based chip that powered the Nintendo N64, the first 64-bit games console.

Like the Nintendo N64 console before it, Hayabusa-2 also uses a 64-bit MIPS CPU. However, the Hayabusa-2 engineers opted for an upgraded version called HR5000 fabricated by HIREC using a special, patented radiation-hardened process specifically developed by the Japanese corporation for space use. The HR5000 processor is clocked at 200MHz and includes high-performance MIPS64 features like a fast dual-issue execution unit, a floating point unit (FPU) for math-crunching, and cache memories with error-proof parity check functionality.

You can read more about Hayabusa-2 and the HIREC HR500 chip in this article.

Submission + - Slashdot Poll: Who has best intuitive grasp of technology?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Slashdot Poll: Who has best intuitive grasp of technology?

Silent Generation (born ~1925-1942)
Baby Boomers (born ~1942-1963)
Generation X (born ~1964-1983)
Generation Y (born ~1984-1994)
Generation Z (born ~1995-present)
CowboyNeal

Slashdot Top Deals

This restaurant was advertising breakfast any time. So I ordered french toast in the renaissance. - Steven Wright, comedian

Close