71232271
submission
MojoKid writes:
NVIDIA released its Quadro M6000 at last week's GPU Technology Conference, but interestingly, it was without much fanfare. Perhaps that has something to do with the card belonging to the professional market that NVIDIA didn't feel the need to trumpet the new release. As the "M" in its name implies, this is a Maxwell-based Quadro — the first of its kind. Just as with the desktop GeForce series, the move from Kepler to Maxwell on Quadro offers a slew of benefits, from improved general performance to increased power efficiency. Specs-wise, the M6000 is effectively a GeForce GTX TITAN X, but clocked down ever-so-slightly. It's comprised of 3,072 CUDA cores, a 988MHz clock speed, and memory throughput of 317GB/s (vs. 336.5GB/s of TITAN X). Also, like the monstrous TITAN X, the M6000 features 12GB of memory and a 250W TDP. While higher-end Kepler-based Quadro K6000 cards offered solid double-precision performance, the M6000 doesn't target that as much. The reason for this is that NVIDIA decided to push the single-precision performance higher, since that's the major demand lately and it also offers improved ray-tracing performance. In that comparison, the M6000 should be close to 20% faster than the K6000, although real-world performance gains greater than that might be achieved, depending on the scenario.
71225069
submission
Lucas123 writes:
Benchmark tests performed on the 2015 MacBook Pro revealed it does have twice the read/write performance as the mid-2014 model. Tests performed with the Blackmagic benchmark tool revealed read/write speeds of more than 1,300MBps/1,400MBps, respectively. So what's changed? The new MacBook Pro does have a faster Intel dual-core i7 2.9GHz processor and 1866MHz LPDDR3) RAM, but the real performance gain is in the latest PCIe M.2 flash module. The 2014 model used a PCIe 2.0 x2 card and the 2015 model uses a PCIe 3.0 x4 (four I/O lanes) card. Twice the lanes, twice the speed. While Apple uses a proprietary flash card made by Samsung, Intel, Micron and SanDisk are all working on similar technology, so it's likely to soon wind up in high-end PCs.
71194859
submission
reifman writes:
The CDC reports that 69% of adult Americans are overweight or obese. Techies like us are at increased risk because of our sedentary lifestyles. Perhaps you even scoffed at Neilsen's recent finding that some Americans spend only 11 hours daily of screen time. Over the last nine months, I've lost 30 pounds and learned a lot about hacking weight loss and I did it without fad diets, step trackers, running or going paleo.
71182501
submission
Michael Ross writes:
Robert, here is the book review meta-data:
author: Josh Lockhart
pages: 268
publisher: O'Reilly Media
rating: 8/10
reviewer: Michael Ross
ISBN: 978-1491905012
summary: Solid advice on some state-of-the-art PHP tools and techniques.
In recent years, JavaScript has enjoyed a dramatic renaissance as it has been transformed from a browser scripting tool primarily used for special effects and form validation on web pages, to a substantial client-side programming language. Similarly, on the server side, after years as the target of criticism, the PHP computer programming language is seeing a revival, partly due to the addition of new capabilities, such as namespaces, traits, generators, closures, and components, among other improvements. PHP enthusiasts and detractors alike can learn more about these changes from the book Modern PHP: New Features and Good Practices, authored by Josh Lockhart.
Programmers familiar with the language and its community may recognize the author's name, because he is the creator of PHP The Right Way, a website which he describes as "an easy-to-read, quick reference for PHP popular coding standards, links to authoritative tutorials around the Web and what the contributors consider to be best practices at the present time," in 21 different languages.
Yet rest assured that the book under review is not merely a dead-tree version of the website. Instead, the book covers the more recent advancements within the language, while the website covers best practices and standards. This should be borne in mind, otherwise the reader may be baffled by the absence from the book of certain topics on the website essential to the language, such as SPL, PEAR, and PHPDoc. Moreover, of the topics shared between the book and the website, the information is generally organized quite differently, with more example code in the book.
This title was published on 1 March 2015, under the ISBN 978-1491905012, by O'Reilly Media, who kindly provided me with a review copy. Its material is presented in 268 pages, organized into 13 chapters (The New PHP; Features; Standards; Components; Good Practices; Posting; Provisioning; Tuning; Deployment; Testing; Profiling; HHVM and Hack; Community), which are grouped into three parts (Language Features; Good Practices; Deployment, Testing, and Tuning) — as well as two appendices (Installing PHP; Local Development Environments) and an index. The publisher's page does not offer much of interest. However, all of the example code is available from the book's GitHub repository. There are differences between the GitHub code and what is printed in the book, e.g., a baffling require 'vendor/autoload.php'; in the first example code file. The author claims that the reader does not need to know PHP, but at least "a basic understanding of [] fundamental programming concepts" (page xiv). However, anyone without at least intermediate skills and experience with PHP could conceivably struggle with these more advanced subjects.
The first chapter is only a brief overview of the history of PHP, its current state, and some possible future changes to the language's engine. The real content starts in the second chapter, in which the author gives the reader a fast-paced introduction to his seven favorite major new features in PHP: namespaces, class interfaces, traits, generators, closures, Zend OPcache, and the built-in HTTP server. In some regards, the coverage is a bit too fast-paced, as some topics and questions likely in the reader's mind are not addressed — for instance, namespace case-sensitivity and techniques for ensuring that a chosen namespace is globally unique (page 9). For each topic, its purpose and advantages are explained, and sometimes illustrated with code examples, although none are extensive.
The second part of the book opens with a chapter on some of the new standards in the PHP ecosystem that are intended to move the common development process from a reliance upon one isolated framework, with an idiosyncratic coding style, to distributed components that can interoperate through the use of interfaces, industry-wide coding standards, and the use of autoloaders for finding and loading classes, interfaces, and traits at runtime. Components are covered in more detail in the subsequent chapter, as is Composer, for installing components and managing dependencies. The fifth chapter is a lengthy but information-packed exposition of numerous best practices regarding input data sanitization, password handling, dates and times, and safe database queries, among other topics. Some of the advice can be found in other PHP books and online, but all of this is neatly explained, updated with the newer PHP versions, and worthwhile as a refresher.
Deployment, testing, and tuning are the broad subject areas of the third and final part of the book. The author discusses the options for hosting your PHP applications, as well as provisioning any self-managed web server and tuning a server for optimal performance. All of the instructions assume you are using Linux and nginx, and thus would be of less value to those using Windows or Apache, for instance. The material on application deployment is relatively brief, and focuses on use of the Capistrano tool. Testing is often neglected in real-world projects, but certainly not in this book, as the author explains unit and functional testing, illustrated through the use of PHPUnit. This is followed by information on how to use a development or production profiler to analyze the performance of your application, with detailed coverage of Xdebug and XHProf, among other tools. The next two chapters dive into topics related to the (possible) future of PHP — specifically, Facebook's HHVM PHP interpreter and their Hack derivative language. The final chapter briefly discusses the PHP community. The two appendices explain how to install PHP on Linux or OS X for commandline use, and how to set up a local development environment. The author mentions a free edition of Zend Server, but the vendor page mentions no such pricing.
Despite its technical subject matter, this book is not a difficult read. The author's writing style is usually light and friendly, especially in the preface. In a few places, the phrasing is a bit too terse, which might prove momentarily confusing to some readers, e.g., "Function and constant aliases work the same as [those of] classes" (page 11). The text has some errata (aside from the two, as of this writing, already reported): "curl" (pages 15, 220, and 222; should read "cURL"), "a an argument" (page 33), "Prepared statement [to] fetch" (pages 99 and 100), "with [the] php://filter strategy" (page 110), "2 Gb" (page 129; should read "2 GB"), "the the" (page 154), "path to a the code" (page 176), and "Wordpress" (page 190; should read "WordPress").
One weakness with the book is that for several of the topics — including some critical ones — there is not enough detailed information provided that would allow one to begin immediately applying that technique or resource to one's own coding, but instead just enough information to whet one's appetite to learn more (presumably from another book or a website). Secondly, some of the narrative — particularly near the end of the book, when discussing various tools — would be of less value to anyone not developing analytics environment. Beware that some of the tools require numerous dependencies. For instance, do you have Composer, Git, MongoDB, and its PHP extension installed? If not, then you won't be using XHGUI. Also, some of the installation and configuration steps are quite lengthy, with no details provided for troubleshooting issues that might arise. Lastly, despite the promise that any reader with only basic programming knowledge will be able to fully understand the book, such a reader would likely find much of its contents mystifying without further preparation from other sources.
Nonetheless, the book has much to offer, despite its slender size. Numerous resources are recommended — most if not all apparently vetted by the author, who clearly has considerable experience in this arena. Some valuable techniques are presented, such as those instances in the text where the author shows how to use iteration on large data sets to minimize memory usage. In addition, the example code demonstrates that the author has made the effort to produce quality code that can serve as a model to others. Modern PHP does a fine job overall of explaining and advocating the newer capabilities of PHP that would attract developers to choose the language for building state-of-the-art websites and web applications.
Michael Ross is a freelance web developer and writer.
71180709
submission
CryoKeen writes:
Its interesting how different news sites spin #marsgate first the Yahoo News
The private colonization project Mars One has pushed its
planned launch of the first humans toward the Red Planet
back by two years, to 2026.
The delay was necessitated by a lack of investment funding,
which has slowed work on a robotic precursor mission that
Mars One had wanted to send toward the Red Planet in
2018, Mars One CEO Bas Lansdorp said in a new video
posted today... "We had a very successful investment round in 2013 that
has financed all the things that we have done up to now.
And we have actually come to an agreement with a
consortium of investors late last year for a much bigger
round of investments. Unfortunately, the paperwork of that
deal is taking much longer than we expected," Lansdorp Lansdorp said in the video.
This Astrowatch article is a lot more scathing and to the point " Mars One, the Dutch company planning to send people on a
one-way trip to Mars, that recently selected a group of 100
hopefuls, struggles with criticism. In a Medium story this
week, Mars One finalist Joseph Roche presented multiple
reasons as to why he believed the entire operation is a
complete scam. In response, the company published a
video Thursday in which Bas Lansdorp, CEO and Co-
founder of Mars One, replies to recent criticism concerning
the feasibility of Mars One's human trip to Mars. He also
revealed that the mission will be delayed for two years.
Roche said that the “only way” to get selected for the next
round of the Mars One candidacy process was to donate
money. “My nightmare about it is that people continue to
support it and give it money and attention, and it then gets
to the point where it inevitably falls on its face,” Roche told
Elmo Keep for Medium."
71179689
submission
HughPickens.com writes:
Bill Davidow And Michael S. Malone write in the WSJ that recent rains have barely made a dent in California's enduring drought, now in its fourth year so it's time to solve the state’s water problem with radical solutions, and they can begin with “virtual water.” This concept describes water that is used to produce food or other commodities, such as cotton. According to Davidow and Malone, when those commodities are shipped out of state, virtual water is exported. Today California exports about six trillion gallons of virtual water, or about 500 gallons per resident a day. How can this happen amid drought? The problem is mispricing. If water were priced properly, it is a safe bet that farmers would waste far less of it, and the effects of California’s drought—its worst in recorded history—would not be so severe. "A free market would raise the price of water, reflecting its scarcity, and lead to a reduction in the export of virtual water," say Davidow and Malone. "A long history of local politics, complicated regulation and seemingly arbitrary controls on distribution have led to gross inefficiency."
For example, producing almonds is highly profitable when water is cheap but almond trees are thirsty, and almond production uses about 10% of California’s total water supply. The thing is, nuts use a whole lot of water: it takes about a gallon of water to grow one almond, and nearly five gallons to produce a walnut. "Suppose an almond farmer could sell real water to any buyer, regardless of county boundaries, at market prices—many hundreds of dollars per acre-foot—if he agreed to cut his usage in half, say, by drawing only two acre-feet, instead of four, from his wells," say the authors. "He might have to curtail all or part of his almond orchard and grow more water-efficient crops. But he also might make enough money selling his water to make that decision worthwhile." Using a similar strategy across its agricultural industry, California might be able to reverse the economic logic that has driven farmers to plant more water-intensive crops. "This would take creative thinking, something California is known for, and trust in the power of free markets," conclude the authors adding that "almost anything would be better, and fairer, than the current contradictory and self-defeating regulations."
71179291
submission
Etherwalk writes:
Sources conflict, but it looks like as many as 300 people have been arrested for cheating in the Indian state of Bidar after the Hindustan Times published images of dozens of men climbing the walls of a test center to pass answers inside. 500-700+ students were expelled and police had been bribed to look the other way. Xinhau's version of the story omits any reference to police bribery, while The ABC's omits the fact that police fired guns into the air.
71177917
submission
Thorfinn.au writes:
Researchers at the University of Rochester and their collaborators have developed a way to transfer 2.05 bits per photon by using “twisted light.” This remarkable achievement is possible because the researchers used the orbital angular momentum of the photons to encode information, rather than the more commonly used polarization of light. The new approach doubles the 1 bit per photon that is possible with current systems that rely on light polarization and could help increase the efficiency of quantum cryptography systems.
Quantum cryptography promises more secure communications. The first step in such systems is quantum key distribution (QKD), to ensure that both the sender and receiver – usually referred to as Alice and Bob – are communicating in such a way that only they know what is being sent. They are the only ones who hold the “key” to the messages, and the systems are set up in such a way that the presence of any eavesdropper would be identified.
71177755
submission
MojoKid writes:
Google has co-developed a tablet device for use by workers battling Ebola in Sierra Leone. The modified Sony Xperia tablet comes with an extra protective shell, can withstand chlorine dousing as well as exposure to the high humidity and storms that are typical of life in West Africa. And it can even be used by workers wearing protective gloves. As even a single piece of paper leaving a high-risk zone poses a risk of passing on the infection, at the end of their shifts Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) doctors on site at the height of the current outbreak of the disease were reduced to shouting patient notes to workers on the other side of a protective zone fence, who would then enter them into patient records. A practice that MSF technology advisor Ivan Gayton says was "error prone, exhausting, and it wasted five or 10 minutes of the hour medics can spend fully dressed inside the protective zone before they collapse from heat exhaustion." To address the issue, MSF challenged a number of technology volunteers to create an "Ebola-proof tablet" to improve efficiency. This collective, which included Whitespell's Pim de Witte and Hack4Good's Daniel Cunningham, grew to include a member of Google's Crisis Response Team, and it was this group that co-developed the device.
71176009
submission
antdude writes:
Ars Technica reported that "Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRIs) show our brains shutting down when we see security prompts. This is your brain after repeated security warnings. Any questions?
Ever feel your eyes glazing over when you see yet another security warning pop up on your monitor? In a first, scientists have used magnetic resonance imaging to measure a human brain's dramatic drop in attention that results when a computer user is subjected to just two security warnings in a short time..."
71175599
submission
PensacolaSlick writes:
A co-founder of Greenpeace, seven-year director of Greenpeace International, with other very pro-environmental credentials, has come out with a brief rationale for why he is "skeptical that humans are the main cause of climate change and that it will be catastrophic in the near future." He argues instead that in a historical context, human activity has saved the planet, declaring that "at 400 parts per million, all our food crops, forests, and natural ecosystems are still on a starvation diet for carbon dioxide."
71174011
submission
theodp writes:
Now that we have hard data on everything, observes the NY Times' Virginia Heffernan in A Sucker Is Optimized Every Minute, we no longer make decisions from our hearts, guts or principles. "The gut is dead," writes Heffernan. "Long live the data, turned out day and night by our myriad computers and smart devices. Not that we trust the data, as we once trusted our guts. Instead, we 'optimize' it. We optimize for it. We optimize with it." To win Presidential elections. To turn web pages into Googlebait. To sucker people into registering for websites. Of the soon-to-arrive Apple Watch, Heffernan notes: "After time keeping, the watch’s chief feature is 'fitness tracking': It clocks and stores physiological data with the aim of getting you to observe and change your habits of sloth and gluttony. Evidently I wasn’t the only one whose thoughts turned to 20th-century despotism: The entrepreneur Anil Dash quipped on Twitter, albeit stretching the truth, 'Not since I.B.M. sold mainframes to the Nazis has a high-tech company embraced medical data at this scale.'"
71173387
submission
abhishekmdb writes:
These 13 characters will crash your Chrome Browser tab on a Mac PC
No browsers are safe as proved yesterday at Pwn2Own, but crashing one of them with just one line of special code is slightly different. A developer has discovered a hack in Google Chrome which can crash the Chrome tab on a Mac PC.
The code is a 13 character special string which appears to be written in Assyrian script
Matt C has reported the bug to Google, who have marked the report as duplicate. This means that Google are aware of the problem and are reportedly working on it.Link to Original Source
