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Submission + - NVIDIA Launches Maxwell-Powered Quadro M6000 Workstation Pro Graphics Cards (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
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.
Robotics

Bring On the Boring Robots 112

Posted by Soulskill from the skynet-lulling-us-into-a-false-sense-of-security dept.
malachiorion writes: After a successful 6-month pilot, Savioke's 'butler bots' are heading to hotels around the country. These are not sexy, scary, or even technically impressive machines. But they were useful enough, over the course of their 2,000 or so deliveries, to warrant a redesign, and a larger deployment starting in April. Savioke's CEO had some interesting things to say about the pilot, including the fact that some 95 percent of guests gave the robot a 5-star review, and only the drunks seemed to take issue with it. Plus, as you might expect, everyone seemed to want to take a damn selfie with it. But as small as the stakes might appear, highly specialized bots like this one, which can only do one thing (in this case, bring up to 10 pounds of stuff from the lobby to someone's door) are a better glimpse of our future than any talk of hyper-competent humanoids or similarly versatile machines.

Submission + - First Lawsuits Challenging FCC's New Net Neutrality Rules Arrive (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A small ISP based in Texas and an industry trade group have become the first to file lawsuits challenging the FCC's recent net neutrality rules. The trade group, USTelecom, argues that the regulations are not "legally sustainable," while Alamo Broadband claims they're facing "onerous requirements" by operating under Title II of the Communications Act. Such legal challenges were expected, and are doubtless the first of many — but few expected them to arrive so soon. While some of the new rules were considered "final" once the FCC released them on March 12, others don't go into effect until they're officially published in the Federal Register, which hasn't happened yet.

Comment Re:Need a standards based Facebook replacement (Score 1) 165

by bigpat (#49322765) Attached to: RMS Talks Net Neutrality, Patents, and More

> I remember the days of sending mass emails

So Facebook solves the "problem" of spamming your friends. NICE.

In other words, it doesn't solve any real problem at all and if anything just enables those that abuse the shared infastructure.

It isn't an abuse of shared infrastructure to send multiple people emails. Facebook is just a different type of social contract. You put something out there and you know it isn't certain anyone will see it, but there is feedback "like" when they do. With emails you expected people to read them, although with some possible delay. versus Texts or IMs which usually you expect an immediate read/response.

Submission + - Why Not Utopia? Mark Bittman on basic income and increasing automation (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Paul Fernhout
Paul Fernhout writes: Mark Bittman wrote an op-ed in the New York Times suggesting a basic income as a solution to increasing automation leading to job loss. He concludes: "We have achieved a level of social equality barely imagined by progressives 50 years ago, but economic equality has gotten much worse. No one knows what the world will look like in 50 years, but if we resign ourselves to dystopia — in which capital has full control, as it nearly does now — we'll surely have one. Let's resolve to build something better. In the long run we know that we'll make the transition from capitalism to some less destructive and hopefully more just system. Why not begin that transition now? If there is going to be a global market that will further enrich capitalists, there must be guarantees that the rest of the population can at least afford housing and food. And things can be even better than that: We'll have the robots work for us."

Submission + - Apple Makes Good on It's Promise to Double MacBook Pro Performance (computerworld.com) 2

Submitted by Lucas123
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.

Comment Word missing. (Score 2) 165

by Futurepower(R) (#49322393) Attached to: RMS Talks Net Neutrality, Patents, and More
"monstrous surveillance engine" He left out evil. Should be: "evil monstrous surveillance engine"

But Facebook can be useful: Are you too happy? Is it uncomfortable being happier than everyone else? Do you want to be miserable like everyone you see around you?

Facebook has an answer. Read Facebook use predicts declines in happiness, new study finds. Or download the scientific paper.

Comment Need a standards based Facebook replacement (Score 1) 165

by bigpat (#49321915) Attached to: RMS Talks Net Neutrality, Patents, and More

Facebook solved the problem of contact management very nicely. I remember the days of sending mass emails to all your contacts with new contact information... unless you manually updated your contact database then it was over and you didn't have great control over who's emails you would see and you couldn't discover old friends online...

To retain some small semblance of our privacy though we really need a set of Internet communications protocols for updating and managing address books and some sort of open directory infrastructure where people could register and look up and discover friends. But keep the information about who is connected to who private and not mediated by an all knowing third party who is selling that data to the highest bidder where it is really being used against our interests.

All it would really take is some protocol for sending or attaching updated contact info in an email or over any other protocol that a client would then use to automatically update a local/server copy of your friends list. People still rely on web mail primarily so the data would likely remain vulnerable to snooping, but at least people would have the option of keeping their data on privately owned hardware.

Canada

Leaked Snowden Docs Show Canada's "False Flag" Operations 202

Posted by samzenpus from the it-wasn't-us dept.
An anonymous reader writes Documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and The Intercept show the extent to which Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC) cooperates with the NSA — and perhaps most interestingly details CSEC's "false flag" operations, whereby cyberattacks are designed and carried out with the intention of attribution to another individual, group or nation state. The revelations come in the midst of Canadian controversy regarding the C-51 anti-terrorism bill.

Submission + - Deep Time, Long Term Thinking, and the Oldest Living Things in the World

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Rachel Sussman has an interesting article at Nautilus about her nine year quest to find and photograph the oldest living things in the world. To qualify for inclusion, each organism must have gone through at least 2,000 years of continuous life as an individual. "I selected 2,000 years as my minimum age specifically to draw attention to the gentleman’s agreement of what “year zero” means. In other words, 2000 years serves both as an all-too-human start date, as well as the baseline age of my subjects," writes Sussman, an American fine art photographer. "The requirement of endurance on an individual level was an important consideration, because we all innately relate to the idea of self. This was a purposeful anthropomorphization that would further imbue the organisms with a reflective quality in which we could glimpse ourselves." Sussman went searching for 5,500-year-old moss in Antarctica, a 2,000-year-old brain coral in Tobago, an 80,000-year-old Aspen colony in Utah, a 2,000-year-old primitive Welwitschia in Namibia, and a 43,600-year-old shrub in Tasmania that’s the last of its kind on the planet, to name a few.

Sussman writes that one of her primary goals was to create a little jolt of recognition at the shallowness of human timekeeping and the blink that is a human lifespan. "Does our understanding of time have to be tethered to our physiological experience of it? writes Sussman. "The more we embrace long-term thinking, the more ethical our decision-making becomes." Sussman says that the dialogue with environmental conservation is a perfect example of the importance of blending art, science, and long-term thinking. "We hear these things like carbon-dioxide levels are rising. You hear "400 parts per million," and it doesn't really register what that means. But when you can look at this organism and say, "Wow, this spruce tree has been living on this mountainside for 9,500 years and, in the past 50, got this spindly trunk in the center because it got warmer at the top of this mountainside," there's something that's a very literal depiction of climate change happening right in front of you . It's observable. So I hope that that's going to be a way that people can connect to that as an issue."
Android

Android's Smart Lock Won't Ask You For a Password Until You Set Your Phone Down 127

Posted by samzenpus from the staying-on dept.
jfruh writes Nothing confronts you with how addicted you are to your phone more than constantly taking it out of your pocket and entering your passcode over and over again to unlock. But without fanfare, Google is releasing an Android update that might solve the problem: a "smart lock" that can figure out if your phone has been set down since the last time you unlocked it. As long as it stays on your person, you won't need to re-enter your password.
EU

Finland's Education System Supersedes "Subjects" With "Topics" 213

Posted by samzenpus from the learning-time dept.
jones_supa writes Finland is about to embark on one of the most radical education reform programs ever undertaken by a nation state – scrapping traditional "teaching by subject" in favor of "teaching by topic". The motivation to do this is to prepare people better for working life. For instance, a teenager studying a vocational course might take "cafeteria services" lessons, which would include elements of maths, languages, writing skills and communication skills. More academic pupils would be taught cross-subject topics such as the European Union — which would merge elements of economics, history, languages and geography. There will also be a more collaborative teaching approach, with pupils working in smaller groups to solve problems while improving their communication skills.

Comment Re:delay (Score 3, Insightful) 89

It's a classic advance fee scam. You promise the suckers something awesome if they'll just front a bit of cash to handle processing fees and transportation fees and whatever other fees the scammers can think of. It works because after the people invest money they don't want to lose their investment and are more willing to handle further fees. In some cases they are trapped because they took out a loan with the promise of the future payout as collateral and they can't afford to pay the loan back unless the deal goes through.

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