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Submission + - Researchers Closer to Industrial Graphene Production Due to $10 Bet (sciencerecorder.com)

Submitted by AaronW on Monday September 08, 2014 @04:51PM

AaronW writes: After trying and failing to convince Nina Kovtyukhona to test her technique of separating layers of graphite and boron nitride to instead try graphene, Thomas E. Mallouk made a bet with Nina that her technique method would work. If it worked, Nina would owe him $10. If it didn't, he would owe her $100. Thomas is now $10 richer and we are now a step closer to industrial scale graphene production.

Submission + - Is there any scenario where violating net neutrality acceptable? 1

Submitted by rcht148 on Monday September 08, 2014 @03:23PM

rcht148 writes: Ever since I heard about T-Mobile's 'Music Freedom' announcement, I have been asking myself this question. If you're unaware of it, T-Mobile recently announced that music streaming from some services (Pandora, iHeartRadio, iTunes Radio, Rhapsody, Slacker, Spotify and some others) will NOT be counted against the customers 4G LTE data cap. I love T-Mobile for the much needed shake-up to the wireless industry that they provided and thanks to them my wireless bill has gone down by almost 40%. In lay man terms this promo sounds great because you get more for your data (Your 2GB 4G LTE plan now means 2GB 4G LTE + music streaming from some providers*). I can't seem to accept this as an engineer. It violates the definition of net neutrality. So, I've been asking myself the broader question, in what scenario does a net neutrality violation become acceptable? If you're a net neutrality supporter do you find this service acceptable?

Submission + - Top Secret Astronomy

Submitted by Jeremy Erwin on Monday September 08, 2014 @03:05PM

Jeremy Erwin writes: NASA is searching for a director for its James Webb Space Telescope the successor to the Hubble. But freethinkers be damned; you'll need a Top Secret/SCI security clearance. The Truth is out there!

Submission + - It's Time To Split Linux In Two 7

Submitted by snydeq on Monday September 08, 2014 @01:08PM

snydeq writes: Desktop workloads and server workloads have different needs, and it's high time Linux consider a split to more adequately address them, writes Deep End's Paul Venezia. 'You can take a Linux installation of nearly any distribution and turn it into a server, then back into a workstation by installing and uninstalling various packages. The OS core remains the same, and the stability and performance will be roughly the same, assuming you tune they system along the way. Those two workloads are very different, however, and as computing power continues to increase, the workloads are diverging even more. Maybe it's time Linux is split in two. I suggested this possibility last week when discussing systemd (or that FreeBSD could see higher server adoption), but it's more than systemd coming into play here. It's from the bootloader all the way up. The more we see Linux distributions trying to offer chimera-like operating systems that can be a server or a desktop at a whim, the more we tend to see the dilution of both. You can run stock Debian Jessie on your laptop or on a 64-way server. Does it not make sense to concentrate all efforts on one or the other?'

Comment Re:Where to draw the line (Score 1) 326

by lkcl on Monday September 08, 2014 @03:32AM (#47850635) Attached to: Stallman Does Slides -- and Brevity -- For TEDx

there is a beautiful tale which i will share with you, which helps to explain why what Dr Stallman is doing is so important:

"the reasonable man adapts himself to the world. the unreasonable man adapts the world to himself. therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man".

now, if it wasn't for Dr Stallman, the average pathological corporation (see the first few minutes of the documentary "The Corporation") would take whatever it could get (and you only have to look at the 98% endemic GPL violations on android smartphones and tablets to see the consequences of non-GPL software such as android)

so if it wasn't for Dr Stallman sticking to his principles, you would probably be using a computer that crashes 10 to 15 times a day for anything but the most mundane of tasks, and was entirely outside of your control.

Comment Re:Can we have a [credible] MS Access equivalent? (Score 1) 185

by wild_berry on Saturday September 06, 2014 @06:36AM (#47840161) Attached to: Why Munich Will Stick With Linux

No real comparable thing exists, and to expect it is to think in the MS single-microcomputer-on-every-desk mindset. We're networked and clouded these days, so every program is a server which can interact with any other program (or should be) and a single-lump tool is limited to its black box. In the Free/Open Source world, you can get full SQL DB's or NoSQL storage engines free-at-point-of-use, so why would you grab a single solution when you can pick the components which best fit your needs?

I think you've condemned your many clients to no scalability and little flexibility. When it comes to cope with larger numbers of records, more complicated business logic or increased concurrent access, there's nothing like Access in the Free/Open Source world because the big-boy DB's are free-at-point-of-use. You then have the freedom to implement a web UI or a GTK+ UI or a QT UI talking a standard protocol and standard DB query language, and with that comes the architectural freedom to divorce the back-end from the business logic from the user interface -- which makes maintenance and ongoing improvements easy.

Submission + - Home Security Cameras 1

Submitted by Insipid Trunculance on Saturday September 06, 2014 @06:32AM

Insipid Trunculance writes: Having been burgled recently , I have been shocked out of my complacency and going all the way to secure my home. I am happy with the quote for the burglar alarm and going ahead ; I am not satisfied with the camera setup they have proposed , essentially its an old style cctv setup with a very clunky web accessible capability. What I have decided to have is Day/Night capable IP cameras which can email/text me whenever they detect motion. I didn't want to particularly setup a dedicated PC to record the video , so direct recording to a NAS and/or inbuilt storage is a requirement. I have been amazed at the number or solutions and the variability in their quality. What setup do fellow slashdotters have?

Submission + - Recommend a service to digitize VHS home movies? (wikipedia.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 05, 2014 @02:17PM

An anonymous reader writes: Could someone recommend a service to convert old VHS home movies to a lossless archival format such as FFV1? The file format needs to be lossless so I can edit and convert the files with less generation loss, it needs 4:1:1 or better chroma subsampling in order to get the full color resolution from the source tapes, and preferably it should have more than 8 bits per channel of color in order to avoid banding while correcting things like color, brightness, and contrast.

So far, the best VHS archival services I've found use either the DV codec or QuickTime Pro-Res, both of which are lossy.

Submission + - Lifeform out of the "Tree of Life" found off the coast of Australia (bbc.com)

Submitted by Taco Cowboy on Thursday September 04, 2014 @06:38PM

Taco Cowboy writes: A mushroom-shaped sea animal discovered off the Tasmanian coast back in 1986 has defied classification in the tree of life

A team of scientists at the University of Copenhagen says the tiny organism does not fit into any of the known subdivisions of the animal kingdom. The organisms, which were originally collected in 1986, are described in the academic journal Plos One. Such a situation has occurred only a handful of times in the last 100 years

The authors of the paper recognise two new species of mushroom-shaped animal: Dendrogramma enigmatica and Dendrogramma discoides. Measuring only a few millimetres in size, the animals consist of a flattened disc and a stalk with a mouth on the end. The authors of the article note several similarities with the bizarre and enigmatic soft-bodied life forms that lived between 635 and 540 million years ago — the span of Earth history known as the Ediacaran Period. Those organisms, too, have proven difficult to categorise and some researchers have even suggested they were failed experiments in multi-cellular life

During a scientific cruise in 1986, scientists collected organisms at water depths of 400m and 1,000m on the south-east Australian continental slope, near Tasmania. But the two types of mushroom-shaped organisms were recognised only recently, after sorting of the bulk samples collected during the expedition. "Finding something like this is extremely rare, it's maybe only happened about four times in the last 100 years," said co-author Jorgen Olesen from the University of Copenhagen

The new organisms are multicellular but mostly non-symmetrical, with a dense layer of gelatinous material between the outer skin cell and inner stomach cell layers. The researchers did find some similarities to other animal groupings, such as the Cnidaria — the phylum that comprises corals and jellyfish — and the Ctenophora, which includes the marine organisms known as comb jellies. But the new organisms did not fulfil all the criteria required for inclusion in either of those categories. Dr Olesen said the new animals could either be a very early branch on the tree of life, or be intermediate between two different animal phyla

One way to resolve the question surrounding Dendrogramma's affinities would be to examine its DNA, but new specimens will need to be found. The original samples were first preserved in formaldehyde and later transferred to 80% alcohol, a mode of treatment that prevents analysis of genetic material. Accordingly, the team's paper in Plos One calls for researchers around the world to keep an eye out for other examples. "We published this paper in part as a cry for help," said Dr Olesen. "There might be somebody out there who can help place it"

Submission + - Home Depot Gets Social-Engineered (darkreading.com)

Submitted by PLAR on Thursday September 04, 2014 @02:18PM

PLAR writes: The team assigned to pump potentially sensitive information out of Home Depot employees during live cold calls during this year's Social Engineering Capture the Flag competition at the DEF CON 22 hacker conference won the overall contest, which targeted major US retailers. While the contest was obviously unrelated to this week's revelation of a possible breach at the home improvement chain, it's an interesting look at the retail industry's wave of security woes.

Comment Re:Nobody has the right not to be offended. (Score 1) 1134

by buchner.johannes on Thursday September 04, 2014 @12:31PM (#47827067) Attached to: Combating Recent, Ugly Incidents of Misogyny In Gamer Culture

because if people have a right not be be offended, then there is no freedom of speech

Oh bullshit. There is a middle way, and the majority of nations have found it, including the USA. Don't be so dogmatic.

Comment Re:I predict (Score 2) 1134

by buchner.johannes on Thursday September 04, 2014 @12:27PM (#47826995) Attached to: Combating Recent, Ugly Incidents of Misogyny In Gamer Culture

It sounds like that was said in the context of comparing to other fan-doms. Such as someone might be a Twilight fan and write some fan-fiction. She is saying, in response to something before the cut which is not shown, that her case is slightly different. She is not a fan.
To me that could even mean "I'm not a fan. I am a gamer."
In any case, I don't think it follows automatically that she does not like video games. That can only be said if the context in which she spoke is ignored, and her words taken to the letter. "Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre." applies here.
That she had to learn a lot about video games also does not mean anything, because there are many genres and games out there. Nobody has an overview without some systematic digging.

I think we can agree that she played games at some point (and thus at least was a gamer), so she can talk on the subject.

Even if she had literally said "I do not like video games" she could have been a prolific gamer, become disappointed with the industry, and stop actively playing. In that case "I do not like video games" would be a true present statement, yet she still has all right to talk on the subject of video games.

Submission + - Cobol Forever! (computerworld.com)

Submitted by mspohr on Thursday September 04, 2014 @12:04PM

mspohr writes: Interesting article in Computerworld about Cobol's die hard fans which include large companies with millions of lines in Cobol code which they keep up to date even though there is a dwindling supply of Cobol coders. One example is Blue Cross:
"The healthcare insurer processes nearly 10% of all healthcare claims in the U.S., and uses six top-of-the line IBM zEnterprise EC12 systems running millions of lines of optimized Cobol to process 19.4 billion online healthcare transactions annually. Its custom-built claims processing engine has been thoroughly modernized and kept up to date, says BCBS of SC vice president and chief technology officer Ravi Ravindra. "It was always in Cobol, and it always will be."
"Cobol was designed to handle transactional workloads, and for large-scale transaction processing it still can't be beat..."
"Some 23 of the world's top 25 retailers, 92 of the top 100 banks, and the 10 largest insurers all entrust core operations to Cobol programs running on IBM mainframes"
So... should we all start learning Cobol?

Submission + - Is there a creativity deficit in science? (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by nerdyalien on Thursday September 04, 2014 @04:07AM

nerdyalien writes: From the article: "There is no more important time for science to leverage its most creative minds in attempting to solve our global challenges. Although there have been massive increases in funding over the last few decades, the ideas and researchers that have been rewarded by the current peer-review system have tended to be safer, incremental, and established. If we want science to be its most innovative, it’s not about finding brilliant, passionate creative scientists; it’s about supporting the ones we already have."

Comment create abstraction (Score 1) 613

by Twillerror on Tuesday September 02, 2014 @07:18PM (#47812195) Attached to: You Got Your Windows In My Linux

I often wonder why the community does not create more tools that abstract away the differences as much as possible.

Every distro has it's package manager and with it different syntax. Imaging if you had a tool like "install-it mysql" which on Ubuntu goes to apt-get install, or pacman's syntax, or yum or whatever.

The thing I mostly worry about is packages. Say what you will about Windows and Mac, but developing an app for them generally has a limited set of ways. There is only one way to do services in Windows, etc.

It is hard to get say Webcam apps to get ported to Linux because the poor devs have to figure out webcams in 10 different distros. Everyone in the boards say "ubuntu 14 +1", .... no no Arch first!!! and so on. Should it matter as much app to app? Shouldn't distros at least have some level of uniformity...a layer of it.

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