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Submission + - The Quiet Before The Next IT Revolution

Submitted by snydeq
snydeq writes: Now that the technologies behind our servers and networks have stabilized, IT can look forward to a different kind of constant change, writes Paul Venezia. 'In IT, we are actually seeing a bit of stasis. I don't mean that the IT world isn't moving at the speed of light — it is — but the technologies we use in our corporate data centers have progressed to the point where we can leave them be for the foreseeable future without worry that they will cause blocking problems in other areas of the infrastructure. What all this means for IT is not that we can finally sit back and take a break after decades of turbulence, but that we can now focus less on the foundational elements of IT and more on the refinements. ... In essence, we have finally built the transcontinental railroad, and now we can use it to completely transform our Wild West.'

Comment PC people might have defective DNA (Score -1, Troll) 541

by Taco Cowboy (#47647761) Attached to: Geneticists Decry Book On Race and Evolution

Looking at this thread --- http://science.slashdot.org/st... --- I can't help but think that people who are so adamantly political correct might have been because their DNA are defective

I know, I know, I know that this is just a wild conjecture --- I have tried very hard to prove myself wrong, but so far I have yet to find the concrete proof yet

Submission + - About half of kids' learning ability is in their DNA (latimes.com)

Submitted by Taco Cowboy
Taco Cowboy writes: http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2...

You may think you’re better at reading than you are at math (or vice versa), but new research suggests you’re probably equally good (or bad) at both. The reason: The genes that determine a person’s ability to tackle one subject influence their aptitude at the other, accounting for about half of a person’s overall ability

The study, published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, used nearly 1,500 pairs of 12-year-old twins to tease apart the effects of genetic inheritance and environmental variables on math and reading ability. The researchers administered a set of math and verbal tests to the children and then compared the performance of different sets of twins. They found that the twins’ scores — no matter if they were high or low — were twice as similar among pairs of identical twins as among pairs of fraternal twins. The results indicated that approximately half of the children’s math and reading ability stemmed from their genetic makeup

A complementary analysis of unrelated kids corroborated this conclusion — strangers with equivalent academic abilities shared genetic similarities. What’s more, the genes responsible for math and reading ability appear to be numerous and interconnected, not specifically targeted toward one set of skills. These so-called “generalist genes” act in concert to determine a child’s aptitude across multiple disciplines

The finding that one’s propensities for math and reading go hand in hand may come as a surprise to many, but it shouldn’t. People often feel that they possess skills in only one area simply because they perform slightly worse in the other

Submission + - Microsoft Surface drowning?

Submitted by hcs_$reboot
hcs_$reboot writes: Again, no much good news for the MS Surface. Computerworld reports a Microsoft's losses on the tablet device at $US1.7 billion so far. But, still, Microsoft is serene

"It’s been exciting to see the response to the Surface Pro 3 from individuals and businesses alike. In fact, Surface Pro 3 sales are already outpacing prior versions of Surface Pro. The Surface business generated more than $2B in revenue for the fiscal year 2014 and $409 million in revenue during Q4 FY14 alone, the latter of which included just ten days of Intel Core i5 Surface Pro 3 sales in Canada and the US".

Should Microsoft pull the plug on the tablet? Or maybe it's just a matter of users getting used to the Surface?
User Journal

Journal Journal: When are you going to tackle the spam problem, Slashdot ?

Journal by Taco Cowboy

The thread http://developers.slashdot.org/story/14/08/10/2250205/new-nsa-funded-code-rolls-all-programming-languages-into-one has been seriously spammed, and that troll that does the spamming always spam threads that are related to "NSA"

So what are you going to do with the spam problem, Slashdot ?

Comment Lack of basic research (Score 5, Insightful) 306

by Taco Cowboy (#47643987) Attached to: New NSA-Funded Code Rolls All Programming Languages Into One

I arrived at America pretty late - at the 60's - but at least at that time America had several institutions doing all kinds of wonderful basic research

Bell Labs
Xerox's famous lab at Palo Alto
The Skunkworks

And at that time Darpa funded a lot of basic research as well

Today, all gone

Even Darpa's funding are not aiming at basic research - such as what TFA has outlined - what they are doing at Carnegie Mellon is actually an applied research ... taking what has been known and add another layer onto it

What's happening in America nowadays is very worrying
Security

Connected Collar Lets Your Cat Do the War-Driving 110

Posted by timothy from the wifi-password-|"pl[\'as[cnp dept.
MojoKid (1002251) writes "Security researcher Gene Bransfield, with the help of his wife's grandmother's cat, decided to see how many neighborhood WiFi access points he could map and potentially compromise. With a collar loaded with a Spark chip, a Wi-Fi module, a GPS module, and a battery, Coco the cat helped Gene identify Wi-Fi networks around the neighborhood and then reported back. The goal here is obvious: Discover all of the unsecured, or at least poorly-secured, wireless access points around the neighborhood. During his journey, Coco identified dozens of Wi-Fi networks, with four of them using easily-broken WEP security, and another four that had no security at all. Gene has dubbed his collar the "WarKitteh", and it cost him less than $100 to make. He admits that such a collar isn't a security threat, but more of a goofy hack. Of course, it could be used for shadier purposes." (Here's Wired's article on the connected cat-collar.)

Submission + - Patents that kill (economist.com)

Submitted by wabrandsma
wabrandsma writes: The Economist:
The patent system, which was developed independently in 15th century Venice and then in 17th century England, gave entrepreneurs a monopoly to sell their inventions for a number of years. Yet by the 1860s the patent system came under attack, including from The Economist. Patents, critics argued, stifled future creativity by allowing inventors to rest on their laurels. Recent economic research backs this up.
Earth

Ask Slashdot: Can Tech Help Monitor or Mitigate a Mine-Flooded Ecosystem? 123

Posted by timothy from the you'l-lbe-stone-dead-in-a-moment dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The dam break which flooded toxic mining sediments into Quesnel Lake, British Columbia will affect the food web of a very important fisheries ecosystem for many years to come. Here is the challenge; I am asking the people here to come up with suggestions for new and inventive ways to monitor and or help mitigate this horrendous ecological disaster. A large portion of a huge world famous food and sport fishery is at stake. The challenges ahead will take thinking outside the box and might not just be effectively done by conventional means." What would you do, and what kind of budget would it take?
Graphics

NVIDIA Tegra K1: First Mobile Chip With Hardware-Accelerated OpenCL 52

Posted by timothy from the bragging-rights dept.
New submitter shervinemami writes (starting with a pretty big disclaimer: "I'm an Engineer at NVIDIA.") The latest CompuBench GPU benchmarks show NVIDIA's Tegra K1 running whole OpenCL algorithms around 5x faster than any other mobile device, and individual instructions around 20x faster! This huge jump is because mobile companies have been saying they support OpenCL on mobile devices since early 2013, but what they don't mention is that they only have software API support, not hardware-accelerated OpenCL running faster on their GPUs than CPUs. Now that NVIDIA's Tegra-K1 chip has started shipping in devices and thus is available for full benchmarking, it is clearly the only mobile chip that actually gives you proper hardware-accelerated OpenCL (and CUDA of course!). The K1 is also what's in Google's Project Tango 3-D mapping tablet.

Submission + - NVIDIA Tegra K1: first mobile chip with hardware-accelerated OpenCL (compubench.com)

Submitted by shervinemami
shervinemami writes: The latest CompuBench GPU benchmarks show NVIDIA's Tegra K1 running whole OpenCL algorithms around 5x faster than any other mobile device, and individual instructions around 20x faster!

This huge jump is because mobile companies have been saying they support OpenCL on mobile devices since early 2013, but what they don't mention is that they only have software API support, not hardware-accelerated OpenCL running faster on their GPUs than CPUs. Now that NVIDIA's Tegra-K1 chip has started shipping in devices and thus is available for full benchmarking, it is clearly the only mobile chip that actually gives you proper hardware-accelerated OpenCL (and CUDA of course!).

Disclaimer: I'm an Engineer at NVIDIA.
Bug

Wiring Programmers To Prevent Buggy Code 116

Posted by timothy from the stop-thinking-about-my-clairvoyance dept.
mikejuk (1801200) writes "Microsoft Researcher Andrew Begel, together with academic and industry colleagues have been trying to detect when developers are struggling as they work, in order to prevent bugs before they are introduced into code. A paper presented at the 36th International Conference on Software Engineering, reports on a study conducted with 15 professional programmers to see how well an eye-tracker, an electrodermal activity (EDA) sensor, and an electroencephalography (EEG) sensor could be used to predict whether developers would find a task difficult. Difficult tasks are potential bug generators and finding a task difficult is the programming equivalent of going to sleep at the wheel. Going beyond this initial investigation researchers now need to decide how to support developers who are finding their work difficult. What isn't known yet is how developers will react if their actions are approaching bug-potential levels and an intervention is deemed necessary. Presumably the nature of the intervention also has to be worked out. So next time you sit down at your coding station consider that in the future they may be wanting to wire you up just to make sure you aren't a source of bugs. And what could possibly be the intervention?"

Submission + - Wire The Programmer To Prevent Buggy Code (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: Here's a new idea.
You might have heard of aids that keep a driver from falling asleep by detecting how alert they are but what about the same idea applied to programmers. In this case the object isn't to stop a crash, well it sort of is, but a bug.
Microsoft Researcher Andrew Begel, together with academic and industry colleagues have been trying to detect when developers are struggling as they work, in order to prevent bugs before they are introduced into code. A paper presented at the 36th International Conference on Software Engineering, reports on a study conducted with 15 professional programmers to see how well an eye-tracker, an electrodermal activity (EDA) sensor, and an electroencephalography (EEG) sensor could be used to predict whether developers would find a task difficult. Difficult tasks are potential bug generators and finding a task difficult is the programming equivalent of going to sleep at the wheel.
Going beyond this initial investigation researchers now need to decide how to support developers who are finding their work difficult. What isn’t known yet is how developers will react if their actions are approaching bug-potential levels and an intervention is deemed necessary. Presumably the nature of the intervention also has to be worked out. So next time you sit down at your coding station consider that in the future they may be wanting to wire you up just to make sure you aren't a source of bugs. And what could possibly be the intervention?
Security

Silent Circle's Blackphone Exploited at Def Con 46

Posted by timothy from the outharshing-one-another dept.
Def Con shows no mercy. As gleefully reported by sites several Blackberry-centric sites, researcher Justin Case yesterday demonstrated that he could root the much-heralded Blackphone in less than five minutes. From n4bb.com's linked report: "However, one of the vulnerabilities has already been patched and the other only exploitable with direct user consent. Nevertheless, this only further proves you cannot add layers of security on top of an underlying platform with security vulnerabilities." Case reacts via Twitter to the crowing: "Hey BlackBerry idiots, stop miss quoting me on your blogs. Your phone is only "secure" because it has few users and little value as a target."

Submission + - Online Tool Flagged Ebola Outbreak Before Formal WHO Announcement (huffingtonpost.com) 1

Submitted by Taco Cowboy
Taco Cowboy writes: Nine days before the announcement from WHO regarding the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, an online tool had the incident flagged

HealthMap, a team of 45 researchers, epidemiologists and software developers at Boston Children's Hospital founded in 2006, hosting an online tool that uses algorithms to scour tens of thousands of social media sites, local news, government websites, infectious-disease physicians' social networks and other sources to detect and track disease outbreaks. Sophisticated software filters irrelevant data, classifies the relevant information, identifies diseases and maps their locations with the help of experts

The tool was introduced in 2006 with a core audience of public health specialists, but that changed as the system evolved and the public became increasingly hungry for information during the swine flu pandemic.

To get a feel of how HealthMap works, in the case of the Ebola outbreak, go to http://healthmap.org/ebola/

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