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Submission + - There's No Such Thing as a General-purpose Processor (acm.org) 1

Submitted by CowboyRobot
CowboyRobot writes: David Chisnall of the University of Cambridge argues that despite the current trend of categorizing processors and accelerators as "general purpose", there really is no such thing and believing in such a device is harmful.

"The problem of dark silicon (the portion of a chip that must be left unpowered) means that it is going to be increasingly viable to have lots of different cores on the same die, as long as most of them are not constantly powered. Efficient designs in such a world will require admitting that there is no one-size-fits-all processor design and that there is a large spectrum, with different trade-offs at different points."

Submission + - Wind Power Generated 126% of Scotland's Household Energy Needs Last Month (inhabitat.com)

Submitted by Taffykay
Taffykay writes: According to new statistics released by the World Wildlife Fund Scotland, Scottish renewable energy had a “bumper month” in October, 2014, with wind power alone generating an estimated 982,842 MWh of electricity. This is enough clean energy to power around 3,045,000 homes, and equates to 126 percent of the electricity needs of Scottish households. Solar power and hot water generation also performed well, despite the country’s reputation for grey and misty weather.

Submission + - How we'll know whether BICEP2 was right about gravitational waves

Submitted by StartsWithABang
StartsWithABang writes: The Big Bang takes us back to very early times, but not the earliest. It tells us the Universe was in a hot, dense state, where even the possibility of forming neutral atoms was impossible due to the incredible energies of the Universe at that time. The patterns of fluctuations that are left over from that time give us insight into the primordial density fluctuations that our Universe was born with. But there’s an additional signature encoded in this radiation, one that’s much more difficult to extract: polarization. While most of the polarization signal that’s present will be due to the density fluctuations themselves, there’s a way to extract even more information about an even earlier phenomenon: gravitational waves that were present from the epoch of cosmic inflation! Here's the physics on how that works, and how we'll find whether BICEP2 was right or not.

Submission + - Using naval logbooks to reconstruct past weather—and predict future climat (thebulletin.org) 1

Submitted by Lasrick
Lasrick writes: What a great idea. The Old Weather Project uses old logbooks to study the weather patterns of long ago, providing a trove of archival data to scientists who are trying to fill in the details of our knowledge about the atmosphere and the changing climate. 'Pity the poor navigator who fell asleep on watch and failed to update his ship’s logbook every four hours with details about its geographic position, time, date, wind direction, barometric readings, temperatures, ocean currents, and weather conditions.' As Clive Wilkinson of the UK's National Maritime Museum adds, 'Anything you read in a logbook, you can be sure that it is a true and faithful account.'

The Old Weather Project uses citizen scientists to transcribe and digitize observations that were scrupulously recorded on a clockwork-like basis, and it is one of several that climate scientists are using to create 'a three-dimensional computer simulation that will provide a continuous, century-and-a-half-long profile of the entire planet’s climate over time'--the 20th Century Reanalysis Project. Data is checked and rechecked by 3 different people before entry into the database, and the logbook measurements are especially valuable because it was compiled at sea. Great story.

Submission + - New Clock May End Time As We Know It (npr.org) 1

Submitted by SonicSpike
SonicSpike writes: At the heart of this new clock is the element strontium. Inside a small chamber, the strontium atoms are suspended in a lattice of crisscrossing laser beams. Researchers then give them a little ping, like ringing a bell. The strontium vibrates at an incredibly fast frequency. It's a natural atomic metronome ticking out teeny, teeny fractions of a second.

This new clock can keep perfect time for 5 billion years.

"It's about the whole, entire age of the earth," says Jun Ye, the scientist here at JILA who built this clock. "Our aim is that we'll have a clock that, during the entire age of the universe, would not have lost a second."

But this new clock has run into a big problem: This thing we call time doesn't tick at the same rate everywhere in the universe. Or even on our planet.

Right now, on the top of Mount Everest, time is passing just a little bit faster than it is in Death Valley. That's because speed at which time passes depends on the strength of gravity. Einstein himself discovered this dependence as part of his theory of relativity, and it is a very real effect.

The relative nature of time isn't just something seen in the extreme. If you take a clock off the floor, and hang it on the wall, Ye says, "the time will speed up by about one part in 1016."

That is a sliver of a second. But this isn't some effect of gravity on the clock's machinery. Time itself is flowing more quickly on the wall than on the floor. These differences didn't really matter until now. But this new clock is so sensitive, little changes in height throw it way off. Lift it just a couple of centimeters, Ye says, "and you will start to see that difference."

This new clock can sense the pace of time speeding up as it moves inch by inch away from the earth's core.

Submission + - Number of billionaires globally doubles since start of financial crisis (westmeathexaminer.ie)

Submitted by monkeyFuzz
monkeyFuzz writes: According to the article, since the financial crisis began, the number of billionaires worldwide has more than doubled and interestingly enough apparently, if the world's three richest people were to spend $1m every single day each, it would take each one of them around 200 years to exhaust all of their wealth

Submission + - Cheap tablets: low RAM + SSD = acceptable? 1

Submitted by TheSHAD0W
TheSHAD0W writes: This $99 tablet was mentioned in an earlier story, running Windows 8.1 on only 1GB of RAM. Is it usable? Will it last?

For $99 you can't expect much more than a toy, but I'm wondering how well it'd work for real-world use. 1GB is low, but you're swapping to a SSD, not a magnetic disk; if the swapping were intelligent enough, it might be workable. A friend wondered about "handling a bunch of tabs" in a browser; has anyone tried this?

Then there are longevity issues; doing a lot of swapping to a SSD will tend to kill its life span. Still, for $99, would you be okay with having to replace it after 3 years or so?

Submission + - Value of DMARC and DKIM 1

Submitted by whoever57
whoever57 writes: How widely is DKIM and DMARC being implemented? Some time ago, Yahoo implemented strict checks on DKIM before accepting email, breaking many mailing lists. However, Spamassassin actually assigns a positive score (more likely to be spam) to DKIM-signed emails, unless the signer domain matches the from domain. Some email marketing companies don't provide a way for emails to be signed with the sender's domain — instead, using their own domain to sign emails. DMARC doesn't seem to have a delegation mechanism, by which a domain owner could delegate other domains as acceptable signatures for emails their emails.

All of these issues suggest that the value of DKIM and DMARC is quite low, both as a mechanism to identify valid emails and as a mechanism to identify spam. In fact, spam is often dkim-signed.

Are /. users who manage email delivery actually using DKIM and DMARC?

Submission + - Denuvo DRM Challenges Game Crackers

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: Now that the PC gaming community has grown very large, it has become only a matter of hours before the copy protection of a major AAA title is cracked and put up for download after its official release, or sometimes, even before. However, it looks like CI Games is having great luck with its recently launched next-gen video game known as Lords of the Fallen, as its PC DRM still remains uncracked now after 3 days of release. The DRM solution that the game uses comes from a copyright protection company known as Denuvo, and it is apparently the same one that has been used in FIFA 15, which is also yet uncracked. While this DRM has kept the game from being pirated until now, it has also been speculated that this solution is supposedly the main cause behind several in-game bugs and crashes that are affecting users' gameplay experience. To improve stability, the developer is working on a patch that is aimed at fixing all performance issues. It remains officially unconfirmed if the new DRM solution is really causing all the glitches.

Submission + - Study suggests milk doesn't strengthen your bones - it ages you instead (gizmocrazed.com) 1

Submitted by Diggester
Diggester writes: You have heard ever since you were a child that the consumption of milk is close to essential for healthy bones and teeth. Two to three glasses a day are recommended by doctors, nutritionists, P.E. teachers and parents (especially your mom) and you’ve always been comfortable knowing that a glass of milk can’t hurt you. Well a study published in the British Medical Journal disagrees with this ancient tradition.

Submission + - Researchers claim metal 'patch' found on Pacific island is from Amelia Earhart

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Amelia Earhart disappeared in 1937, but scientists may have now uncovered where she ended up. Researchers have identified a piece of aluminum, which washed up on a remote Pacific island, as dated to the correct time period and consistent with the design of Earhart's Lockheed Electra. From the article: "The warped piece of metal was uncovered on a 1991 voyage to the island of Nikumaroro in the Republic of Kiribati by The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), which has spent millions of dollars searching for Earhart's plane in a project that has involved hundreds of people. 'We don't understand how that patch got busted out of (the plane) and ended up on the island where we found it, but we have the patch, we have a piece of Earhart's aircraft,' TIGHAR executive director Ric Gillespie said.

Submission + - Most planets in the Universe are homeless

Submitted by StartsWithABang
StartsWithABang writes: We like to think of our Solar System as typical: a central star with a number of planets — some gas giants and some rocky worlds — in orbit around it. Yes, there's some variety, with binary or trinary star systems and huge variance in the masses of the central star being common ones, but from a planetary point of view, our Solar System is a rarity. Even though there are hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy for planets to orbit, there are most likely around a quadrillion planets in our galaxy, total, with only a few trillion of them orbiting stars at most. Now that we've finally detected the first of these, we have an excellent idea that this picture is the correct one: most planets in the Universe are homeless. Now, thank your lucky star!

Submission + - France investigating mysterious drone activity on 7 nuclear power plant sites (deredactie.be)

Submitted by thygate
thygate writes: In France, an investigation has been launched into the appearance of "drones" on 7 different nuclear power plant sites across the country in the last month. Some of the plants involved are Creys-Malville en Bugey in the southeast, Blayais in the southwest, Cattenom en Chooz in the northeast, Gravelines in the north, and Nogent-sur-Seine, close to Paris. On each occasion "drones" were seen on the domain somewhere from late in the evening to early in the morning, while it is forbidden to fly over these sites on altitudes less than 1 km in a 5 km radius. According to a spokesman of the state electric company that runs the facilities (EDF), there was no danger to the security and production of the plants. However these incidents will likely bring nuclear safety concerns back into the spotlight. France is number one country in the world when it comes to dependency on nuclear power, with a total of 58 centrals spread over 19 sites across the country.

Greenpeace's head of its anti-nuclear power campaign has already denied involvement. Their spokesman added that these events are very troubling, and also mentions they have learned about more "drone" activity above the French Center for nuclear research (CEA) close to Paris.

Submission + - Is Geometric Algebra finally adopted in STEM curricula? (wavewatching.net)

Submitted by quax
quax writes: It has been over a century that William Kingdon Clifford developed Geometric Algebra. Yet due to his untimely death it was quickly forgotten, only to be partially reinvented when Dirac tackled relativistic quantum mechanics and introduced spinors. But geometric algebra is much more versatile than that, for instance it makes for a better alternative to vector calculus, combining div and curl operators and doing away with the cross-product in favor of bivectors. It is such a straightforward unification of otherwise, disparate mathematical techniques that I very much regret that my physics curriculum twenty years ago didn't cover it. Has this changed? Have you encountered geometric algebra in an undergraduate program?

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