Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

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

Submitted by AaronW
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
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 + - It's Time To Split Linux In Two 7

Submitted by snydeq
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?'

Submission + - Home Security Cameras 1

Submitted by Insipid Trunculance
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
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
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
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.

Submission + - Cobol Forever! (computerworld.com)

Submitted by mspohr
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
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."

Submission + - Are there any Linux-friendly DESKTOP x86 motherboard manufacturers? (phoronix.com) 1

Submitted by storkus
storkus writes: The release of Haswell-E and a price drop on Devil's Canyon has made me itch for a PC upgrade. However, looking around I discovered a pair of horror stories on Phoronix (2nd story link at the bottom of the first), and plenty more Googling around.

My question: if MSI, Gigabyte, Asus (and by extension Asrock) are out, who's left and are they any good? Note that I want to build a (probably dual-boot, but don't know for sure) gaming and "other" high-end machine with one of the above chips so we're talking Z97 or X99; however, these stories seem to point to the problems being M$-isms in the BIOS/UEFI structures rather than actual hardware incompatibility, combined with a real lousy attitude (despite the Steam distro being real soon now).

Slashdot Top Deals

2.4 statute miles of surgical tubing at Yale U. = 1 I.V.League

Close