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Comment Re: To answer your question (Score 1) 279

by jdschulteis (#49123963) Attached to: Intel Moving Forward With 10nm, Will Switch Away From Silicon For 7nm

But as we move to smaller processes that require less electricity to function, perhaps heat dissipation will become a none issue.

The reduction of power consumption (and hence heat production, and the need to dissipate the heat) along with feature size is called Dennard scaling. As feature size has fallen it has not been possible to keep lowering the voltage and current proportionally.

But give it a few years, maybe 5, and something in a similar form factor will be much more affordable and will still be able to perform the role of a traditional desktop.

My phone has 3GB of RAM, a quad-core 2GHz CPU, and 96GB of storage, which would have been a pretty sweet desktop once upon a time.

Submission + - DARPA aims to breach the human-computer natural language barrier (networkworld.com)

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes: Will it be possible to actually communicate with a computer and have it understand context, gestures and even its human counterparts facial expressions? Such notions are usually reserved for the screenplays of science fiction novels and movies. A new Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) program however wants to take such ideas out of the science fiction realm and make them reality in the next few years.

Submission + - Jellyfish are attacking nuclear power plants (thebulletin.org)

Submitted by Lasrick
Lasrick writes: The power plant shutdowns (both nuclear and non-nuclear) that jellyfish cause are increasing, possibly due to warming oceans. And it's not just jellyfish: algae and kelp are responsible for wreaking havoc on filtering systems that are proving no match for aquatic life. 'Jellyfish and algae have assaulted nuclear power plants in the United States, Canada, Scotland, Sweden, Japan, and France. In Scotland alone, two reactors at the country’s Torness power station had to shut down in a single week when the seawater they used as a coolant was inundated with jellyfish. (Because of their tremendous need for cool water, nuclear power plants are often located next to oceans and other naturally occurring large bodies of water.)' The IAEA warns that current monitoring and removal systems in place for 'biological fouling' are inadequate and that warming waters are going to cause more and more of these incidents, the costs of which are astronomical.

Submission + - Swiss robot clock writes time on a whiteboard (thestack.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Whiteboard Clock is a little time-keeping device designed by Maurice Bos which actually jots the current time onto a whiteboard with a dry wipe marker pen. The robot clock uses 3D-printed arms to hold the pen in place, while magnets help it keep its place against the whiteboard. The clock mechanism, a tiny PIC16F1454 microcontroller, currently operates the marker to write the time every five minutes. A 433MHz receiver is used to wirelessly transmit information and updates as pulses from Bos’ computer: ones are transmitted as a 0.20ms signal followed by a 0.10ms silence, and zeros as the reverse. The font is also sent in a similarly clever fashion in series of x and y coordinates. When new time information is sent to the device, a C++ program is able to convert the pulses into dots and dashes which are then plotted by the marker pen.

Submission + - Why Hollywood Had To Fudge The Relativity-Based Wormhole Scenes in Interstellar

Submitted by KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: When Christopher Nolan teamed up with physicist Kip Thorne of Caltech to discuss the science behind his movie Interstellar, the idea was that Thorne would bring some much-needed scientific gravitas to the all-important scenes involving travel through a wormhole. Indeed, Thorne used the equations of general relativity to calculate the various possible shapes of wormhole and how they would distort the view through it. A London-based special effects team then created footage of a far away galaxy as seen through such a wormhole. It showed the galaxy fantastically distorted as a result, just as relativity predicts. But when it came to travelling through a wormhole, Nolan was disappointed with the footage. The problem was that the view of the other side when travelling through a wormhole turns out to be visually indistinguishable from a conventional camera zoom and utterly unlike the impression Nolan wanted to portray, which was the sense of travelling through a shortcut from one part of the universe to another. So for the final cut, special effects artists had to add various animations to convey that impression. "The end result was a sequence of shots that told a story comprehensible by a general audience while resembling the wormhole’s interior," admit Thorne and colleagues in a paper they have published about wormhole science in the film. In other words, they had to fudge it. Nevertheless, Thorne is adamant that the visualisations should help to inspire a new generation of students of film-making and of relativity.

Submission + - Star Wars Galaxies Development Kit Leaked (reddit.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: It seems that a 2010 version of the development tools, client, and pdb files for the abandonware MMO "Star Wars Galaxies" have been leaked on reddit. Interestingly, the tools in this collection were compiled in 2014, meaning someone out there must have their source code.

This leak coupled with the sale of Sony Online Entertainment to a new owner has reignited the passion of SWG enthusiasts, who have have started a petition on change.org requesting an official release of the source code and documentation for the SWG server, client, and tools.

Submission + - NIST: Crystal Pattern Matching Recovers Obliterated Serial Numbers from Metal (nist.gov)

Submitted by chicksdaddy
chicksdaddy writes: Criminals beware: researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have figured out how to recover serial numbers obliterated from metal surfaces such as firearms and automobiles — a common problem in forensic examinations.

Law enforcement agencies use serial numbers to track ownership of firearms and build criminal cases. But serial numbers can be removed by scratching, grinding or other methods. Analysts typically try to restore the numbers with acid or electrolytic etching or polishing, because deformed areas behave differently from undamaged material. But these methods don’t always work.

According to this report (http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/tech-beat/tb20150218.cfm#ebsd) NIST researchers used a technique called electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) to read, in the crystal structure pattern, imprints on steel that had been removed by polishing.

In EBSD, a scanning electron microscope scans a beam of electrons over the surface of a crystalline material such as a metal. The electrons strike atoms in the target and bounce back. Because the atoms are arranged in a regular pattern, the scattered electrons interact and form patterns that reveal the crystal’s structure on a scale down to tens of nanometers. The more perfect the crystal structure, the stronger and clearer the pattern. Software can then calculate the pattern quality to reveal crystal damage; areas with more damage produce lower quality patterns.

In the NIST experiments, described in Forensic Science International,* researchers hammered the letter “X” into a polished stainless steel plate. The letter stamps were as deep as 140 micrometers, meeting federal regulations for firearm serial numbers. The researchers then polished the metal again to remove all visible traces of the letters, and collected the EBSD diffraction patterns and pattern quality data and analyzed them for evidence of the imprints.

Submission + - New contender in mass extinction theories - Dark Matter (techienews.co.uk)

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: There have been many theories that claim to put forward reasons behind mass extinction of dinosaurs, but none have implicated the role of dark matter until now. A new research claims that Earth's infrequent yet predictable path around and through Milky Way's disc may have a direct and significant effect on geological and biological phenomena occurring on Earth. The research adds that dark matter may perturb the orbits of comets and lead to additional heating in the Earth's core, both of which could be connected with mass extinction events. In his research published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, New York University Biology Professor Michael Rampino analyzed the pattern of the Earth's passes through the Galactic disc and found that these disc passages seem to correlate with times of comet impacts and mass extinctions of life. The famous comet strike 66 million ago that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs is just one example, he notes.

Submission + - The threat of certificate-authority fraud, and how it's being fixed (fastcompany.com)

Submitted by harrymcc
harrymcc writes: The Lenovo adware that's in the news today reportedly inserts itself via man-in-the-middle attack via certificate-authority fraud. The technique presents real dangers for the entire web, and most people don't know about it. The good news is that several fixes are on their way. At Fast Company, my colleague Glenn Fleishman takes a look at the risks and the solutions.

Submission + - Tens of thousands of home routers at risk with duplicate SSH keys

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: A setup mistake has apparently left hundreds of thousands of home routers running the SSH (Secure Shell) remote access tool with identical private and public keys. John Matherly, founder of a specialized search engine company whose technology is used for querying Internet-connected devices, found more than 250,000 devices that appear to be deployed by Telefónica de España sharing the same public SSH key. A different search found another 150,000 devices, mostly in China and Taiwan, that have the same problem. Matherly said in a phone interview on Wednesday it is possible the manufacturers copied the same operating system image to all of the routers.

Submission + - Samsung buying LoopPay; competes head-on with Apple Pay and Google Wallet. (cnet.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Samsung is buying our major Apple Pay and Google Wallet competitor LoopPay. The major advantage this has over the two alternatives is that this works with existing POS card readers, so it's already accepted everywhere Apple Pay and Google Wallet are trying to get to. Not being an Apple fan and not trusting Google to store all my financial data on their servers, this alone would make me switch to a Samsung phone.

Submission + - Apple would be crazy to make cars, former GM chief says (cnet.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Is there wisdom in the former GM CEO's advice to Apple not to get into the auto industry? Or just like the nay-sayers' advice to Apple on the iPhone and iPad, do critics of Apple's decisions ever truly understand the level of devotion demonstrated by the fanboi?

Submission + - Verizon Makes It Very Clear Its 'Spectrum Crunch' Never Existed (techdirt.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: If you recall, the wireless industry has spent much of the last decade proclaiming that a "spectrum crunch" was afoot, declaring that unless the government did exactly as requested, wireless growth and innovation would grind to a halt. AT&T was quick to claim that it needed to buy T-Mobile because of said spectrum crunch, though the company's own leaked documents highlighted that this simply wasn't true ..

Comment Re:Can someone explain node's supposed speed (Score 2) 319

by jdschulteis (#49082807) Attached to: Java Vs. Node.js: Epic Battle For Dev Mindshare

Node is fast supposedly because it uses low-overhead single-threaded asynchronous calls, instead of threading. So if that is such a fast paradigm, why don't we build a low-overhead single-threaded asynchronous Java or Python or C# engine? Eg: Node.java, Node.cs, and Node.py?

There is no reason not to build a single-threaded, asynchronous web server in the language of your choice. I'd be surprised if there aren't a bunch of them out there by now.

Node has the advantage of using the same language for both client and server side code. Since JavaScript is the de facto standard for in-browser code, any other language pretty much requires a translation step.

Node also has a robust community and a lot of framework and library packages.

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