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Comment Sound Quality (Score 3, Interesting) 361

by johkir (#41400141) Attached to: Neil Young Pushes Pono, Says Piracy Is the New Radio
Most of the people listening to mp3s (that I know, self included) don't listen to the music on a nice system. Earbuds rarely provide definition or range of the actual recorded material. Yes, they may provide frequencies from 50-15,000 Hz, but you're not really feeling the bass line as recorded. Even if listening to a CD/DVD with 5.1, with the earbuds on, it may as well be a mp3.

Comment Exposure Exposure Exposure (Score 1) 1264

by johkir (#39850243) Attached to: Why Desktop Linux Hasn't Taken Off
When I go a big box or electronic store, I see a dozen Windows machines. Maybe a Macbook or iMac here and there. I've never seen a Linux box on display, never mind the distro. I have Fedora at home, but stuck with XP at work. I see iPhone/iPads/Macbooks all over, so those must be popular too. I just don't see many linux distros out there, unless everyone has an environment which mimics Windows! Yes, I can tell people how cool it is, but if they don't see it at stores or at work, I'm just a lone computer geek!
Security

Submission + - Copiale Cipher Cracked after 250 years (lingfil.uu.se)

Submitted by
johkir
johkir writes: "Centuries after it was devised, the 105 page manuscript containing all in all around 75 000 characters, the Copiale Cipher finally has been broken.

The mysterious cryptogram, bound in gold and green brocade paper, reveals the rituals and political leanings of an 18th-century secret society in Germany. The manuscript seems straight out of fiction: a strange, handwritten message in abstract symbols and Roman letters meticulously covering 105 yellowing pages hidden in the depths of an academic archive."
Government

Submission + - Gov't Security Officials Call For Secure OS Develo (threatpost.com)

Submitted by Gunkerty Jeb
Gunkerty Jeb writes: -One of the keys to addressing the widespread security threats facing both private and government networks is to develop more secure operating systems from the ground up and not rely on trying to secure existing ones, top CIA and Pentagon information assurance officials said.

The federal government, especially military and intelligence agencies, is facing a broad spectrum of threats from many different angles, from lower level attackers poking at their Web sites to nation-state actors and politically motivated groups looking to compromise key networks and exfiltrate sensitive data. Defending against this range of threats is becoming more difficult and complex all the time, and the technologies and approaches that are in use right now are not getting the job done to a large degree.

Speaking on a panel on pressing technological needs at the SINET Innovation Showcase here Wednesday, security officials from the CIA and the Department of Defense said that a return to the efforts to build a secure, trusted operating system would be a huge step in the right direction.
Technology

Submission + - Boeing uses accelerometers in 787 Dreamliner (geek.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Boeing has come up with a novel solution to limit the effects of turbulence in the new 787, otherwise known as the Dreamliner. In the nose of the plane are accelerometers that monitor for a sudden drop. When one is encountered, they tell the plane flaps to adjust quickly (nanoseconds) and this drastically reduces the amount the plane drops overall. The example given is a typical plane would drop 9 feet, where as the 787 would only drop 3 feet given the same situation.
Earth

Submission + - Flights in Europe cancelled due to Icelandic erupt (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by
johkir
johkir writes: "All flights in and out of the UK and several other European countries have been suspended as ash from a volcanic eruption in Iceland moves south.

Up to 4,000 flights are being cancelled with airspace closed in Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark among others. Thousands of travelers have been stranded at some of the world's busiest airports, including London's Heathrow. It's not clear how long flights will be grounded, but the Associated Press reports that Irish authorities, for example, estimated the ban on travel through their airways would last at least eight hours. Jalopnik.com examines "how volcanic ash can kill an airplane." It says that if a passenger jet flies through air saturated with volcanic ash, "glassy particles ... inhaled by the engines instantly melt. In the course of exhaust, the glassy materials are rapidly cooled down in the turbine chamber, stick on the turbine vanes, and disturb the flow of high-pressure combustion gases. This disorder of the flow may stop the entire engine in serious cases.""
Space

Submission + - Follow the Apollo Moon landing, 40 years later

Submitted by
johkir
johkir writes: "The folks over at Nature are celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Apollo lunar landing by tweeting it. Nature News twitters the Apollo 11 moon mission as it happened — 40 years on. Followers can read about technical milestones, political challenges, and related events in the space race starting today, just over a month before the 40th anniversary of the first lunar landing. The Tweets, located at http://twitter.com/ApolloPlus40, will follow Apollo 11's crew to the moon and back, and taper off during the weeks following the mission to give followers the context surrounding the moon mission and its fallout for science and the wider world. Can we get excited about space missions again? And in this world of instant information, compared to blips of news every few days to hours, such as we had with newspapers and TV of the day, be able to hold our interest?"
Education

Russia Mandates Free Software For Public Schools 271

Posted by CmdrTaco from the in-soviet-russia-joke-makes-you dept.
Glyn Moody writes "After running some successful pilots, the Russian government has decided to make open source the standard for all schools. If a school doesn't want to use the free software supplied by the government, it has to buy commercial licenses using its own funds. What's the betting Microsoft starts slashing its prices in Russia?"
Earth

Submission + - Geoengineering to Cool the Earth

Submitted by
johkir
johkir writes: "As early as 1965, when Al Gore was a freshman in college, a panel of distinguished environmental scientists warned President Lyndon B. Johnson that CO2 emissions from fossil fuels might cause "marked changes in climate" that "could be deleterious." Yet the scientists did not so much as mention the possibility of reducing emissions. Instead they considered one idea: "spreading very small reflective particles" over about five million square miles of ocean, so as to bounce about 1 percent more sunlight back to space--"a wacky geoengineering solution," In the decades since, geoengineering ideas never died, but they did get pushed to the fringe--they were widely perceived by scientists and environmentalists alike as silly and even immoral attempts to avoid addressing the root of the problem of global warming. Three recent developments have brought them back into the mainstream."
Programming

Submission + - Microsoft says we're all mixed source 1

Submitted by
johkir
johkir writes: "Microsoft thinks the battle of open source vs. proprietary software is basically over. Microsoft's Horacio Gutierrez notes Microsoft is releasing plenty of stuff as open source, while open-source companies like Red Hat often license commercial software alongside their open-source products. "I actually think the war between proprietary and open source is a thing of the past," he said. Maybe those 235 patent violations were not necessarily designed by Microsoft after all."

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