59550279
submission
turbosaab writes:
A Florida man who installed a cellular telephone jammer in the back seat of his Toyota Highlander is facing $48,000 in fines levied by the FCC. The case first came to light when T-Mobile USA’s local carrier, a company called Mobile PCS, noticed problems with their towers over a 12 mile stretch of Interstate 4 between Seffner and Tampa. After noting that the interference seemed to coincide with the morning and evening commutes, Mobile PCS contacted the FCC who used direction finding equipment to identify the suspect’s blue Toyota Highlander. When Sheriff’s deputies approached the car, they noted that their own radios ceased to work and, after a search of the vehicle, found the jamming device hidden beneath a seat cover in the back seat.
59548047
submission
roelbj writes:
Maximum PC has posted a free PDF archive of their premiere issue, dating back to September 1998. Anyone who has been building computers for a while will appreciate gems such as "When will we get to use our USB ports? (p.13); overclocking a CPU to a blistering 225 Mhz (p.64); reviews of cutting-edge CD-ROM drives, PhotoShop 5.0, the Iomega Buz, and Final Fantasy VII; and and of course the Intel/AMD debate which existed even then (p.10). If you are offended by beige, look away.
59547865
submission
Valejo writes:
According to a study released today by Course Report, programming bootcamps are expected to grow by 2.8x in 2014, meaning that bootcamps will graduate a student for every 8 CS undergraduates. The survey (PDF) also found that 57% of the schools teach in Ruby and that the average tuition is $9,900. The authors collected responses from 95% of US schools, including General Assembly, Dev Bootcamp, and Flatiron School.
59547463
submission
cartechboy writes:
While electric cars are now more available than ever, combustion engines will remain for decades to come. Now auto engineers are working to refine combustion power as part of cars that are increasingly electrified, including plug-in hybrids. Toyota's new 'Free Piston Engine Linear Generator' (or FPEG) shows us one potential way. Linear engines eliminate the rotating crankshaft of conventional engines in favor of a single chamber, in which a piston moves forward and backward. A linear engine has no crankshaft, nor connecting rods. In their place is a gas-filled chamber, the compression of which functions like a spring — returning the piston after the expansion / combustion phases of a typical combustion cycle. This back-and-forth motion can be turned into energy, when you haven't got a crankshaft and the mechanically-useful rotation it produces. While linear engines are far from new, and Toyota's test units are only 10 kW (13 horsepower), a pair of them can still produce enough electricity for a Yaris or Corolla-sized vehicle to cruise on the highway at 75 mph.
59543685
submission
ConstantineM writes:
What has been planned for a long time now, prior to the infamous heartbleed fiasco of OpenSSL (which does not affect SSH at all), is now officially a reality — with the help of some recently adopted crypto from DJ Bernstein, OpenSSH now finally has a compile-time option to no longer depend on OpenSSL — `make OPENSSL=no` has now been introduced for a reduced configuration OpenSSH to be built without OpenSSL, which would leave you with no legacy SSH-1 baggage at all, and on the SSH-2 front with only AES-CTR and chacha20+poly1305 ciphers, ECDH/curve25519 key exchange and Ed25519 public keys.
59518145
submission
schwit1 writes:
Some of you may remember a video from Star Trek fan pulled over by the police. He just received a $100K
settlement
59517829
submission
schwit1 writes:
A man doing a 16-mile charity swim was surrounded and protected from a shark by dolphins. With video.
More evidence that dolphins are much smarter than we think.
59516403
submission
FullBandwidth writes:
Two Virginia aerospace players, Arlington-based Alliant Techsystems and Dulles-based Orbital Sciences, are merging to create a $5 Billion (US) venture. The companies announced the merger in a joint announcement Tuesday. ATK is also spinning off its lucrative hunting gear segment into a separate company.
58767557
submission
barlevg writes:
In May 2012, in the midst of an FTC investigation into Google's search practices, the law school at George Mason University in Northern Virginia hosted a conference attended by congressmen, regulators and staffers. The topic: competition, search and social media. What none of the attendees of the conference knew was that Google was pulling many of the strings behind the event, even going so far as to suggest invited speakers.
This event, as documented in The Washington Post is just a snapshot of the operations of one of the largest and highest spending lobbying entities in DC, a far cry from the one-man shop it started out as nine years ago, from a company "disdainful" of Washington's "pay-to-play" culture.
58764475
submission
chicksdaddy writes:
One of the meta-stories to come out of the Heartbleed (http://heartbleed.com/) debacle is the degree to which large and wealthy companies have come to rely on third party code (http://blog.veracode.com/2014/04/heartbleed-and-the-curse-of-third-party-code/) — specifically, open source software maintained by volunteers on a shoestring budget. Adding insult to injury is the phenomenon of large, incredibly wealthy companies that gladly pick the fruit of open source software, but refusing to peel off a tiny fraction of their profits to financially support those same groups.
Exhibit 1: Apple Computer. On Friday, IT World ran a story that looks at Apple's long history of not giving back to the technology and open source community. The article cites three glaring examples: Apple's non-support of the Apache Software Foundation (despite bundling Apache with OS X), as well as its non-support of OASIS and refusal to participate in the Trusted Computing Group (despite leveraging TCG-inspired concepts, like AMDs Secure Enclave in iPhone 5s).
Given Apple's status as the world's most valuable company and its enormous cash hoard, the refusal to offer even meager support to open source and industry groups is puzzling. From the article:
"Apple bundles software from the Apache Software Foundation with its OS X operating system, but does not financially support the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) in any way. That is in contrast to Google and Microsoft, Apple's two chief competitors, which are both Platinum sponsors of ASF — signifying a contribution of $100,000 annually to the Foundation. Sponsorships range as low as $5,000 a year (Bronze), said Sally Khudairi, ASF's Director of Marketing and Public Relations. The ASF is vendor-neutral and all code contributions to the Foundation are done on an individual basis. Apple employees are frequent, individual contributors to Apache. However, their employer is not, Khudairi noted.
The company has been a sponsor of ApacheCon, a for-profit conference that runs separately from the Foundation — but not in the last 10 years. "We were told they didn't have the budget," she said of efforts to get Apple's support for ApacheCon in 2004, a year in which the company reported net income of $276 million on revenue of $8.28 billion."
Carol Geyer at OASIS is quoted saying her organization has done "lots of outreach" to Apple and other firms over the years, and regularly contacts Apple about becoming a member. "Whenever we're spinning up a new working group where we think they could contribute we will reach out and encourage them to join," she said. But those communications always go in one direction, Geyer said, with Apple declining the entreaties.
Today, the company has no presence on any of the Organization's 100-odd active committees, which are developing cross-industry technology standards such as The Key Management Interoperability Protocol (KMIP) and the Public-Key Cryptography Standard (PKCS).
58743509
submission
cogcritter writes:
In June of 2009, the dump/restore utilities version 0.4b42 for Linux's ext3 filesystem were released. This was the last version where incremental dumps could actually be used. A bug introduced in 0.4b43, one year later, causes restore to fail when processing an incremental backup unless, basically, no directory deletions occurred since the level 0 part of the backup set was taken.
The bug is certainly present in Debian Wheezy, and comments in Debian's defect tracking system suggest that the bug has permeated out into other distros as well.
How can Linux's backup/restore tools for its popular ext2/ext3 filesystem be broken for 3+ years, and nobody seems to care? Does nobody take backups? Or do they not use incremental backups? How many people are going to find themselves scrambling when they next NEED to restore a filesystem, and find themselves in possession of long-broken tools?
Just in case this article is where some hapless sysadmin ends up, the workaround is to go to dump.sf.net, go to the files section, pull down the 0.4b42 version and build it for yourself. For me, I think going forward I'm going to switch to filesystem mirroring using rsync.
58729007
submission
An anonymous reader writes:
When Microsoft terminated official support for Windows XP on April 8th, most organizations had taken the six years of warnings to heart and migrated to another solution. But not the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. Only 52,000 of their 110,000 Windows-powered computers have been upgraded to Windows 7. They'll now be forced to pay Microsoft for Custom Support. How much? Using Microsoft's standard rate of $200 per PC, it'll be $11.6 million for one year. That leaves $18.4 million of their $30 million budget to finish the upgrades themselves, which works out to $317 per computer.
58725375
submission
An anonymous reader writes:
Ars reports on a panel at PAX East which delved into the strength of the PC as a platform for games, and what its future looks like. The outlook is positive: 'Even as major computer OEMs produce numbers showing falling sales, the PC as a platform (and especially a gaming platform) actually shows strong aggregate growth.' The panelists said that while consoles get a lot of the headlines, the PC platform remains the only and/or best option for a lot of developers and gamers. They briefly addressed piracy, as well: 'Piracy, [Matt Higby] said, is an availability and distribution problem. The more games are crowdfunded and digitally delivered and the less a "store" figures into buying games, the less of a problem piracy becomes. [Chris Roberts] was quick to agree, and he noted that the shift to digital distribution also helps the developers make more money—they ostensibly don't have everyone along the way from retailers to publishers to distributors taking their cut from the sale.'
58582113
submission
szczys writes:
Aleksandar Bradic just wrote an epic post about Bob Widlar and his role in the early days of the modern IC industry. It includes a bit about the 1-finger salute which was so common with the early analog wizards, and covers his nearly mythological behavior when on the job.
If you're involved in electronics in any way this should be on the top of the week's reading list.
57835153
submission
ananyo writes:
John Ioannidis, the epidemiologist who published an infamous paper entitled 'Why most published research findings are false', has co-founded an institute dedicated to combating sloppy medical studies. The new institute is to focus on irreproducibility, waste in science and publication bias. The institute, called the Meta-Research Innovation Centre or METRICS, will, the Economist reports, 'create a “journal watch” to monitor scientific publishers’ work and to shame laggards into better behaviour. And they will spread the message to policymakers, governments and other interested parties, in an effort to stop them making decisions on the basis of flaky studies. All this in the name of the centre’s nerdishly valiant mission statement: “Identifying and minimising persistent threats to medical-research quality.”'
