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

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Submission + - Earthquake sensors track urban traffic, too (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Besides the roar of engines and honking of angry drivers, rush-hour traffic also makes underground “noise.” We can’t hear most of these ground vibrations, but seismic sensors can. With a network of 5300 geophones—devices that convert ground movements into voltage—researchers recorded 1 week’s worth of urban vibrations in a 70-km2 area of Long Beach, California. By analyzing the seismic data, they could measure how fast individual trains were moving between stations, count the number of planes landing and taking off at the airport, and calculate the average speed of vehicles on a 10-lane highway. Without GPS or cameras, seismic systems could allay privacy concerns by tracking urban activity in an anonymous way.

Submission + - The oldest star in the Universe

Submitted by StartsWithABang
StartsWithABang writes: No, we haven't found it yet. But there are good reasons that we probably never will, and that even if we did find it, we probably wouldn't be able to recognize it as such. Come learn the nuances of what we think it should look like, what our prospects for hunting them are, and what the closest is that we've come so far!

Submission + - MIT professor advocates ending Asteroid Redirect Mission to fund asteroid survey (examiner.com)

Submitted by MarkWhittington
MarkWhittington writes: Professor Richard Binzel published a commentary in the journal Nature that called for two things. He proposed that NASA cancel the Asteroid Redirect Mission currently planned for the early 2020s. Instead, he would like the asteroid survey mandated by the George E. Brown, Jr. Near-Earth Object Survey Act of 2005, part of the 2005 NASA Authorization Act, funded at $200 million a year. Currently NASA funds the survey at $20 million a year, considered inadequate to complete the identification of 90 percent of hazardous near-Earth objects 140 meters or greater by 2020 as mandated by the law.

Submission + - New study shows three abrupt pulses of CO2 during last deglaciation (washington.edu)

Submitted by vinces99
vinces99 writes: A new study shows that the increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide that contributed to the end of the last ice age more than 10,000 years ago did not occur gradually but rather was characterized by three abrupt pulses. Scientists are not sure what caused these abrupt increases, during which carbon dioxide levels rose about 10 to 15 parts per million – or about 5 percent per episode – during a span of one to two centuries. It likely was a combination of factors, they say, including ocean circulation, changing wind patterns and terrestrial processes. The finding, published Oct. 30 in the journal Nature, casts new light on the mechanisms that take the Earth in and out of ice ages.

“We used to think that naturally occurring changes in carbon dioxide took place relatively slowly over the 10,000 years it took to move out of the last ice age,” said lead author Shaun Marcott, who did the work as a postdoctoral researcher at Oregon State University and is now at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “This abrupt, centennial-scale variability of CO2 appears to be a fundamental part of the global carbon cycle.”

Previous research has hinted at the possibility that spikes in atmospheric carbon dioxide may have accelerated the last deglaciation, but that hypothesis had not been resolved, the researchers say. The key to the new finding is the analysis of an ice core from the West Antarctic that provided the scientists with an unprecedented glimpse into the past.

Submission + - Hewlett-Packard pleads guilty to Bribery (usatoday.com)

Submitted by Charliemopps
Charliemopps writes: Hewlett-Packard and three subsidiaries pleaded guilty Thursday to paying bribes to foreign officials in Russia, Mexico and Poland and agreed to pay $108 million in criminal and regulatory penalties. For over 10 years Hewlett-Packard kept 2 sets of books to track slush-funds they used to bribe government officials for favorable contracts.

Submission + - SanDisk Releases 512GB SD Card (computerworld.com)

Submitted by Lucas123
Lucas123 writes: SanDisk today announced the world's highest capacity SD card, a 512GB model that represents a 1,000-fold increase over the company's first 512MB card that it shipped a decade ago. The SanDisk Extreme PRO SDXC UHS-I memory card has a max read/write rate of 95MB/s and 90MB/s, respectively. The card is rated to function in temperatures from -13 to 185 degrees Fahrenheit. The 512GB model retails for $800. The card also comes in 128GB and 256GB capacities.

Submission + - Chrome OS Can Now Run Android Apps with No Porting Required

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: On Thursday, Google launched "App Runtime for Chrome (Beta)" which allows Android apps to run on Chrome OS without the need for porting. At the moment, only Duolingo, Evernote, Sight Words, and Vine are available on the platform with the rest of the Play Store's offerings to come later. Google "built an entire Android stack into Chrome OS using Native Client" in order to achieve this.

Submission + - Stephen Hawking tries Linux powered Wheelchair made by Intel (themukt.com)

Submitted by sfcrazy
sfcrazy writes: While media was crazy about a smart watch, Intel created a smart chair for disabled people. Stephen Hawking, one of the smartest brains on the planet, gave Intel’s Linux powered wheelchair a try and talked about it. The company showcased their ‘Connected Wheelchair’ at the ongoing Intel Developer Conference (IDF).

Submission + - City of Turin to Switch from Windows to Linux and Save €6M (zdnet.com)

Submitted by jrepin
jrepin writes: The municipality of Turin in Italy hopes to save 6 million Euro over five years by switching from Windows XP to Ubuntu Linux in all of its offices. The move will mean installing the open source operating system on 8,300 PCs, which will generate an immediate saving of roughly €300 per machine (almost €2.5m altogether, made up from the cost of Windows and Office licences) — a sum that will grow over the years as the need for the renewal of proprietary software licences vanishes, and the employees get used to the new machines.

Submission + - Intel Discloses Core M Broadwell Speeds, Feeds And Performance Expectations (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Intel's next-generation Broadwell Y (now known as the Core M processor) is set to ship on schedule for the end of the year. The company, occasionally flagged with criticism of its delays on the chip and with its IDF show ramping-up next week, is sharing more detail on the upcoming speeds, feeds, features and performance characteristics of its new 14nm mobile platform. Intel's Broadwell-Y lineup initially consists of three chips with apparently very little difference, except for clock speed. Base idle frequencies tip-toe along at 800MHz to 1.1GHz, with max turbo frequencies up to 2.6GHz for the dual-core chips that Intel is announcing today. All parts are able to hit a very low 4.5 Watt TDP (Thermal Design Power) power envelope. Intel is also claiming clock-for-clock gains at the CPU level but also a 40 percent gain in graphics performance, versus the previous generation low power Haswell architecture. Larger, premium tablets and 2-in-1 devices are expect to start shipping at a trickle in Q4, with a larger volume ramp in Q1.

Submission + - LLVM 3.5 Brings C++1y Improvements, Unified 64-bit ARM Backend (phoronix.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: LLVM 3.5 along with Clang 3.5 are now available for download. LLVM 3.5 offers many compiler advancements including a unified 64-bit ARM back-end from the merging of the Apple and community AArch64 back-ends, C++1y/C++1z language additions, self-hosting support of Clang on SPARC64, and various other compiler improvements.

Submission + - What Are the Most Confounding Features of Various Programming Languages? (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: Every programming language has its own unique quirks, such as weird syntax, unusual functionality or non-standard implementations, things that can cause developers new to the language, or even seasoned pros, to scratch their heads in wonder (or throw their hands up in despair). ITworld's Phil Johnson has rounded up some of the WTFiest — from the + operator in JavaScript to the trigraphs in C and C++ and indentation level in Python. What programming language oddities cause you the most grief?

Submission + - Low-Carb Diet Trumps Low-Fat Diet In Major New Study (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The NY Times reports on a new study (abstract) showing that low-carb diets have better health benefits than low-fat diets in a test without calorie restrictions. "By the end of the yearlong trial, people in the low-carbohydrate group had lost about eight pounds more on average than those in the low-fat group. They had significantly greater reductions in body fat than the low-fat group, and improvements in lean muscle mass — even though neither group changed their levels of physical activity. While the low-fat group did lose weight, they appeared to lose more muscle than fat. They actually lost lean muscle mass, which is a bad thing,' Dr. Mozaffarian said. 'Your balance of lean mass versus fat mass is much more important than weight. And that’s a very important finding that shows why the low-carb, high-fat group did so metabolically well.' ... In the end, people in the low-carbohydrate group saw markers of inflammation and triglycerides — a type of fat that circulates in the blood — plunge. Their HDL, the so-called good cholesterol, rose more sharply than it did for people in the low-fat group. Blood pressure, total cholesterol and LDL, the so-called bad cholesterol, stayed about the same for people in each group."

Submission + - Why hackers may be stealing your credit card numbers for years (computerworld.com.au)

Submitted by angry tapir
angry tapir writes: The PCI Security Standards Council, which develops PCI-DSS, has recommended that merchants switch to using point-to-point encryption to prevent the largescale siphoning of credit card details from point of sale terminals (think Target, Neiman Marcus, Michaels, UPS Store and others). However, retailers often have long technology refresh cycles, so it could be five to seven years before most move to it — not to mention that the fact that PCI-DSS version 3.0 doesn't even mandate the use of point-to-point encryption.

Slashdot Top Deals

Top Ten Things Overheard At The ANSI C Draft Committee Meetings: (5) All right, who's the wiseguy who stuck this trigraph stuff in here?

Close