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Submission + - Sorry, Fanboys, There Will Be No Rise of the Machines (blog)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: From the blog: "You’ve seen it in billion dollar movie franchises. You’ve read it in countless science fiction novels. You’ve heard it straight from the mouths of luminaries in the world of technology. It’s the premise that one day, machines will become so intelligent that they will rise up against their human creators, and either destroy them outright or simply out-compete them to extinction. The premise sounds plausible. It plays into our innate paranoia towards everything we don’t understand. But it’s actually as ridiculously and preposterously absurd as the premise that the earth is flat — maybe more so!"

Submission + - Print Isn't Dead: How Linux Voice Crowdfunded A New Magazine

Submitted by M-Saunders
M-Saunders writes: The death of print has been predicted for years, and many magazines and publishers have taken a big hit with the rise of eBooks and tablets. But not everyone has given up. Four geeks quit their job at an old Linux magazine to start Linux Voice, an independent GNU/Linux print and digital mag with a different publishing model: giving profits and content back to the community. Six months after a successful crowdfunding campaign, the magazine is going well, so here is the full story.

Submission + - No RIF'd Employees Need Apply for Microsoft External Staff Jobs for 6 Months 1

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: So, what does Microsoft do for an encore after laying off 18,000 employees with a hilariously bad memo? Issue another bad memo — Changes to Microsoft Network and Building Access for External Staff — "to introduce a new policy [retroactive to July 1] that will better protect our Microsoft IP and confidential information." How so? "The policy change affects [only] US-based external staff (including Agency Temporaries, Vendors and Business Guests)," Microsoft adds, "and limits their access to Microsoft buildings and the Microsoft corporate network to a period of 18 months, with a required six-month break before access may be granted again." Suppose Microsoft feels that's where the NSA went wrong with Edward Snowden? And if any soon-to-be-terminated Microsoft employees hope to latch on to a job with a Microsoft external vendor to keep their income flowing, they best think again. "Any Microsoft employee who separated from Microsoft on or after July 1, 2014," the kick-em-while-they're-down memo explains, "will be required to take a minimum 6-month break from access between the day the employee separates from Microsoft and the date when the former employee may begin an assignment as an External Staff performing services for Microsoft."

Submission + - The real case for Mars and why NASA is stagnant (nationalreview.com)

Submitted by icer1024
icer1024 writes: For the past 42 years, NASA leadership has been adrift. Between 1961 and 1973, NASA flew the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Skylab, Ranger, Surveyor, and Mariner missions, and did all the development for the Pioneer, Viking, and Voyager missions as well. In addition, the space agency developed hydrogen–oxygen rocket engines, multi-staged heavy-lift launch vehicles, nuclear rocket engines, space nuclear reactors, radioisotope power generators, spacesuits, in-space life-support systems, orbital rendezvous techniques, soft-landing rocket technologies, interplanetary navigation technology, deep-space data-transmission techniques, reentry technology. Contrast that against the period of 2000 to 2014, NASA flew 39 Shuttle missions, allowing it to twice repair the Hubble Space Telescope and complete a space station. About a dozen interplanetary probes were launched (compared to over 30 lunar and planetary probes between 1961 and 1973). Even more astounding is that the past 14 years have seen a adjusted budget of just 18% beneath the 1961-1973 era. Why the discrepancy in productivity? The NASA of today is marked by a complete failure in leadership from the top down. Read on for more...

Submission + - Apollo 11 Moon Landing Turns 45

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: On July 20, 1969, U.S. astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to walk on the moon. Neil Armstrong would say later he thought the crew had a 90% chance of getting home from the moon, and only a 50% chance of landing safely. The scope of NASA's Apollo program seems staggering today. President Kennedy announced his moon goal just four years into the Space Age, but the United States had not even launched a human into orbit yet. Amazingly, just eight years later, Armstrong and Aldrin were walking on the moon.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Linux Login and Resource Management/Restriction in a Computer Lab

Submitted by rongten
rongten writes: I am managing a computer lab composed of various kind of Linux workstations, from small desktops to powerful workstations with plenty of ram and cores. The users' $HOME is NFS mounted, and they either access via console (no user switch allowed), ssh or x2go. In the past the powerful workstations were reseved to certain power users, but now even "regular" students may need to have access to high memory machines for some tasks.
I ask slashdort, is there a sort of resource management that would permit: to forbid a same user to log graphically more than once (like UserLock), to limit the amount of ssh sessions (i.e. no user using distcc and spamming the rest of the machines or even worse running in parallel), to give priority to the console user (i.e. automatically renicing remote users jobs and restricting their memory usage), to avoid swapping and waiting (i.e. all the users trying to log into the latest and greatest machine, so have a limited amount of logins proportional to the capacity of the machine).
The system being put in place uses Fedora 20, ldap PAM authentication, it is puppet managed, and NFS based. In the past I tried to achieve similar functionality via cron jobs, login scripts, ssh and nx management, queuing system.
But it is not an elegant solution and it is hacked a lot.
Since I think these requirements should be pretty standard for a computer lab, I am surprised to see that I cannot find something already written for it.
Does any of you know of a similar system, preferably opensource? A commercial solution could be acceptable as well.

Submission + - Can the Multiverse be Tested Scientifically? (discovery.com)

Submitted by astroengine
astroengine writes: Physicists aren’t afraid of thinking big, but what happens when you think too big? This philosophical question overlaps with real physics when hypothesizing what lies beyond the boundary of our observable universe. The problem with trying to apply science to something that may or may not exist beyond our physical realm is that it gets a little foggy as to how we could scientifically test it. A leading hypothesis to come from cosmic inflation theory and advanced theoretical studies — centering around the superstring hypothesis — is that of the "multiverse," an idea that scientists have had a hard time in testing. But now, scientists at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, in Ontario, Canada, have, for the first time, created a computer model of colliding universes in the multiverse in an attempt to seek out observational evidence of its existence.

Submission + - Comcast Is Astroturfing the Net Neutrality Issue (esquire.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: By its own admission, Comcast is working with think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute. Fellows at the Institute are printing op-eds all throughout the media in support of killing Net neutrality--without disclosing the think tank's ties to Comcast

Submission + - MicroxWin Creates Linux DIstribution That Runs Debian/Ubuntu & Android Apps (phoronix.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: VolksPC who developed MicroXwin as a lightweight X Window Server has come up with their own Linux distribution. Setting apart VolksPC's distribution from others is that it's based on both Debian and Android and has the capability to run Debian/Ubuntu/Android apps together in a native ARM experience. The implementation doesn't depend on VNC or other similar solutions of the past that have tried to join desktop apps with mobile Android apps. This distribution is also reportedlby compatible with all Android applications. The distribution is expected to begin shipping on an ARM mini-PC stick.

Submission + - Linux Needs Resource Management for Complex Workloads (enterprisestorageforum.com)

Submitted by storagedude
storagedude writes: Resource management and allocation for complex workloads has been a need for some time in open systems, but no one has ever followed through on making open systems look and behave like an IBM mainframe, writes Henry Newman at Enterprise Storage Forum. Throwing more hardware at the problem is a costly solution that won’t work forever, notes Newman.

He writes: 'With next-generation technology like non-volatile memories and PCIe SSDs, there are going to be more resources in addition to the CPU that need to be scheduled to make sure everything fits in memory and does not overflow. I think the time has come for Linux – and likely other operating systems – to develop a more robust framework that can address the needs of future hardware and meet the requirements for scheduling resources. This framework is not going to be easy to develop, but it is needed by everything from databases and MapReduce to simple web queries.’

Submission + - Biggest "patent troll" slapped hard by appeals court (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by mpicpp
mpicpp writes: Dozens of companies were sued over an old Polaroid digital imaging patent.

The most litigious "patent troll" in the US has lost a major case after the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit found its patent was too abstract.

Court declines to stop software patents altogether.

The ruling from last week is one of the first to apply new Supreme Court guidance about when ideas are too "abstract" to be patented. In the recent Alice v. CLS Bank case, the high court made clear that adding what amounts to fancy computer language to patents on basic ideas shouldn't hold up in court.

The patents in this case describe a type of "device profile" that allows digital images to be accurately displayed on different devices. US Patent No. 6,128,415 was originally filed by Polaroid in 1996. After a series of transfers, in 2012 the patent was sold to Digitech Image Technologies, a branch of Acacia Research Corporation, the largest publicly traded patent assertion company. A study on "patent trolls" by RPX found that Acacia Research Corporation was the most litigious troll of 2013, having filed 239 patent lawsuits last year.

Submission + - U.S. Senator blasts Microsoft's H-1B push as it lays 18,000 off workers (computerworld.com)

Submitted by dcblogs
dcblogs writes: On the floor of U.S. Senate Thursday, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) delivered a scalding and sarcastic attack on the use of highly skilled foreign workers by U.S. corporations that was heavily aimed at Microsoft, a chief supporter of the practice. Sessions' speech began as a rebuttal to a recent New York Times op-ed column by Microsoft founder Bill Gates, investor Warren Buffett and Sheldon Adelson, a casino owner that has chastised Congress for failing to take action on immigration reform. But the senator's attack on "three of our greatest masters of the universe," and "super billionaires," was clearly primed by Microsoft's announcement, also on Thursday, that it was laying off 18,000 employees. "What did we see in the newspaper today?" said Sessions, "News from Microsoft. Was it that they are having to raise wages to try to get enough good, quality engineers to do the work? Are they expanding or are they hiring? No, that is not what the news was, unfortunately. Not at all."

Submission + - China's Tianhe-2 Tops Supercomputer Chart Again (bbc.com)

Submitted by arisvega
arisvega writes: China has the world's most powerful supercomputer for the third time in a row as the country once again ups its presence in the global top 500.

Tianhe-2 was top of the twice-yearly list that keeps tabs on supercomputer development and growth.

Since the last list, China had 20% more supercomputers in the top 500, while US representation went down 15%.

However, the US still dominates the chart with 233 computers making the latest tally.

China had 76, up from 63 in the last count. This is almost as many as the UK (30), France (27) and Germany (23) combined.

The full list is to be published Monday (today) at a conference in Leipzig, Germany.

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