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Submission + - AMD Launches Radeon R7 Series Solid State Drives With OCZ (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: AMD is launching a new family of products today, but unless you follow the rumor mill closely, it's probably not something you'd expect. It's not a new CPU, APU, or GPU. Today, AMD is launching its first line of solid state drives (SSDs), targeted squarely at AMD enthusiasts. AMD is calling the new family of drives, the Radeon R7 Series SSD, similar to its popular mid-range line of graphics cards. The new Radeon R7 Series SSDs feature OCZ and Toshiba technology, but with a proprietary firmware geared towards write performance and high endurance. Open up one of AMD's new SSDs and you'll see OCZ's Indilinx Barefoot 3 M00 controller on board—the same controller used in the OCZ Vector 150, though it is clocked higher in these drives. That controller is paired to A19nm Toshiba MLC (Multi-Level Cell) NAND flash memory and a DDR3-1333MHz DRAM cache. The 120GB and 240GB drives sport 512MB of cache memory, while the 480GB model will be outfitted with 1GB. Interestingly enough, AMD Radeon R7 Series SSDs are some of the all-around, highest-performing SATA SSDs tested to date. IOPS performance is among the best seen in a consumer-class SSD, write throughput and access times are highly-competitive across the board, and the drive offered consistent performance regardless of the data type being transferred. Read performance is also strong, though not quite as stand-out as write performance.

Submission + - Munich reverses course, may ditch Linux for Microsoft (networkworld.com) 1

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: The German city of Munich, long one of the open-source community’s poster children for the institutional adoption of Linux, is close to performing a major about-face and returning to Microsoft products. Munich’s deputy mayor, Josef Schmid, told the Süddeutsche Zeitung http://www.sueddeutsche.de/mue... that user complaints had prompted a reconsideration of the city’s end-user software, which has been progressively converted from Microsoft to a custom Linux distribution – “LiMux” – in a process that dates back to 2003.

Submission + - Nintendo plans Pokémon Trading Card Game for iOS (playerattack.com)

Submitted by dotarray
dotarray writes: After years of saying it'd never happen, Nintendo is releasing a game for iOS. Pokémon Trading Card Game Online is officially headed to iPad, due out by the end of the year. While it's not necessarily the gotta catch 'em all RPG fans have been asking for, it's still a nifty little offering.

Submission + - Feds: Red light camera firm paid for Chicago official's car, condo

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The former CEO of Redflex, a major red light camera vendor, and John Bills, former Managing Deputy Commissioner at the Department of Transportation, have been indicted on federal corruption charges stemming from a contract with the City of Chicago. According to the indictment, a friend of Bills was hired as a contractor and paid $2 million. Much of that money was then kicked back to Bills, who also got a Mercedes and a condominium via Redflex employees. The defendants are facing 23 counts including: mail fraud, wire fraud, and bribery. Each fraud count carries a maximum sentence of 20 years.

Submission + - NASA HDEV failed camera? (nasa.gov)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: [KTH] The NASA HDEV video feed located at http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/HDEV/ is currently showing a seriously bugged video feed, might they have had their first camera failure?

Submission + - Cell Phone Guide For US Protesters (eff.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Electronic Frontier Foundation has updated its guide for protecting yourself and your cell phone at a protest. In addition to being extremely powerful tools (real-time communication to many watchers via social media, and video recording functionality), cell phones can also give authorities a lot of information about you if they confiscate it. The EFF is trying to encourage cell phone use and prepare people to use them. Here are a few small snippets: "Start using encrypted communications channels. Text messages, as a rule, can be read and stored by your phone company or by surveillance equipment in the area. ... If the police ask to see your phone, tell them you do not consent to the search of your device. Again, since the Supreme Court's decision in Riley, there is little question that officers need a warrant to access the contents of your phone incident to arrest, though they may be able to seize the phone and get a warrant later. ... If your phone or electronic device was seized, and is not promptly returned when you are released, you can file a motion with the court to have your property returned."

Submission + - Switching Game Engines Halfway Through Development

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Third-party game engines are wonderful creations, allowing developers to skip a lengthy and complicated part of the development process and spend more time on content creation. But each engine has its own strengths and weaknesses, and they may not be apparent at the beginning of a project. If you realize halfway through that your game doesn't work well on the engine you picked, what do you do? Jeff LaMarche describes how he and his team made the difficult decision to throw out all their work with Unity and start over with Unreal. He describes some technical limitations, like Unity's 32-bit nature, and some economic ones, like needing to pay $500 per person for effective version control. He notes that Unreal Engine 4 has its problems, too, but the biggest reason to switch was this: "Our team just wasn't finding it easy to collaborate. We weren't gelling as a cohesive team and we often felt like the tools were working against us."

Submission + - NSA/GCHQ: The HACIENDA Program for Internet Colonization (heise.de)

Submitted by Advocatus Diaboli
Advocatus Diaboli writes: Since the early days of TCP, port scanning has been used by computer saboteurs to locate vulnerable systems. In a new set of top secret documents seen by Heise, it is revealed that in 2009, the British spy agency GCHQ made port scans a "standard tool" to be applied against entire nations. Twenty-seven countries are listed as targets of the HACIENDA program in the presentation, which comes with a promotional offer: readers desiring to do reconnaissance against another country need simply send an e-mail.

Submission + - The IPV4 internet has broken (www.nux.ro) 2

Submitted by pla
pla writes: Due to a new set of routes published today, the internet has effectively undergone a schism. All routers with a TCAM allocation of 512k (or less), in particular Cisco Catalyst 6500 and 7600's, have started randomly forgetting portions of the internet. Time to switch to all IPV6 yet?

Submission + - UCSD To Test Safety Of Spinal Stem Cell Injection (ucsd.edu)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have launched a clinical trial to investigate the safety of neural stem cell transplantation in patients with chronic spinal cord injuries. This Phase I clinical trial is recruiting eight patients for the 5-year study.

Pre-clinical studies of these cells by Ciacci and Martin Marsala, MD, at the UC San Diego School of Medicine, showed that these grafted neural stem cells improved motor function in spinal cord injured rats with minimal side effects indicating that human clinical trials are now warranted.

Submission + - New Jersey May Shield Drivers From Other States' Red Light, Speed Cameras (aol.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: New Jersey may soon prohibit other states from issuing traffic citations to its residents for alleged violations caught on speed or red-light cameras.

Lawmakers in the Garden State have introduced a bill that would stop New Jersey's Motor Vehicles Commission from providing license-plate numbers or other identifying information to another state or an interstate information network for the purpose of doling out a fine.

"I've been getting loads of complaints from people," state senator Nick Sacco told The Star-Ledger , the state's largest newspaper. "They drive to Virginia to visit relatives. They go through Maryland. They come back home and start receiving tickets in the mail. And they swear that they're not speeding; that they're keeping up with the traffic."

The whole process stinks from a lack of due process. You are guilty until you can prove your innocence and your state will suspend your license without a hearing if you fail to pay out of state traffic fines.

Submission + - About half of kids' learning ability is in their DNA (latimes.com)

Submitted by Taco Cowboy
Taco Cowboy writes: http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2...

You may think you’re better at reading than you are at math (or vice versa), but new research suggests you’re probably equally good (or bad) at both. The reason: The genes that determine a person’s ability to tackle one subject influence their aptitude at the other, accounting for about half of a person’s overall ability

The study, published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, used nearly 1,500 pairs of 12-year-old twins to tease apart the effects of genetic inheritance and environmental variables on math and reading ability. The researchers administered a set of math and verbal tests to the children and then compared the performance of different sets of twins. They found that the twins’ scores — no matter if they were high or low — were twice as similar among pairs of identical twins as among pairs of fraternal twins. The results indicated that approximately half of the children’s math and reading ability stemmed from their genetic makeup

A complementary analysis of unrelated kids corroborated this conclusion — strangers with equivalent academic abilities shared genetic similarities. What’s more, the genes responsible for math and reading ability appear to be numerous and interconnected, not specifically targeted toward one set of skills. These so-called “generalist genes” act in concert to determine a child’s aptitude across multiple disciplines

The finding that one’s propensities for math and reading go hand in hand may come as a surprise to many, but it shouldn’t. People often feel that they possess skills in only one area simply because they perform slightly worse in the other

Feed Google News Sci Tech: FCC doesn't buy Verizon's throttling rationale, wants all carriers to explain .. (google.com)

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Reuters
FCC doesn't buy Verizon's throttling rationale, wants all carriers to explain ...
PCWorld
On Friday, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler dismissed Verizon's reasoning for throttling certain mobile broadband users, and announced that the Commission was questioning other mobile carriers' throttling policies as well,...
FCC vote pushes 911 texting service for allDigital Trends
FCC chairman slams Verizon's 'all the kids do it' defense to data throttlingApple Insider
FCC to wireless providers: When do you slow download speeds?Christian Science Monitor
VentureBeat-Reuters
all 102 news articles

Submission + - DARPA Wants To Kill The Password (itworld.com)

Submitted by jfruh
jfruh writes: Many security experts agree that our current authentication system, in which end users are forced to remember (or, more often, write down) a dizzying array of passwords is broken. DARPA, the U.S. Defense Department research arm that developed the Internet, is trying to work past the problem by eliminating passwords altogether, replacing them with biometric and other cues, using off-the-shelf technology available today.

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