58450961
submission
jones_supa writes:
Japan has ordered a destroyer in the Sea of Japan to strike any ballistic missiles that may be launched by North Korea in the coming weeks after Pyongyang fired a Rodong medium-range missile over the sea. Japanese Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera issued the order on Thursday, but did not make it public in order to avoid putting a chill on renewed talks between Tokyo and Pyongyang. The Rodong missile fell into the sea after flying 650 km, short of a maximum range thought to be some 1,300 km, which means it could reach Japan. Japanese Aegis destroyers in the Sea of Japan are equipped with advanced radar equipment able to track multiple targets and carry missiles designed to take out targets at the edge of space.
58359233
submission
jones_supa writes:
Speculation about this project started to circulate in November last year when some noticed that a certain Windows Store app had a much faster start up time. Known internally as Project N, .NET Native improves the performance of .NET applications by precompiling managed code into native one using the Microsoft’s C++ back-end infrastructure. This technology is different from NGen (Native Image Generator) or dynamic compilation for Store apps. MRT100.DLL represents a minimum CLR, refactored and optimized for static compilation. So, when the application starts up it runs against this minimal CLR without loading the entire .NET runtime, without involving any JIT compilation. Applications can still use dynamic to access objects whose type is decided at run time. This is made possible by discovering during code optimization and keeping all the possible types that might be accessed at runtime. Also, the standard background garbage collection is used. Not much changes for the .NET developer, except that you obviously have to build separate binaries for different architectures.
58353675
submission
jones_supa writes:
A new Northwestern Medicine study reports the timing, intensity and duration of your light exposure during the day is linked to your weight — the first time this has been shown. People who had most of their daily exposure to even moderately bright light in the morning had a significantly lower body mass index (BMI) than those who had most of their light exposure later in the day, the study found. It accounted for about 20 percent of a person’s BMI and was independent of an individual’s physical activity level, caloric intake, sleep timing, age or season. About 20 to 30 minutes of morning light is enough to affect BMI. The senior author Phyllis C. Zee rationalizes this by saying that light is the most potent agent to synchronize your internal body clock that regulates circadian rhythms, which in turn also regulate energy balance. The study was small and short. It included 54 participants (26 males, 28 females), an average age of 30. They wore a wrist actigraphy monitor that measured their light exposure and sleep parameters for seven days in normal-living conditions. Their caloric intake was determined from seven days of food logs. The study was published April 2 in the journal PLOS ONE. Giovanni Santostasi, a research fellow in neurology at Feinberg, is a co-lead author.
58322609
submission
jones_supa writes:
Wanting to focus their efforts on their most important strategic initiatives and ensuring that the company is not spread too thin, Canonical is shutting down Ubuntu One file services. Being an additional motive, the free storage wars aren’t a sustainable place for Canonical to be, particularly with other services now regularly offering from 25 GB to 50 GB free storage. As of today, it will no longer be possible to purchase storage or music from the Ubuntu One store. The Ubuntu One software will not be included in the upcoming Ubuntu 14.04 LTS release, and the Ubuntu One apps in older versions of Ubuntu and in the Ubuntu, Google, and Apple stores will be updated appropriately. The current services will be unavailable from 1 June 2014; user content will remain available for download until 31 July, at which time it will be deleted. For a spark of solace, the company promises to open source the backend code.
58262779
submission
jones_supa writes:
Microsoft Visual C++ compiler's static-analysis parallelism caused Bruce Dawson's machine to seriously get on its knees, so he rolled up his sleeves and dug deeper to investigate. It turns out that the MSVC++ compiler (cl.exe) causes the full Internet Explorer engine (mshtml.dll) to be loaded every time the static code analysis feature is used. However the actual slowdown isn't created by the weight of the IE engine but by the communication on the windowing system. In fact, about 65% of the traffic on the windowing system lock was from the VC++ compiler, mostly via mshtml.dll. But why? Well, here's what we know. The compiler loads mspft120.dll – the /analyze DLL. Then mspft120 loads msxml6.dll to load an XML configuration file. Then msxml6 loads urlmon.dll to open the stream, and finally urlmon loads mshtml.dll. Then mshtml.dll creates a window, because that’s what it does. If you run many copies of the compiler then you get many windows being opened, and over-subscribed CPUs, and madness ensues. Maybe nobody at Microsoft ever noticed that mshtml.dll was being loaded, or else they didn’t run enough parallel compiles for it to matter.
58236261
submission
jones_supa writes:
Having a good night's sleep seems to play a big part in people having heart attack risk. Switching over to daylight saving time, and hence losing one hour of sleep, raised the risk of having a heart attack the following Monday by 25 percent, compared to other Mondays during the year, according to a new U.S. study released on Saturday. By contrast, heart attack risk fell 21 percent later in the year, on the Tuesday after the clock was returned to standard time, and people got the extra hour of sleep. The not-so-subtle impact of moving the clock forward and backward was seen in a comparison of hospital admissions from a database of non-federal Michigan hospitals. It examined admissions before the start of daylight saving time and the Monday immediately after, for four consecutive years. Researchers cited limitations to the study, noting it was restricted to one state and heart attacks that required artery-opening procedures, such as stents.
58216611
submission
jones_supa writes:
New Caledonian crows — already known to be smart — may also understand how to displace water to receive a reward, with the causal understanding level of a 5-7 year-old child, according to results published in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Sarah Jelbert from University of Auckland and colleagues. As demonstrated in the included video, Scientists used the Aesop's fable riddle — in which subjects drop stones into water to raise the water level and obtain an out-of reach-reward — to assess New Caledonian crows' causal understanding of water displacement. Crows completed 4 of 6 water displacement tasks, including preferentially dropping stones into a water-filled tube instead of a sand-filled tube, dropping sinking objects rather than floating objects, using solid objects rather than hollow objects, and dropping objects into a tube with a high water level rather than a low one. However, they failed two more challenging tasks, one that required understanding of the width of the tube, and one that required understanding of counterintuitive cues for a U-shaped displacement task. The authors note that these tasks did not test insightful problem solving, but were directed at the birds' understanding of volume displacement.
58042041
submission
jones_supa writes:
Everyone knows video games are big in Japan, but in recent years the question has been whether Japan is still big in video games. 'Japan is over. We're done. Our game industry is finished,' said Mega Man and Dead Rising creator Keiji Inafune at the Tokyo Game Show in 2009, and five years on there's no doubt that the country has continued to lose the grip it once held on the gaming world. Whereas the biggest games in the PlayStation 2 era came from Japanese franchises like Final Fantasy and Resident Evil, the most recent console generation saw blockbuster development dominated by Western games like Call of Duty and Mass Effect. The responsibility of saving the situation could be in the hands of Japanese indie developers.
57943499
submission
jones_supa writes:
The legendary musician Kate Bush will play her first series of shows after a 35-year break, performing August and September in the UK. Bush will play 15 shows at London’s Eventim Apollo starting 26 August as part of her Before the Dawn series of shows. Theories to explain her absence from the tour circuit have included a fear of flying, perfectionism and the death of her lighting director, Bill Duffield, who was killed in an accident during her April 1979 concert at Poole Arts Centre. In an interview with Mojo magazine in 2011, Bush said she’d also endured extreme exhaustion as a result of the tour. 'It was enormously enjoyable. But physically it was absolutely exhausting.' The singer has made isolated and rare appearances in the 80s.
57904369
submission
jones_supa writes:
Researchers at Tampere University of Technology, Finland have been surprised of their finding about engine braking creating significant amounts of toxic nanoparticles (Google translation). 'Traffic exhaust fumes carrying nanoparticles are distributed all around where people go. Whether we are indoors or outdoors, there is an exposure to them. According to current knowledge, nanoparticles are the biggest health concern in our environment', tells associate professor Topi Rönkkö from the aerosol physics laboratory. The metal-based particles are released when gasoline injection is stopped during driving when performing engine braking. When they analyzed a heavy diesel engine vehicle rolling downhill with the foot lifted from the gas pedal, the amount of generated toxic particles shot through the roof, even though previous research claims otherwise. This was a surprise also to car manufacturers and oil companies. After the finding, Rönkkö himself cringes driving especially behind large trucks and recommends keeping a good safe distance.
57874273
submission
jones_supa writes:
Unreal Engine 4 from Epic to game developers is launching now. Supported platforms are Windows, OS X, iOS and Android, with desktop Linux coming later. The monetization scheme is unique: anyone can get access to literally everything for a $19/month fee. Epic is working to build a company that succeeds when UE4 developers succeed. Therefore, part of the deal is that anyone can ship a commercial product with UE4 by paying 5% of gross revenue resulting from sales to users, helping the ecosystem. The tools you get are the Unreal Editor in ready-to-run form, and the engine's complete C++ source code hosted on GitHub for collaborative development. Provided also is the foundation for the community: chat in the forums, add to the wiki, participate in the AnswerHub Q&A, and join collaborative development projects via GitHub. The company is also shipping lots of ready-made content, samples, and game templates. So, will this effort succeed? That's up to you and your judgment of the engine’s value. Unreal Engine 4 has been built by a team of over 100 engineers, artists and designers around the world, and this launch 'represents all of Epic's hopes and dreams of how major software can be developed and distributed in the future'.
57868147
submission
jones_supa writes:
In a Business Insider column, Dan Moskowitz observes McDonald's having to change in future to survive. The restaurants would become more of a coffee shop, or die a slow and painful death. This doesn't mean McDonald's will completely stop serving burgers and fries. That has yet to be established, and even if it did do this, it would likely occur many years down the road. However, one thing is certain: because of the rise of the health-conscious consumer, burgers and fries will not be the company's growth catalyst. Moskowitz talks a lot about healthy breakfast choices in the menu already gaining increasing interest. It's very possible that McDonald's key competitors down the road will be Dunkin' Donuts and Starbucks, not Wendy's and Burger King.
57834749
submission
jones_supa writes:
More great news for Linux gamers: following the footsteps of Steam, GOG.com is preparing delivery of Linux games, with expected showtime being this autumn. The officially supported distributions will be Ubuntu and Mint. Right now they are performing testing on various configurations, training up their teams on Linux-speak, and generally preparing for the rollout of at least 100 titles — DRM-free as usual. This will update some existing games of the catalog with a Linux port and bring new ones to the collection. Further information on specific games is yet not known, but GOG invites fans and customers to their community wishlist to discuss.
57797659
submission
jones_supa writes:
In a new blog post, the Ubuntu main man Mark Shuttleworth calls an end for proprietary firmwares such as ACPI. His reasoning is that running any firmware code on your phone, tablet, PC, TV, wifi router, washing machine, server, or the server running the cloud your SAAS app is running on, is a threat vector against you, and NSA's best friend. 'Arguing for ACPI on your next-generation device is arguing for a trojan horse of monumental proportions to be installed in your living room and in your data centre. I've been to Troy, there is not much left.' As better solutions, Shuttleworth suggests delivering your innovative code directly to the upstream kernel, or using declarative firmware that describes hardware linkages and dependencies but doesn’t include executable code.
57792745
submission
jones_supa writes:
The Khronos Group today announced the immediate release of the OpenGL ES 3.1 specification, bringing significant functionality enhancements to the royalty-free 3D graphics API that is used on nearly all of the world’s mobile devices. Key features of ES 3.1 include: compute shaders, mixing and matching shaders without explicit linking step, indirect memory-fetched draw commands, enhanced texturing functionality, new shader language features and, optional extensions. The API will retain compatibility with previous versions of OpenGL ES. The OpenGL ES working group at Khronos expects also to update the OpenGL ES Adopter’s Program to provide extensive conformance tests for OpenGL ES 3.1 within three months. This ensures that conformant OpenGL ES implementations provide a reliable, cross-platform graphics programming platform.
