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Submission + - Corporate FOSS Users seek to tell developers what to do.

Submitted by jralls
jralls writes: OK, maybe the headline is a tiny bit inflammatory. The New York Times broke a story today (paywalled if you look at more than 10 stories a month) about ToDo, "an open group of companies who run open source programs" who are seeking to "committed to working together in order to overcome" the challenges of using FOSS, "including ensuring high-quality and frequent releases, engaging with developer communities, and using and contributing back to other projects effectively". The more militant among us will read that as "It's not enough getting a free ride off of developers building great software, we want to shove our roadmap down their throats and get them to work harder for us — without having to pay for it, of course." That might be a bit harsh, but none of the companies on the page are exactly well known for cooperating with the projects they use, with Google being one of the worst offenders by forking both Linux and WebKit.

Submission + - Zappos proactively resets account passwords for users

Submitted by grahamsaa
grahamsaa writes: I received an e-mail tonight stating that my Zappos password had been reset. Since I rarely use the site and don't store credit card information there, I used a throwaway password for that account. Apparently my throwaway password made it onto the the list of passwords, so Zappos proactively changed it.

Have any other sites done this to you recently? What's your stance on using an easy to remember 'throwaway' password on sites that don't have any of your sensitive data?

Submission + - 'Solid light' could compute previously unsolvable problems (scienceblog.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Researchers at Princeton University have begun crystallizing light as part of an effort to answer fundamental questions about the physics of matter. The researchers are not shining light through crystal – they are transforming light into crystal. As part of an effort to develop exotic materials such as room-temperature superconductors, the researchers have locked together photons, the basic element of light, so that they become fixed in place. “It’s something that we have never seen before,” said Andrew Houck, one of the researchers. “This is a new behavior for light.”

Submission + - Universal Big Bang lithium deficit confirmed

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: New data from a globular cluster in nearby dwarf galaxy has confirmed that the deficit of lithium that astronomers have found in the Milky Way also exists in other galaxies.

According to the Big Bang theory, the amount of lithium in the universe should be two or three times more than it is. This result shows that the deficit exists outside the Milky Way, which suggests strongly that something significant is wrong with the Big Bang theory.

Submission + - Laid off from job, man builds tweeting toilet (computerworld.com)

Submitted by dcblogs
dcblogs writes: With parts from an electric motor, a few household items, an open-source hardware board running Linux, and some coding, Thomas Ruecker, built a connected toilet that Tweets with each flush. The first reaction to the Twitter feed at @iotoilets may be a chuckle. But the idea behind this and what it illustrates is serious. It tracks water usage, offers a warning about the future of privacy in the Internet of Things, and may say something about the modern job hunt. Ruecker built his device on a recent long weekend after he was laid off as an open source evangelist at a technology firm undergoing "rightsizing," as he put it. He lives in Finland.
User Journal

Journal Journal: Rant: Untrusted Data from the Source 4

Journal by Chacham

While trying to load test data, we found duplicates (based on the unique key) in the provided file. So, the BA (English is not her first language) asked them:

Does the test file present valid business scenarios?

The response

Submission + - Linus Torvalds Want to Dominate the Desktop (eweek.com)

Submitted by darthcamaro
darthcamaro writes: Linux is everywhere or is it? At the LinuxCon conference in Chicago today Linus Torvalds was asked where Linux should go next. Torvalds didn't hesitate with his reply.

"I still want the desktop," Torvalds said as the audience erupted into boisterous applause.

Torvalds doesn't see the desktop as being a kernel problem at this point either, but rather one about infrastructure. While not ready to declare a 'Year of the Linux Desktop' he does expect that to happen — one day.

Submission + - Involuntary Eye Movement May Provide Definitive Diagnosis of ADHD (gizmag.com)

Submitted by Zothecula
Zothecula writes: If a child who's simply very active is mistakenly diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), they can end up on pharmaceuticals such as Ritalin unnecessarily. The problem is, it can be quite difficult to determine if someone actually has ADHD, and misdiagnoses are common. Now, however, researchers from Tel Aviv University have announced that analyzing a patient's eye movements may be the key.

Submission + - Do Dark Matter and Dark Energy cast doubt on the Big Bang?

Submitted by StartsWithABang
StartsWithABang writes: Back in the 1960s, after the discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background, the Big Bang reigned supreme as the only game in town. But back then, we also assumed that what we consider as "normal matter" — i.e., protons, neutrons and electrons — was, along with photons and neutrinos, the only stuff that made up the Universe. But the last 50 years have shown us that dark matter and dark energy actually make up 95% of the energy composition of our cosmos. Given that, is there any wiggle room to possibly invalidate the Big Bang?

Submission + - FCC Mandates Text-to-911 From All US Wireless Carriers

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: On Friday, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted to require all U.S. wireless carriers and popular messaging applications to support texting to emergency response units via 911. AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile implemented this capability back in 2012; the FCC's vote will make it mandatory for all carriers that operate in the country as well as all messaging applications that interconnect with the SMS structure in the U.S. to follow suit. One technological hurdle this mandate faces is the difficulty of tracing "the exact physical origin of a text message, particularly in residences with multiple floors."

Submission + - Has radar technology caught up with steath technology? (usni.org)

Submitted by AbrasiveCat
AbrasiveCat writes: In the continuing game of cat and mouse between offensive and defensive technologies of war, the technology of radar stealth may have been matched by new multiple frequency radar systems. U.S Naval Institute News (http://news.usni.org/2014/07/29/chinese-russian-radars-track-see-u-s-stealth) reports the Chinese and Russians maybe developing such systems. The present radar systems use high frequency waves for accurately locating an incoming target. Stealth aircraft are designed to adsorb or reflect these wave away from the receiver. It turns out longer wave radars can see the stealth aircraft. The longer wave radar lacks the precision of the high frequency radar, but when the two are combined, as the Russians, Chinese (and US) are doing, you can produce accurate targeting radar. The F117 may have been in a golden age for stealth technology, it will be interesting to see if the F35 arrives to late to be effective against other countries with advanced radar systems.

Submission + - Veep Joe Biden Briefs U.S. Governors on H-1B Visas, IT, and Coding

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Back in 2012, Computerworld blasted Vice President Joe Biden for his ignorance of the H-1B temporary work visa program. But Joe's got his H-1B story and he's sticking to it, characterizing the visa program earlier this month in a speech to the National Governors Association as "apprenticeships" of sorts that companies provide to foreign workers to expand the Information Technology industry only after proving there are no qualified Americans to fill the jobs. Biden said he also learned from his talks with tech's top CEOs that 200,000 of the jobs that companies provide each year to highly-skilled H-1B visa holders could in fact be done by Americans with no more than a two-year community college degree.

Submission + - Firefox 33 gets Cisco's OpenH264 (ghacks.net)

Submitted by NotInHere
NotInHere writes: As promised, version 33 of the Firefox browser will fetch the OpenH264 module from Cisco, which enables Firefox to decode and encode H.264 video, for both the <video> tag and WebRTC, which has a codec war on this matter. The module won't be a traditional NPAPI plugin, but a so-called Gecko Media Plugin (GMP), Mozilla's answer to the disliked Pepper API. Firefox had no cross-platform support for H.264 before.

Submission + - Comcast Customer Service Rep Just Won't Take No For An Answer

Submitted by RevWaldo
RevWaldo writes: The Verge and other sources post how AOL's Ryan Block ultimately succeeded in cancelling his Comcast account over the phone, but not before the customer service representative pressed him for eight solid minutes (audio) to explain his reasoning for leaving "the number one provider of TV and internet service in the country" in a manner that would cause a character in Glengarry Glen Ross to blanch. Comcast has as of now issued an apology.

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