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Submission + - Monday's Keep Us Up At Night

Submitted by randomErr
randomErr writes: Tune Hotels Group completed a study that we're like Wowbagger from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in that we can't deal well with Sunday afternoons and nights. People in general have a sleep deficit because of the anxieties about starting the working week. Jason Ellis, Professor of Sleep Science at Northumbria University is quotes as saying "Sunday-somnia" is something I see a lot and it's important that people deal with the issues surrounding their sleep deprivation so that it doesn't have a knock on effect on sleep later in the week.'

Comment Re:define terms in article summary (Score 1) 44

by Gazzonyx (#49201775) Attached to: Red Hat Strips Down For Docker

[...]

I'd be interested to see which distro can get their image down to the smallest (functional) size. Strip the OS down to just the absolute minimum required to boot it up, then leave it upto the docker image creators to decide what services to enable. It's a great way to minimize attack vectors, keep image size down and make the container nice and lightweight.

A few years ago for a special purposed built box, I gutted a Slackware install, modified the disk scheduler in the kernel and removed every driver and every module that my hardware didn't use. My memory is a foggy on the numbers, but I believe the install itself was under a handful of GB (with my development tool chain and libraries) and booted to run level 3 using somewhere between 64-128 MB RAM (I think it was actually in the 32 MB range, but that sounds too small for me to be confident about it) and part of that was actually dedicated to the readahead daemon.

Granted I'd never do that again, but it was a fun summer project to build a server rack when I was just out of college. These days I don't flinch to throw hardware at a problem if I think it's going to take up my valuable time and it will scale for whatever values of "N" I'm expecting to be reasonable.

Submission + - The Abandoned Google Project Memorial Page

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Quentin Hugon, Benjamin Benoit and Damien Leloup have created a memorial page for projects adandoned by Google over the years including: Google Answers, Lively, Reader, Deskbar, Click-to-Call, Writely, Hello, Send to Phone, Audio Ads, Google Catalogs, Dodgeball, Ride Finder, Shared Stuff, Page Creator, Marratech, Goog-411, Google Labs, Google Buzz, Powermeter, Real Estate, Google Directory, Google Sets, Fast Flip, Image Labeler, Aardvark, Google Gears, Google Bookmarks, Google Notebook, Google Code Search, News Badges, Google Related, Latitude, Flu Vaccine Finder, Google Health, Knol, One Pass, Listen, Slide, Building Maker, Meebo, Talk, SMS, iGoogle, Schemer, Notifier, Orkut, Hotpot, Music Trends, Refine, SearchWiki, US Government Search, Sparrow, Web Accelerator, Google Accelerator, Accessible Search, Google Video, and Helpouts. Missing from the list that we remember are Friend Connect, Google Radio Ads, Jaiku, SideWiki, and Wave.

We knew there were a lot, but who knew there'd be so many. Which abandoned Google project do you wish were still around?

Submission + - NVIDIA Fixes Old Compiz Bug

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: NVIDIA has fixed a long-standing issue in the Ubuntu Unity desktop by patching Compiz. When opening the window of a new application, it would go black or become transparent on NVIDIA hardware. There has been bug reports dating back to Ubuntu 12.10 times. The problem was caused by Compiz, which had some leftover code from a port. An NVIDIA developer posted on Launchpad and said that the NVIDIA team has been looking at this issue and they also proposed a patch. "Our interpretation of the specification is that creating two GLX pixmaps pointing at the same drawable is not allowed, because it can lead to poorly defined behavior if the properties of both GLX drawables don't match. Our driver prevents this, but Compiz appears to try to do this.", wrote NVIDIA's Arthur Huillet. The Compiz patch has been accepted upstream.

Submission + - Astronomers Find a Dusty Galaxy That Shouldn't Exist (nationalgeographic.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Peering back in time to find the very earliest objects in the universe, an international team of astronomers has discovered a galaxy that shouldn't be there at all.

The problem, the scientists report Monday in Nature , is that while the tiny galaxy dates from just 700 million years or so after the big bang, it's far more dusty than something this young and small has any right to be.

The dusty galaxy is just one of the recent surprises astronomers have found. "Last week," says Marrone, "we learned of an incredibly massive black hole in the early universe. Now we have this average galaxy with significant amounts of dust. We've had this cartoon picture of the early universe, but it's clear that we really don't know what's going on."

Submission + - Photo First: Light Captured as Both Particle and Wave (discovery.com)

Submitted by mpicpp
mpicpp writes: It’s one of those enduring Zen koans of science that we’ve all grown up with: Light behaves as both a particle and a wave—at the same time. Einstein taught us that, so we’re all generally on board, but to actually understand what it means would require several Ph.D.s and a thorough understanding of quantum physics.

What’s more, scientists have never been able to devise an experiment that documents light behaving as both a wave and a particle simultaneously. Until now.

That’s the contention of a team of Swiss and American researchers, who say they’ve succeeded in capturing the first-ever snapshot of light’s dual behavior. Using an advanced electron microscope – one of only two on the planet – at the EPFL labs in Switzerland, the team has generated a kind of quantum photograph of light behaving as both a particle and a wave.

The experiment involves firing laser light at a microscopic metallic nanowire, causing light to travel — as a wave — back and forth along the wire. When waves traveling in opposite directions meet, they form a “standing wave” that emits light itself — as particles. By shooting a stream of electrons close to the nanowire, the researchers were able to capture an image that simultaneously demonstrates both the wave-nature and particle-nature of light.

“This experiment demonstrates that, for the first time ever, we can film quantum mechanics — and its paradoxical nature — directly,” says lead researcher Fabrizio Carbone of EPFL, on the lab’s project page. The study is to be officially published this week in the journal Nature Communications.

Submission + - New Seagate Shingled hard drive teardown

Submitted by Peter Desnoyers
Peter Desnoyers writes: Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) drives are starting to hit the market, promising larger drives without heroic (and expensive) measures such as helium fill, but at a cost — data can no longer be over-written in place, requiring SSD-like algorithms to handle random writes.

At the USENIX File and Storage Technologies conference in February, researchers from Northeastern University (disclaimer — I'm one of them)
dissected shingled drive performance both figuratively and literally, using both micro-benchmarks and a window cut in the drive to uncover the secrets of Seagate's first line of publicly-available
SMR drives.

TLDR: It's a pretty good desktop drive — with write cache enabled (the default for non-server setups) and an intermittent workload it performs quite well, handling bursts of random writes (up to a few tens of GB total) far faster than a conventional drive — but only if it has long powered-on idle periods for garbage collection. Reads and large writes run at about the same speed as on a conventional drive, and at $280 it costs less than a pair of decent 4TB drives. For heavily-loaded server applications, though, you might want to wait for the next generation.

Videos (in 16x slow motion) showing the drive in action — sequential read after deliberately fragmenting the drive, and a few thousand random writes.

Comment Re:Great News (Score 1) 234

I, for one, am concerned over the constant use of the words "legal content" without defining what is and what isn't "legal content" and under what jurisdictions that falls. My pet theory is that bullying and "hate speech" will become unlawful and then blocked, and you know how the government is when it has a new hammer; everything starts to look like our thumbs.

Submission + - NSA Spying Wins Another Rubber Stamp (nationaljournal.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: The FISA court has again renewed an order allowing the NSA to continue its illegal bulk collection of Americans' phone records, at least until June 1 when it is set to expire in Congress. President Obama pledged to end the controversial program more than a year ago.

The extension is the fifth of its kind since Obama said he would effectively end the Snowden-exposed program as it currently exists during a major policy speech in January 2014. Obama and senior administration officials have repeatedly insisted that they will not act alone to end the program without Congress.

After all the other things he's done against or without congressional approval and he balks at this one?

Submission + - Google Taking Over New TLDs (sealedabstract.com)

Submitted by bobo the hobo
bobo the hobo writes: In the corner of the internet where people care about DNS, there is a bit of an uproar at Google's application for over a hundred new top-level domains, including .dev, .lol, .app, .blog, .cloud and .search. Their application includes statements such as:
By contrast, our application for the .blog TLD describes a new way of automatically linking new second level domains to blogs on our Blogger platform – this approach eliminates the need for any technical configuration on the part of the user and thus makes the domain name more user friendly.

And also limiting usage of .dev to Google only:
Second-level domain names within the proposed gTLD are intended for registration and use by Google only, and domain names under the new gTLD will not be available to the general public for purchase, sale, or registration. As such, Charleston Road Registry intends to apply for an exemption to the ICANN Registry Operator Code of Conduct as Google is intended to be the sole registrar and registrant.

Submission + - Intel Employee here. Intel says it's for Net Neutrality, but isn't?

Submitted by whistlingtony
whistlingtony writes: I work for Intel.

I'm not in a position of authority. I work in the Fab. This is NOT my area of expertise, although I care about the issue and try to be informed.

I was pretty bummed to find that Intel was on an letter with other companies against Title II regulation.

I also ran into a little piece on the company intranet about Net Neutrality, and emailed the author. It turns out he is, I believe, Intel's main lobbyist in Washington D.C.

He told me that Intel was FOR Net Neutrality. It seems everyone thinks that we're against it.

http://www.theverge.com/2014/1...

http://arstechnica.com/busines...

After speaking to him via phone and email, I got pretty discouraged. It really feels to me as if Intel is trying to say "Yay! We're for NN!" while doing everything it can to sink real regulation and oversight.

After talking to the guy for a while, It seems Intel believes that Title II regulation will slow growth. In addition, Intel thinks that the FCC has all the authority it needs under section 706, so the FCC shouldn't TRY for Title II regulation.

I think that's hogwash, to be polite. I hope it's the position of this one guy, and not the company? I doubt this though.

Frankly, I think that Intel will do well in a competitive environment. Without Net Neutrality, we WILL have a less competitive environment. I'm afraid of broadband companies strangling the next Google or Netflix because they don't want the competition for their own services. As a stockholder, I think this is a bad move.

I also don't think the Broadband companies will spend less under Title II. Oh, they SAY they will, but of course they do... What else would they say?

Frankly, I think broadband companies are simply afraid of unbundling. Back in the dial up days when most of us got our internet over the phone lines, there was Title II regulation and the ISPs had to lease their lines to competitors at sane prices. This gave us choice and competition. You could go get a mom and pop local company to be your ISP, and their service was AWESOME. I think the entire resistance to Title II is that the ISPs don't want those days again. Comcast has long been one of the worst companies in America in terms of customer service and satisfaction.

I don't know why Intel is following their lead. We should want MORE competition, not less. Why are we doing this?

I looked into section 706, and it seems to lack a LOT of teeth. Our main lobbyist said that the FCC could use section 706, but Title II would be tied up in the courts for a long time.

I read up on court cases from 2014, and the circuit court in D.C. said that the FCC gave up it's authority and that all it needed to do was reclassify to title II and it could have it back. The courts themselves seem to disagree with Intel's position. Section 706 is a mandate to report and vague permission to do something if broadband coverage isn't widely spread enough. It's very vague, and WILL be tied up in the courts.

From the court case...

“Even though section 706 grants the Commission authority to promote broadband deployment by regulating how broadband providers treat edge providers, the Commission may not utilize that power in a manner that contravenes any specific prohibition contained in the Communications Act. ... We think it obvious that the Commission would violate the Communications Act were it to regulate broadband providers as common carriers. Given the Commission’s still-binding decision to classify broadband providers not as providers of “telecommunications services” but instead as providers of “information services,” such treatment would run afoul of section 153(51).”

http://transition.fcc.gov/Dail...

I think it's pretty disingenious for Intel to say that we're for Net Neutrality while we try to sink it. I think Intel is lying to people, and I don't like it, as a customer, as an employee, and as a shareholder.

The FCC is voting to decide if we get Title II regulation BACK (We had it before and it was awesome) on the 26th of Feb, 2015. It's coming soon! I wish my company was on the right side here, but it seems they're not.

I wish I could change that, but it seems I can't.

Does anyone have any ideas? Should I be calling for boycott? Should I take to Twitter? Will that help?

I am also a little scared of being too effective. I LIKE my job, and Intel is good to me as an employee. I just wish we wouldn't be saying things are are demonstratively wrong, to ourselves and to the world.

For more information, please read up. This is IMPORTANT folks. The internet is our main communication channel now.

http://www.savetheinternet.com...

https://www.aclu.org/net-neutr...

https://www.eff.org/issues/net...

Submission + - How Machine Learning Ate Microsoft

Submitted by snydeq
snydeq writes: Yesterday's announcement of Azure Machine Learning offers the latest sign of Microsoft's deep machine learning expertise — now available to developers everywhere, InfoWorld reports. 'Machine learning has infiltrated Microsoft products from Bing to Office to Windows 8 to Xbox games. Its flashiest vehicle may be the futuristic Skype Translator, which handles two-way voice conversations in different languages. Now, with machine learning available on the Azure cloud, developers can build learning capabilities into their own applications: recommendations, sentiment analysis, fraud detection, fault prediction, and more. The idea of the new Azure offering is to democratize machine learning, so you no longer need to hire someone with a doctorate to use a machine learning algorithm.'

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