Forgot your password?

Close
typodupeerror

Comment: Dark Matter and the Rest of Us (Score 1) 28

by gpronger (#43773255) Attached to: Dark Matter, WIMPS, and NASA's Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer Data
I do not believe the issue is it being over-hyped; I would take it as a positive for anything to grab the general public's attention in a positive way for basic science research. Maybe we have a bit of solid marketing here by Michael Turner in coining the term "Dark Matter" for this stuff which grabs the imagination of folk who are outside the small sphere of people who actually understand this (and I would completely acknowledge that I am one).

Is the article a bit "fluffy"? Sure. But if the link was to the IOP, maybe in about 2 weeks, and pulling out my college physics textbooks (oops, they predate this stuff) I might begin to understand the actual theoretical equations behind it. If you churn through the full length of the article it does touch on some meatier topics mentioning WIMPS, supersymmetry, and my favorite the neutralino (just because it sounds cool). Again, yes, lightly, but for the audience targeted doing a pretty decent job of explaining in terms that can be understood and maybe whet the appetite a bit.

And maybe that is the point, sitting here more than a few years past college, I am not likely to go back into to school and study theoretical physics and put together an eloquent equation that pulls all of this together. But, maybe in talking with my kids (in college or college bound) they may pick up the excitement and move the topic forward. Because, in the end it is all marketing. Where are the brightest heading, and what will move forward. If articles like this one sparks some interest, then I'll put up with a bit of fluff (and fully recognize that I would not understand much at all if they broke out the underlying math) if it sways public opinion in favor of basic research, and maybe helps sway a couple of new physicists.

Comment: Bigger Problem Than Realized (Score 1) 953

by gpronger (#43528611) Attached to: Some Windows XP Users Can't Afford To Upgrade
If you go into the lab world, it is unlikely that your trash can a lab instrument just because the operating system is no longer supported. The instrument vendor, always looking at their own bottom line, will, more often than not, want you to buy a new ($100K+) instrument. Of our core analytical instruments, (say 16 PC's) only one is running Windows 7 (don't get me started on Windows 8). Most are XP (very stable platform) but a few are Windows 2000 machines.

Comment: Wondows 8 - Ummmm, Yeah. (Score 1) 1010

by gpronger (#43435559) Attached to: Windows 8 Killing PC Sales
Using 8 on a new PC (PC had died). Contrary to the Microsoft commercials, Windows 8 was not designed for the desktop, and I would not recommend it unless you had to. Between Win 7 & Win 8, I would have trouble identifying ANY advantages of 8 over 7. As in literally none. Conversely, 7, from a desktop perspective is easier to navigate, doesn't end up with a bunch of open windows, tucked into the side of your screen, etc.
Ubuntu

+ - Ubuntu Developer Summit Reformatted; Is Canonical Starting To Cut Costs?->

Submitted by sfcrazy
sfcrazy writes "The upcoming Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) scheduled to take place in Oakland, California in May 2013 has been 'canceled' and will instead be conducted online. This marks a major shift in UDS as they won't be physical events anymore. It's a very surprising move when the company needs physical interection even more as they enter the mobile space. It seems thecompany has started to cut cost and this doen't look very good as the company is not making any profit and doesn't have any product in the market which can promise any revenue. Ubuntu TV and Ubuntu for Android were announced more than a year ago and have not found any partners to bring them to users. Is Canonical spreading too thin and it needs to shed some weight and focus on its' core area — enterprise and server space?"
Link to Original Source
Space

+ - Astronomers Used Dashcam Footage to Calculate the Russian Meteor's Trajectory->

Submitted by derekmead
derekmead writes "The Chelyabinsk meteorite was unexpected, but the digital age means we’re always ready to capture something interesting. Case in point. News of the meteorite broke with a slew of amateur videos from cars, security cameras, and cell phones, offering immediate proof that the news wasn’t a hoax. The videos all also captured something really useful: the trail of a fireball streaking across the sky.

To researchers, that’s perfect trajectory data. Amateur videos caught enough of the fireball’s trajectory that Jorge Zuluaga and Ignacio Ferrin, two researchers at the University of Antioquia in Medellin, Colombia, were able to work backward to find the meteorite’s orbit and origin. Their results are now available on the arXiv pre-print server (PDF).

The Colombian researchers were inspired by Stefen Geens, who first published an estimate of the Chelyabinsk meteor’s path. Matching dashboard and security cameras footage with data from Google Earth, he was able to reconstruct the path of the rock as it entered the atmosphere. It matched the trajectory image taken by the geostationary weather satellite Meteosat-9."
Link to Original Source
Android

+ - Google's Rumored Music Streaming Service Could Give Spotify The Chills ->

Submitted by
pigrabbitbear
pigrabbitbear writes "Would you be willing to let Google take over more of your life? Google thinks so: It's rumored to be creating a subscription-based streaming service that would undoubtedly give Spotify a run for its money. The details are sparse right now, but an anonymous source told Bloomberg that "negotiations are under way with major record labels to license their music.""
Link to Original Source
Privacy

+ - Hospital unresponsive to multiple alerts about stolen data ->

Submitted by
netbuzz
netbuzz writes "Security experts trying to tell a rural hospital that sensitive data belonging to its staff and possibly patients sits exposed on the Internet have been stymied since last week by the fact that no one at the medical facility will respond to their repeated warnings. “This is more commonplace than you might suspect,” says a healthcare professional who volunteers for the Open Security Foundation and blogs about privacy issues under the pseudonym Dissent Doe. “I've gone through hoops trying to notify various city agencies at times, and have gotten no responses to attempts to alert a major Canadian newspaper, a major U.S. health insurer where patient info was available on the web if you knew where to look, and a number of small businesses. And those are just the ones I can recall offhand.”"
Link to Original Source

+ - DOJ admits Aaron's prosecution was political-> 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "The DOJ has told Congressional investigators that Aaron’s prosecution was motivated by his political views on copyright.
I was going to start that last paragraph with “In a stunning turn of events,” but I realized that would be inaccurate — because it’s really not that surprising. Many people speculated throughout the whole ordeal that this was a political prosecution, motivated by anything/everything from Aaron’s effective campaigning against SOPA to his run-ins with the FBI over the PACER database. But Aaron actually didn’t believe it was — he thought it was overreach by some local prosecutors who didn’t really understand the internet and just saw him as a high-profile scalp they could claim, facilitated by a criminal justice system and computer crime laws specifically designed to give prosecutors, however incompetent or malicious, all the wrong incentives and all the power they could ever want."
Link to Original Source

+ - Stanford announces winners for SPIRL prize for innovation in research libraries->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Stanford has announced the winners of it's inaugural SPIRL prize for innovation in research libraries. The national library of France and the in Spain were the winners, with Australia's Griffith University Research Hub and the New York Public Library Labs winning commendations of merit."
Link to Original Source
Technology

+ - How a cute animal video deceived everybody->

Submitted by colinneagle
colinneagle writes "In September, an astounding video of an amazingly altruistic pig saving a goat that appeared to be trapped in a small pond went viral quickly, spreading from an otherwise unused YouTube account to Time magazine, NBC's "Today" show, and ABC's "Good Morning America." The New York Times reports that the video, which has since racked up more than 7 million YouTube views — and will probably see a few million more in the wake of the Times' report — was staged.

Even more notably, it wasn't staged by an anonymous YouTube user, like the one behind the infamous "Golden Eagle Snatches Kid" video, which saw 42 million views before it was debunked hours later. The more adorable, and plausible, story of the goat and the pig was staged by Nathan Felder, the 29-year-old comedian and star of the upcoming Comedy Central show "Nathan For You," in which Felder "helps small businesses execute outrageous marketing stunts devised by him and his producers," the Times says.

NBC apparently showed the video on its Nightly News program even though Felder says he ignored the network's "fairly persistent" requests, the Times says. However, what is even more interesting is how little the reporters behind these shows bothered to verify the video's legitimacy. To NBC's credit, Nightly News anchor Brian Williams acknowledged that he had "no way of knowing if it's real." As the Times points out, few others bothered to even look into it:

"When the video was played on 'Good Morning America,' Elizabeth Vargas tried to ask her fellow presenters how the pig had freed the goat, but she was met with laughter. 'Every day with Elizabeth, it’s like, ‘How did this happen?’' replied the weather anchor Sam Champion."
Link to Original Source
Games

+ - Crysis 3 Review: Amazing Graphics, Boring Execution->

Submitted by
MojoKid
MojoKid writes "Let's get one thing clear up front. Crysis 3's graphics are absolutely stunning. Crytek's latest game doesn't raise the bar — it annihilates it. At the highest settings, Crysis blows Battlefield 3 out of the water, makes mincemeat of Max Payne, and makes the original Crysis — itself a graphics powerhouse — look more like the first Call of Duty. Crysis 3 really is that stunning, provided that you've got the graphics card to handle it. Like the first game, this title is capable of bringing even a high-end card to its knees. Cevat Yerli swore that he and his team would deliver an uncompromisingly amazing product for the PC. And they did. Everyone who worked in the artistic departments, from character animations to texturing, deserves an award. The people who wrote the game's plot, on the other hand, don't. The game's design and some poor pacing decisions completely undermine what should be its greatest selling point. Crysis 3 could've been a great game but it feels like a science experiment. How much poor gameplay will players suffer through in exchange for utterly amazing graphics?"
Link to Original Source
Security

+ - Stuxnet's Earliest Known Version Discovered and Analyzed->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Symantec researchers have discovered an older version of the infamous Stuxnet worm that caused the disruption at Iran's nuclear facility in Natanz: Stuxnet 0.5. According to a whitepaper released by the researchers at RSA Conference 2013, Stuxnet 0.5 has first been detected in the wild in 2007 when someone submitted it to the VirusTotal malware scanning service, but has been in development as early as November 2005. Unlike Stuxnet versions 1.x that disrupted the functioning of the uranium enrichment plant by making centrifuges spin too fast or too slow, this one was meant to do so by closing valves."
Link to Original Source
The Internet

+ - Six strick warning from internet providers for illegal downloads begins-> 1

Submitted by mynameiskhan
mynameiskhan writes "Major internet service providers will monitor the internet traffic 'to' the customer's computer and will warn them if they download copyrighted materials using peer to peer network. The article says "A person will be given up to six opportunities to stop before the Internet provider will take more drastic steps, such as temporarily slowing their connection, or redirecting Internet traffic until they acknowledge they received a notice or review educational materials about copyright law.". Furthermore, if you appeal the warning you will be required to pay $35 to stake your claim. Have the ISPs have had enough of RIAA pestering or are they siding with RIAA?"
Link to Original Source
Security

+ - Cryptography Becoming 'Less and Less Important', Adi Shamir Says->

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes "In the current climate of continuous attacks and intrusions by APT crews, government-sponsored groups and others organizations, cryptography is becoming less and less important and defenders need to start thinking about new ways to protect data on systems that they assume are compromised, one of the fathers of public-key cryptography said Tuesday. Adi Shamir, who helped design the original RSA algorithm, said that security experts should be preparing for a "post-cryptography" world.

"I definitely believe that cryptography is becoming less important. In effect, even the most secure computer systems in the most isolated locations have been penetrated over the last couple of years by a series of APTs and other advanced attacks," Shamir, of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, said during the Cryptographers' Panel session at the RSA Conference here today.

"We should rethink how we protect ourselves. Traditionally we have thought about two lines of defense. The first was to prevent the insertion of the APT with antivirus and other defenses. The second was to detect the activity of the APT once it's there. But recent history has shown us that the APT can survive both of these defenses and operate for several years.""
Link to Original Source

Abstainer, n.: A weak person who yields to the temptation of denying himself a pleasure. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"

Close