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The Military

+ - China's J-20 stealth fighter leaks

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes "China plans to begin test flight of its first J-20 stealth fighter as early as this month and plans to deploy them by 2017. Beijing appears to have completed a prototype of the stealth fighter, which Chinese experts are comparing to the US F-22 fighter, reinforcing the country's rapid military build-up, Japanese newspaper Ashai Shimbun reported quoting Chinese military sources."
Businesses

+ - For Mac developers, Armageddon comes tomorrow->

Submitted by kdawson
kdawson writes "David Gewirtz's blog post over at ZDNet warns of an imminent price collapse for traditional Mac applications, starting tomorrow when the Mac App Store opens. The larger questions: what will Mac price plunges of 90%-95% mean for the PC software market? For the Mac's market share? Quoting: 'The Mac software market is about as old-school as you get. Developers have been creating, shipping, and selling products through traditional channels and at traditional price points for decades. ... Mac software has historically been priced on a parity with other desktop software. That means small products are about $20. Utilities run in the $50-60 range. Games in the $50 range. Productivity packages and creative tools in the hundreds, and specialty software — well, the sky's the limit. Tomorrow, the sky will fall. Tomorrow, the iOS developers move in and the traditional Mac developers better stick their heads between their legs and kiss those price points goodbye.'"
Link to Original Source
Space

+ - Ten-year-old Girl Discovers Supernova

Submitted by mvar
mvar writes "Ten-year-old Kathryn Aurora Gray of Fredericton, New Brunswick under the watch of astronomers, Paul
Gray and David Lane, are pleased to report the discovery of a magnitude 17 supernova in galaxy UGC 3378
in the constellation of Camelopardalis, as reported on IAU Electronic Telegram 2618. The galaxy was imaged
on New Year's Eve 2010, and the supernova was discovered on January 2, 2011 by Kathryn Aurora Gray and
Paul Gray.

The official announcement here (pdf)"
Linux

+ - Linux Kernel 2.6.37 released

Submitted by mvar
mvar writes "Version 2.6.37 is out: It's early January, and bleary-eyed people everywhere are getting over their hangovers and wondering where they should send their merge requests to. And now they can. Because 2.6.37 is out, and the merge window for the next release is thus open. Of course, as usual, I'll probably let 2.6.37 cool for a few days to try to encourage people to look at the release rather than go all crazy with newly merged features in the next tree."
Hardware Hacking

+ - Everything you wanted to know about the MOS 6502

Submitted by mcpublic
mcpublic writes "The MOS 6502 microprocessor is famous among the vintage computing and classic gaming crowds. It was used inside the Apple II, the Commodore 64, the Atari 2600, and the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). Need I say more? In 2010, the chip's 35th anniversary year, reverse engineers came out in droves and published more details about the 6502 than ever before—yes, really! For the assembly language crowd there is Michael Steil's excellent 50 minute talk on the 6502's architecture and instruction set delivered at 27C3, the video posted just yesterday. Or maybe you just want a quick read on 6502 history and some awesome reverse engineering efforts? Check out Russ Cox's blog. But if you are looking for the original 6502 netlist, accurate down to the last undocumented instruction, or want to run an animated 6502 chip simulation in your browser, you'll definitely want to visit Greg James, Barry and Brian Silverman's visual6502.org web site. These pied pipers have attracted an enthusiastic following of like-minded engineers who are now photographing and disecting even more classic chips."
Idle

+ - Google's own office blurred out on Street View->

Submitted by digitaldc
digitaldc writes "Sometimes, even those companies that are supposedly open turn out to operate under a cloud of deep, dark secrecy.

Google, it turns out, has become one of those--at least in Germany, and not of its own volition.

I am indebted to loyal reader Ingo Klein, who directed me to the news that Google's office at Dienerstrasse 12 in Munich seems to have enjoyed the attentions of the "German Street View Shroud.""
Link to Original Source
Sci-Fi

+ - Antimatter Tests Could Lead to Starship Enterprise->

Submitted by digitaldc
digitaldc writes "Scientists at CERN, the research facility that's home to the Large Hadron Collider, claim to have successfully created and stored antimatter in greater quantities and for longer times than ever before.

Researchers created 38 atoms of antihydrogen – more than ever has been produced at one time before and were able to keep the atoms stable enough to last one tenth of a second before they annihilated themselves (antimatter and matter destroy each other the moment they come into contact with each other). Since those first experiments, the team claims to have held antiatoms for even longer, though they weren't specific of the duration.

While scientists have been able to create particles of antimatter for decades, they had previously only been able to produce a few particles that would almost instantly destroy themselves.

"This is the first major step in a long journey," Michio Kaku, physicist and author of Physics of the Impossible, told PCMag. "Eventually, we may go to the stars.""
Link to Original Source
Linux

+ - All you need is BASH?->

Submitted by lagi
lagi writes "i was looking for a quick way to manage a CentOS dedicated web server's services, configs and other common tasks, so that my co-workers will have easier life while managing things like Apache Virtual Hosts config files. and control services (via SSH, not using any server management tool) ... i'm a LAMP freelancer developer, so the logical thing was writing a PHP CLI script that does some cool stuff, but then i remembered the days all i knew about Linux is that it's called "hurricane" and then "apollo" and that was c00l! (not as much as Slackware) and i also had this BASH script to fire my ISDN connection, always worked like magic. so i looked in google for some Bash Scripting Tutorials and found this one, it covers all basic topics as well as some advance onces too, all topics with examples and are very straightforward. so i ended up with a 30 minutes script that restarts services, and manage some apache config files in a git like syntax. so now that i have this great ref by my side, i would like to know what other common development and deployment tasks i can do with bash? or maybe i should get a server management software like webmin? looks a bit too heavy for my needs..."
Link to Original Source
Privacy

EU Commission Says People Have a 'Right To Be Forgotten' Online 200

Posted by timothy
from the pesky-data-retention-laws dept.
nk497 writes "The European Commission wants to strengthen data protection rules to give more power to consumers — including the right to be forgotten online. Legislation it's looking to push through next year will let consumers know when and how their data is being used, and force companies to delete it when asked. 'People should be able to give their informed consent to the processing of their personal data,' the commission said in a statement. 'They should have the "right to be forgotten" when their data is no longer needed or they want their data to be deleted.'"
Google

CDN Optimizing HTML On the Fly 121

Posted by timothy
from the speed-is-good dept.
Caerdwyn writes "Cotendo, which is a content distribution network, has taken to altering HTML as it passes through their CDN to optimize web pages for faster rendering. This is essentially a repackaging of the Apache mod mod_pagespeed (from Google), with the critical difference being that the rewriting of HTML occurs inline rather than at the web server. We all know that well-written HTML can result in much better rendering of whatever your content is; the questions are 'Will this automatic rewriting cause other problems, i.e. browser quirks?' and 'Assuming that only the web pages of Cotendo's customers are altered, are there nonetheless potential legal troubles with someone rewriting HTML before delivery to a browser?'"
Biotech

+ - DNA-Less 'Red Rain' Cells Reproduce at 121 C->

Submitted by eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes "A new paper up for prepublication from the controversial solid-state physicist Godfrey Louis claims that the cells Louis collected from a Keralan red rain incident divide and produce daughter cells at 121 degrees Celsius. While unusual, this is not unheard of as the paper recalls cells cultivated from hydrothermal vents are known to reproduce at 121 C as well. Of course, caution is exercised when dealing with the possible explanation surrounding the theory of panspermia but the MIT Technology Review says researchers 'examined the way these fluoresce when bombarded with light and say it is remarkably similar to various unexplained emission spectra seen in various parts of the galaxy. One such place is the Red Rectangle, a cloud of dust and gas around a young star in the Monocerous constellation.' Evidence of panspermia or merely proof that Earthly life is diverse and sometimes far above us?"
Link to Original Source
Amiga

+ - The Amiga is back!?-> 1

Submitted by AtlSickBoi
AtlSickBoi writes "Commodore USA has acquired the rights to sell computers under the Amiga brand with the plan to have the computers running AROS. I'm sure Davy Haynie is getting his camera ready for another documentary."
Link to Original Source

+ - Open data needs open source tools->

Submitted by macslocum
macslocum writes "Nat Torkington begins sketching out an open data process that borrows liberally from open source tools: "An open data project would need a mailing list to collaborate on, IRC or equivalent to chat in real-time, and a bug-tracker to identify what needs work and ensure that the users' needs are being met. The official dataset of New Zealand school zones has errors but there's nobody to report them to, much less a way to submit a fix to a maintainer. Oh, and don't forget a way to acknowledge and credit contributors—think not just of credits.txt but also of the difference between patch submitter, committer, and project maintainer.""
Link to Original Source

+ - Slashdot poll suggestion

Submitted by
vikingpower
vikingpower writes "Precision of the most precise measuring device you ever used:
- picometers
- femtofarads
- microvolts
- attobreadcrumbs
- metric tons
- evacowboyneals
- what is this precision thing you are talking of ?
- I am in marketing, you insensitive clod !"

No one wants war. -- Kirk, "Errand of Mercy", stardate 3201.7

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