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Submission + - The FIBIAC - a 3D printed electromechanical computer (chrisfenton.com)

Submitted by Brietech
Brietech writes: "Behold the FIBIAC! Its loud! It computes! It uses actual punch cards!" The FIBIAC is a simple, stepper-motor based, (mostly) 3D-printed electromechanical computer. The program is stored on a loop of paper punch-cards, and the machine uses three, 3-digit electromechanical counters for storage (which could be expanded to support more complicated programs) Watch it in action computing the Fibonacci sequence, or jump on Thingiverse and build your own!
Science

Submission + - Scientists Plan $1 Billion Ghost Town

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Although a fully operation city with no people sounds like the setup for a dystopian sci-fi novel, the Boston Globe reports that the Center for Innovation, Testing and Evaluation will develop a $1 billion scientific ghost town near Hobbs, New Mexico to help researchers test everything from intelligent traffic systems and next-generation wireless networks to automated washing machines and self-flushing toilets on existing infrastructure without interfering in everyday life. Bob Brumley, senior managing director of Pegasus Holdings, says the town will be modeled after the real city of Rock Hill, South Carolina, complete with highways, houses and commercial buildings, old and new although unlike traditional cities, City Labs will start with its underground “backbone” infrastructure that will allow the lab to monitor activity throughout the 17-mile site. “The idea for The Center was born out of our own company’s challenges in trying to test new and emerging technologies beyond the confines of a sterile lab environment,” says Brumley. Since nobody lives in the Center's buildings, computerized systems will mimic human behavior such as turning thermostats up and down, switching lights off and on, or flushing toilets. The Center’s test facilities and supporting infrastructure may require as much as 20 square miles of open, unimproved land where the controlled environment will permit evaluation of the positive and negative impacts of smart grid applications and integration of renewable energies for residential, commercial and industrial sectors of the economy. Additional testing opportunities would include technologies emerging in intelligent traffic systems, next-generation wireless networks, smart grid cyber security and terrorism vulnerability. “It’s an amusement park for the scientists,” adds Brumley. "The only thing we won't be doing is destructive testing, blowing things up — I hope.""
Facebook

Submission + - Facebook Is Killing Text Messaging

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: We’ve heard many times and from multiple sources that text messaging is declining. There are multiple reasons for this (BlackBerry Messenger, Apple’s iMessage, and even WhatsApp), but the biggest one is Facebook (Messenger). Facebook is slowly but surely killing the text message. As a result, the social networking giant is eating into the traffic carriers receive from text messaging, and thus a huge chunk of their revenues.
Bitcoin

Submission + - Bitcoinica breach nets hackers $87,000 in Bitcoin (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by dynamo52
dynamo52 writes:

More than $87,000 worth of the virtual currency known as Bitcoin was stolen after online bandits penetrated servers belonging to Bitcoinica, prompting its operators to temporarily shutter the trading platform to contain the damage.

Friday's theft came after hackers accessed Bitcoinica's production servers and depleted its online wallet of 18,547 BTC, as individual Bitcoin units are called, company officials said in a blog post published on Friday. It said the heist affected only a small fraction of Bitcoinica's overall bitcoin deposits and that all withdrawal requests will be honored once the platform reopens.
Games

Submission + - Space Quest Creators Kickstarting New Sci-Fi Adventure (kickstarter.com)

Submitted by
Decaffeinated Jedi
Decaffeinated Jedi writes: "The Two Guys from Andromeda, creators of Sierra's Space Quest series, have reunited after twenty years, and they're collaborating on a new SpaceVenture. Like the recent Leisure Suit Larry revival, the Two Guys are relying on crowdfunding through Kickstarter to get their new sci-fi adventure game off the ground. They've already released one prototype in HTML5, and they plan to release more as the project meets future funding milestones."
Space

Submission + - PSA: Dropbox Dropquest begins right now! (engadget.com)

Submitted by
TheGift73
TheGift73 writes: "Big Dropbox fan are you? Got plans for the weekend? Cancel 'em. Dropquest 2012 begins right now. If you're unfamiliar — it's the storage company's internet scavenger hunt that involves a series of puzzles, challenges and, erm, origami. If you complete the game, you'll get 1GB of extra space for free, but if you come in first place, you'll get 100GB free for your entire life, while 10 second-placers get 20GB for life and so on. You're not allowed to ask for help on the company's support forum (you'll get disqualified) and you're competing against at least half a million other fans of the service, but if that hasn't daunted you then head on down to the source link and get puzzling!"
Google

Submission + - Google Talks About Ubuntu Experience (ubuntuvibes.com)

Submitted by dartttt
dartttt writes: There was a very interesting session at UDS by Google developer Thomas Bushnell. He talked about how Ubuntu, its derivatives and Goobuntu (Google's customized Ubuntu based distro) are used by Google developers. He starts by saying 'Precise Rocks' and that many Google employees use Ubuntu including managers, software engineers, translators, people who wrote original Unix, people who have no clue about Unix etc. Many developers working on Chrome and Android use Ubuntu.

Ubuntu systems at Google are upgraded every LTS release. The entire process of upgrading can take as much as 4 months and it is also quite expensive as one reboot or a small change can cost them as much as 1 million dollars.
Security

Submission + - Adobe Changes Tune on Forcing Paid Upgrade to Fix Security Flaws (securityweek.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey
wiredmikey writes: On Thursday, news of Adobe deciding to forgo developing a software patch to address code execution vulnerabilities in three applications under its popular CS5 creative suite. The problem exists within the parsing of TIFF files. If a malicious TIFF is opened, an attacker could execute code on the system with the privileges of the active user.

Instead of developing a patch for the software, Adobe originally said that in order to fix the issue, users would have to upgrade their software to the newer CS6 version—something users would have to pay for.

But since then, and after complaints, bad press, and user backlash, Adobe has changed its tune. The company now says that it is in the process of developing a patch that won’t essentially force users to upgrade in order to fix the security vulnerability.

For a popular product that was just over two years old, providing a fix to address a serious security flaw its what customers deserve. And while Adobe may have originally tried to sneak by without addressing the issue and pushing users to upgrade to its new product, the company made the right move in the end.
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft Redesigns CHKDSK for Windows 8, Improves NTFS Health Model (hothardware.com)

Submitted by
MojoKid
MojoKid writes: "Microsoft can't do anything to magically make hard drives stop failing when parts go bad, but Redmond is rolling out a new NTFS health model for Windows 8 with a redesigned CHKDSK tool for disk corruption detection and fixing. In past versions of the CHKDSK and NTFS health model, the file system volume was either deemed healthy or not healthy. In Windows 8, Microsoft is changing things up. Rather than hours of downtime, Windows 8 splits the process into phases that include "Detect Corruption," "Online Self-Healing," "Online Verification," "Online Identification & Logging," and "Precise & Rapid Correction.""
Businesses

Submission + - Late-ish Career Boost via degree: CS or Business Informatics?

Submitted by Qbertino
Qbertino writes: Hoi Slashdotters. I'm in my early 40ies and after a little more than 10 years of web, scripting and software development as a freelancer and some gigs as a regular fulltime employee I'm seriously considering giving my IT career a boost to be more able to move up the food chain by getting a degree. I'm your regular 80ies computer kid and made a career switch to IT during the dot-bomb days. Now I'm with quite a bit of programming and project experience but sans a degree and find myself hitting somewhat of a glass ceiling with maybe a little age discrimination thrown in there — i.e. at my age you're either moving up the ladder or out. Since I'm in Germany, degrees count a lot (70% of IT staff have a degree) so getting one seems fitting and a nice touch to my portfolio. However, I'm pondering wether I should go for CS ('Informatics / Informatik' in German) or Business Informatics.

I'd like to move into Projekt Management or Technical Account Management and am in a little dilemma: CS gives me the pro credibility and proves my knowledge with low-level and tech stuff and I'd be honing my C/C++ and *nix skills and emphasising my tech cred. BI would teach me some bean-counting skills, I'd be doing modelling, ERP with Java or .Net all day (creepy, I know) and give me some BA cred but I'd lose karma with the T-Shirt wearing crew and the decision makers in that camp. Help me make my move with some educated opinions please. I'm leaning a little toward BI because I suspect that's where the money is in my case, but am not quite sure wether a classic CS degree wouldn't still be better — even if I'm wearing a suit. Any suggestions?
The Military

Submission + - Britain to deploy "sonic gun" at Olympics (reuters.com)

Submitted by skipkent
skipkent writes: Britain's military will be armed with a sonic device that can be used as a high-volume loudspeaker or a non-lethal weapon to disperse crowds at this summer's Olympic Games in London, the defence ministry said on Friday.

The equipment, which can project a piercing sound over hundreds of metres causing physical pain, has been used during protests at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh in 2009 and against pirates operating off the Somali coast.

The Ministry of Defence said it expected to use it primarily in loudspeaker mode to communicate with boats it wants to stop on the River Thames.

Defence chiefs have already caused controversy by announcing plans to put surface-to-air missiles on the top of residential buildings near the Olympics site in east London.
Music

Submission + - FireHero - Arduino and Guitar Play with Fire (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: This is more than an air guitar — it's a fire guitar and it's the most dangerous, but most impressive, Arduino project encountered to date. Take one Guitar Hero controller, an Arduino, some code and a lot of pipe work and you have ... well watch the video to see.
Censorship

Submission + - Pirate Bay ‘Censorship’ Judge is Corrupt, Claims Pirate Party Founde (torrentfreak.com) 1

Submitted by
TheGift73
TheGift73 writes: "This week yet another court order was handed down in Europe with the aim of censoring The Pirate Bay. The ruling forbids the Dutch Pirate Party from not only running a direct proxy, but also telling people how to circumvent an earlier court ordered blockade. However, according to Pirate Party founder Rick Falkvinge, the judge in the case has a history of corruption relating to another file-sharing case he presided over in the Netherlands.

The Court of The Hague in the Netherlands has been particularly busy this work with Pirate Bay-related cases."

Submission + - Could a computer write this story? (cnn.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: "I think the place where this technology is absolutely essential is the area that's loosely referred to as big data," Hammond said. "So almost every company in the world has decided at one point that in order to do a really good job, they need to meter and monitor everything."
Microsoft

Submission + - The 30 best features of Windows (pcpro.co.uk)

Submitted by
Barence
Barence writes: "PC Pro has picked out its 30 best of Windows 8. Its countdown includes features such as the revamped Task Manager, the option to run ISOs and VHDs natively, and Windows To Go, which allows you to take a portable installation of Windows 8 with you.

PC Pro has also picked ten features it would like to see added to Windows 8, including the return of the Start button on the desktop, virtual desktops and one-click sharing of optical drives."
Earth

Submission + - NASA's Hansen Calls Out Obama on Climate Change

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Dr James Hansen, director of the Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who first made warnings about climate change in the 1980s, writes in the NY Times that he was troubled to read a recent interview with President Obama in Rolling Stone in which he said that Canada would exploit the oil in its vast tar sands reserves “regardless of what we do.” According to Hansen "Canada’s tar sands, deposits of sand saturated with bitumen, contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history. If we were to fully exploit this new oil source, and continue to burn our conventional oil, gas and coal supplies, concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere eventually would reach levels higher than in the Pliocene era, more than 2.5 million years ago, when sea level was at least 50 feet higher than it is now." Hansen says that instead of placing a rising fee on carbon emissions to make fossil fuels pay their true costs, leveling the energy playing field, the world’s governments are forcing the public to subsidize fossil fuels with hundreds of billions of dollars per year. "President Obama speaks of a “planet in peril,” but he does not provide the leadership needed to change the world’s course. Our leaders must speak candidly to the public — which yearns for open, honest discussion — explaining that our continued technological leadership and economic well-being demand a reasoned change of our energy course.""
Linux

Submission + - Open Source Multi-user Password Management

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I work in a network environment that requiring multiple people have access to numerous Wireless Access Keys, iTunes/iCloud accounts/passwords, hardware appliance logins, etc.

Attempting to replace the ever popular "protected" excel spreadsheet that exists in almost every network with all usernames and passwords just waiting to be discovered.

Are there any open source, multi-user, secure and preferably Linux based password management tools that the slashdot community would recommend?
Space

Submission + - Engineer Thinks We Could Build a Real Starship Enterprise in 20 Years (universetoday.com) 3

Submitted by
Nancy_A
Nancy_A writes: "An engineer has proposed — and outlined in meticulous detail – building a full-sized, ion-powered version of the starship Enterprise complete with 1G of gravity on board, and says it could be done with current technology, within 20 years. “We have the technological reach to build the first generation of the spaceship known as the USS Enterprise – so let’s do it,” writes the curator of the Build The Enterprise website, who goes by the name of BTE Dan."

Submission + - Russia opened a criminal case related to Sukhoi crash (upilnews.com)

Submitted by
ishaverstore
ishaverstore writes: "Russia’s Investigative Committee has opened a criminal case related to the Sukhoi Superjet 100 airplane crash on the cliffs of Mount Salak in Cijeruk district, Bogor, West Java. The plane was carrying about 50 people and this news was revealed to the victims has not been found. Committee spokesman Vladimir Markin said the investigation into the collapse of commercial aircraft Sukhoi Superjet-100 began on Thursday. “As part of a criminal case, investigators have analyzed the flight crew training procedures before the flight and to assess the technica"

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