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The Internet

Submission + - Amazon.com: Earth's Biggest Wine Cellar?

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Ever get carded by your FedEx guy? You will. Several writers at GeekWire had just unboxed, uncorked and polished off their first bottle of Amazon wine, only to have their buzz killed by the need to cover Steven Sinofsky's unexpected exit from Microsoft. With the caveat that per-order shipping charges will discourage those watching their pennies from ordering single bottles of inexpensive wine, GeekWire gave the overall Amazon wine buying experience a thumbs-up. Still time to send a case to whoever's hosting Thanksgiving for that hard-drinking family of yours!
Math

Submission + - Climate treaty negotiators are taking the wrong approach, says game theory (sciencenews.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Climate treaty negotiators would do well to have a little chat with some game theorists, according to this article. The fundamental approach they've been taking for the last several years is flawed, these researchers say, and they can prove it. They also have some better ideas about what to do.
Google

Submission + - Google open non-destructive book scanner; books and libraries rejoice (google.com)

Submitted by
leighklotz
leighklotz writes: "Google released open hardware designs for a book scanner that "sucks" pages to turn them, using a vacuum cleaner. The Google Tech Talk Video starts with Jeff Breidenbach of the Google Books team, and moves on to Dany Qumsiyeh showing how simple his design is to build. Could it be that the Google Books team has had enough of destroying the library in order to save it? Or maybe the just want to up-stage the Internet Archive's Scanning Robot.

Disclaimer: I worked with Jeff when we were at Xerox (where he did the awesome hack Gnu Chess on your Scanner), but this is more awesome because it saves books."

Submission + - Hostess (Twinkies!) to liquidate if bakers' strike continues through Thursday (cnn.com) 4

Submitted by PolygamousRanchKid
PolygamousRanchKid writes: Hostess Brands said Wednesday that it will go into liquidation unless bakers striking in protest against a new contract imposed in bankruptcy court return to work by the end of the day Thursday.

Even if Hostess does end up in liquidation, analysts say that some of its most iconic brand names — Twinkies, Ding Dongs and Wonder Bread, to name a few — will likely live on, getting scooped up at auction and attached to products from other companies
Software

Submission + - US Air Force scraps ERP project after $1 billion spent (computerworld.com.au)

Submitted by
angry tapir
angry tapir writes: "The U.S. Air Force has decided to scrap a major ERP (enterprise resource planning) software project after spending US$1 billion, concluding that finishing it would cost far too much more money for too little gain. Dubbed the Expeditionary Combat Support System (ECSS), the project has racked up $1.03 billion in costs since 2005, "and has not yielded any significant military capability," an Air Force spokesman said in a statement. "We estimate it would require an additional $1.1B for about a quarter of the original scope to continue and fielding would not be until 2020. The Air Force has concluded the ECSS program is no longer a viable option for meeting the FY17 Financial Improvement and Audit Readiness (FIAR) statutory requirement. Therefore, we are cancelling the program and moving forward with other options in order to meet both requirements.""
Science

Submission + - Volcano may have killed off new bioluminescent cockroach (mongabay.com)

Submitted by terrancem
terrancem writes: A newly discovered light-producing cockroach, Lucihormetica luckae, may have already been driven to extinction by a volcanic eruption in Ecuador. The species, only formally described by scientists this year, hasn't been spotted since the Tungurahua Volcano erupted in July 2010. The new species was notable because it represented the only known case of mimicry by bioluminescence in a land animal. Like a venomless king snake beating its tail to copy the unmistakable warning of a rattlesnake, Lucihormetica luckae's bioluminescent patterns are nearly identical to the poisonous click beetle, with which it shares (or shared) its habitat.
Science

Submission + - Entire Pig Genome Sequenced in Breakthrough That Could Combat Human Disease (medicaldaily.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Scientists announced Wednesday that they have mapped the entire genome of the domestic pig, revealing that besides providing tasty bacon and sausages, the animal may also be useful in fighting human diseases.
The study published in the journal Nature found that pigs and humans share 112 DNA mutations that have previously been linked to diseases like obesity, diabetes, dyslexia, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, according to US and European researchers.
Researchers said that because pigs share many of the same complex genetic diseases as humans, the animals would serve as excellent models for studying the underlying biology of human disease.
Security

Submission + - Hacker Grabs 150k Adobe User Accounts via SQL Injection (darkreading.com)

Submitted by
CowboyRobot
CowboyRobot writes: "Adobe today confirmed that one of its databases has been breached by a hacker and that it had temporarily taken offline the affected Connectusers.com website. The hacker, who also goes by Adam Hima, told Dark Reading that the server he attacked was the Connectusers.com Web server, and that he exploited a SQL injection flaw to execute the attack. "It was an SQL Injection vulnerability, somehow I was able to dump the database in less requests than normal people do," he says. Users passwords for the Adobe Connectusers site were stored and hashed with MD5, he says, which made them "easy to crack" with freely available tools. And Adobe wasn't using WAFs on the servers, he notes. Tal Beery, a security researcher at Imperva, analyzed the data dump in the Connectusers Pastebin post and found that the list appears to be valid and that the hacked database was relatively old."
Internet Explorer

Submission + - IE 10 almost finished for Windows 7 with final preview (arstechnica.com) 1

Submitted by Billly Gates
Billly Gates writes: IE 10 just hit the final preview yesterday for Windows 7. Windows XP and Windows Vista support has been dropped. Most slashdotters have a complex relationship with Internet Explorer. Many of us are hating it, while some of us are writting websites for it, or supporting it in an office setting. Microsoft has tried last year to make IE good again with release IE 9 which had some fanfare on slashdot, such as hardware acceleration and better standards compliancy, while MS even launched a full campaign to get us to switch.. IE 10 is supposed to continue the new process and promises to be much faster and support much more HTML 5 and CSS 3 and W3C HTML 5.1 and CSS 3.1 with a score of 320 on HTML5test. As a comparison, last years IE 9 only scored 138. The download is available here. Perhaps a few webdevelopers could care to comment if MS is really changing up its game since IE 6? It also appears that MS is rapidly releasing its browser on an annual schedule as well. What are the reactions of IT departments since IE 9 is now going to be an obsolete browser already?
Moon

Submission + - Google Lunar X Prize teams now in a race with China as well as each other (examiner.com)

Submitted by
MarkWhittington
MarkWhittington writes: "The Google Lunar X Prize rules of competition has a clause that reduces the $20 million grand prize to $15 million for the first private group to land a rover on the lunar surface should a government funded rover land first. The first scheduled government funded rover to land on the moon is the Chinese Chang’e 3. It is slated for a 2013 landing."
Android

Submission + - CyanogenMod Domain Stolen (cyanogenmod.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The team behind CyanogenMod, one of the most popular community-driven, Android-based operating systems for phones and tablets, has announced that they're moving to Cyanogenmod.org after their .com domain was held ransom by a community member. He had been in control of the .com domain name for some time, but the team found out he was impersonating Cyanogen to make deals with community sites. When they removed his access to other parts of the CM infrastructure, he demanded $10,000 to relinquish control of the domain and threatened to change the DNS entries. When they refused to pay, he went through with it. The team is now disputing control of the domain with ICANN. They said, 'We will continue to be open about the what, when, how, but unfortunately, we may never know the "why" – though greed comes to mind. The team itself has not made a profit off of CM and that is not our goal. But to have one of our own betray the community like this is beyond our comprehension.'
Chrome

Submission + - Visualizing 100,000 Stars in Chrome (thenextweb.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Google has rolled out a new web experiment for Chrome. This one is a visualization of the locations of over 100,000 nearby stars. It pulls data from astrometric databases and catalogs to show accurate relative locations of the stars. You can zoom and pan around the cluster, zoom all the way in to the solar system, or zoom all the way out to see how even this huge number of stars is dwarfed by the rest of the Milky Way. It also has data on a number individual stars in our stellar neighborhood. This web app works best in Chrome (much like their previous one, Jam With Chrome), but I was able to try it in Firefox as well.
Red Hat Software

Submission + - Red Hat Developer Demands Competitor's Source Code (muktware.com)

Submitted by sfcrazy
sfcrazy writes: A very serious argument erupted on the Linux kernel mailing list when Andy Grover, a Red Hat SCSI target engineer, requested that Nicholas A. Bellinger, the Linux SCSI target maintainer, provide proof of non-infringment of the GPL. Nick is developer at Rising Tide Systems, a Red Hat competitor, and a maker of advanced SCSI storage systems. Nick's company recently produced a groundbreaking technology involving advanced SCSI commands which will give Rising Tide Systems a lead in producing SCSI storage systems. Now, RTS is blocking Red Hat for getting access to that code as its proprietary. What's uncertain is whether RTS' code is covered by GPL or not — if it is then Red Hat has all the rights to get access to it and it's a serious GPL violation.
Microsoft

Submission + - The Empire In Decline?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Pundits continue to weigh in on Steve Sinofsky's sudden exit from Microsoft (as executive head of Windows Division, he oversaw the development and release of Windows 7 and 8). SemiAccurate's Charlie Demerjian sees Microsoft headed for a steep decline, with their habit of creating walled gardens deliberately incompatible with competitors' platforms finally catching up to them. Few PC users are upgrading to Windows 8 with its unwanted Touch UI, sales of the Surface tablet are disappointing, and few are buying Windows Phones. On the Sinofsky front, Microsoft watcher Mary Jo Foley is willing to take the Redmond insiders' word that the departure was more about Sinofsky's communication style and deficiencies as a team player than on unfavorable market prospects for Windows 8 and Surface. Meanwhile, anonymous blogger Mini-Microsoft had suspiciously little to say.

Submission + - Salt Lake City Police to wear cameras. (ksl.com)

Submitted by
Psychotic_Wrath
Psychotic_Wrath writes: "Salt Lake Police department will be much more transparent with their law enforcement. A program is being rolled out to require officers wear glasses equipped with a camera to record what they see. Of course there are several officers that oppose this idea, and will resist the change. One of the biggest shockers to me is that the police chief is in strong support of this measure.

If Chief Burbank gets his way, these tiny, weightless cameras will soon be on every police officer in the state.

With all the opposition of police officers being recorded by citizens that we are seeing throughout the country it is quite a surprise that they would make a move like this. The officers would wear them when they are investigating crime scenes, serving warrants, and during patrols. Suddenly Utah isn't looking like such a bad place to be. Now we just need to hope other states and departments would follow suite. It sure will be nice when there is video evidence to show the real story.

"
Power

Submission + - LA Metro to Harvest Energy From Subway Trains (vyconenergy.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Today the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority awarded VYCON Energy with a $3.6 million contract to install a flywheel energy recovery system at the Red Line Westlake/MacArthur Park subway station. The system will harness kinetic energy from braking trains then use the stored energy to help trains accelerate.
Network

Submission + - New WiFi protocol boosts congested wireless network throughput by 700% (extremetech.com)

Submitted by
MrSeb
MrSeb writes: "Engineers at NC State University (NCSU) have discovered a way of boosting the throughput of busy WiFi networks by up to 700%. Perhaps most importantly, the breakthrough is purely software-based, meaning it could be rolled out to existing WiFi networks relatively easily — instantly improving the throughput and latency of the network. As wireless networking becomes ever more prevalent, you may have noticed that your home network is much faster than the WiFi network at the airport or a busy conference center. The primary reason for this is that a WiFi access point, along with every device connected to it, operates on the same wireless channel. This single-channel problem is also compounded by the fact that it isn't just one-way; the access point also needs to send data back to every connected device. To solve this problem, NC State University has devised a scheme called WiFox. In essence, WiFox is some software that runs on a WiFi access point (i.e. it’s part of the firmware) and keeps track of the congestion level. If WiFox detects a backlog of data due to congestion, it kicks in and enables high-priority mode. In this mode, the access point gains complete control of the wireless network channel, allowing it to clear its backlog of data. Then, with the backlog clear, the network returns to normal. We don’t have the exact details of the WiFox scheme/protocol (it’s being presented at the ACM CoNEXT conference in December), but apparently it increased the throughput of a 45-device WiFi network by 700%, and reduced latency by 30-40%."
Intel

Submission + - Supercomputer-on-a-Chip Only Available on Board (sourceforge.net) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The massively parallel Xeon Phi is now shipping, but only on a PCIe board! GoParallel says that Intel's lead in supercomputing will get a boost, but why isn't Intel making the chip available. The 60-core Xeon Phi chip is light years ahead in x86 program execution, but you need a Xeon-based server or workstation to use it. Why doesn't Intel sell the chip alone, so that all types of supercomputer class devices can be built by we geeks?
Music

Submission + - Band uses nuclear isotopes to make music (foxnews.com)

Submitted by Velcroman1
Velcroman1 writes: Every second in your body, thousands of tiny isotopes are bursting with radioactive decay. And, all around you, imperceptible gamma rays explode in a brilliant but invisible lightshow. And they've just formed a live band. Yes, you read that correctly. But it's all for science: The Radioactive Orchestra 2.0 is part of a Swedish project to help us understand how low-energy radiation works, by showing the energy patterns of nuclear isotopes. Swedish musician Kristofer Hagbard conceived of the orchestra about a year ago and released an album last spring, but the new 2.0 version of "the band" allows him to perform live in front of an audience. “This can be looked at as a piano for high energy photons, so every detection gives us a note,” Hagbard said. “The musical instrument is as good as the gamma spectrometer we are using.”

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