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Government

Submission + - Romney Campain Accidentally Launches Transition Web Site (yahoo.com)

Submitted by stevegee58
stevegee58 writes: The Mitt Romney presidential campain accidentally launched a transition web site the day after the election. Sporting a "President Elect" seal and a catchy new tagline ("Smaller, Simpler, Smarter") , the site was up briefly before the gaffe was discovered and the site taken down.

Fortunately an alert blogger, Taegan Goddard, found the errant site and published some screen shots.
Businesses

Submission + - Europe surpasses its plastic recycling aims (buildingaccessories.co.uk)

Submitted by apcox
apcox writes: European countries recycled 33.6% of all its plastics packaging waste in 2011, surpassing the EU’s minimum requirement of 22.5%, according to a new report. The report `Plastics – The Facts 2012’ says European Union members, as well as Norway and Sweden, recovered 66.8% of plastic packaging waste last year. Some 5.246m tonnes (33.6%) was recycled and 33.2% went to energy recovery processes.
Intel

Submission + - Intel's Eight-Core, Heavily-Updated Poulson Itanium Processor Unveiled (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Intel's Itanium 9500 family, codenamed Poulson, was announced today and it's the most significant refresh Intel has ever done on the Itanium family. Just moving from 65nm to 32nm technology would've substantially reduced power consumption and increased clock speeds, but Santa Clara has overhauled virtually every aspect of the CPU. Poulson can issue 11 instructions per cycle compared to Tukwila's six. It adds execution units and rebalances those units to favor server workloads over HPC and workstation capabilities. Its multi-threading capabilities have been overhauled and it uses faster QPI links between the CPUs. The L3 cache design has also changed. Previous Itanium 9300 processors had a dedicated L3 cache for each core. Poulson, in contrast, has a unified L3 that's attached to all its cores by a common ring bus.
Data Storage

Submission + - A year after Thailand flooding, hard drive prices remain high (techreport.com) 1

Submitted by
crookedvulture
crookedvulture writes: "Last October, Thailand was hit by massive flooding that put much of the world's hard drive industry under water. Production slowed to a crawl as drive makers and their suppliers mopped up the damage, and prices predictably skyrocketed. One year later, production has rebounded, with the industry expected to ship more drives in 2012 than it did in 2011. For the most part, though, hard drive prices haven't returned to pre-flood levels. Although 2.5" notebook drives are a little cheaper now than before the flood, the average price of 3.5" desktop drives is up 35% from a year ago. Prices have certainly fallen dramatically from their post-flood peaks, but the rate of decline has slowed substantially in recent months, suggesting that higher prices are the new norm for desktop drives."
Intel

Submission + - Cray Unveils XC30 Supercomputer (slashdot.org)

Submitted by
Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: "Cray has unveiled a XC30 supercomputer capable of high-performance computing (HPC) workloads of more than 100 petaflops. Originally code-named “Cascade,” the system relies on Intel Xeon processors and Aries interconnect chipset technology, paired with Cray’s integrated software environment. Cray touts the XC30’s ability to utilize a wide variety of processor types; future versions of the platform will apparently feature Intel Xeon Phi and Nvidia Tesla GPUs based on the Kepler GPU computing architecture. Cray leveraged its work with DARPA’s High Productivity Computing Systems program in order to design and build the XC30.

Cray’s XC30 isn’t the only supercomputer aiming for that 100-petaflop crown. China’s Guangzhou Supercomputing Center recently announced the development of a Tianhe-2 supercomputer theoretically capable of 100 petaflops, but that system isn’t due to launch until 2015. Cray also faces significant competition in the realm of super-computer makers: it only built 5.4 percent of the systems on the Top500 list, compared to IBM with 42.6 percent and Hewlett-Packard with 27.6 percent. However, Cray also leads Appro (3.6 percent) and SGI and Bull (3.2 percent each)."

Submission + - City of Paris Loses Domain Hijacking Case (domainnamewire.com)

Submitted by jollyrgr3
jollyrgr3 writes: This story comes from domainnamewire.com

A U.S. federal district court has ordered Ville de Paris (City of Paris) to pay $100,000 for reverse domain name hijacking and tortious interference.

Judge Melinda Harmon also ordered the city to pay $26,830 in attorney’s fees and costs.

The judgment stems from a UDRP the city of Paris filed against the owner of Parvi.org in 2009. In that case, panelist Andrew Christie decided to give the domain name to Paris despite determining that the domain name was not originally registered in bad faith.

The domain owner sued to stop the transfer. His lawsuit asked for a determination that he wasn’t cybersquatting and that Paris was attempting reverse domain name hijacking.

When Paris filed the UDRP with World Intellectual Property Organization it agreed to court jurisdiction in the location of the domain registrar, which was Texas. Yet, despite agreeing to this jurisdiction, the city decided not to show up to fight the charges. (This isn’t the first time Paris has run away from U.S. jurisdiction after picking a fight.)

The judge entered a default judgment against Ville de Paris. She issued the final judgment with damages on Friday.

This is the second Texas court I’m aware of that has awarded six figure damages for reverse domain name hijacking.

Will Parvi.org’s owner ever collect the judgment? It won’t be easy. But keep in mind that the defendant here is applying for the .paris top level domain name. It won’t be disqualified from getting the TLD just because it’s guilty of reverse domain name hijacking (the guidebook allows three such rulings before you’re disqualified). But it’s possible .paris will be an asset in the United States, which might give Parvi.org’s owner something to go after.

The plaintiff’s attorneys in the case were Travis Crabtree, Paul Keating, and John Berryhill.
Hardware

Submission + - Open Compute Wants to Make Biodegradable Servers (datacenterknowledge.com)

Submitted by 1sockchuck
1sockchuck writes: The Open Compute Project has challenged students at Purdue University to develop a biodegradable server chassis. Although the steel used in most server chassis can be recycled, the OCP says it wants to "explore designs that retain the needed resiliency but push the boundaries of sustainability,” even allowing a chassis to be composted. The project aligns with Facebook's goal of separating the technology refresh cycle for CPUs and other components from the surrounding chassis and racks. The Purdue students will tackle this issue next semester, but Slashdot readers can brainstorm the issue now. Is a biodegradable server chassis viable? If so, can it be affordable?
IT

Submission + - What to do after you fire an idiot sysadmin or developer (hp.com) 1

Submitted by
Esther Schindler
Esther Schindler writes: "The job of dealing with an under-performing employee doesn't end when the culprit is shown the door. Everyone focuses on security tasks, after you fire the idiot, such as changing passwords, but that's just one part of the To Do list. More important, in the long run, is the cleanup job that needs to be done after you fire the turkey, looking for the hidden messes and security flaws the ex-employee may have left behind. Otherwise, you’ll still be cleaning up the problems six months later, when you discovered that the backup he automated... well, not that we are speaking from experience or anything, but we wanted to bring him back in just so we could fire his butt all over again. Rick Cook has a checklist of Stuff To Look For in his article, Cleaning Out The Turkey Coop: What To Do After You Get Rid of an Incompetent Employee. See what you might add to the list."

Submission + - Why are online contact forms so bad?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: This is a cry for help and an attempt to speak directly to the world's web developers. Why are web contact forms so useless? In the last hour I used one contact form for my bank that prohibited the use of the Euro symbol. I live in Europe. Ok, so banking back ends are subject to all kinds of regulation but another form I just used to contact an insurance company prohibited the pound sterling sign. Currency symbols aren't the only issue, of course. Contact forms often balk at dates and phone numbers not being entered exactly as they want them to be. Fields to type credit card numbers often balk if you type a space between the numbers — although that's how the numbers are printed on the card. Shouldn't we have found a way past these elementary gotchas in our modern day and age? Are there any open source libraries that can parse contact forms so that they're made safe, regardless of what the user types, so that the user isn't picked up for typing a potentially dangerous / or in their messages? Or that include intelligence to understand the various ways humans type dates? In short, does it really have to be like this?
Politics

Submission + - All of Nate Silver's Presidential Predictions Proved True (singularityhub.com) 2

Submitted by
kkleiner
kkleiner writes: "For the last few months, the political pundit class has been at war with NYT/FiveThirtyEight blogger Nate Silver. Joe Scarborough of MSNBC called him a “joke,” while an op-ed in the LA Times accused him of running a “numbers racket.” But last night, Silver triumphed: every one of his state-level presidential predictions proved true. Statistics FTW!"
China

Submission + - Foxconn Sees New Source Of Cheap Labor: The United States (forbes.com) 1

Submitted by hackingbear
hackingbear writes: Foxconn is planning to build manufacturing plants in the U.S., probably in cites such as Detroit and Los Angeles. “Since the manufacturing of Apple’s products is rather complicated, the market watchers expect the rumored plants to focus on LCD TV production, which can be highly automated and easier.” Nice to think they will be hiring herebut still a fascinating insult to U.S. manufacturing prowess, dontcha think – the idea that actually making Apple products is a little too complicated for Americans to handle (Or maybe they won't be able to hire enough workers sitting 8 hours a day screwing really tiny screws into iPhone 5; despite of the higher unemployment rate, laborers here may not be as desperate as the millions of migrant workers looking for work in China.) Foxconn chairman Terry Guo, at a recent public event, noted that the company is planning a training program for US-based engineers, bringing them to Taiwan or China to learn the processes of product design and manufacturing.
Toys

Submission + - Buckyballs Throws in the Towell

Submitted by RenderSeven
RenderSeven writes: As previously reported the immensely popular Buckyballs office toys have been targeted by the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Last week Maxfield and Oberton, the maker of Buckyballs gave up the battle and announced they would discontinue sales and close. However, being driven out of business is not enough for R Buckminster Fuller's estate, who has filed yet another lawsuit that they own all rights to the name "buckyballs" despite widespread use of the term. If you still haven't bought your own yet, a few thousand sets in stock are still available.
Biotech

Submission + - Proteins made to order (nature.com)

Submitted by
ananyo
ananyo writes: "Proteins are an enormous molecular achievement: chains of amino acids that fold spontaneously into a precise conformation, time after time, optimized by evolution for their particular function. Yet given the exponential number of contortions possible for any chain of amino acids, dictating a sequence that will fold into a predictable structure has been a daunting task.
Now researchers report that they can do just that. By following a set of rules described in a paper published in Nature (abstract), a husband and wife team from David Baker’s laboratory at the University of Washington in Seattle has designed five proteins from scratch that fold reliably into predicted conformations. The work could eventually allow scientists to custom design proteins with specific functions."
Piracy

Submission + - BitTorrent traffic is up 40 percent from six months ago (techpounce.com) 2

Submitted by
damagedbits
damagedbits writes: "BitTorrent traffic is still booming even though legal streaming services like Netflix and YouTube are on the rise. It's far from its all time high of the mid 2000's, but BT traffic is up 40 percent from six months ago. BitTorrent is responsible for about 11 percent of total Internet traffic in the US."

Submission + - Cloud version of OpenOffice (apache.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Apache Foundation revealed in Sinsheim, Germany their plans for a cloud version of OpenOffice.org based on html5. Chinese and German engineers use OpenOffice in "headless" mode as a base.
Television

Submission + - Fox's attempt to block ad-skipping TV recorder Autohop fails (bbc.co.uk) 2

Submitted by another random user
another random user writes: A bid to block a TV service that allows viewers to automatically skip adverts on recorded shows has been rejected.

Fox had called for a preliminary injunction on Dish Network's Autohop ahead of a copyright ruling.

Broadcasters Fox, Comcast, NBC and CBS have each sued Dish Networks, saying the show recordings are unauthorised.

Fox said it would appeal against the ruling. It says Autohop is "destroying the fundamental underpinnings of the broadcast television ecosystem".

But Dish called the decision not to grant a preliminary injunction a "victory for common sense".

Its Hopper digital video recorder can record and store prime-time content from the four major networks for up to eight days.

And the Autohop feature lets viewers skip advertisements completely — rather than fast-forwarding through them — at the press of a button.
China

Submission + - Government Work Too Boring, Says Chinese Ex-Hacker (itworld.com)

Submitted by
itwbennett
itwbennett writes: "Now working at IBM, 41-year-old Tao Wan, who was once a member of the Green Army hacker group, is dismissive of today's young Chinese hackers. Wan told the audience at the Power of Community security conference in Seoul that 'this generation of hackers are not that technically capable, they just like to show off — young kids with a low technical ability.' Wan went on to say that China's 'overall hacking ability is still less sophisticated that other countries' and that 'they need to become more competitive.' For himself, however, Wan said government work was to boring to pursue."

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