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Submission + - Cloud Harmony Benchmarking Results Reveal Performance Upgrades (iadweek.me)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Benchmarking tests utilizing the Geekbench 3 utility (http://support.primatelabs.com/kb/geekbench/) for CPU performance and CloudHarmony’s own test results for Disk I/O, pitted similar offerings by Rackspace, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Liquid Web, and DigitalOcean against each other. According to the resulting metrics, the CPUs in Liquid Web’s VPS instances perform 76% better than Rackspace, 84% better than Digital Ocean, and 191% faster than AWS. Also critical is Disk I/O, which measures the input and output operations (reading or writing data) that can be performed by the storage device every second and is referenced when judging a server’s potential to be slowed by the “bottlenecking” of inbound and outbound data. According to CloudHarmony’s metrics, Liquid Web’s VPS instances were 323% faster than Rackspace, 979% faster than Digital Ocean, and 388% faster than AWS in random write IOPS.

Submission + - Laser-Propulsion Could Give Space Rockets a Serious Boost (gizmag.com)

Submitted by Zothecula
Zothecula writes: Russian scientists have proposed a novel way to accelerate a spaceship while in flight – firing a ground-based laser up its backside. The new technique uses a plasma flow caused by laser ablation to increase the exhaust efficiency of a traditional rocket propulsion system, and could theoretically accelerate an aircraft beyond Mach 10.

Submission + - Michigan About To Ban Tesla Sales

Submitted by cartechboy
cartechboy writes: It's a story we've come to see quite often: a state trying to ban Tesla's direct sales model. It seems something sneaky just happened in Michigan where Tesla sales are about to be banned. Bill HB 5606 originally intended to offer added protection to franchised dealers and consumers from price gouging by carmakers, and was passed by the Michigan House in September without any anti-Tesla language. However, once it hit the Senate wording was changed that might imply the legality of a manufacturer-owned dealership was removed. The modified bill was passed unanimously by the Senate on October 2, and then sent back to the House that day where it passed with only a single dissenting vote. The bill was modified without any opportunity for public comment. Michigan Governor Rick Snyder has less than a week to sign the bill into law. Of course, Tesla's already fighting this legislation. It's already been said that in the end, Tesla will win all of these situations and that time is being wasted.

Submission + - Early childhood neglect associated with altered brain structure, ADHD (washington.edu)

Submitted by vinces99
vinces99 writes: Under the rule of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, thousands of Romanian children were placed in overcrowded orphanages with bleak conditions and minimal human contact, a legacy that continued even after the 1989 revolution. Only recently have research and public concern caused policy changes.

University of Washington research on children who began life in these institutions shows that early childhood neglect is associated with changes in brain structure. A paper published this month in Biological Psychiatry shows that children who spent their early years in these institutions have thinner brain tissue in cortical areas that correspond to impulse control and attention. “These differences suggest a way that the early care environment has dramatic and lasting effects for children’s functioning,” said lead author Katie McLaughlin, a UW assistant professor of psychology.

Since 2000, the Bucharest Early Intervention Project has worked to document and treat the children’s health. McLaughlin joined the team about six years ago to focus on brain development. This study is among the first in any setting to document how social deprivation in early life affects the thickness of the cortex, the thin folded layer of gray matter that forms the outer layer of the brain. The study provides “very strong support” for a link between the early environment and ADHD, McLaughlin said.

Submission + - Rosetta Stalks Dark Comet in Stunning New Space Selfie (discovery.com)

Submitted by astroengine
astroengine writes: At a distance of only 10 miles from comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko’s surface, the European Rosetta mission has captured yet another dazzling self portrait with the dark comet lurking in the background. But the orbiter couldn’t have snapped this “selfie” without the help of a little friend — the attached Philae lander that is currently undergoing preparations for its historic comet surface landing in November.

Submission + - Smart battery tells you when it's about to explode (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Material scientists have found a clever way to alert users of damaged batteries before any hazard occurs. A typical lithium-ion cell consists of a lithium oxide cathode and a graphite anode, separated by a thin, porous polymer sheet that allows ions to travel between the electrodes. When the cell is overcharged, microscopic chains of lithium, called “dendrites,” sprout from the anode and pierce through the polymer separator until they touch the cathode. An electrical current passing through the dendrites to the cathode can short-circuit the cell, which causes overheating and, in some cases, fire. Attempts to stop dendrite formation have met with limited success, so the researchers tried something different. They built a “smart” separator by sandwiching a 50-nanometer thin copper layer between two polymer sheets and connecting the copper layer to a third electrode for voltage measurement. When the dendrites reach the separator, the voltage between the anode and the copper layer drops to zero, alerting users that they should change the damaged battery while it is still operating safely—disaster averted.
Idle

Submission + - PETA is not happy that Google used a camel to get a desert "StreetView" (kitsapsun.com)

Submitted by flopwich
flopwich writes: So Google used a camel-mounted camera to get a "street view" of a stretch of desert in the United Arab Emirates. PETA's director is all sniffy about it, saying they should have used jeeps. Oblivious to PETA's opinion, the camel in the video, munching food as it carries the camera, really doesn't look like it minds all that much.

Comment No Degree? (Score 1) 655

Ohh Dear Lord! No Degree at All? How do they know how to function without being taught in over priced schools by teachers that barely understood the technology that was already outdated by the time they realized it should be taught? (Sorry, it just bugs me when people imply that not having a degree means a person is stupid, lazy, or incompetent)
Government

Submission + - Save Our Balls! (getbuckyballs.com)

Submitted by
Dyablos
Dyablos writes: "As many of you may or may not know, the CPSC is attempting to ban Buckyballs. Buckyballs is not going to go down without a fight. They have put this together to help spread the word. From the article:
"We are going to fight hard to keep our products on the market... and our balls in your hands. But we need your help. Make your opinion heard: post, tweet, comment and make noise. Tell the CPSC to keep their hands off your balls (and cubes). Or just order a set to help us stay in business and defend our company and products. Use promo code "ThanksCPSC" for free shipping on any order."

Comment Switchable Grpahics (Score 4, Interesting) 212

by PerlJedi (#40414119) Attached to: XBMC Developers Criticize AMD's Linux Driver
The video codecs are the least of my problems with linux support from both NVidia and AMD. Neither of them off any kind of support for switchable graphics under linux. I have laptops with modern graphics cards from each of these guys, and in both cases it has been a long up hill battle getting the graphics cards to work correctly.

Comment This has happened to me (Score 5, Insightful) 518

by PerlJedi (#40297895) Attached to: NewEgg: Installing Linux Breaks Laptop
This very same problem befell me about 1 year ago. I complained very loudly, including on a consumer review website. Within 24 hours of posting my detailed (and scathing) review I received a call from a newegg customer care representative, who assured me they would make it right. They did in fact allow me to exchange the laptop for a new one, and actually gave me a $100 gift card to make up for the trouble.
While I clearly can't say everyone will get that response, I personally feel that it is important that those of us who run Linux stand up and make it known that we cannot be ignored just because we are not giving our money to either Microsoft or Apple.
Your Rights Online

Submission + - War and Nookd - Ebook regex gone haywire (futureoftheinternet.org)

Submitted by
PerlJedi
PerlJedi writes: "

The Superior Formatting Publishing version isn’t a Barnes and Noble book, so this isn’t the work of a rogue Nook marketer from B&N. Rather, it’s likely that Superior Formatting Publishing ported its Kindle version of War and Peace over to the Nook — doing a search and replace to make sure that any Kindle references they’d inserted, such as in the advertising at the end of the book about their fine Kindle products, were simply changed to Nook.

"
Science

Submission + - New 'Beautiful' Particle Discovered at LHC (forbes.com) 1

Submitted by SchrodingerZ
SchrodingerZ writes: On the search for the imfamous Higg Boson, "Researchers at the Large Hadron Collider submitted a paper to Physical Review Letters claiming that they’d discovered a new Baryon particle." It is composed of a strange quark, a beauty quark, and an up or down quark. It was given the notation Xi_b^*0. The discovery of this new particle helps to solidify the " validity of the Standard Model of Particle Physics, and helps contribute to our understanding of atomic interactions."
Advertising

Submission + - Google Announces Algorithmic Crackdown on Webspam (blogspot.ca)

Submitted by eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: You've most likely seen search results returned that are just a garbage full of keywords via Google's bread-and-butter "Panda" search algorithm. Some might be a little more innocuous — working unrelated anchored links into their text just to bump up their pagerank — while others are more bitcoin weightloss rapidshare ledet cloud zimmerman. Well, Google claims they've taken care of this in their latest update and they're trying to coin these practices “black hat webspam” which they attempt to define in case you run a site implementing a search engine optimization (SEO) scheme. Ars notes that some of the sites adversely affected in these nine or so changes that have been rolled out since February were actually innocent. In these next few days, will Google's tweak actually weed out the webspam or will it hurt a few innocent sites as the black hats adjust their methods and game it another way? On with the cat and mouse game!

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