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Submission + - Unknown Mathematician Proves Surprising Property of Prime Numbers (wired.com)

Submitted by PantherSE
PantherSE writes:

On April 17, a paper arrived in the inbox of Annals of Mathematics, one of the discipline’s preeminent journals. Written by a mathematician virtually unknown to the experts in his field — a 50-something lecturer at the University of New Hampshire named Yitang Zhang — the paper claimed to have taken a huge step forward in understanding one of mathematics’ oldest problems, the twin primes conjecture.

Other than the groundbreaking discovery, this is a story of "someone whose talents had been so overlooked after he earned his doctorate in 1992 that he had found it difficult to get an academic job, working for several years as an accountant and even in a Subway sandwich shop" whose persistence has finally paid off.

Submission + - Chilean Start-up Prints First Mind-Designed Object 1

Submitted by seanellis
seanellis writes: Chilean start-up Thinker Thing has delivered on its promise, and has announced the first real object designed by pure thought. Using an evolutionary algorithm guided by emotional feedback, Thinker Thing's goal is to allow the creation of designs without having to first learn a craft to make them. Their current project is to allow schoolchildren to design toy monsters, which are ideal experimental objects as they are very flexible and emotionally charged.

Submission + - Prenda lawyer kicked off 9th Circuit case

Submitted by rudy_wayne
rudy_wayne writes: On Friday, Paul Hansmeier, a Minnesota attorney who has been pointed to as one of the masterminds of the Prenda copyright-trolling scheme, filed an emergency motion to stay the $81,000 sanctions order while he and his colleagues could mount an appeal. Today the appeals court flatly denied his motion.. Two appellate judges signed this order, and it gives Hansmeier the option to make a plea for delay with the district court judge. That would be US District Judge Otis Wright, the judge who sanctioned Hansmeier in the first place.

Hansmeier is also getting kicked off a case he was working on that was totally unrelated to Prenda's scheme of making copyright accusations over alleged pornography downloads. On Friday, the 9th Circuit Commissioner ordered Hansmeier, in no uncertain terms, to withdraw a the case involving Groupon since he has been referred to the Minnesota State Bar for investigation. The commissioner has delayed Hansmeier's admission to the 9th Circuit because of Wright's order, which refers to Wright's finding of "moral turpitude."

Submission + - 450 Million Lines Of Scanned Software Code Can't Be Wrong (drdobbs.com)

Submitted by CowboyRobot
CowboyRobot writes: The 2012 Coverity Scan Open Source Report details the analysis of more than 450 million lines of software code. Key findings this year suggest that code quality for open source software continues to mirror that of proprietary software. Defect density (defects per 1,000 lines of software code) is a commonly used measurement for software quality. Coverity's analysis found an average defect density of .69 for open source software projects that leverage the firm's own scan service. It also found an average defect density of .68 for proprietary code developed by the firm's own enterprise customers. Both have better quality as compared to the accepted industry standard defect density for good quality software of 1.0.

Submission + - Google drops support for Jabber in latest Hangouts (paritynews.com) 1

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: Google is busy replacing its Talk chat client with the recently announced Hangouts, which was introduced last week at the Google I/O 2013 conference and will bring an end to Talk, Google+ Messenger and the original Google+ Hangouts. The new app, available as a Chrome extension as well as for Android, iOS, and Windows, has a serious disadvantage to the previous Talk client – it doesn’t support the XMPP open source chat protocol aka Jabber. Support for XMPP allowed Talk to communicate to XMPP accounts that were not registered with Google servers thereby allowing users to communicate with their contacts outside of Google.

Submission + - 10 things you may not know about Ethernet (networkworld.com)

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes: Ethernet's value to networking and IT is well established over the past 40 years. But did you know that "Ethernet" refers to two slightly different ways of sending information between endpoints on a LAN? That and some other perhaps lesser known facts about this 40-year-old technology.

Comment What interests you exactly? (Score 1) 2

by PantherSE (#42578091) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: What Does It Take to Become a Software Engineer?
You pointed out a few things that interests you. I have a CS degree so I'm speaking from that perspective. Here's the deal, a degree only gets you knowledge so you can learn more stuff--strange I know, but that's reality. You're interest that you've listed indicates that an EE might be a better track for you if you really want to do the electrical engineering stuff. I know people that have EE degrees that after they started doing programming or network-related stuff never turned back. I also know people that have EE degrees that enjoy writing embedded software as part of their electrical engineering-related work. Here's my suggestion: if you're at a college where your lower-division coursework can be applied to either EE or CS after your second year, then I suggest decide before the end of your second year. If you can't then I suggest you look at what you've done so far between your high school electrical work and your A+ and see what really interests you more between the two.
Transportation

Submission + - FAA Urges Maintenance Of Manual Flight Skills (avweb.com)

Submitted by PantherSE
PantherSE writes: This might not be standard slashdot topic, but I think those of us in IT appreciates that automation only works best when the "golden path" is followed. The reason why you have 2 trained people in front of the plane is so they can take over when the autopilot decides the plane has left the "golden path". Problem is when they don't get a chance to practice, they get rusty; except you never want them rusty.
Java

Submission + - Oracle Ships Java 7 Update 11 With Vulnerability Fixes

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: After announcing a fix was coming just yesterday, Oracle on Sunday released Java 7 Update 11 to address the recently disclosed security vulnerability. If you use Java, you can download the latest update now from the Java Control Panel or directly from Oracle’s website here: Java SE 7u11. In the release notes for this update, Oracle notes this version "contains fixes for security vulnerabilities." A closer look at Oracle Security Alert for CVE-2013-0422 details that Update 11 fixes two vulnerabilities.
Space

Submission + - AXE and Buzz Aldrin Announce Apollo Space Sweepstakes 1

Submitted by
RocketAcademy
RocketAcademy writes: "Apollo 11 lunar-module pilot Buzz Aldrin joined AXE, a personal-grooming brand of Unilever, to announce the AXE Apollo Sweepstakes, which will select 22 winners to become astronauts on the XCOR Lynx Mk II spacecraft.

“Space travel for everyone is the next frontier in the human experience,” Aldrin said. “I’m thrilled that AXE is giving the young people of today such an extraordinary opportunity to experience some of what I’ve encountered in space.”

According to XCOR Aerospace, AXE will select one winner following the Super Bowl on February 3. Twenty-one additional winners will be selected later on. 100 early-stage winners will attend the AXE Apollo Space Academy in Orlando, Florida in December 2013.

Private citizens can also earn a chance to fly on the Lynx through Citizens in Space, a non-profit project of the United States Rocket Academy, which has purchased 10 flights for citizen astronauts."
Power

Submission + - US Deserves Transparency From Oil Refineries

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Gregg Laskoski writes in US News and World Report that virtually all of the retail gasoline price volatility that Americans experienced this past year was connected to significant problems at refineries and it was those refineries' vulnerability that subjected US consumers to the year's highest average price ever, $3.63 per gallon. February delivered the BP refinery fire in Cherry Point, Washington that led to gasoline price spikes all along the Pacific coast, refinery problems in the Great Lakes region pushed Chicago gas prices to an all-time high of $4.56 per gallon, and over the summer, west coast refineries incurred outages, and California saw record highs in most markets, with Los Angeles gasoline's average price peaking at $4.72/gallon in October. Finally after Reuters reported that some 7,700 gallons of fuel spilled from Phillips 66's Bayway refinery in Linden, NJ, after Hurricane Sandy, New Jersey environmental protection officials said they were not made aware of a major spill at the Bayway plant, and the refinery failed to respond to inquiries from Reuters reporters. "Too many times, history has shown us, the Phillips 66 response or lack thereof characterizes the standard practice of the oil industry. Refineries often fail or are slow to communicate problems that create significant disruptions to fuel supplies and spikes in retail gasoline prices. More often than not, scant information is provided reluctantly, if at all," writes Laskoski. "When such things occur is silence from refineries acceptable? Or does our government and the electorate who put them there have a right to know what's really going on?""
Education

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: What Does It Take to Become a Software Engineer? 2

Submitted by
Jeheto
Jeheto writes: "I’ve always had an interest in IT, and now I’m at the point where I can choose my career. I’m currently a freshman college student trying to decide between Electrical Engineering and Computer Science as a major. I’m about to take my A+ certification, I have a few years of high school level training in electronics theory/soldering, and I know a just the smallest bit of Python from working with the MITOpenCourseWare program. I’m equally interested in networking, electrical engineering, and programming. My question to Slashdot is, what should I learn?"

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