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Android

$35 Indian Tablet Has Until March 31st To Ship or Be Cancelled 46

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the too-good-to-be-true dept.
damitr writes "With a lot of fanfare the Indian Government had launched a $35 tablet named Aakash (The Sky). Despite skepticism, the government went ahead with the project. But delays in production and deployment of the tablet have left the project in risk of failure. The manufacturer has been unable to supply the required 100,000 units, and a deadline of March 31 has been set. The new minister Pallam Raju says: 'Aakash is only a tablet... there are other such devices as well. While work will continue to develop it and increase its productivity, manufacturing is obviously a problem.'" For what it's worth, they did manage to ship 17,000 of them. It looks like meeting the deadline is impossible and the $35 tablet is dead.
Earth

Cold Spring Linked To Dramatic Sea Ice Loss 422

Posted by Soulskill from the and-here-i-was-blaming-the-schools dept.
hrvatska writes "An article at Weather Underground reports that researchers have linked large snowstorms and cold spring weather across Britain and large parts of Europe and North America to the dramatic loss of Arctic sea ice. It is thought that the Arctic ice loss adds heat to the ocean and atmosphere, which shifts the position of the jet stream, allowing cold air from the Arctic to plunge much further south. Researchers expect that a warming Arctic ocean will drive more extreme weather in North America and Europe (abstract)."
The Internet

Largest DDoS In History Reaches 300 Billion Bits Per Second 450

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the making-enemies dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The NYT is reporting that the Largest DDoS in history reached 300 Gbps. The dispute started when the spam-fighting group Spamhaus added the Dutch company Cyberbunker to its blacklist, which is used by e-mail providers to weed out spam. Millions of ordinary Internet users have experienced delays in services like Netflix or could not reach a particular Web site for a short time. Dutch authorities and the police have made several attempts to enter the bunker by force but failed to do so. The attacks were first mentioned publicly last week by Cloudflare, an Internet security firm in Silicon Valley that was trying to defend against the attacks and as a result became a target."
Enlightenment

Enlightenment Terminal Allows Video Playback, PDF Viewing 114

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the symbolics-did-it-better dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The E17 Enlightenment project has released a new version of its Terminology terminal emulator. With Terminology 0.3 comes several fancy features, including the ability to preview video files, images, and PDF files from within the terminal. There's new escape sequences, inline video playback, and other features to this terminal emulator that's only built on EFL and libc."
Science

Washington's Exploding Manholes Explained? 112

Posted by Soulskill from the it-was-aliens-all-along dept.
sciencehabit writes "Researchers who mapped methane concentrations on the streets of the nation's capital found natural gas leaks everywhere, at concentrations of up to 50 times the normal background levels. The leaking gas wastes resources, enhances ozone production, and exacerbates global warming—not to mention powering the city's infamous exploding manholes. Most of the natural gas we burn for heat and on stovetops in the United States is methane, a simple carbon atom surrounded by four hydrogens. Carbon dioxide gets more press, but methane is the more powerful agent of global warming, 21 times more effective than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere. And methane levels are rising fast. Methane levels in the atmosphere were just 650 parts per billion a century ago, versus 1800 ppb today."
Programming

Fantastic js1k Submissions 70

Posted by Soulskill from the still-waiting-on-a-quake-3-implementation dept.
An anonymous reader writes "With just five days left in the current competition to write an app in only 1kb of JavaScript, the submissions are becoming increasingly impressive. Take for instance a beautiful 3D animation drawing on a 2D canvas. Or a mine cart animation. If you wait long enough you'll actually get to caves! Can you manage to write a demo that fits on the hall of fame before the deadline closes?"
Technology

Ask Slashdot: Why Buy a Raspberry Pi When I Have a Perfectly Good Cellphone? 273

Posted by samzenpus from the expensive-knock-off dept.
scorp1us writes "I've been looking into getting a Raspberry Pi, but I end up needing a case, a display, and some way to power it, and wanting some degree of portability. It seems to me that even the most outdated cellphone has far superior features (screen, touch screen, Wifi, 3g/4g camera(s), battery etc) in a much better form factor. The only thing that is missing are the digital/analog in/out pins. So why not flip it around and make a USB or bluetooth peripheral board with just the pins? I've been looking for this and can't find any, but does anyone know of any in the corners of the internet? I don't care what phone platform."
Space

Landsat's First Images Show Rocky Mountains In Stunning Detail 63

Posted by samzenpus from the more-real-than-real dept.
Zothecula writes "We haven't heard anything from NASA's Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM) spacecraft since its launch in February, but the satellite is now ready to start sending its first images back home. The first batch of photos are part of a three-month testing period, and show the meeting of the Great Plains with the Front Ranges of the Rocky Mountains in Wyoming and Colorado. Viewed from space, it's already a pretty spectacular scene, but the images from the LDCM managed to enhance it even further."
Bug

Matthew Garrett Has a Fix To Prevent Bricked UEFI Linux Laptops 74

Posted by timothy from the and-it-can-be-yours-for-free dept.
hypnosec writes "UEFI guru Matthew Garrett, who cleared the Linux kernel in Samsung laptop bricking issues, has come to rescue beleaguered users by offering a survival guide enabling them to avoid similar issues. According to Garrett, storage space constraints in UEFI storage variables is the reason Samsung laptops end up bricking themselves. Garrett said that if the storage space utilized by the UEFI firmware is more than 50 percent full, the laptop will refuse to start and ends up being bricked. To prevent this from happening, he has provided a Kernel patch."
The Internet

ICANN Reveals Regional Winners of New gTLDs 69

Posted by timothy from the the-envelope-please dept.
hypnosec writes "The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers has approved and released a list of domain names as per its new global Top Level Domain plans. A total of 27 domain names have been cleared for use by ICANN, and all of them are non-English domain names. Consisting of Chinese and Arabic names, the list of domain names seems to be mostly for regional companies, prominent among which are the .Qatartelecom and .Mozaic domains."
Earth

Earthquakes Deposit Gold In Fault Zones 55

Posted by samzenpus from the shake-rattle-and-gold dept.
sciencehabit writes "Gold deposits may be created in a flash—literally. Along fault zones deep within Earth's crust, small cavities filled with fluids rich in dissolved substances such as gold and silicate minerals can expand suddenly to as much as 130,000 times their former size during a major earthquake, a new analysis suggests. In such circumstances, pressure drops accordingly, driving a process the scientists call flash evaporation. And when the pressure in the cavity suddenly drops, so does the solubility of minerals in the water there. Along with substantial quantities of quartz, large earthquakes could deposit as much as 0.1 milligrams of gold along each square meter of a fault zone's surface in just a fraction of a second Typical rates of seismicity along a fault, such as the San Andreas fault zone shown in the main image, could generate a 100-metric-ton deposit of gold in less than 100,000 years."
GNU is Not Unix

The Pirate Bay's Oldest Torrent Is Revolution OS 130

Posted by samzenpus from the back-in-the-day dept.
jrepin writes "After nearly 9 years of seeding The Pirate Bay's oldest working torrent is still very much alive. Interestingly, the torrent is not a Hollywood classic nor is it an evergreen music album. The honor goes to a pirated copy of Revolution OS, a documentary covering the history of Linux, GNU and the free software movement."
Beer

How Beer Gave Us Civilization 325

Posted by samzenpus from the the-cause-and-solution-to-all-of-life's-problems dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Jeffrey P. Khan writes in the NY Times about how recent anthropological research suggests that human's angst of anxiety and depression ultimately results from our transformation, over tens of thousands of years, from biologically shaped, almost herd-like prehistoric tribes, to rational and independent individuals in modern civilization. The catalyst for suppressing the rigid social codes that kept our clans safe and alive was fermented fruit or grain. 'Once the effects of these early brews were discovered, the value of beer must have become immediately apparent,' writes Khan. 'With the help of the new psychopharmacological brew, humans could quell the angst of defying those herd instincts. Conversations around the campfire, no doubt, took on a new dimension: the painfully shy, their angst suddenly quelled, could now speak their minds.' Examining potential beer-brewing tools in archaeological remains from the Natufian culture in the Eastern Mediterranean, the team concludes that 'brewing of beer was an important aspect of feasting and society in the Late Epipaleolithic' era. In time, humans became more expansive in their thinking, as well as more collaborative and creative. A night of modest tippling may have ushered in these feelings of freedom — though, the morning after, instincts to conform and submit would have kicked back in to restore the social order. Today, many people drink too much because they have more than average social anxiety or panic anxiety to quell — disorders that may result, in fact, from those primeval herd instincts kicking into overdrive. But beer's place in the development of civilization deserves at least a raising of the glass. As the ever rational Ben Franklin supposedly said, 'Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.'"
NASA

NASA Restarts Plutonium Production 139

Posted by timothy from the yeah-but-now-it's-non-planetary dept.
Celarent Darii writes "In what looks like good news for the American Space program, NASA has restarted production of plutonium. According to the article, after the closure of Savannah Rivers reactor NASA purchased plutonium from Russia, but since 2010 this was no longer possible. The native production of plutonium is a step forward for the space program to achieve the energy density for long term space exploration."
Education

Educational Linux Distro Provides Tech-Bundle For Kids and Educators 55

Posted by samzenpus from the learning-linus dept.
First time accepted submitter Jason Hibbets writes "Ubermix is a version of Linux designed for kids and educators. In this interview with Jim Klein, founder of Ubermix, we discover a Linux distribution designed with kids, education, and educators in mind. This could change the way our the next generation learns about Linux and open source software like Celestia, Stellarium, Scratch, VirtualLab Microscope, iGNUit, and more."

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