Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:The problem is half truths (Score 1) 601

by marcgvky (#55027825) Attached to: Higher Minimum Wages Bring Automation and Job Losses, Study Suggests
This entire hairball can be summed up, by one statement: "government should not be dictating, how to price labor." Socialism and control (yes, even semi-controlled) markets inevitably FAIL to achieve the desired objective. However, that's never stopped a progressive from trying again and again and again... of course, expecting a different result.

Submission + - Astronomers might find Planet 9 by the end of August (ieee.org)

Submitted by Wave723
Wave723 writes: One team of planet-hunters is about to flip the switch on a new computational technique that will sort through hundreds of thousands of images to try to find the elusive ninth planet, reports IEEE Spectrum.

Submission + - Microsoft Is Hustling Us With "White Spaces" (wired.com)

Submitted by rgh02
rgh02 writes: Microsoft recently announced their plan to deploy unused television airwaves to solve the digital divide in America. And while the media painted this effort as a noble one, at Backchannel, Susan Crawford reveals the truth: “Microsoft's plans aren't really about consumer internet access, don't actually focus on rural areas, and aren't targeted at the US—except for political purposes.” So what is Microsoft really up to? This deep dive into Microsoft’s plan for "white spaces" tells the story newspapers missed and what the internet giant is really after.

Submission + - Does espionage pay off? East German spy records reveal surprises (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Economists and historians have long wondered whether industrial espionage is worth it for the country subsidizing all the spying. Now, in the first study of its kind, researchers have analyzed more than 150,000 previously classified documents from the former East German Ministry for State Security (also known as the Stasi) to reach a surprising conclusion: Stealing can boost economic productivity in the short-term, but it cannibalizes long-term investment in research and development.

“It’s R&D on cocaine,” says author Erik Meyersson, a political economist at the Stockholm School of Economics. “Maybe you can have a little bit of fun with it, but it’s not good for you in the long run.”

Submission + - Code.org Releases Analysis of Impact of K-12 CS Education Policy Changes

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: The top Google search result for "average of averages" is Why is an average of an average usually incorrect? So, it's interesting to see tech-backed Code.org, which is teaching the nation's schoolchildren computational thinking, use averages-of-averages in analysis released last week that attempts to quantify "positive changes in overall student participation" in AP CS A exams, which the nonprofit suggests stemmed from efforts by the Code.org Advocacy Coalition to change education policy to allow high school computer science to "count" for graduation. "This [averaging state-level metrics] was done with intention to lend the same weight to states of different sizes," Code.org explains in a footnote to the data and calculations. One wonders what Data Scientists from the Coalition's members — which include Microsoft, Facebook, and Google — might make of the choice to make Wyoming (6 AP CS A exam takers in 4 schools, 2,822 AP exam takers in 37 schools) and Idaho (59 AP CS A exam takers in 7 schools, 11,297 AP exam takers in 88 schools) count the same as California (10,244 AP CS A exam takers in 370 schools, 743,280 AP exam takers in 2,284 schools). Somewhat ironically, Code.org eschewed code in favor of a chock-full-o-formulas Google Sheet to come up with its measures of success. Sample cell content: =(sumifs('ap data by state'!$I$2:$I$511,'ap data by state'!$Q$2:$Q$511, "pre-2013",'ap data by state'!$B$2:$B$511,A29)+sumifs('ap data by state'!$I$2:$I$511,'ap data by state'!$Q$2:$Q$511, "2014",'ap data by state'!$B$2:$B$511,A29)+sumifs('ap data by state'!$I$2:$I$511,'ap data by state'!$Q$2:$Q$511, "2015",'ap data by state'!$B$2:$B$511,A29)+sumifs('ap data by state'!$I$2:$I$511,'ap data by state'!$Q$2:$Q$511, "2016",'ap data by state'!$B$2:$B$511,A29))/(COUNTIFS('ap data by state'!$B$2:$B$511, A29, 'ap data by state'!$Q$2:$Q$511, "pre-2013") + COUNTIFS('ap data by state'!$B$2:$B$511, A29, 'ap data by state'!$Q$2:$Q$511, "2014")+ COUNTIFS('ap data by state'!$B$2:$B$511, A29, 'ap data by state'!$Q$2:$Q$511, "2015")+ COUNTIFS('ap data by state'!$B$2:$B$511, A29, 'ap data by state'!$Q$2:$Q$511, "2016"))

Submission + - AMD Unveils New Radeon RX Vega Series Consumer Graphics Cards Starting At $399 (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: AMD has officially lifted the veil on its new Radeon RX consumer graphics line-up, featuring the company's next-generation Vega GPU architecture. Initially, there will be four cards in the Radeon RX Vega line-up, the standard air-cooled Radeon RX Vega 64, a Radeon RX Vega 64 Limited Edition with stylized metal fan shroud, the liquid-cooled Radeon RX Vega 64 Liquid, and the lower-cost Radeon RX Vega 56. At the heart of all Radeon RX Vega series cards is the Vega 10 GPU which is comprised of roughly 12.5 billion transistors and is manufactured using a 14nm FinFET LPP process. AMD claims they have made extensive changes to Vega's design to improve timings across the ASIC and due to the design changes, Vega 10 can reliable reach the 1.7GHz range, whereas Fiji hovered around 1GHz and Polaris around 1.3GHz. The base GPU clock speed of the air-cooled Vega 64 is 1,247MHz with a boost clock of 1,546MHz. There is 8GB of HBM2 memory on-board that offers up peak bandwidth of 484GB/s. All told, the Radeon RX Vega 64 is capable of 12.66 TFLOPs (single-precision) or 25.3 TFLOPs (half-precision) of compute performance. The Radeon RX Vega 64 Liquid-Cooled Edition has the same GPU configuration, but with higher base and boost clocks – 1,406MHz and 1,677MHz, respectively. The Liquid-Cooled Edition card has peak single-precision compute performance of 13.7 TFLOPs, with 27.5 TFLOPs at half-precision. The lower cost Radeon RX Vega 56 features the same Vega 10 GPU, but 8 of its CUs have been disabled and its clocks are somewhat lower. It features 3,584 active stream processors and has a base clock of 1,156MHz and a boost clock of 1,471MHz. Although AMD touts a number of efficiency improvements, the Vega RX series requires some serious power. The Vega 56's board power is in the 210W range, while the top-end liquid-cooled card lands in the 345W range. AMD claims the top-end cards will be performance competitive with NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1080 series. Radeon RX Vega cards are expected to ship on August 14th.

Submission + - SPAM: Robot cracks open safe live on Def Con's stage

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Using a cheap robot, a team of hackers has cracked open a leading-brand combination safe, live on stage in Las Vegas.

The team from SparkFun Electronics was able to open a SentrySafe safe in around 30 minutes.

The robot is able to reduce the number of possible combinations from one million to just 1,000, before quickly and automatically trying the remaining combinations until it breaks in.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - Petition Asks Adobe to Open-Source Flash for the Sake of Internet History (bleepingcomputer.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A petition is asking Adobe to release Flash into the hands of the open-source community. Finnish developer Juha Lindstedt started the petition a day after Adobe announced plans to end Flash support by the end of 2020. "Flash is an important piece of Internet history and killing Flash means future generations can't access the past," Lindstedt explains in the petition's opening paragraph. "Games, experiments and websites would be forgotten."

The developer wants Adobe to open-source Flash or parts of its technology so the open-source community could take on the job of supporting a minimal version of the Flash plugin or at least create a tool to accurately convert old SWF and FLA files to modern HTML5, canvas data, or WebAssembly code. Lindstedt is asking users to sign the petition by starring the project on GitHub. At the time of writing, the petition has garnered over 3,000 stars.

Submission + - Microbe new to science found in self-fermented beer (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: In May 2014, a group of scientists took a field trip to a small brewery in an old warehouse in Seattle, Washington--and came away with a microbe scientists have never seen before. In so-called wild bear, the team identified a yeast belonging to the genus Pichia, which turned out to be a hybrid of a known species called P. membranifaciens and another Pichia species completely new to science. Other Pichia species are known to spoil a beer, but the new hybrid seems to smell better. The finding means brewers and scientists may be one step closer to unveiling the alchemy of spontaneous fermentation.

Submission + - Looming Power Struggle Over U.S. Hydroelectric System (nytimes.com) 1

Submitted by cdreimer
cdreimer writes: According to a report in The New York Times (possibly paywalled, alternative story), the Trump Administration has proposed selling off 250 hydropower dams on the Columbia River in the Northwest that provides power for half of the U.S. hydroelectric system:

"To ride down the Columbia River as the John Day Dam’s wall of concrete slowly fills the view from a tugboat is to see what the country’s largest network of energy-producing dams created through five decades of 20th-century ambition, investment and hubris. Nearly half of the nation’s hydropower electricity comes from more than 250 hydropower dams that were built on the Columbia and its tributaries — a vast and complex arc of industry and technology that touches tens of millions of lives across the West every day. Google taps the river’s energy to power a data center 90 minutes east of Portland, Ore. — drawn there by some of the cheapest, most environmentally friendly electricity in the nation. Farmers farther upriver in Washington State pump irrigation water into alfalfa fields — with both the water and the electricity supplied by a dam. The Space Needle in Seattle uses Columbia River electricity to slowly spin tourists in its sky-view restaurant. High-voltage transmission lines shoot south to California. Now, the Trump administration has proposed rethinking the entire system, with a plan to sell the transmission network of wires and substations owned by the Bonneville Power Administration, a federal agency that distributes most of the Columbia basin’s output, to private buyers."

Submission + - Linux Kernel 4.14 Will Be an LTS Release

Submitted by prisoninmate
prisoninmate writes: Development of the Linux 4.14 kernel series did not even start, as the version that's being developed these days is Linux 4.12, which should be promoted to stable early next month, but Softpedia reports that renowned Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman announced earlier this morning that the upcoming Linux 4.14 kernel series will be an LTS (Long Term Support) branch. The developer promises to support the Linux 4.14 kernel series for at least two years after its release in November 2017, probably until November 2019.

Submission + - 'build', auto-configuration in 1000 lines of makefile

Submitted by descubes
descubes writes: Most open-source projects use tools such as autoconf and automake. For C and C++ projects, build is a make-based alternative that offers auto-configuration, build logs, colorization, testing and install targets, in about 1000 lines of makefile. A sample makefile looks like this:

BUILD=./
SOURCES=hello.cpp
PRODUCTS=hello.exe
CONFIG= <stdio.h> <iostream> clearenv libm
TESTS=product
include $(BUILD)rules.mk

Slashdot Top Deals

"It's the best thing since professional golfers on 'ludes." -- Rick Obidiah

Close