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The Internet

Submission + - Obama reaffirms support for Net neutrality (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by garg0yle
garg0yle writes: From Ars Technica: "Rampant speculation suggests that the network neutrality rule at the FCC may be watered down significantly, and that the White House has been unhappy with just how radical the proposal is. But in his YouTube Q&A yesterday, President Obama made clear his own commitment to an open Internet."
Science

Submission + - SPAM: Next X-Prize = $10M for a brain-computer interface 1

Submitted by destinyland
destinyland writes: This time it's inner space, as Peter Diamandis holds a workshop at MIT discussing a $10 million X-Prize for building a brain-computer interface. This article includes video of Ray Kurzweil's 36-minute presentation, "Merging the Human Brain with Its Creations," and MIT synthetic neuroscientist Ed Boyden also made a presentation, followed by discussion groups about Input/Output, Control, Sensory, and Learning. Besides the ability to communicate by thought, the article argues, a Brain-Computer Interface X Prize "will reward nothing less than a team that provides vision to the blind, new bodies to disabled people, and perhaps even a geographical 'sixth sense' akin to a GPS iPhone app in the brain." And one software engineer argues the technology could become commercially available within the next 10 years.
Link to Original Source
Google

Submission + - Google Reveals Once-Secret Server Design

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "Most companies buy servers from the likes of Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, or Sun Microsystems but Google, which has hundreds of thousands of servers and considers running them part of its core expertise, designs and builds its own. For the first time Google revealed the hardware at the core of its Internet might at a conference this week about data center efficiency. Google's big surprise: each server has its own 12-volt battery to supply power if there's a problem with the main source of electricity. "This is much cheaper than huge centralized UPS," says Google server designer Ben Jai. "Therefore no wasted capacity." Efficiency is a major financial factor. Large UPSs can reach 92 to 95 percent efficiency, meaning that a large amount of power is squandered. The server-mounted batteries do better, Jai said: "We were able to measure our actual usage to greater than 99.9 percent efficiency." Google has patents on the built-in battery design, "but I think we'd be willing to license them to vendors," says Urs Hoelzle, Google's vice president of operations. Google has an obsessive focus on energy efficiency. "Early on, there was an emphasis on the dollar per (search) query," says Hoelzle. "We were forced to focus. Revenue per query is very low.""
The Military

Submission + - Soldiers' Networked Helmets Locate Enemy Shooters 1

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "Engineers at Vanderbilt University's Institute for Software Integrated Systems (ISIS) have developed a system that that can display the location of enemy shooters in three dimensions and accurately identify the caliber and type of weapons they are firing by turning their combat helmets into "smart nodes" in a wireless sensor network. Each node for the ISIS system weighs only slightly more than the four AA batteries that power it and costs about $1,000 to construct using currently available commercial hardware. The system relies on the sound waves produced when a high-powered rifle is fired. These acoustic signals have distinctive characteristics that allow the systems to pick them out from other loud noises and track them back to their source. The ISIS system combines information from a number of nodes to triangulate on shooter positions and improve the accuracy of its location identification process. It also uses a patented technique to filter out the echoes that can throw off other acoustic detection system. "It's strong points are that it isn't limited to locating shots fired in direct line-of-sight, it can pick up multiple shooters at the same time, and it can identify the caliber and type of weapon that is being fired." says Retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Albert Sciarretta, who assesses new military technologies in urban environments for DARPA."
Education

Submission + - Australian Govt says no to Linux Netbooks (technologyandbusiness.com.au)

Submitted by teflon_king
teflon_king writes: So this is a somewhat disappointing. The Australian Government is spending millions across the country to buy laptops/notebooks/netbooks for school kids. The funding is Federal but the education departments are run by each state. So each state gets funding, and they then go out and get tenders to supply the gear. According to this report, the state of NSW did consider Linux netbooks but they have awarded the $150 million contract to Lenovo for netbooks running Windows . Now I can understand a government going through a tender process and making this decision. From the comment by Microsoft's Australian country manager it certainly sounds like Microsoft made them a hot deal on the operating systems. Not surprising really because it's great for future Microsoft OS sales once these kids leave school. However it's disappointing from the perspective that these kids won't have the option of really getting into the nuts and bolts of how an operating system is put together. They won't be learning about the shell and so forth. And of course, they won't have access to all the open options for programming that exist on Linux. And I would guess that the machines are going to be very locked down: do you think they are going to be able to use Firefox or install other open source programs. It just sounds to me that one of the main advantages of getting all these machines in the hands of kids should be about giving them the opportunity to explore programming. It should not just be about giving them access to Web browsers and word processors. It would be an interesting follow up to find that out and especially find out if the machines are also going to be bundled with Microsoft Office — it would certainly be a smart move by Microsoft.
Privacy

Submission + - Major drop in internet traffic after new law (thelocal.se) 1

Submitted by
iamnot
iamnot writes: "The new IPRED law came into effect in a big way in Sweden on April 1st. A news report has come out showing that internet traffic dropped by 30% from March 31st to April 1st. A lawyer from the Swedish anti-piracy agency was quoted as saying that the drop in traffic "sends a very strong signal that the legislation works". Is the new law, which allows for copyright holders to request the identification of people sharing files, truly curing people of their evil ways? Or perhaps it is just taking some time for Swedish downloaders to figure out the new IPREDator VPN system from The Pirate Bay."
IBM

Submission + - IBM Buys Linus Torvalds

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes: "IBM CEO, Samuel Palmisano, announced at 12:01 am EDT that IBM has completed the purchase of Linux kernel creator Linus Torvalds for $4.6 Billion in cash and stock. This unprecedented human purchase by a corporation is being met with shock and surprise within the Linux and IT communities. Palmisano said that IBM was the "highest bidder" in a bitter battle for Torvalds."
Security

Submission + - SPAM: UltraDNS service knocked offline by attack

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: NeuStar confirmed that some of its UltraDNS managed DNS service customers were knocked offline for several hours Tuesday morning by a distributed denial of service attack. "Early this morning, our monitoring systems detected a significant denial of service attack, which affected a small subset of our customers, in some cases for as long as a few hours," the Reston, Va. company said in a statement. "While we continue to investigate the cause, the extent, and the duration of the attack, service was completely restored by 10 a.m. EST." NeuStar is a leading provider of high-availability DNS services to e-retailers including J.Jill and Diamond.com as well as high-tech companies such as Oracle and Juniper.
Link to Original Source

Comment Re:And they were probably correct (Score 1) 1061

by anticlimate (#26620175) Attached to: Global Warming Irreversible, NOAA Scientist Finds
Here is the car analogy:
The Sun is shining like mad, your car has no AC. You have many options:
  • Buy a new car with AC (analogy of taking expensive weather controlling measures)
  • Turn sunshine lower (analogy of turn sunshine lower - like you suggested)
  • Pull down the f*cking windows (analogy of decreasing the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere)
  • Don't do anything just sit there slowly boiling, blaming the weather (analogy of doing nothing and bitching about "so-called" Global Warming)

Comment Conflicting interests (Score 4, Insightful) 85

by anticlimate (#26620029) Attached to: Lawsuit Stops Headline Scraping
Deeplinking and "stealing" your stories may hurt you int the short term financially. But - let's face it - the real reason of operating a newspaper or site is to make your audience see the world through your goggles. The more your opinionated news are linked or copied in one, the more influence you have on other people's thoughts, decisions etc.
Yes I'm that cynical (in the case of the news industry at least).

Comment Mod parent redundant (Score 3, Informative) 1061

by anticlimate (#26619517) Attached to: Global Warming Irreversible, NOAA Scientist Finds

In the 70s they were also predicting a coming ice age.

That has been refuted even here on Slashdot IIRC. Global Cooling article in Wikipedia says:
"Of those scientific papers considering climate trends over the 21st century, only 10% inclined towards future cooling, while most papers predicted future warming."

Which doesn't mean your statement is necessary false, but you should provide some data supporting it.

Comment (Capitalism vs. Government debate) == airboxing (Score 2, Interesting) 122

by anticlimate (#26268631) Attached to: New Photos of SpaceX's Falcon 9 Assembly
What do you mean by "capitalist"? Someone who has capital (how much?)? Someone who blindly believes in an "ism" which promotes free market as the cure for everything? Someone who generally favours market friendly solutions to economic problems? And the meaning of "free market" have many interpretations too. Especially when applied to the financial sector. At least you didn't use the word globalization... :)
Graphics

Submission + - NVIDIA's Sub-$100 GeForce 9500 GT Launched (hothardware.com)

Submitted by
MojoKid
MojoKid writes: "NVIDIA has announced the new GeForce 9500 GT today and it's their latest addition to their sub-$100 graphics card offering. Of course the card won't bring the same level of 3D performance as current high-end, more expensive products but its feature set is comparable to just about anything else on the market. In comparison to the recently released GeForce GTX series, the GeForce 9500 GT has only a fraction of the number of stream processors, ROPs, and texture units available, but the GPU's configuration does put it on par with or ahead of the GeForce 8500 / 8600 series of graphics cards, that the 9500 GT will eventually replace."

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