physburn - Slashdot User

Submission + - Meg Whitman claims HP was defrauded by Autonomy; HP stock plunges (cnbc.com)

Submitted by McGruber on Tuesday November 20, 2012 @12:29PM

McGruber writes: CNBC has the news (http://www.cnbc.com/id/49900639) that Meg Whitman is claiming that search engine Autonomy defrauded HP.

"We believed there is a willful effort on the part of certain members of Autonomy management to mislead shareholders when Autonomy was a publicly traded company, and to mislead potential buyers including HP, Whitman said. "We stand by the forensic review that we’ve seen," she added.

Submission + - Apes Go Through Mid-Life Crisis (medicaldaily.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 20, 2012 @12:19PM

An anonymous reader writes: The study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, revealed that like humans, the wellbeing or happiness of chimpanzees and orangutans also follows a U shape and is high in youth, falls in middle age and rises again into old age.

Submission + - IBM Supercomputer Used to Simulate a Typical Human Brain (gizmag.com)

Submitted by Zothecula on Tuesday November 20, 2012 @10:38AM

Zothecula writes: Using the world's fastest supercomputer and a new scalable, ultra-low power computer architecture, IBM has simulated 530 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses – matching the numbers of the human brain – in an important step toward creating a true artificial brain.

Submission + - Valve's Steam License Causes Linux Packaging Concerns (phoronix.com) 2

Submitted by skade88 on Friday November 16, 2012 @12:38PM

skade88 writes: With the Linux Steam beta giving Ubuntu and it's large user base all the love, other Linux gamers are understandably wanting to let in on the fun. For the beta, Valve has provided Steam as a Debian package. Many hungry Linux gamers have reported that they have have Steam running on their fav. distro, but that still leaves the legal debate. What is the legal threshold needed to get Steam in the repos of your fav. flavor of Linux? Will Valve's one-size-fits-every-OS license be flexible to work on Linux or will it kill/Delay the dream of a viable gaming world for Linux? We are so close to bridging the last major hurdle in finally realizing the year of the Linux desktop: Gaming. Lets hope the FOSS community and Valve can play together so we all win.

Submission + - Man hunted with spears 200k years earlier than expected (telegraph.co.uk)

Submitted by

AoOs

on Friday November 16, 2012 @10:01AM

AoOs writes: "Findings published in Science indicate that man started hunting with spears 500,000 years ago. 200,000 years earlier than previously thought. This early use indicated that the early human species and Neanderthals used spears for hunting. "Although both Neanderthals and humans used stone-tipped spears, this is the first evidence that the technology originated prior to or near the divergence of these two species." says Jayne Wilkins, a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto in Canada."

Submission + - DNA sequencers stymie spread of MRSA (nature.com)

Submitted by

ananyo

on Wednesday November 14, 2012 @08:02AM

ananyo writes: "A superbug outbreak that plagued a special-care neonatal unit in Cambridge, UK, for several months last year was brought to an end by insights gained from genome sequencing. The case, reported in Lancet Infectious Disease (abstract), marks the first time that scientists have sequenced pathogen genomes to actively control an ongoing outbreak.
Sharon Peacock, a clinical microbiologist at the University of Cambridge, and her team became involved in the outbreak after three infants at nearby Rosie Hospital’s 24-cot special-care baby unit tested positive for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) within a couple days of each other.
The ward was sterilized but another baby tested positive for MRSA just days later. Confronted with an ongoing outbreak, the researchers cast their net wider, searching for the outbreak strain among the 154 workers on the baby unit. One tested positive for a matching MRSA strain, despite showing no symptoms. The employee was 'decolonized' by extensive washing with topical antibiotics and the outbreak stopped."

Submission + - Airlines Face Acute Pilot Shortage 2

Submitted by

Hugh Pickens writes

on Tuesday November 13, 2012 @02:05PM

Hugh Pickens writes writes: "The WSJ reports that US airlines are facing their most serious pilot shortage since the 1960s, with federal mandates taking effect that will require all newly hired pilots to have at least 1,500 hours of prior flight experience—six times the current minimum—raising the cost and time to train new fliers in an era when pay cuts and more-demanding schedules already have made the profession less attractive. Meanwhile, thousands of senior pilots at major airlines soon will start hitting the mandatory retirement age of 65. "We are about four years from a solution, but we are only about six months away from a problem.,” says Bob Reding, recently retired executive vice president of operations at AMR Corp. A study by the University of North Dakota's aviation department indicates major airlines will need to hire 60,000 pilots by 2025 to replace departures and cover expansion over the next eight years. Meanwhile only 36,000 pilots have passed the Air Transport Pilot exam in the past eight years, which all pilots would have to pass under the congressionally imposed rules and there are limits to the ability of airlines, especially the regional carriers, to attract more pilots by raising wages. While the industry's health has improved in recent years, many carriers still operate on thin profit margins, with the airlines sandwiched between rising costs for fuel and unsteady demand from price-sensitive consumers. "It certainly will result in challenges to maintain quality," says John Marshall, an independent aviation-safety consultant who spent 26 years in the Air Force before overseeing Delta's safety. "Regional carriers will be creative and have to take shortcuts" to fill their cockpits."

Comment Newspapers (Score 1) 211

by physburn on Tuesday November 13, 2012 @12:33PM (#41968725) Attached to: The Last Thing You Read Was

Does no one read the newspaper any more. I choose newspaper, i read the Metro on the way to work and the evening standard on the way home. I probably wouldn't read a newspaper at all, but both those sheet are free, and given out on the london underground.

Submission + - Supersymmetry theory dealt a blow (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by Dupple on Monday November 12, 2012 @10:45AM

Dupple writes: Researchers at the Large Hadron Collider have detected one of the rarest particle decays seen in Nature.

The finding deals a significant blow to the theory of physics known as supersymmetry.

Many researchers had hoped the LHC would have confirmed this by now.

Supersymmetry, or SUSY, has gained popularity as a way to explain some of the inconsistencies in the traditional theory of subatomic physics known as the Standard Model.

The new observation, reported at the Hadron Collider Physics conference in Kyoto, is not consistent with many of the most likely models of SUSY.

Prof Chris Parke, who is the spokesperson for the UK Participation in the LHCb experiment, told BBC News: "Supersymmetry may not be dead but these latest results have certainly put it into hospital."

Submission + - Goatse.cx re-invented as mail provider 1

Submitted by erikkemperman on Monday November 12, 2012 @10:07AM

erikkemperman writes: As reported by El Reg, you can now obtain your own @goatse.cs e-mail address. As the article says, "Want absolutely NO ONE to read your mail?". While I'm pretty sure few will miss that guy, does this in some weird way mark the end of an era?

Submission + - A Wet Way to Better Burning? (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit on Friday November 09, 2012 @12:34PM

sciencehabit writes: Researchers in New York state report creating a new long-lived catalyst that uses the energy in sunlight to generate hydrogen gas, a carbon-free fuel. With further improvements, the advance could lead to systems that use sunlight to split water molecules, generating a fuel that can power cars and trucks without emitting any greenhouse gases.

Submission + - Facebook's Corona: When Hadoop MapReduce Wasn't Enough (slashdot.org)

Submitted by

Nerval's Lobster

on Friday November 09, 2012 @12:29PM

Nerval's Lobster writes: "Facebook’s engineers face a considerable challenge when it comes to managing the tidal wave of data flowing through the company’s infrastructure. Its data warehouse, which handles over half a petabyte of information each day, has expanded some 2500x in the past four years—and that growth isn’t going to end anytime soon.

Until early 2011, those engineers relied on a MapReduce implementation from Apache Hadoop as the foundation of Facebook’s data infrastructure. Still, despite Hadoop MapReduce’s ability to handle large datasets, Facebook’s scheduling framework (in which a large number of task trackers that handle duties assigned by a job tracker) began to reach its limits. So Facebook’s engineers went to the whiteboard and designed a new scheduling framework named “Corona.”"

Submission + - Proteins made to order (nature.com)

Submitted by

ananyo

on Thursday November 08, 2012 @12:15PM

ananyo writes: "Proteins are an enormous molecular achievement: chains of amino acids that fold spontaneously into a precise conformation, time after time, optimized by evolution for their particular function. Yet given the exponential number of contortions possible for any chain of amino acids, dictating a sequence that will fold into a predictable structure has been a daunting task.
Now researchers report that they can do just that. By following a set of rules described in a paper published in Nature (abstract), a husband and wife team from David Baker’s laboratory at the University of Washington in Seattle has designed five proteins from scratch that fold reliably into predicted conformations. The work could eventually allow scientists to custom design proteins with specific functions."

Submission + - Quantum entangled batteries could be the perfect power source (extremetech.com)

Submitted by

MrSeb

on Thursday November 08, 2012 @09:10AM

MrSeb writes: "Two European theoretical physicists have shown that it may be possible to build a near-perfect, entangled quantum battery. In the future, such quantum batteries might power the tiniest of devices — or provide power storage that is much more efficient than state-of-the-art lithium-ion battery packs. In a quantum system, some quantum states have energy that can be extracted, reducing the system to a passive, neutral energy state. Robert Alicki of the University of Gdansk in Poland, and Mark Fannes of the University of Leuven in Belgium, theorize that it should be possible to build a quantum battery that is full of energy-rich quantum states — and then, somehow, recharge it when you run out of juice. Better yet, the physicists also theorize that quantum entanglement could be used to create an even more efficient quantum battery. In essence, Alicki and Fannes say that you can link together any number of quantum batteries, allowing you to extract all of the stored energy in one big gulp. Their research paper goes on to say that with enough entanglement, these batteries would be perfect — with no energy lost/wasted during charge or discharge."

Submission + - Australian Government Scraps Plan To Filter The Internet (gizmodo.com.au)

Submitted by lukehopewell1 on Thursday November 08, 2012 @08:56AM

lukehopewell1 writes: After three years of trying to pass a controversial plan to filter the internet from Refused Classification (material rated above X) content, the Australian Government has tonight finally walked away from its plans to subject the country's internet users to a mandated "clean-feed".

Instead the government will now compel Australian internet service providers to implement a filter that blocks out only the material listed on Interpol's blacklist.

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