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Software

Submission + - Tested: Five Web browsers you've never heard of 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Whether you consider Opera an underdog browser or not, it came out on top in a feature on CNet this weekend. It was up against "underdog Web browsers" Camino, K-Meleon, Shiira and Arora in a piece loosely aimed at determining whether these browsers are yet ready to steal significant numbers of users from Firefox, Safari, IE etc. Interesting most to me, however, is that it transpires that Shiira, the Mac browser from Japan, is one of the fastest browsers on the planet, beating the original Chrome v1.0, Firefox 3.5 and more in its benchmark tests.
Internet Explorer

Submission + - Microsoft Finally Joins HTML 5 Standard (cnet.com)

Submitted by bonch
bonch writes: On Friday, Microsoft posted to a mailing list that IE developers are reviewing the HTML5 standard for future versions of Internet Explorer. Microsoft is dragging its feet, however, saying that they "have more questions than answers" and criticizing many of HTML5's new tags like HEADER, FOOTER, and ASIDE, calling them "arbitrary" or unnecessary. It remains to be seen whether Microsoft waited too long to try to influence basic parts of the spec that most of their competitors have already adopted.

Comment Re:This is how it always goes down (Score 1) 119

by koh (#28961939) Attached to: <em>Wipeout HD</em> Loading Ads Scrapped After Uproar

Congratulations. The ad worked perfectly. It managed to catch your eye and intrigue you during a boss battle (which in itself is no small feat) and had you get back to the level to figure it out. Rogers is now forever associated with this game in your mind, and probably also in the mind of a fraction of readers of your post.

Ads are social engineering. Ads work. It was money well-spent by Rogers. You're proof.
Operating Systems

Phoronix Releases Linux Benchmarking Distribution 31

Posted by timothy from the medium-infrastructure dept.
Bitnit writes "Phoronix has released a major update to their automated Linux benchmarking software, the Phoronix Test Suite, and more interestingly they have released their own distribution that's designed for hardware testing and benchmarking on Linux. With PTS Desktop Live they provide this Linux distribution that's to run only from a live environment off a DVD / USB key and then allows their benchmarking software to run — and only that — on this standardized software stack, which makes hardware comparisons a lot easier."
Space

White Knight Two Unveiled 144

Posted by kdawson from the call-me-EVE dept.
xanthos writes "Sir Richard Branson was at the annual Experimental Aircraft Assoc Fly-in to show off EVE (previously known as White Knight Two), the launch vehicle for Virgin Galactic's commercial space operation. Test flights for the vehicle are slated for next year with the first paying passengers going up in 2011. What surprised me was the following from the article: 'So many people have signed up already, Whitehorn said, that the company has collected $40 million in deposits with orders to build five spaceships to meet the demand.' Will this mean that the $200k price tag may be dropping?"
The Courts

Student Suing Amazon For Book Deletions 646

Posted by kdawson from the incident-that-will-not-stay-down-the-memory-hole dept.
Stupified writes "High school student Justin Gawronski is suing Amazon for deleting his Kindle copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four (complaint, PDF), because doing so destroyed the annotations he'd created to the text for class. The complaint states: 'The notes are still accessible on the Kindle 2 device in a file separate from the deleted book, but are of no value. For example, a note such as "remember this paragraph for your thesis" is useless if it does not actually reference a specific paragraph.' The suit, which is seeking class action status, asks that Amazon be legally blocked from improperly accessing users' Kindles in the future and punitive damages for those affected by the deletion. Nothing in Amazon's EULA or US copyright law gives them permission to delete books off your Kindle, so this sounds like a plausible suit."

Comment Re:So sad... (Score 1) 383

by koh (#28627341) Attached to: Firefox To Get Multi-Process Browsing

You do not have to use multiple threads in order to wait for the network without locking your UI. select(2) has existed since the dawn of time, and there are other ways now to achieve the same thing. Multithreading only spans better to multiple cores and is a little easier to write.
Power

Submission + - 15 Year Old Invents Algae-Powered Energy System (inhabitat.com)

Submitted by
Mike
Mike writes: "Signaling a bright future for sustainable energy, 15-year old Javier Fernandez-Han has created a remarkable algae-powered energy system that is capable of producing food and fuel, treating waste, containing greenhouse gases, and releasing oxygen. Dubbed the VERSATILE system, the project recently netted him a $20,000 scholarship for winning this year's Invent Your World Challenge."
Earth

Submission + - SPAM: Jets on Saturn's moon Enceladus not geysers

Submitted by
FiReaNGeL
FiReaNGeL writes: "Water vapor jets that spew from the surface of Saturn's icy moon Enceladus are not really geysers from an underground ocean as initially envisioned by planetary scientists, according to a study led by the University of Colorado at Boulder. First observed following a close flyby by NASA's Cassini spacecraft in July 2005, the jets were found to consist of both water vapor and icy particles, said Professor Nicholas Schneider of CU-Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. The jets inspired speculation by planetary scientists that they were geysers — violent explosions of water out of a vent caused by expanding bubbles of water vapor emanating from an ocean beneath the icy crust of Enceladus."
Link to Original Source
Music

Submission + - Archeologists Find Earliest Musical Instruments

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "The NY Times reports the discovery of a bone flute carved some 35,000 years ago that they say represents the earliest known flowering of music-making in Stone Age culture. The five hole flute made from a hollow bone of a griffon vulture was found at Hohle Fels Cave in the hills west of Ulm and is "by far the most complete of the musical instruments so far recovered from the caves" in a region where pieces of other flutes have been turning up in recent years. A three-hole flute carved from mammoth ivory was uncovered a few years ago at another cave, as well as two flutes made from wing bones of a mute swan but until now the artifacts appeared to be too rare and not as precisely dated to support wider interpretations of the early rise of music. "These finds demonstrate the presence of a well-established musical tradition at the time when modern humans colonized Europe," says Nicholas J. Conard of the University of Tübingen. A replica is yet to be made of the recent discovery, but the archaeologists found that a replica of the ancient three-hole flute produced a range of notes comparable in many ways to modern flutes. "The tones are quite harmonic," says Friedrich Seeberger, a German specialist in ancient music and archeologists expect the five-hole flute with its larger diameter to "provide a comparable, or perhaps greater, range of notes and musical possibilities." Scientists speculate that the Stone Age music "could have contributed to the maintenance of larger social networks, and thereby perhaps have helped facilitate the demographic and territorial expansion of modern humans.""
Earth

Submission + - NASA believes sun heats earth (dailytech.com) 2

Submitted by windowshater13
windowshater13 writes: Report indicates solar cycle has been impacting Earth since the Industrial Revolution Some researchers believe that the solar cycle influences global climate changes. They attribute recent warming trends to cyclic variation. Skeptics, though, argue that there's little hard evidence of a solar hand in recent climate changes.Via Daily Tech Al Gore in search of new income.
Security

Submission + - RSA Broken? (liveammo.com)

Submitted by
liveammo
liveammo writes: "This is a factoring attack against RSA with an up to 80% reduction in the search candidates required for a conventional brute force key attack, and affects any cryptosystem that uses modular arithmetic including the RSA encryption algorithm, potentially symmetric ciphers such as DES which use modular multiplication and addition rounds for diffusion, and even reduction of entropy attacks against PRNG functions such as those that are used to seed TCP/IP Initial Sequence Numbers (ISNs) and DNS servers for example. Sample Erlang proof of concept factoring code is included at the end of this post, and implements the attack against the prime number multiplication process in RSA so that security enthusiasts and armchair cryptographers alike can experiment with and validate these findings. For lack of a more descriptive term and in keeping with the field of cryptanalysis' somewhat arcane nomenclature, I am referring to this attack method as a "Reduction Sieve"."

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It's a naive, domestic operating system without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption.

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