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Hardware

Submission + - Startup Combines CPU And DRAM On One Chip (techweekeurope.co.uk) 3

Submitted by
judgecorp
judgecorp writes: "Startup Venray believes that instead of packing more and more cores onto a processor chip, the CPU and DRAM should be combined on one piece of silicon. The company thinks bandwidth between CPU and memory, and fewer signals going out over the chip's pins, is a better better way to improve performance. No actual product yet, unfortunately, and the current burst of publicity seems to be designed to attract a buyer."
Transportation

Submission + - What to Do with a 1,000 Foot Wrecked Cruise Ship?

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "What do you do with a 1,000-foot wreck that's full of fuel and half-submerged on a rocky ledge in the middle of an Italian marine sanctuary? Remove it. Very carefully. Stuck on a rocky shoal off the Tuscan island of Giglio, leaving the wreck where it is probably isn't an option but removing a massive ship that's run hard aground and incurred major damage to the hull involves logistical and environmental issues that are just as large. First there's the fuel. A half a million gallons of fuel could wreak havoc on the marine ecosystem — the ship is smack in the middle of the Pelagos Sanctuary for Mediterranean Marine Mammals. Engineers may need to go in from the side using a special drill to cut through the fuel tanks in a process called hot tapping. "You fasten a flange with a valve on it, you drill through, access the tank, pull the drill back out, close the valve, and then attach a pumping apparatus to that," says Tim Beaver, president of the American Salvage Association. "It's a difficult task, but it's doable." Then if it's determined that the Costa Concordia can be saved, engineers could try to refloat the ship and tug it back to dry dock for refurbishing. The job will likely require "a combination of barges equipped with winches and cranes" to pull the cruise liner off its side then once the Concordia is off the rocks, "they are going to have to fight to keep it afloat, just like you would a battle-damaged ship." Another alternative is to cut the vessel into smaller, manageable parts using a giant cutting wire coated with a material as hard as diamonds called a cheese wire in a method was used to dismember the 55,000-ton Norwegian-flagged MV Tricolor. Regardless of how the Concordia is removed, it's going to be a difficult, expensive and drawn-out process. "I don't see it taking much less than a year, and I think it could take longer," says Bob Umbdenstock, director of planning at Resolve Marine Group."

Comment Re:Oracle matters less thank you'd think (Score 1) 157

by pburghdoom (#38724180) Attached to: Oracle and the Java Ecosystem
This was my thought exactly, instead of the boolean why not call a method. The method name can and should be highly descriptive so you know what is going on (both for readability and maintainability) and it also allows for code reuse which was one of the arguments earlier for goto. The OP's claim that it had to be done with the extra boolean was unsettling.
The Courts

Submission + - Kodak sues HTC, Apple over patents (networkworld.com)

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: Here we go again with mobile industry patent lawsuits: Struggling Eastman Kodak is alleging that Apple's and HTC's smartphones and tablets infringe on its digital imaging technology, and has filed a complaint and lawsuits with the U.S. International Trade Commission and the U.S. District Court for the Western District of New York. The complaint to the ITC claims that some of Apple's iPhones, iPads, and iPods, and HTC's smartphones and tablets, infringe Kodak patents related to technology for transmitting images. Kodak also alleges that HTC's smartphones infringe on a patent related to a method for previewing images, which is already the subject of pending actions against Apple.
Education

Submission + - UK School's ICT to be replaced by computer science (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by
peetm
peetm writes: "It seems that the UK government has at last come to its senses and has announced the scraping of (a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_and_communications_technology">ICT in schools — which in the UK means playing about with Word and Excel etc. By the way, that came as a shock to most students – they thought ICT meant using Facebook, Twitter, Bebo, sadly, when they became enlightened they also switched off. But who can blame them really – one or two years of Powerpoint, Word, Excel! Yuck. So anyway, it’s being scrapped – and about time too – and is to be replaced with computer science lessons (deliberate lowercase). However, what about those kids (and let’s face it – we’re talking about the majority) who won’t be able to cope with even lowercase cs? How to prepare them for the real world?"
Education

Submission + - UK to scrap "dull" IT classes (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by Rik Sweeney
Rik Sweeney writes: Schools in England are to scrap the current programme of information and communications technology (ICT) and replace it with an "open source" curriculum in computer science and programming designed with the help of universities and industry after it was described as "harmful and dull".
Space

Submission + - Russian Space Agency Chief Suspects Sabotage

Submitted by mvar
mvar writes: Roscosmos chief Vladimir Popovkin stopped short of accusing any specific country of disabling Russian satellites, but in an interview in the daily Izvestia he said some Russian craft had suffered "unexplained" malfunctions while flying over another side of the globe beyond the reach of his nation's tracking facilities.
"I wouldn't like to accuse anyone, but today there exists powerful means to influence spacecraft, and their use can't be excluded," he said.
James Oberg, a NASA veteran who has written books on the Russian space program and now works as a space consultant, said Popovkin's comments were a sad example of the Russian cultural instinct to 'blame foreigners.'

Submission + - In protest of SOPA, Reddit will go black on Jan 18 (crypticide.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In protest of SOPA, Reddit will go black on January 18th from 8am–8pm EST (1300–0100 UTC). I wonder how many other sites (if any) will join them.

Comment Re:Congress vs the world's 10-million geek army... (Score 1) 449

by pburghdoom (#38448228) Attached to: Coders Develop Ways To Defeat SOPA Censorship
I think your average p2p client would have been a fairly obscure piece of technology for most just a few years ago, but now because of the ubiquity of them we have SOPA. People have grown accustom to getting what they want when they want it. If hackers come up with a way to circumvent SOPA restrictions that is mildly user friendly people will use it.

Submission + - Light Higgs Discovered And About To Destroy The Un (science20.com)

Submitted by pburghdoom
pburghdoom writes: With todays press release from CERN I felt this quirky little article on what it would mean to have a light Higgs would be apropos.

... the Higgs particle is below a certain threshold of mass, our best theories of our own universe will imply that the vacuum is unstable! It means that the universe decays much like a radioactive particle. Its average life expectancy depends on the Higgs mass.

Looks like the end of the world is coming!

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