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Submission + - Building a PC in the Year 1998

Submitted by roelbj
roelbj writes: Maximum PC has posted a free PDF archive of their premiere issue, dating back to September 1998. Anyone who has been building computers for a while will appreciate gems such as "When will we get to use our USB ports? (p.13); overclocking a CPU to a blistering 225 Mhz (p.64); reviews of cutting-edge CD-ROM drives, PhotoShop 5.0, the Iomega Buz, and Final Fantasy VII; and and of course the Intel/AMD debate which existed even then (p.10). If you are offended by beige, look away.

Comment Re:Backport\Upstream? Seems unlikely (Score 2) 304

by MrBingoBoingo (#46759171) Attached to: OpenBSD Team Cleaning Up OpenSSL
With something as big and messy as crufty as OpenSSL, there probably isn't a sane way to approach the problem of decrapifying it that doesn't involve first stripping it down to the minimum.The OpenBSD devs aren't Windows devs, Apple Devs, or Linux Devs. There is no "greater evil" in making something more secure in less time for your own platform when contorting themselves to maintain compatiility keeps junk that slows them in their task to the point they don't every get to the clean secure rewrite.

Submission + - Starting on intermediate maths?

Submitted by hughbar
hughbar writes: I haven't done any 'real' maths since university about 40 years ago. I wasn't useless, but not that great either, I had to do some elementary quantum mechanics and the kind of arithmetic that an empirical scientist always needs.

I'd like to start on a little more, but every entry in Wikipedia seems to lead to another entry. Can't find the end of this piece of string. Should I specialise? Is there a book or course that covers university entry and first year maths for non-mathematicians [for example, people switching major subject]? Any ideas on this welcome, I'm ready to start but just don't know where to start.

Comment Re:Want to write a kernel ? (Score 4, Insightful) 392

by MrBingoBoingo (#46541671) Attached to: The Myth of the Science and Engineering Shortage
A large problem in trying to deal with "scientists" and "engineers" as a macro problem is people in those professions aren't very fungible. To be a scientist or and engineer is to have a substantial degree of professional specialization. A micro biologist is not fungible with a zoologist, and even most microbiologists are not fungible with other microbiologist or zoologists fungible with other zoologists.

Submission + - Westboro Baptist Church founder Fred Phelps dies

Submitted by johnsnails
johnsnails writes: THE fiery founder of the Westboro Baptist Church, who drew international condemnation for outrageous and hate-filled protests that blamed almost everything, including the deaths of AIDS victims and US soldiers, on America's tolerance for gay people, has died. He was 84.

Submission + - Mark Shuttleworth calls for an end to ACPI (markshuttleworth.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: ACPI comes from an era when the operating system was proprietary and couldn't be changed by the hardware manufacturer.

We don't live in that era any more.

However, we DO live in an era where any firmware code running on your phone, tablet, PC, TV, wifi router, washing machine, server, or the server running the cloud your SAAS app is running on, is a threat vector against you.

If you read the catalogue of spy tools and digital weaponry provided to us by Edward Snowden, you'll see that firmware on your device is the NSA's best friend. Your biggest mistake might be to assume that the NSA is the only institution abusing this position of trust — in fact, it's reasonable to assume that all firmware is a cesspool of insecurity courtesy of incompetence of the worst degree from manufacturers, and competence of the highest degree from a very wide range of such agencies.

Submission + - Astronomers Glimpse Universe's First Split Second (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: If imagining the big bang makes your head ache, what happened an instant later might make it explode. Cosmologists think the just-born universe—a hot, dense soup of matter and energy—went through a burst of expansion faster than the speed of light. Like a magical balloon, the cosmos doubled its size 60 times in a span of 10-32 seconds. This phase, known as inflation, ended well before the universe was even a second old.

Now, 13.7 billion years later, cosmologists have detected what they say is the first direct evidence of this inflation—one of the biggest discoveries in the field in 20 years. From studying the cosmic microwave background (CMB)—the leftover radiation from the big bang—they have spotted traces of gravitational waves—undulations in the fabric of space and time—that rippled through the universe in that infinitesimally short epoch following its birth. The imprint of these gravitational waves upon the CMB matches what theorists had predicted for decades. The findings, announced this morning at a scientific presentation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, also show that gravity—at the smallest scale—follows the rules of quantum mechanics, similar to other forces such as electromagnetism.

Submission + - Bitcoin Barron Challenges Berkshire (trilema.com) 2

Submitted by MrBingoBoingo

Submission + - Julie Ann Horvath Quits GitHub, Citing Harrassment (twitter.com)

Submitted by PvtVoid
PvtVoid writes: From TechCrunch: The exit of engineer Julie Ann Horvath from programming network GitHub has sparked yet another conversation concerning women in technology and startups. Her claims that she faced a sexist internal culture at GitHub came as a surprise to some, given her former defense of the startup and her internal work at the company to promote women in technology.

Submission + - Russian State TV Anchor: Russia could turn US to 'radioactive ash' (yahoo.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Yahoo reports, ""Russia is the only country in the world realistically capable of turning the United States into radioactive ash," anchor Dmitry Kiselyov said on his weekly news show on state-controlled Rossiya 1 television. ... His programme was broadcast as the first exit polls were being published showing an overwhelming majority of Crimeans voting to leave Ukraine and join Russia. He stood in his studio in front of a gigantic image of a mushroom cloud produced after a nuclear attack, with the words "into radioactive ash". ... Kiselyov has earned a reputation as one of Russia's most provocative television news hosts, in particularly with his often blatantly homophobic remarks. But he is also hugely influential with his weekly news show broadcast at Sunday evening prime time. Putin last year appointed Kiselyov head of the new Russia Today news agency that is to replace the soon to be liquidated RIA Novosti news agency with the aim of better promoting Russia's official position." — Russia has threatened to stop nuclear disarmament treaty inspections and cooperation. Russian troops are reported to have seized a natural gas terminal in Ukraine outside of Crimea. There are reported to be 60,000 Russian troops massing on Russia's border with Ukraine.

Comment Re:90 day budget (Score 4, Insightful) 185

by MrBingoBoingo (#46470889) Attached to: Mars Rover Opportunity Faces New Threat: Budget Ax
Sure, but... Continuing a legacy like that is cheaper than launching anything else. It's almost like the Airforce retiring the A-10 and supposing a vaporware F-35 can replace it, the F-35 being both Vaporware and an abortion because someone insisted the bulk of the US's future airplanes must take off and land like helicopters. Seriously, Fund NASA, axe the F-35 and just buy some French Raphaels already.

Submission + - AI researcher says amoral robots pose a danger to humanity 1

Submitted by rlinke
rlinke writes: With robots becoming increasingly powerful, intelligent and autonomous, a scientist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute says it's time to start making sure they know the difference between good and evil.

"I'm worried about both whether it's people making machines do evil things or the machines doing evil things on their own," said Selmer Bringsjord, professor of cognitive science, computer science and logic and philosophy at RPI in Troy, N.Y. "The more powerful the robot is, the higher the stakes are. If robots in the future have autonomy..., that's a recipe for disaster.

Submission + - How to Avoid Being Tasered: Wear Carbon-Fibre Clothing (ibtimes.co.uk)

Submitted by concertina226
concertina226 writes: Hackaday user Shenzhen cut open a suit jacket and lined it with strip after strip of carbon-fibre tape together with iron-on interfacing.

When he tried to shock himself with a Taser, the carbon-fibre conducted the 50,000-volt electrical charge but he did not receive a shock. He also attempted to shock himself with the Taser needle piercing through the suit into his skin — and still came out unscathed.

Submission + - GnuTLS Goto Bug is Not Same as Apple Goto Fail (threatpost.com)

Submitted by msm1267
msm1267 writes: The similarities between the GnuTLS bug and Apple’s goto fail bug begin and end at their respective failure to verify TLS and SSL certificates. Otherwise, they’re neither siblings, nor distant cousins.
The GnuTLS bug is very different, though like Apple’s infamous goto fail error, it will also treat bogus digital certificates as valid.
“This one was more of a dumb coding mistake, whereas Apple could have been a cut-and-paste error. It looks like [GnuTLS] failed to cast a return variable correctly. C is hard," said cryptographer Matthew Green of Johns Hopkins University.
While the goto command appears in the buggy code in both vulnerabilities, the GnuTLS bug veers off in a different direction. Goto fail, for example is a standard C paradigm for error handling. Goto, in this case, is being used correctly, said Melissa Elliott, a security researcher with Veracode. The problem, she said, is related to variable typing and an improper mixing of error codes that led to this mess.

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