Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Submission + - Endurance experiment writes one petabyte to six consumer SSDs

crookedvulture writes: Last year, we kicked off an SSD endurance experiment to see how much data could be written to six consumer drives. One petabyte later, half of them are still going. Their performance hasn't really suffered, either. The casualties slowed down a little toward the very end, and they died in different ways. The Intel 335 Series and Kingston HyperX 3K provided plenty of warning of their imminent demise, though both still ended up completely unresponsive at the very end. The Samsung 840 Series, which uses more fragile TLC NAND, perished unexpectedly. It also suffered a rash of cell failures and multiple bouts of uncorrectable errors during its life. While the sample size is far too small to draw any definitive conclusions, all six SSDs exceeded their rated lifespans by hundreds of terabytes. The fact that all of them wrote over 700TB is a testament to the endurance of modern SSDs.

Submission + - AMD Kaveri Notebook APU Preview Shows Solid All Around Performance (hothardware.com)

MojoKid writes: AMD has had a tough time competing with Intel on the desktop lately, but when it comes to the notebook arena, performance, value and power efficiency are measured against a very different yardstick. Multimedia performance in these highly integrated designs can matter much more than desktop designs where discrete graphics engines are easily accommodated. Back in January of this year, AMD launched their Kaveri desktop APU. Targeted for desktops and with integrated AMD GCN graphics on board, Kaveri also had a number of optimizations and enhancements made to its Steamroller CPU cores as well. All told, Kaveri represents a much-needed upgrade to AMD's base APU lineup. Today, AMD is launching their Kaveri mobile variant and early testing shows it's relatively competitive versus mainstream Intel notebook chips, even the latest Haswell cores. With four AMD Steamroller CPU cores and up to 8 GCN-based GPU cores on board, AMD's Kaveri mobile APUs offer up competitive CPU performance and graphics performance that surpasses Intel's integrated graphics by a wide margin, with the exception of perhaps their rare, high-end Iris Pro variant.

Submission + - The Forensic Dentist Who's Reviving Mexico's Unidentified Corpses (NSFW) (vice.com)

Daniel_Stuckey writes: CIUDAD JUAREZ — The man cuts a striking profile. He’s been dead for two years—a nameless hit-and-run victim, I’m told, left to bleed out on the side of some dusty road in this Mexico-US border town of 1.5 million people. The accident punched a hole in his forehead. From where I’m standing, hunched over an autopsy stretcher on which his body is strewn akimbo, I can see through to his pickled brain. If I didn’t know any better, there's still life in this man. It’s been 120 hours since Dr. Alejandro Hernández Cárdenas got to work. That’s when Hernández Cárdenas, an unassuming local dentist who splits his time practicing, teaching graduate forensic odontology courses at the Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez, and identifying the unidentified at the Juarez Forensic Science Lab, submerged this man’s gnarled, sun-scorched body into what Hernández Cárdenas affectionately calls the “Jacuzzi.”

Submission + - Linux Mint 17 "Qiana" released (linuxmint.com)

Tailhook writes: Linux Mint 17 "Qiana", a long term support edition of Linux Mint, has been released. Mint 17 is available in both MATE and Cinnamon editions. Mint 17 is derived from Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty Tahr) and will receive security updates until April, 2019. The Cinnamon edition provides Cinnamon 2.2, with a much improved update manager, driver manager, HiDPI display support and many usability refinements. This release of Mint establishes a baseline on which the next several releases will be based; `Until 2016 the development team won't start working on a new base and will be fully focused on this one; future versions of Linux Mint will use the same package base as Linux Mint 17, making it trivial for people to upgrade.'

Submission + - Bitcoin Securities Issuer Settles with SEC (thedrinkingrecord.com)

MrBingoBoingo writes: The United States Securities and Exchange Commission has extracted a Settlement from Erik Voorhees that consists of $15,843.98 in profits and a penalty of $35,000 for the high crime of having been involved in financing two offerings with Bitcoin. If you read the Security and Exchange Commission's actual filing you can see that all of the fines and settlements relate to FeedZeBirds with any actions relating to S.DICE on MPEx consisting of a strong finger wag and stern look. With the light assessment in this case, it seems that the SEC's ability to act in mature Bitcoin markets like MPEx may be limited unless they work to build cooperative relationships with those markets.

Submission + - Scientists Building Sperm-Size Robots To Deliver Drugs Inside The Human Body (itworld.com)

jfruh writes: One of the difficulties of treating certain diseases is that it's necessary to deliver tiny amounts of medicine to very specific parts of the human body. Dutch scientists are hoping that the tiny robots they're building, inspired by sperm cells, can help. In addition to delivering drugs, the sperm-bots could clean arteries or (appropriately) assist with in vitro fertilization.

Submission + - Game of Thrones: The dragons and nuclear weapons nexus (thebulletin.org)

Lasrick writes: Yes, Game of Thrones has deep meanings with a surprising number of lessons about peace and security for real life, and Timothy Westmyer of the Rising Powers Initiative explores the dragon metaphor here: 'One parallel, however, has escaped analysis: dragons as living, fire-breathing metaphors for nuclear weapons. Despite the fantasy setting, the story teaches a great deal about the inherent dangers that come with managing these game-changing agents, their propensity for accidents, the relative benefits they grant their masters, and the strain these weapons impose upon those wielding them.' As Thrones creator George R.R. Martin has said: 'Dragons are the nuclear deterrent...but is that sufficient?'

Submission + - Pirate Bay Uploader Faces $32m Lawsuit over UFC Sports Content (ibtimes.co.uk)

concertina226 writes: A New York online pirate who uploads live sporting events to torrent such as the Pirate Bay and Kickass Torrents is being sued for $32m (£19m).

Zuffia, the parent company of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) pay-per-view cable channel which shows boxing and wrestling events, has launched a civil lawsuit against Steven Messina, 27, of Great Kills, Staten Island.

Messina is known online as "Secludedly" and numerous torrent files bear his name on the internet. On Kickass Torrents, he is considered to be a "verified uploader", meaning that the files he uploads are safe to download and do not contain malware or adware.

Secludedly updated his profile on Kickass Torrents to say: "My apologies to Zuffa and the UFC. All files deleted in respect for my favorite MMA organisation."

Submission + - Building a PC in the Year 1998

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

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?

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.

Slashdot Top Deals

For God's sake, stop researching for a while and begin to think!

Working...