Duc de Montebello - Slashdot User

Submission + - GLOBE at Night Aims to Map Global Light Pollution (globeatnight.org) 1

Submitted by Kilrah_il on Tuesday March 22, 2011 @03:10PM

Kilrah_il writes: Light pollution is a big problem this days, affecting not only astronomers and wild life, but also everyone else because of wasted energy. GLOBE at Night aims to raise awareness by urging people to go outside and find out how much light pollution there is in their area. "The campaign is easy and fun to do. First, you match the appearance of the constellation Orion in the first campaign (and Leo or Crux in the second campaign) with simple star maps of progressively fainter stars found. Then you submit your measurements, including the date, time, and location of your comparison. After all the campaign’s observations are submitted, the project’s organizers release a map of light-pollution levels worldwide."

Submission + - Intel processor launch 10-core Xeon in half 2011 (blogspot.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 22, 2011 @03:02PM

An anonymous reader writes: The recognized provider of chips, Intel has recently announced that the 10-core "Westmere-EX "Xeon is available before the end of the first half of 2011.

The chip will be the next successor to the fastest server processor from Intel, the Nehalem-EX which has eight cores, and was published in 2010.

Intel will use 32nm process technology to construct the 10-core "Westmere-EX" Xeon processor. It should be noted that the current chip Nehalem-EX is designed with the processing of 45-nm technology.

A spokesman for the chip manufacturer, said the next target high-end servers in data centers, large databases and other application needs.

The spokesman also said the systems Westmere EX chips is two socket supports up to 2 TB memory. new technologies help users update the server processors.

Meanwhile, Intel's main rival Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) is preparing a new Bulldozer architecture-based 16-core (code-named Interlagos) start in the third quarter of this year.

Submission + - US takes tiny steps to help big rare earth problem (networkworld.com)

Submitted by

coondoggie

on Tuesday March 22, 2011 @02:48PM

coondoggie writes: "Sometimes when you are so far behind in a particular game of strategy, it's ok to fallback, regroup and slowly reevaluate your plan of attack.
That's about where the US is right now — in the regrouping phase, as the Department of Energy today sent about its second Request For Information plea to help it assess the rare earth materials world and develop some sort of plan of attack by the end of the year. The crux of the situation: China controls some 97% of the world's rare earth materials — and currently sells them for $44,361 a ton — almost double 2010 prices , according to the Wall Street Journal."

Submission + - Companies accused of spectrum hoarding (cio.com.au)

Submitted by

angry tapir

on Monday March 21, 2011 @12:21AM

angry tapir writes: "The National Association of Broadcasters, asked by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission and some lawmakers to give up television spectrum for mobile data uses, has fired back by accusing several other companies of hoarding the spectrum they hold. In recent weeks, the NAB has gone on the offensive by suggesting that several spectrum holders, including Verizon Communications, AT&T and Time Warner Cable, have not developed the spectrum they already have."

Submission + - Why isn't more of the Web using HTTPS? (arstechnica.com) 1

Submitted by

JDRucker

on Monday March 21, 2011 @12:04AM

JDRucker writes: "You wouldn't write your username and passwords on a postcard and mail it for the world to see, so why are you doing it online? Every time you log in to Twitter, Facebook or any other service that uses a plain HTTP connection that's essentially what you're doing."

Submission + - Motorola Sholes Bootloader Unlocked (droid-life.com)

Submitted by teh31337one on Sunday March 20, 2011 @09:49PM

teh31337one writes: Motorola's locked bootloader for their sholes-family devices (Droid OG, Milestone, DroidX, Droid 2 etc, not Atrix 4G) has finally been cracked.

@nenolod explains on his website: The Motorola(r) sholes platform uses a trusted bootloader environment. Signatures are stored as part of the CDT stored on the NAND flash. mbmloader verifies the signature on mbm before passing control. mbm verifies all other signatures before allowing the device to boot.

There is a vulnerability in the way that Motorola generated the signatures on the sections stored in the CDT. This vulnerability is very simple. Like on the PlayStation 3, Motorola forgot to add a random value to the signature in order to mask the private key. This allowed the private key and initialization vector to be cracked.

This comes at the time when HTC are also stepping up their attempts at locking down their phones. The recently released LTE flagship — ThunderBolt is their most locked-down phone to date... They made signed images, a signed kernel, and a signed recovery. They also locked the memory.

Submission + - Google Accuses China of Interfering with Gmail 2

Submitted by

Hugh Pickens writes

on Sunday March 20, 2011 @09:21PM

Hugh Pickens writes writes: "The Guardian reports that Google has accused the Chinese government of interfering with Gmail. According to the search giant, Chinese customers and advertisers have increasingly been complaining about their Gmail service in the past month and attempts by users to send messages, mark messages as unread and use other services have generated problems for Gmail customers. The announcement follows a blog posting from Google on 11 March in which the firm said it had "noticed some highly targeted and apparently politically motivated attacks against our users. We believe activists may have been a specific target." The search firm is not commenting further on this latest attack, but technology experts said it seemed to show an increasingly high degree of sophistication. "In the wake of what is happening in the Middle East I don't think China wants to be seen making heavy-handed attacks on the internet, that would draw too much attention," says one internet executive who wished to remain anonymous adding making it look like a fault in Google's system was extremely difficult to do and the fact that these attacks appear to come and go makes the attack look "semi-industrial and very, very sophisticated.""

Submission + - "An Internal Brain Drain" (sciencemag.org) 1

Submitted by walterbyrd on Sunday March 20, 2011 @06:24PM

walterbyrd writes: Dr. Norman Matloff of the University of California-Davis computer science department, argues that US citizens are avoiding "Science Technology Engineering Math" (STEM) careers, because US citizens see those fields as being ruined by massive offshoring, and inshoring.

Submission + - Making Java Fun with Mirah - Ruby Syntax For Java (arbia.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 20, 2011 @03:49PM

An anonymous reader writes: Java is performant, widely adopted and eminently portable, however, its syntax is largely inherited from C++ along with some of it's esoteric unfriendliness. Mirah aims to place a friendly face on Java through the implementation of a syntax who's primary concern is developer friendliness, think ruby/python/groovy, and route of least surprise. The result is a truly cogent alternative syntax delivering readability, expressiveness and some compelling new language features.

Submission + - Apple, Google, Microsoft Team Up on $1T Project 2

Submitted by theodp on Sunday March 20, 2011 @01:55PM

theodp writes: Q. What does it take to get Apple, Google, Microsoft, Cisco, Adobe, Oracle, and Qualcomm all on the same page? A. $1 trillion-plus in foreign-held profits! BusinessWeek reports the tech companies are members of a growing coalition of U.S. corporations lobbying for another tax holiday on repatriated foreign profits. It's a seductive argument — reap billions in tax revenue from money that's currently untaxed and generate economic growth to boot. However, a nearly identical holiday passed by Congress in 2004 and taken mostly in 2005 did little to boost jobs or investment, according to several independent economic studies. One anecdote, notes BW, makes the point acutely: HP, even as it was pulling $14.5B home from abroad at an estimated tax rate of 5.25%, announced plans in 2005 to reduce its workforce by 14,500.

Submission + - Righthaven Copyright Lawsuit Backfires

Submitted by

Hugh Pickens writes

on Sunday March 20, 2011 @01:44PM

Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Steve Green reports in the Las Vegas that US District Judge James Mahan has ruled that the Center for Intercultural Organizing, an Oregon nonprofit, did not infringe on copyrights when it posted an entire Las Vegas Review-Journal story on its website without authorization and that there was no harm to the market for the story. Mahan stressed that his ruling hinged largely on the CIO's nonprofit status and said the copyright lawsuit would be dismissed because the nonprofit used it in an educational way, didn't try to use the story to raise money, and because the story in question was primarily factual as opposed to being creative. "The market (served by the CIO) is not the R-J's market," says Mahan. This is the second fair use defeat for Righthaven and is significant since it involved an entire story post rather than a partial story post. Green says that Righthaven's strategy of suing 250 web site and demanding $150,000 in damages plus forfeiture of the web site's domain name has clearly backfired and now Righthaven, the self-appointed protector of the newspaper industry, has left the newspaper industry with less copyright protection than if they never filed their lawsuits at all. "Righthaven may argue its lawsuits have deterred rampant online infringements of newspaper material — but there's no proof that infringements it usually targets involving bloggers and special-interest websites ever affected newspaper revenue in the first place," writes Green. "While these aren't binding precedents upon other judges, these rulings can now be used by special-interest websites to justify their postings of what used to be copyright-infringing content. These, clearly, are setbacks for all newspapers interested in protecting their copyrights.""

Comment But we are already running out of Indium... (Score 0) 83

by Duc de Montebello on Tuesday November 23, 2010 @01:29AM (#34314354) Attached to: Ultra-Thin Alternative To Silicon

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20827831.000-ten-years-to-save-the-touchscreen.html

Comment Re:Meanwhile on the PC (Score 2, Informative) 201

by Rewind on Wednesday May 12, 2010 @01:21AM (#32179196) Attached to: <em>Halo 2</em> Online Preservation Effort Ends

That is somewhat misleading. Isn't the original Tribes down? WON went down along with all the original games that were on it (though you can migrate to Steam). Heck EA shuts down PC things left and right. You are making this sound console specific when in reality it is just more obvious on consoles.

Comment Re: Some valid criticisms (Score 1) 214

by wagnerrp on Wednesday May 12, 2010 @12:21AM (#32178874) Attached to: MythTV 0.23 Released

Completely agree about the settings being categorised - in fact I'd be happier if they were nicely categorised in the database, but as it is they're all just glommed into a single table listed in alphabetical order, without any sort of hierarchical structure in the key names (such as you do with objects in firefox's about:config for example) - wouldn't it be nice to have a frontend.display.widgets.renderer = opengl for instance?

Agree that it's entirely possible I'm doing very complicated things, but this is why I get so annoyed at the bulk of Myth power users; I say something's needlessly complicated, and I'm told it's because Myth is so powerful. If something powerful doesn't work as I'd like it to, I'm told I'm making things needlessly complicated.

Technically, there is no ordering of settings in the database. They are just inserted as needed. If they showed up in alphabetical order, its because you sorted them that way in your select statement. Manual tinkering with settings outside the GUI has never been recommended or supported in any manner.

Almost everyone will agree that there are far too many settings, and that their layout could be handled better. MythTV was designed for, and used on for several years, low resolution standard definition TVs. What works there doesn't make much sense on a higher resolution display. I have to say 'almost everyone', as there has been concerted effort over the past year to clear out bad and unnecessary settings. Every time something would be removed, people would pop into the mailing list and IRC channels bickering about how they couldn't live without their particular pet setting. Nevermind the fact that the setting was no longer even functional, and when it previously did function, enabling it caused bad things to happen.

Comment How did that get uprated? (Score 2, Insightful) 457

by Tancred on Tuesday May 11, 2010 @11:40PM (#32178626) Attached to: The Telcos' Secret Anti-Net Neutrality Strategy

1. crooksandliars.com and mediamatters.org are sites whose main purpose is to document the outrageous behavior of the right so we don't have to rely on hearsay and wacky conspiracy theories. They actually do what you claim Glenn Beck does.

2. Glenn Beck is one seriously troubled and paranoid man. Or else he's morally bankrupt and just acting nuts so he can make truckloads of money by whipping people into a frenzy.

3. You've got the "hands over control of the internet" idea exactly backwards. Net neutrality is about preventing any entity from having control of the Internet - whether that is the government or corporations. It's the opposite of shutting down dissent - it makes it illegal to shut down dissent. And that's a good idea under any administration.

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