Comment oops, forgot the link... (Score 1) 2
http://www.yankodesign.com/2010/05/25/in-2020-we-can-wear-sony-computers-on-our-wrist/
Submission + - Very cool PC Bracelet from sony... 2
gibbled writes: In 2020 We Can Wear Sony Computers On Our Wrist
Our present need for internet connectivity is so profound that secondary devices like the Nextep Computer are bound to happen. Developed to be worn as a bracelet, this computer concept is constructed out of a flexible OLED touchscreen. Earmarked for the year 2020, features like a holographic projector (for screen), pull-out extra keyboard panels and social networking compatibility, make the concept plausible. Ten years from now is not too far away, so how many of you think we’d be buying such gadgets?
Designer: Hiromi Kiriki
Our present need for internet connectivity is so profound that secondary devices like the Nextep Computer are bound to happen. Developed to be worn as a bracelet, this computer concept is constructed out of a flexible OLED touchscreen. Earmarked for the year 2020, features like a holographic projector (for screen), pull-out extra keyboard panels and social networking compatibility, make the concept plausible. Ten years from now is not too far away, so how many of you think we’d be buying such gadgets?
Designer: Hiromi Kiriki
Submission + - The Long-Term Impact of Developer Burnout (infoworld.com)
snydeq writes: "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister discusses how today's 'disposable geek' mentality toward developers is certain to hurt companies in the long run. The mentality — fast contributing to developer burnout, most visibly in the gaming industry — see some of the smartest and most highly specialized members of the workforce treated like disposable labor, easily replaced by newer, cheaper recruits. 'When workplace conditions become unbearable, the brightest and most talented employees are usually the first to leave,' McAllister writes. 'As a result, the overall competency of development teams tends to sink to the lowest common denominator. In other words, the more managers pressure their developers to perform beyond their limits, the less effective their teams become in the long run.' Worse, the resulting conditions give companies incentive to offshore work, exacerbating the effect. 'The lower the quality of the in-house development team, the more tempting it is to replace them with low-cost outsourced development. But the more in-house developers feel they can easily be replaced, the less invested they will be in their work, the company, or its goals.'"
Submission + - Era ends for The Blue Cube (mercurynews.com)
HockeyPuck writes: Before a color guard and the wife of a hero, they said goodbye Wednesday to a famous artifact of space and the Cold War — Onizuka station (aka Sunnyvale's "Blue Cube,") — named for pioneering Asian-American astronaut Ellison Onizuka, who was killed in the 1986 Challenger crash. The windowless blue box that housed secret operations for four decades. In its first 25 years, the people at the center did critical work as a global antenna for military and civil satellites. In many ways, it is a monument to technology long since supplanted. The Cube was built to house big mainframe computers, which demanded temperatures in the 60s. Even now, the rules of classification forbid the Cube's veterans from talking about most of what they did, but they can tell a few fond stories of how they did it.
Submission + - Pay-Per-View Journalism Burns Reporters Out Fast
Hugh Pickens writes: "The NY Times reports that young journalists who once dreamed of trotting the globe in pursuit of a story are instead shackled to their computers, where they try to eke out a fresh thought or be first to report even the smallest nugget of news — anything that will impress Google algorithms and draw readers their way. The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times all display a “most viewed” list on their home pages and some media outlets, including Bloomberg News and Gawker Media, now pay writers based in part on how many readers click on their articles. “At a paper, your only real stress point is in the evening when you’re actually sitting there on deadline, trying to file,” says Jim VandeHei, Politico’s executive editor. “Now at any point in the day starting at 5 in the morning, there can be that same level of intensity and pressure to get something out.” The pace has led to substantial turnover in staff at digital news organizations. Departures at Politico have been particularly high, with roughly a dozen reporters leaving in the first half of the year — a big number for a newsroom that has only about 70 reporters and editors. “When my students come back to visit, they carry the exhaustion of a person who’s been working for a decade, not a couple of years,” says Duy Linh Tu of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. “I worry about burnout.”"
Submission + - Cyberwarrior Shortage Threatens U.S. Security (npr.org)
An anonymous reader writes: U.S. security officials say the country's cyberdefenses are not up to the challenge. In part, it's due to a severe shortage of computer security specialists and engineers with the skills and knowledge necessary to do battle against would-be adversaries. The protection of U.S. computer systems essentially requires an army of cyberwarriors, but the recruitment of that force is suffering.
"We don't have sufficiently bright people moving into this field to support those national security objectives as we move forward in time," says James Gosler, a veteran cybersecurity specialist who has worked at the CIA, the National Security Agency and the Energy Department.
Gosler estimates there are now only 1,000 people in the entire United States with the sophisticated skills needed for the most demanding cyberdefense tasks. To meet the computer security needs of U.S. government agencies and large corporations, he says, a force of 20,000 to 30,000 similarly skilled specialists is needed.
Some are currently being trained at the nonprofit SANS (SysAdmin, Audit, Network, Security) Institute outside Washington, D.C., but the demand for qualified cybersecurity specialists far exceeds the supply.
"We don't have sufficiently bright people moving into this field to support those national security objectives as we move forward in time," says James Gosler, a veteran cybersecurity specialist who has worked at the CIA, the National Security Agency and the Energy Department.
Gosler estimates there are now only 1,000 people in the entire United States with the sophisticated skills needed for the most demanding cyberdefense tasks. To meet the computer security needs of U.S. government agencies and large corporations, he says, a force of 20,000 to 30,000 similarly skilled specialists is needed.
Some are currently being trained at the nonprofit SANS (SysAdmin, Audit, Network, Security) Institute outside Washington, D.C., but the demand for qualified cybersecurity specialists far exceeds the supply.
Submission + - Google Chrome now has resource-blocking adblock (google.com)
MackieChan writes: "It seems to have slipped under the radar, but Google Chrome now has resource-blocking abilities, and may have had the ability for some time. Using the "beforeload" event on the document, an extension can now intercept resources from loading. Adblock for Chrome has already added it, and I expect the other 'ad-blocking' extensions have as well. Before you start praising Google, however, its the WebKit team that deserves your credit; one chromium developer responded to praise by stating '... thank Apple — they added it to WebKit, we just inherited it.' Firefox vs Chrome just got a bit more exciting."
Submission + - StarCraft II Video Card Performance Investigated (hardwarecanucks.com)
SKYMTL writes: StarCraft II is bound to be popular and sales of graphics cards are sure to spike as people look for the best possible solution to push this game to the limits. Hardware Canucks has tested today's most popular GPU upgrades' performance, price AND power consumption in order to see which cards are best suited fir StarCraft II.
Submission + - What to do with supercomputer time?
An anonymous reader writes: So I have NSF supercomputer time what should I do with it? Folding at home? Nuclear simulations? Go?
Comment Assassination Politics (Score 1) 491
Wow, this reminds me of the heyday of the Cypherpunks mailing list and Jim Bell's Assassination Politics...
Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Who watches the watchmen? 1
An anonymous reader writes: I'm posting this anonymously, but it's something that has happened that has shacked me up a bit. A close friend of mine was in a confrontation with a boyfriend, who turned out used to work for the US Department of Defense. Apparently he has friends in the secret service that does work for groups that investigate things such as counter-terrorism.
His friend suspected her of cheating on him, and had a log of all her text messages and confronted her with it. It's an embarrassing situation with a lot of drama, to say the least, so she has no intention of exposing him. But what has basically happened was that this person was able to arrange a friend who is in a government agency to perform a full wire tap. He pulled a picture that she had sent someone from nearly 3 months before he'd even known her. At first I was quite skeptical that it was even a possibility. I was under the clear impression that he had somehow managed to get into her phone physically, and simply read her messages, but it wasn't the case.
My question to Slashdot is, does the general public know how easily the powers the US government has in monitoring and in this case abusing her rights? I was completely shocked to find this out, and I've been relatively in tune with the technical and security-related media and have never heard of this happening. How much trouble can this person get into for doing this? What agency would be responsible for perusing this person for committing what i feel is a crime against all parties involved 4th amendment rights. If I've -EVER- had a push to take personal encryption serious, this is it. AT&T was the carrier, iPhone was the device and the persons phone wasn't even in her own name, it was under another parties. I've inspected the phone and have found zero evidence of tampering.
Apparently this person has confessed to the same person he did this to that this is the same way he managed to catch his ex-wife cheating, and he has serious trust issues at this point and has done it a few times since he started dating. How wide-spread is this practice? Does the media have any idea how easily these monitoring technologies can be abused?
His friend suspected her of cheating on him, and had a log of all her text messages and confronted her with it. It's an embarrassing situation with a lot of drama, to say the least, so she has no intention of exposing him. But what has basically happened was that this person was able to arrange a friend who is in a government agency to perform a full wire tap. He pulled a picture that she had sent someone from nearly 3 months before he'd even known her. At first I was quite skeptical that it was even a possibility. I was under the clear impression that he had somehow managed to get into her phone physically, and simply read her messages, but it wasn't the case.
My question to Slashdot is, does the general public know how easily the powers the US government has in monitoring and in this case abusing her rights? I was completely shocked to find this out, and I've been relatively in tune with the technical and security-related media and have never heard of this happening. How much trouble can this person get into for doing this? What agency would be responsible for perusing this person for committing what i feel is a crime against all parties involved 4th amendment rights. If I've -EVER- had a push to take personal encryption serious, this is it. AT&T was the carrier, iPhone was the device and the persons phone wasn't even in her own name, it was under another parties. I've inspected the phone and have found zero evidence of tampering.
Apparently this person has confessed to the same person he did this to that this is the same way he managed to catch his ex-wife cheating, and he has serious trust issues at this point and has done it a few times since he started dating. How wide-spread is this practice? Does the media have any idea how easily these monitoring technologies can be abused?
Submission + - Free clock democratises atomic accuracy (itnews.com.au)
schliz writes: A new, trial network of software-based clocks could give data centres and networks the accuracy of an atomic clock for free. The so-called RADclock analyses information from multiple computers across the internet by collecting the time from each machine's internal quartz clock, the time it takes for this information to be transmitted across the network, and comparing all the information collected to determine a time that is most likely to be accurate, so machines are calibrated across the network with up to microsecond accuracy — as good as that provided by a $50,000 atomic clock, researchers say.
Submission + - PhysX API mired by poor optimization, x87 code (realworldtech.com)
EconolineCrush writes: Nvidia has long pushed its PhysX game physics middleware as a prime candidate for GPU acceleration. However, it seems that the company may have also taken steps to ensure that PhysX performs poorly when run on a modern CPU. Despite the fact that physics calculations lend themselves to parallel processing, games tend to implement PhysX with a single thread. PhysX also relies largely on x87 code rather than SSE instructions. The latter should run faster and make life easier for developers, and Nvidia has taken advantage of similar instructions with its console-specific PhysX implementations. But not on the PC, which smells like a willful attempt to hinder PhysX performance on anything but an Nvidia GPU.
Submission + - Woolly Mammoth Protein Comes Back from Extinction (sciencemag.org)
cremeglace writes: By inserting a 43,000-year-old woolly mammoth gene into Escherichia coli bacteria, scientists have figured out how these ancient beasts adapted to the subzero temperatures of prehistoric Siberia and North America. The gene, which codes for the oxygen-transporting protein hemoglobin, allowed the animals to keep their tissues supplied with oxygen even at very low temperatures. "It's no different from going back 40,000 years and taking a blood sample from a living mammoth," says Kevin Campbell, a biologist at the University of Manitoba in Canada. Full article at ScienceNOW.
Submission + - Time Machines for Dummies By: Stephen Hawking
psyph3r writes: Dailymail.co.uk has published an interesting article written by Stephen Hawking on the practicality of time travel. He covers wormholes and approaching the speed of light as methods of time travel. He also covers current evidence that the passage of time is not constant, but varies based on conditions such as gravity (GPS satellite time loss) or velocity (LHC time dilation) He then expands on this proof into possible and impossible ways for humanity to travel through time. Long article, but a recommended read.
