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Cloud

Submission + - Building a Personal FOSS Cloud

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Cloud-based personal data management is pretty cool... if you don't mind entrusting the entirety of your personal data to a gigantic corporation. Apart from the risks of their doing unseemly things with your data, also the security of your data is entirely in their unreliable hands. So, is it possible to build my own personal data repository, where for example, I can store my contacts and calendars to sync to multiple devices? This could be hosted on any third party hosting service assuming also that all of my data was encrypted at the data level. So even if the host wanted to look at my data, all they'd see is 1s and 0s. What are the options for the tinfoil hat wearing FOSS folks that want to participate in the cloud age?

Comment I don't care about Windows (Score 1) 177

by mehemiah (#40301469) Attached to: Thunderbolt On Windows: Hardware and Performance Explored
great, when is linux getting it? What's that, Intel doesn't care? After multiple speeches from multiple Intel executives at several conferences they don't move at all on publishing a software spec for it. We're not asking for a diagram of how it works, (there are enough of those) give us a bus, a frequency, something!
NASA

Submission + - Falcon 9 Launch Aborted At Last Minute (cbsnews.com)

Submitted by ClockEndGooner
ClockEndGooner writes: Sadly, SpaceX had to abort its launch of the Falcon 9 to the International Space Station this morning due to higher than expected pressure levels in one of its engine chambers. NASA and SpaceX have another launch window scheduled for early next week. "Billionaire rocket designer Elon Musk “Will adjust limits for countdown in a few days,” he tweeted".
Linux

Submission + - EDE 2.0 released (equinox-project.org)

Submitted by karijes
karijes writes: EDE (Equinox Desktop Environment) is light desktop for UNIX-like operating systems that doesn't get on your way.

This is major relese fully powered with FLTK 1.x, a light GUI toolkit, where everything was rewritten from scratch with adding a lot of freedesktop.org specifications. This release also integrates pekwm as default window manager.
Windows

Submission + - Aero Glass UI no more on Windows 8 (theverge.com)

Submitted by closer2it
closer2it writes: Microsoft has revealed that it has made some big changes to its desktop UI for Windows 8, which includes moving away from Aero Glass — the UI first introduced with Vista. According to the company, this means visual changes that include "flattening surfaces, removing reflections, and scaling back distracting gradients." Despite all of these changes with the interface, the company doesn't appear to be worried about the issue of "learnability." Instead, Microsoft believes that with a little help it won't take long for users to adapt to the new operating system.
Earth

Submission + - Scientists Unravel the Mystery of the 'Dark Day' 1

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "BBC reports that 232 years ago a strange event occurred that remains shrouded in mystery to this day. On May 19, 1780 the sky turned yellow in New England and Canada, animals ran for cover and darkness descended, causing people to light candles and start to pray. By lunchtime night had fallen. With little scientific knowledge amongst the populace, people were afraid and some lawmakers in Connecticut believed it was the day of judgment. "There are some verses in Matthew that might have led them to believe that this is the second coming of Christ," says historian Mike Dash. "At the time, natural events — even birds fighting in the sky — were a sign of God's intentions. The Dark Day would have seemed like a warning to Man." A solar eclipse can be ruled out as there is a record of when these occur — and they only last for a matter of minutes, there is no record of volcanic activity in 1780 making a huge ash cloud an unlikely explanation, and a meteorite is equally unlikely. Now scientists may have found the answer in the trees. Academics at the University of Missouri's Department of Forestry analyzed tree trunks inland from New England, where westerly prevailing winds would originate and found signs of fire-scarred rings in tree trunks dating back to that period in the area that is today occupied by Algonquin Provincial Park. Eyewitness accounts in New England support the forest fire hypothesis as soot was spotted in rivers, and one letter noted that the air had the "smell of a malt-house or a coal-kiln". Whatever the cause in 1780, geography must have exacerbated the fear, says Dash with European settlers living on the edge of a vast unknown continent. "When it goes dark for them, there's no guarantee it is ever going to get light again," says Dash. "In those days it would be quite natural to think it was the Second Coming.""
Science

Submission + - "Colloidal Display" Turns Soap Film Into a Projector Screen

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: 3 graduate students from University of Tokyo, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Tsukuba have developed Colloidal Display — a clear projector screen that can control its transparency. Normally soap film will pass through the light but Colloidal Display does not. It mixes colloid into the solution and uses an ultra sonic speakers to vibrate the surface of the soap film to achieve this. They have created several prototype such as 3D planer screen to show how this technology can be useful.
Robotics

MIT Unveils Robotic Manipulator Filled With Coffee Grounds 60

Posted by timothy from the your-creepy-robot-smells-delicious dept.
An anonymous reader writes "MIT researchers have developed a highly articulated robotic manipulator based on soft materials that can harden to reposition the device. The technique is known as jamming, and it relies on pouches filled with granular material like coffee grounds; when air is removed from the pouches, they become rigid. The researchers combined jamming actuators with cables to build a manipulator resembling an elephant trunk. They say the device is low-cost, capable of grasping a variety of objects, and can remain in a hardened state for extended periods of time using little energy."
Patents

Submission + - Amazon Patents Pitching As-Seen-On-TV Products

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Q. What do you get when you surround the image of Men in Black star Will Smith trying on sunglasses with a pitch for 'MIB Bill Smith Dark Shades'? A. U.S. Patent No. 8,180,688. 'Many people consume broadcast media such as television shows and movies for many hours a week,' Amazon explained to the USPTO in its patent application for a Computer-Readable Medium, System, and Method for Item Recommendations Based on Media Consumption. 'The consumed broadcast media may depict a variety of items during the course of the transmission, such as clothing, books, movies, accessories, electronics, and/or any other type of item.' So, does Amazon's spin on As Seen on TV advertising deserve a patent?
Cloud

Submission + - Government reneges on open source promise for Cloudstore 2.0 (computerworlduk.com)

Submitted by
DerekduPreez
DerekduPreez writes: "The UK government has finally unveiled the second iteration of its Cloudstore after a number of delays, and has reneged on its pledge to make version 2.0 open source.

Cloudstore is an online catalogue that the public sector can use to procure cloud services provided by suppliers signed up to the G-Cloud framework. The first version of the Cloudstore was unveiled in February.

Computerworld UK spoke to former G-Cloud director Chris Chant shortly after the first release, who was at the time also overseeing the second iteration. He stated during his interview that Cloudstore 2.0 would be go live in April and it would be built using open source code.

However, following weeks of delays, the Cabinet Office has now confirmed that the second iteration also isn’t open source.

“We had said that we wanted to move to an open source solution but it has not been possible to do so in this version of CloudStore,” said a Cabinet Office spokesperson."

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