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Comment Re:Someone help me out here (Score 2, Insightful) 282

by nyet (#33937538) Attached to: NRO Warns They Are On Final IPv4 Address Blocks

> Well, NAT saved us from a certain doom, and also provides extra security

NAT is a horrible hack. It might be a good solution for some things, but to fix the addressable space option, it is a disaster.

Talk about an almost entirely useless "broadcast" only Internet. Is that what you want?

> (might act as a firewall).

Even worse. I don't even want to begin to explain to you why you are wrong about this. The broad adoption of UPNP makes the idea that NAT provides you with a useful firewall complete idiocy....

If you want a firewall, make a firewall. Do not rely on NAT. Ever.
NASA

The Sun Unleashes Coronal Mass Ejection At Earth 220

Posted by Soulskill from the return-fire dept.
astroengine writes "Yesterday morning, at 08:55 UT, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory detected a C3-class flare erupt inside a sunspot cluster. 100,000 kilometers away, deep within the solar atmosphere (the corona), an extended magnetic field filled with cool plasma forming a dark ribbon across the face of the sun (a feature known as a 'filament') erupted at the exact same time. It seems very likely that both eruptions were connected after a powerful shock wave produced by the flare destabilized the filament, causing the eruption. A second solar observatory, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, then spotted a huge coronal mass ejection blast into space, straight in the direction of Earth. Solar physicists have calculated that this magnetic bubble filled with energetic particles should hit Earth on August 3, so look out for some intense aurorae — a solar storm is coming."
Slashdot.org

Submission + - Slashdot Struggles to Remain Relevant (nytimes.com) 2

Submitted by gollum123
gollum123 writes: Earlier today we published an analysis of the top traffic drivers in social media, based on data from Web analytics company Woopra. The biggest traffic driver was StumbleUpon (51%), followed by Digg (30%), Hacker News (12%) and Reddit (5%). Surprisingly, tech news community Slashdot was not in the list of top referrers. In fact, according to Woopra CEO John Pozadzides, Slashdot "drives close to 0% of traffic to the sites Woopra measures." (emphasis ours). Why is Slashdot almost irrelevant to the social media community? It used to be the biggest driver of traffic to tech web sites, but now it hardly delivers any traffic at all to them. We explore some of the reasons, including input from our own community.
America Online

VLC 1.1 Forced To Drop Shoutcast Due To AOL Anti-OSS Provision 315

Posted by Soulskill from the more-shouting-imminent dept.
The folks over at VideoLAN are in the process of releasing version 1.1.0 of VLC, and one of the major changes is the removal of SHOUTcast, a media-streaming module from AOL-owned Nullsoft. "During the last year, the VLC developers have received several injunctions by e-mail from employees at AOL, asking us to either comply to a license not compatible with free software or remove the SHOUTcast capability in VLC." Within the license is a clause prohibiting the distribution of SHOUTcast with any product whose own license requires that it be "disclosed or distributed in source code form," "licensed for the purpose of making derivative works," or "redistributable at no charge." The license would also force VideoLAN to bundle Nullsoft adware with VLC. Update: 06/22 00:52 GMT by H : The 1.1 release is ready from their site; you can also read up on the release information.
Science

Copernicus Reburied As Hero 369

Posted by timothy from the late-to-the-party dept.
CasualFriday writes "Mikolaj Kopernik, a.k.a. Nicolaus Copernicus, the 16th-century astronomer whose findings were condemned by the Roman Catholic Church as heretical, was reburied by Polish priests as a hero on Saturday, nearly 500 years after he was laid to rest in an unmarked grave. On Saturday, his remains were blessed with holy water by some of Poland's highest-ranking clerics before an honor guard ceremoniously carried his coffin through the imposing red brick cathedral and lowered it back into the same spot where part of his skull and other bones were found in 2005."
Education

Exam Board Deletes C and PHP From CompSci A-Levels 663

Posted by samzenpus from the who-needs-them dept.
VitaminB52 writes "A-level computer science students will no longer be taught C, C#, or PHP from next year following a decision to withdraw the languages by the largest UK exam board. Schools teaching the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance's (AQA) COMP1 syllabus have been asked to use one of its other approved languages — Java, Pascal/Delphi, Python 2.6, Python 3.1, Visual Basic 6, and VB.Net 2008. Pascal/Delphi is 'highly recommended' by the exam board because it is stable and was designed to teach programming and problem-solving."

Comment Re:What's an "industry-recognized standard"? (Score 1) 310

by nyet (#32161022) Attached to: Can We Legislate Past the H.264 Debate?

That's the whole point of the patents owned by the body - to ensure that implementations follow the guidelines of the standards body (particularly about compatibility.)

Bull. That was NEVER the point to patenting any parts of a standard. I don't know of any standards that are NOT being broken because of the threat of a patent lawsuit. I can't think of a single one. The point to adhering to a standard is so you have a checkbox on your datasheet. If it doesn't adhere, your customers complain, and they go to a different vendor.

You claim this is your field, but your assertion truly baffles (and enrages) me, unless you are trying to spin patents as "good" to people who watch patent games ruin standards efforts daily.
Earth

Caltech Makes Flexible, 86% Efficient Solar Arrays 439

Posted by kdawson from the bend-me-shape-me dept.
strredwolf writes "Caltech has released a flexible solar array that converts 95% of single-wavelength incandescent light and 86% of all sunlight into electricity. Instead of being flat-panel, they stand thin silicon wires in a plastic substrate that scatters the light onto them. The total composition is 98% plastic, 2% wire — the amount of silicon used is 1/50th that of ordinary panels. So as soon as they can get these to market, solar could be very viable and cheap to produce." Update: 03/01 21:02 GMT by KD : Reader axelrosen points out evidence that the 80%+ efficiency figure is wrong. MIT's Tech Review, in covering the Caltech announcement, says that the new panel's efficiency is in the 15%-20% range — which is competitive with the current state of the art. And the Caltech panel should be far cheaper to manufacture.
Security

Time Bomb May Have Destroyed 800 Norfolk City PCs' Data 256

Posted by timothy from the philadelphia-experiment dept.
krebsonsecurity writes "The City of Norfolk, Virginia is reeling from a massive computer meltdown in which an unidentified family of malicious code destroyed data on nearly 800 computers citywide. The incident is still under investigation, but city officials say the attack may have been the result of a computer time bomb planted in advance by an insider or employee and designed to trigger at a specific date, according to krebsonsecurity.com. 'We don't believe it came in from the Internet. We don't know how it got into our system,' the city's IT director said. 'We speculate it could have been a time bomb waiting until a date or time to trigger. Whatever it was, it essentially destroyed these machines.'"

Comment Re: Defect scandal at Toyota grows -- without boun (Score 1) 913

by nyet (#30975146) Attached to: Toyota Pedal Issue Highlights Move To Electronics

Further, the Toyota ETC lacks an important safety mechanism: if the customer presses both the throttle pedal and the brake pedal, then the ETC should give priority to the brake. The Toyota ETC gives priority to the throttle. How can Toyota engineers commit such a gross design mistake? Common sense tells us that the brake should receive priority.

When tuning my own ECU, this is the first thing I disabled. It makes left foot braking impossible. Bottom line, we need better drivers, not cars for idiots.
Technology

Using EMP To Punch Holes In Steel 165

Posted by timothy from the you'll-need-some-big-batteries dept.
angrytuna writes "The Economist is running a story about a group of researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Machine Tools and Forming Technology in Chemnitz, Germany, who've found a way to use an EMP device to shape and punch holes through steel. The process enjoys advantages over both lasers, which take more time to bore the hole (0.2 vs. 1.4 seconds), and by metal presses, which can leave burrs that must be removed by hand."
GUI

IDEs With VIM Text Editing Capability? 193

Posted by timothy from the one-keybinding-to-rule-them-all dept.
An anonymous reader writes "I am currently looking to move from text editing with vim to a full fledged IDE with gdb integration, integrated command line, etc. Extending VIM with these capabilities is a mortal sin, so I am looking for a linux based GUI IDE. I do not want to give up the efficient text editing capabilities of VIM though. How do I have my cake and eat it too?"
Programming

An Open Source Compiler From CUDA To X86-Multicore 71

Posted by timothy from the abstraction-gains-a-layer dept.
Gregory Diamos writes "An open source project, Ocelot, has recently released a just-in-time compiler for CUDA, allowing the same programs to be run on NVIDIA GPUs or x86 CPUs and providing an alternative to OpenCL. A description of the compiler was recently posted on the NVIDIA forums. The compiler works by translating GPU instructions to LLVM and then generating native code for any LLVM target. It has been validated against over 100 CUDA applications. All of the code is available under the New BSD license."

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