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Submission + - ZDNet proclaims "Windows: It's over" 1

Submitted by plastick
plastick writes: "You can think Windows 8 will evolve into something better, but the numbers show that Windows is coming to a dead end."

ZDNet is known to take the side of Microsoft in the past. ZDNet's Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols explains "The very day the debate came to an end, this headline appeared: IDC: Global PC shipments plunge in worst drop in a generation. Sure, a lot of that was due to the growth of tablets and smartphones and the rise of the cloud, but Windows 8 gets to take a lot of the blame too. After all, the debate wasn't whether or not Windows 8 was any good. It's not. The debate was over whether it could be saved."

Submission + - Nano-Suit Protects Bugs From Space-Like Vacuums (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Put a fruit fly larva in a spacelike vacuum, and the results aren't pretty. Within a matter of minutes, the animal will collapse into a crinkled, lifeless husk. Now, researchers have found a way to protect the bugs: Bombard them with electrons, which form a "nano-suit" around their bodies. The advance could help scientists take high-resolution photographs of tiny living organisms. It also suggests a new way that creatures could survive the harsh conditions of outer space and may even lead to new space travel technology for humans.

Submission + - The forgotten MACRO language of HTML, XBL (wikipedia.org) 1

Submitted by tvlinux
tvlinux writes: The web is becoming more than just a media display, there is more interaction and more special things that need to be done. Right now jquery is the preferred method of very dynamic user interface. There is a W3 standard called XBL2.0. It is the macro language of the html. To me it seems like a great idea, Reusable HTML widgets where each one is a separate object contained with in it self. You can define properties, methods, events, each that is self contained.
If the browsers supported XBL2, I can vision a whole ecosystem of new widgets, charts, grids and inputs that people could add to web pages just like any other HTML element. I see less experience developers be able to create fancy websites by just using DOM and not having to learn jquery.
My question is WHY is XBL dead? I think a MACRO language for HTML is a good idea.
     
Communications

Open Source Emoji Project Wants Money For Icons 156

Posted by timothy from the and-your-weird-little-grimaces dept.
Kagetsuki writes "There's a project on KickStarter for a Free and Open set of emoji [the graphical emoticon glyph set which has a block reserved in Unicode]. Currently there are no full sets of Emoji that are completely free (as in beer and and freedom), so if this project gets funded it will be the first and only set of emoji that can, say, be distributed with FLOSS Linux/BSD/GNU systems. Not to mention anyone will be able to incorporate them into any project without any restrictive conditions." And lest you think emoji devoid of literary value, reader coondoggie points out that the Library of Congress has just welcomed (or at least allowed) onto its vaunted shelves an all-emoji version of Melville's Moby Dick, created with the help of translators working through Amazon's Mechanical Turk.
EU

Submission + - ACTA gets death certificate in Europe (ffii.org)

Submitted by Seeteufel
Seeteufel writes: The controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement is now officially pronounced dead in the E.U. The European Parliament broadly rejected the Anti-Counterfeiting Agreement a while ago, but there was still a court case pending at the European Court of Justice about the legality of ACTA. The Commission was open about its intent to reintroduce ACTA raticication to the Parliament after a positive Court decision. Now we learn the Commission has withdrawn its questions to the Court.
Technology

Submission + - Research Discovery Could Revolutionalize Semiconductor Manufacture (lunduniversity.lu.se)

Submitted by arobatino
arobatino writes: A new method of manufacturing semiconductors which eliminates the substrate (in other words, no wafer) could be much faster and cheaper. From the article:

'A completely new method of manufacturing the smallest structures in electronics could make their manufacture thousands of times quicker, allowing for cheaper semiconductors. The findings have been published in the latest issue of Nature.

Instead of starting from a silicon wafer or other substrate, as is usual today, researchers have made it possible for the structures to grow from freely suspended nanoparticles of gold in a flowing gas.'
Earth

Submission + - Scientific American's Fred Guterl explores the real threats posed by technology (thebulletin.org)

Submitted by Lasrick
Lasrick writes: Fred Guterl is the executive editor of Scientific American, and in this piece he explores various real threats posed by technology that modern civilization relies on. Discusses West African and Indian monsoons, infectious diseases, computer hacking. Here's a quote: "Today the technologies that pose some of the biggest problems are not so much military as commercial. They come from biology, energy production, and the information sciences — and are the very technologies that have fueled our prodigious growth as a species. They are far more seductive than nuclear weapons, and more difficult to extricate ourselves from. The technologies we worry about today form the basis of our global civilization and are essential to our survival."
Network

Submission + - Caltech and UVic set 339Gbps internet speed record (extremetech.com) 1

Submitted by
MrSeb
MrSeb writes: "Engineers at Caltech and the University of Victoria in Canada have smashed their own internet speed records, achieving a memory-to-memory transfer rate of 339 gigabits per second (5.3GB/s), 187Gbps (2.9GB/s) over a single duplex 100-gigabit connection, and a max disk-to-disk transfer speed of 96Gbps (1.5GB/s). At a sustained rate of 339Gbps, such a network could transfer four million gigabytes (4PB) of data per day — or around 200,000 Blu-ray movie rips. These speed records are all very impressive, but what’s the point? Put simply, the scientific world deals with vasts amount of data — and that data needs to be moved around the world quickly. The most obvious example of this is CERN’s Large Hadron Collider; in the past year, the high-speed academic networks connecting CERN to the outside world have transferred more than 100 petabytes of data. It is because of these networks that we can discover new particles, such as the Higgs boson. In essence, Caltech and the University of Victoria have taken it upon themselves to ride the bleeding edge of high-speed networks so that science can continue to prosper."

Submission + - BP and Executive Facing Criminal Charges (chron.com) 1

Submitted by SleazyRidr
SleazyRidr writes: Finally some news that will please a lot of the Slashdot crowd: A company has been charged with Manslaughter! BP has been charged with manslaughter following the Macondo Incident. Two of the rig supervisors and a BP executive are also facing jail time. Is this the start of companies being forced to take responsibility for their actions?
Programming

Submission + - Why Coding at Fifty May be Nifty 4

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Enough with the dadgum naysayers. Google's Vivek Haldar lists some good reasons for why you would want to program at fifty (or any other age). Haldar's list would probably get a thumbs-up from billionaire SAS CEO Jim Goodnight, who had this to say about coding when interviewed at age 56: 'I would be happy if I just stayed in my office and programmed all day, to tell you the truth. That is my one real love in life is programming. Programming is sort of like getting to work a puzzle all day long. I actually enjoy it. It's a lot of fun. It's not even work to me. It's just enjoyable. You get to shut out all your other thoughts and just concentrate on this little thing you're trying to do, to make work it. It's nice, very enjoyable.'
BSD

Submission + - Dragonfly BSD 3.2 released (dragonflybsd.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Dragonfly BSD recently announced the release of version 3.2 of their operating system. Improvements include: USB4BSD, a second-generation USB stack; merging of a GSoC project to provide CPU topology awareness to the scheduler, giving a nice boost for hyperthreading Intel CPUs; and last but not least, a new largely rewritten scheduler.

Some background is in order for the last one. PostgreSQL 9.3 will move from SysV shared memory to mmap for its shared memory needs. It turned out that the switch much hurts its performance on the BSDs. Matthew Dillon was fast to respond with a search for bottlenecks and got the performance up to par with Linux.
Firefox

Submission + - Seamonkey vs. Firefox - any takers? (seamonkey-project.org) 4

Submitted by Rexdude
Rexdude writes: Firefox continues to be criticized for their new versioning system and being a memory hog. People talk about Chrome, IE9, Opera as alternatives — but do Slashdotters ever use Seamonkey? I've never seen anyone mention it in any discussion on browsers.
The successor to the original Mozilla Suite, it has a fullblown email/news/RSS client, Chatzilla, and an HTML editor. Also several other default features that would require separate extensions for Firefox. And they don't update their versions like crazy either, the current version is 2.13.1. I've been quite happy with it so far, it's snappier to use than Firefox. How many people on Slashdot use Seamonkey, and what has been your experience? (Note — I'm not affiliated with the project)
Government

Submission + - FTC throws down robocall gauntlet: $50,000 for best way to stop annoying calls (networkworld.com) 4

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes: "It's not clear if the Federal Trade Commission is throwing up its hands at the problem or just wants some new ideas about how to combat it, but the agency is now offering $50,000 to anyone who can create what it calls an innovative way to block that will block illegal commercial robocalls on landlines and mobile phones."
Australia

Submission + - Privacy advocates oppose Aussie data breach laws (itnews.com.au)

Submitted by schliz
schliz writes: This week, Australia's Attorney-General released a discussion paper about introducing laws that would force companies to notify members of the public any time personal information about that customer falls into the wrong hands. California introduced similar mandatory data breach notification laws in 2003, but Australian privacy advocates are now opposing the move, saying it's a decade too late.
Science

Submission + - Carbon clock gets reset (nature.com)

Submitted by
ananyo
ananyo writes: "Climate records from a Japanese lake are set to improve the accuracy of carbon dating, which could help to shed light on archaeological mysteries such as why Neanderthals became extinct.
Carbon dating is used to work out the age of organic material. But the technique assumes that the amount of carbon-14 in the atmosphere was constant — any variation would speed up or slow down the clock. Since the 1960s, scientists have started accounting for the variations by calibrating the clock against the known ages of tree rings. The problem is that tree rings provide a direct record that only goes as far back as about 14,000 years.
Now, using sediment from bed of Lake Suigetsu, west of Tokyo, researchers have pushed the calibration limit back much further. Two distinct sediment layers have formed in the lake every summer and winter over tens of thousands of years. The researchers collected roughly 70-metre core samples from the lake and painstakingly counted the layers to come up with a direct record stretching back 52,000 years.
The recalibrated clock could help to narrow the window of key events in human history. Take the extinction of Neanderthals, which occurred in western Europe less than 30,000 years ago. Archaeologists disagree over the effects changing climate and competition from recently arriving humans had on the Neanderthals' demise. The more accurate carbon clock should yield better dates for any overlap of humans and Neanderthals, as well as for determining how climate changes influenced the extinction of Neanderthals."

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