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Comment Re:Here we go again... (Score 3, Informative) 140

by NuclearBovineBoy (#24469369) Attached to: Free Tools To Evade China's Web Censorship
I've met some nontechnical (not at all CS, use Windows, though use computers for a living) 20- and 30-somethings in China -- they all know how to get around the Great Firewall, or at least know somebody who knows how to get around it. It's not something they worry much about, as long as they aren't generating politically sensitive content themselves. I haven't met any of the latter people.
Portables

VIA Nano CPU Benchmarked, Beats Intel Atom 279

Posted by timothy from the hoping-for-even-cheaper-subnotebooks dept.
Vigile writes "Back in May, when the Isaiah architecture was first disclosed, VIA declared a performance victory over Intel's upcoming Silverthorne technology. Since then, Isaiah has become the VIA Nano processor, and Silverthorne changed to the Intel Atom — and now we can finally see tests comparing the two technologies. The Nano's out-of-order super-scalar design is definitely an architectural leap over the Atom's in-order single-issue design, but with Intel including HyperThreading technology in their CPU the competition is closer than expected. The Nano does win the performance tests by a considerable margin, but what might be more impressive is seeing the Atom use only 4 watts of power under full load!" As reader Mierdaan points out, that's 4 watts more than at idle, for about 60 watts total.
Cellphones

Your Computer and Cell Phone Are Lying To You 479

Posted by timothy from the they're-in-it-with-the-aliens dept.
Ant writes with a story from Dan's Data, which says that the battery meter and connection-strength displays in your portable electronics are lying to you, "and not just when they whisper to you in the night." Quoting: "Mobile phones, and most modern laptops, have signal strength and battery life displays. One or both of these displays has probably been the focus of all of your attention at one time or another. Neither display is actually telling you what you think it's telling you. The signal strength bars on a mobile phone or laptop do, at least, say something about how strong the local signal is. But they don't tell you the ratio between that signal and the inevitable, and often very considerable, noise that accompanies it ..."
Power

Are SSDs Really More Power Efficient? 222

Posted by CmdrTaco from the how-will-i-green-up-now dept.
Bakasama writes "Tom's Hardware compared the power performance of several available SSD cards with a Rotating HDD that was chosen specifically for its poor power efficiency. The results seem to fly in the face of current wisdom. 'Flash-based solid state drives (SSDs) are considered to be the future of performance hard drives, and everyone seems to be jumping on the bandwagon. We are no exception, as we have been publishing many articles on flash-based SSDs during the last few months, emphasizing the performance gains and the potential power savings brought by flash memory. And there is nothing wrong with this, since SLC flash SSDs easily outperform conventional hard drives today (SLC = single level cell). However, we have discovered that the power savings aren't there: in fact, battery runtimes actually decrease if you use a flash SSD.'"
Earth

Supplies of Rare Earth Elements Exhausted By 2017 958

Posted by kdawson from the they-don't-call-them-rare-for-nothing dept.
tomhudson writes "While we bemoan the current oil crisis, I ran across an editorial that led me to research a more immediate threat. Ramped-up production of flat-panel displays means the material to make them will be 'extinct' by 2017. This goes for other electronics as well. Quoting: 'The element gallium is in very short supply and the world may well run out of it in just a few years. Indium is threatened too, says Armin Reller, a materials chemist at Germany's University of Augsburg. He estimates that our planet's stock of indium will last no more than another decade. All the hafnium will be gone by 2017 also, and another twenty years will see the extinction of zinc. Even copper is an endangered item, since worldwide demand for it is likely to exceed available supplies by the end of the present century.' More links at the journal entry."
Space

The Scream Aliens Hear From the Earth 223

Posted by kdawson from the ice-cream dept.
onehitwonder writes "Astronomers have discovered that the Earth emits awful, ear-piercing chirps and whistles that could be heard by any aliens who might be listening, according to an article up at Space.com. The sounds are created by charged particles from the solar wind colliding with Earth's magnetic field. This article explains more about the sounds and links to an audio recording of it."
Earth

Trees' Leaves Grow At a Cool 70° All Over the World 537

Posted by timothy from the 73°-is-right-out dept.
biogeochick writes "Ever turn on the air conditioner on a hot day? How about a heater when it gets cold? OK, so we all know that humans act to keep themselves cool, but what about trees? A recent article on tree core isotopic evidence has shown that trees from tropical to boreal forests all grow at 70 degrees. The study, published in Nature by some fantastic researchers (so one of them is my adviser, so sue me) and covered by NPR on All Things Considered, has shed some light on the convergent temperature at which trees perform photosynthesis." Update: 06/19 21:31 GMT by T : I give, I give -- that's 70 degrees Fahrenheit.
Supercomputing

"Intrepid" Supercomputer Fastest In the World 122

Posted by CmdrTaco from the bravely-and-quickly dept.
Stony Stevenson writes "The US Department of Energy's (DoE) high performance computing system is now the fastest supercomputer in the world for open science, according to the Top 500 list of the world's fastest computers. The list was announced this week during the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany. IBM's Blue Gene/P, known as 'Intrepid,' is located at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility and is also ranked third fastest overall. The supercomputer has a peak performance of 557 teraflops and achieved a speed of 450.3 teraflops on the Linpack application used to measure speed for the Top 500 rankings. According to the list, 74.8 percent of the world's supercomputers (some 374 systems) use Intel processors, a rise of 4 percent in six months. This represents the biggest slice of the supercomputer cake for the firm ever."
Education

Helping Some Students May Harm High Achievers 1114

Posted by samzenpus from the stop-dragging-us-down dept.
palegray.net writes "According to a new study performed by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute in Washington, increased emphasis on helping students with a history of lower academic achievement results in lower performance for high achievers. This trend appears to be related to the No Child Left Behind Act. Essentially, programs designed to devote a large number of resources to assisting students who are deemed to be 'significantly behind' leave little room for encouraging continued academic growth for higher-performing students."
Security

Man Fired When Laptop Malware Downloaded Porn 635

Posted by samzenpus from the your-computer-wants-porn dept.
Geoffrey.landis writes "The Massachusetts Department of Industrial Accidents fired worker Michael Fiola and initiated procedures to prosecute him for child pornography when they determined that internet temporary files on his laptop computer contained child porn. According to Fiola, 'My boss called me into his office at 9 a.m. The director of the Department of Industrial Accidents, my immediate supervisor, and the personnel director were there. They handed me a letter and said, "You are being fired for a violation of the computer usage policy. You have pornography on your computer. You're fired. Clean out your desk. Let's go."' Fiola said, 'They wouldn't talk to me. They said, "We've been advised by our attorney not to talk to you."' However, prosecutors dropped the case when a state investigation of his computer determined there was insufficient evidence to prove he had downloaded the files. Computer forensic analyst Tami Loehrs, who spent a month dissecting the computer for the defense, explained in a 30-page report that the laptop was running corrupted virus-protection software, and Fiola was hit by spammers and crackers bombarding its memory with images of incest and pre-teen porn not visible to the naked eye. The virus protection and software update functions on the laptop had been disabled, and apparently the laptop was 'crippled' by malware. According to Loehrs, 'When they gave him this laptop, it had belonged to another user, and they changed the user name for him, but forgot to change the SMS user name, so SMS was trying to connect to a user that no longer existed ... It was set up to do all of its security updates via the server, and none of that was happening because he was out in the field.' A malware script on the machine surfed foreign sites at a rate of up to 40 per minute whenever the machine was within range of a wireless site."
Idle

Village Re-elects Dead Mayor 2

Posted by samzenpus
Gheorghe Dobrescu has to be the most unpopular man in Romania. He recently lost a mayoral race to a dead opponent. A supporter of the dead guy said, "I know he died, but I don't want change." Election authorities gave the post to Dobrescu in the end but some villagers have called for a new election. The dead mayor said that he was willing to forego his usual salary in lieu of fresh brains.
Microsoft

China Launches Antitrust Probe Vs. Microsoft 295

Posted by CmdrTaco from the get-on-the-bus dept.
snydeq writes "China has launched an investigation into whether Microsoft unfairly dominates its software market, according to a state media report. A working committee of China's State Intellectual Property Office is investigating whether Microsoft engaged in discriminatory pricing and will also look at Microsoft's practice of bundling other software programs within its Windows operating system, according to the report. The probe is part of a greater sweep of operating systems and other software developed by multinational companies that cost much more in China than in the U.S. 'On the one hand, global software firms, taking advantage of their monopoly position, set unreasonably high prices for genuine software while on the other hand, they criticise Chinese for poor copyright awareness. This is abnormal,' a source said."
The Internet

Inside the Internet Archives 85

Posted by CmdrTaco from the those-who-ignore-history-are-doomed-to-eat-a-sandwich dept.
blackbearnh writes "O'Reilly Media is running an interview with Gordon Mohr, Chief Technologist for the Internet Archive (archive.org). If you've ever wondered how pages are selected for archiving, or just how they manage such a huge quantity of data, the answers are here. The interview also touches on the problems of intellectual property in archives, archiving the Internet in a post Web 2.0 world, and the potential vulnerabilities exposed by archiving web sites that may include security exploits."
Graphics

Computer Scientists Scour Your Holiday Photos 156

Posted by CmdrTaco from the fanny-pack-detected dept.
Barence writes "Hundreds of thousands of images on Flickr are being used to teach a program to determine the geographic location of an image, simply by looking at it. The program attempts to mimic the way that humans can deduce the location of an image by searching for visual clues, such as similarities to pictures or locations they have seen previously. In its current state it can guess the location of a photo to within 200km, 16% of the time — extremely accurate given the complexity of the problem."

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