69315575
submission
Titus Andronicus writes:
NASA http://www.giss.nasa.gov/resea... and NOAA http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/... each announced today that 2014 was the warmest year in the instrumental temperature record, surpassing the prior winners, 2010 and 2005. NASA made a little video: https://youtu.be/-ilg75uJZZU
46389895
submission
Titus Andronicus writes:
Today, NOAA reported that "On May 9, the daily mean concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of Mauna Loa, Hawaii, surpassed 400 parts per million for the first time since measurements began in 1958." For comparison, over the last 800,000 years, CO2 has ranged from roughly 180 ppm to 280 ppm. The last time Earth had 400 ppm was probably more than 3 megayears ago. When will CO2 pass 500 ppm?
42998751
submission
Titus Andronicus writes:
LibreOffice 4.0.0 has been released. Some of the changes are for developers: an improved API, a new graphics stack, migrating German code comments to English, and moving from Apache 2.0 to LGPLv3 & MPLv2. Some user-facing changes are: better interoperability with other software, some functional & UI improvements, and some performance gains.
42490259
submission
Titus Andronicus writes:
Slashdot editors: I revised my prior submission to more clearly spell out the major use case for exFAT. I also changed one of the URLs to its canonical version.
fuse-exfat, a GPLv3 implementation of the exFAT file system for Linux, FreeBSD, and OS X, has reached 1.0 status, according to an announcement from Andrew Nayenko, the primary developer.
exFAT is a file system designed for sneaker-netting terabyte-scale files and groups of files on flash drives and memory cards between and among Windows, OS X, and consumer electronics devices. It was introduced by Microsoft in late 2006.
Will fuse-exfat cut into MS’s juicy exFAT licensing revenue? Will MS litigate fuse-exfat’s developers and users into patent oblivion? Will there be a DKMS dynamic kernel module version of the software, similar to the ZFS on Linux project?
ReadWrite, The H, and Phoronix cover the story.
37256189
submission
Titus Andronicus writes:
Angela Fritz and Jeff Masters of Weather Underground analyze this year's record ongoing Arctic ice melt. Arctic sea ice extent, area, and volume are all at record lows for the post-1979 satellite era. The ice is expected to continue melting for perhaps another couple of weeks.
Extreme sea ice melting might help cause greater numbers of more powerful Arctic storms, help to accelerate the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, and help to accelerate global warming itself, due to the increased absorption of solar energy into the ocean.
31967681
submission
Titus Andronicus writes:
Scientific fraud has always been with us. But as stated or suggested by some scientists, journal editors, and a few studies, the amount of scientific “cheating” has far outpaced the expansion of science itself. According to some, the financial incentives to “cut corners” have never been greater, resulting in record numbers of retractions from prestigious journals.
From the article: “For example, the journal Nature reported that published retractions had increased tenfold over the past decade, while the number of published papers had increased by just 44 percent.”
31933893
submission
Titus Andronicus writes:
Professors Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng of Stanford University announced a major expansion in the catalog of free massive open online courses being offered by the company they founded, Coursera. The subject areas include computer science, mathematics, and business. The providers include Stanford, Princeton, Michigan, and Penn. Even more courses are expected to be announced by competitors such as Udacity, MITx, Minerva, Udemy, perhaps soon. Is this the future of education?
29447989
submission
Titus Andronicus writes:
Years in the making, the major new release of VideoLAN’s media player has better support for multicore processors, GPUs, and much, much more.
27601634
submission
Titus Andronicus writes:
The South Pole experienced its highest ever recorded temperature of -12.3C (+9.9F) on December 25, 2011, according to preliminary reporting from the Antarctic Meteorological Research Center at the University of Wisconsin.
