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Submission + - The White Noise of Smell (livescience.com)

Submitted by Frosty Piss
Frosty Piss writes: Scientists have discovered a new smell, but you may have to go to a laboratory to experience it yourself. The smell is dubbed "olfactory white," because it is the nasal equivalent of white noise, researchers report in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Just as white noise is a mixture of many different sound frequencies and white light is a mixture of many different wavelengths, olfactory white is a mixture of many different smells. In a series of experiments, they exposed participants to hundreds of equally mixed smells, and what they discovered is that our brains treat smells as a single unit, not as a mixture of compounds to break down, analyze and put back together again.. The web site LiveScience talks about it here.

Submission + - Nexus 4 includes support for LTE (anandtech.com)

Submitted by slashchuck
slashchuck writes: One of the drawbacks of Google's Nexus $ was its lack of support for 4G LTE. Now comes a report from Anand Tech that is supported on on the Nexus 4.

It seems that a simple software update can allow the Nexus 4 smartphone to run on LTE Band 4. All users have to do is dial *#*#4636#*#* (INFO) or launch the Phone Info app. After that, choosing to connect to AWS networks should allow the Nexus 4 to run on LTE networks on Band 4.

The AnandTech report states explicitly that the LG Nexus 4 only works on LTE Band 4, on 1700/2100MHz frequencies, and supports bandwidths of 5,10, and 20MHz.
AI

Submission + - Scientists See Advances in Deep Learning, a Part of Artificial Intelligence - NY (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Advances in an artificial intelligence technology that can recognize patterns offer the possibility of machines that perform human activities like seeing, listening and thinking. ... But what is new in recent months is the growing speed and accuracy of deep-learning programs, often called artificial neural networks or just 'neural nets' for their resemblance to the neural connections in the brain. 'There has been a number of stunning new results with deep-learning methods,' said Yann LeCun, a computer scientist at New York University who did pioneering research in handwriting recognition at Bell Laboratories. 'The kind of jump we are seeing in the accuracy of these systems is very rare indeed.' Artificial intelligence researchers are acutely aware of the dangers of being overly optimistic. ... But recent achievements have impressed a wide spectrum of computer experts. In October, for example, a team of graduate students studying with the University of Toronto computer scientist Geoffrey E. Hinton won the top prize in a contest sponsored by Merck to design software to help find molecules that might lead to new drugs. From a data set describing the chemical structure of 15 different molecules, they used deep-learning software to determine which molecule was most likely to be an effective drug agent.
Games

Submission + - What Nobody Tells You About Being a Game Dev (altdevblogaday.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Alex Norton is the man behind Malevolence: The Sword of Ahkranox, an upcoming indie action-RPG. What makes Malevolence interesting is that it's infinite. It uses procedural generation to create a world that's actually endless. Norton jumped into this project without having worked any big gaming studios, and in this article he shares what he's learned as an independent game developer. Quoting: "A large, loud portion of the public will openly hate you regardless of what you do. Learn to live with it. No-one will ever take your project as seriously as you, or fully realise what you’re going through. ... The odds of you making money out of it are slim. If you want to succeed, you’ll likely have to sell out. Just how MUCH you sell out is up to you.' He also suggests new game devs avoid RPGs for their first titles, having a thorough plan before you begin (i.e. game concepts explained well enough that a non-gamer could understand), and to consider carefully whether the game will benefit from a public development process.

Comment Re:ummm, no. (Score 3) 112

by fintler (#42062183) Attached to: Supercomputers' Growing Resilience Problems

Google is having the same problems that this article describes -- they haven't fixed it either.

If your problem domain can always be broken down into map-reduce, you can easily solve it with a hadoop-like environment to get fault tolerance. If your application falls outside of map-reduce (the applications this article is referring to), you need to start duplicating state (very expensive on systems of this scale) to recover from failures.

Comment Re:"and they halt operations when they do so" (Score 1) 112

by fintler (#42062125) Attached to: Supercomputers' Growing Resilience Problems

Checkpoints will probably stick around for quite some time, but the model will need to change. Rather than serializing everything all the way down to a parallel filesystem, the data could potentially be checkpointed to a burst buffer (assuming a per-node design) or a nearby node (experimental SCR design). Of course, it's correct that even this won't scale to larger systems.

I think we'll probably have problems with getting data out to the nodes of the cluster before we start running into problems with checkpointing. The typical NFS home directory isn't going to scale. We'll need to switch over to something like udsl projections or another IO forwarding layer in the near future.
Music

Behind the Scenes In Apple Vs. the Record Labels 146

Posted by CmdrTaco from the does-steve-wear-turtlenecks-in-private-too dept.
je ne sais quoi writes "The New York Times recently posted an article describing what really happened between Apple and the Record labels that culminated with the January 6th Macworld Keynote by Apple Senior VP Phil Schiller." Essentially they discuss a bit of a swap: Apple allowed variable pricing for songs and the industry allowed DRM free music. And apparently the iTunes homepage is a huge hit making device. Big shock.
NASA

Discovery Launch Delayed Due To Engine Issue 62

Posted by CmdrTaco from the oh-here's-yer-problem dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The launch of Space Shuttle Discovery was originally slated for February 12th, has now been postponed to February 19th — at the earliest. The change of launch dates were decided by NASA managers during a review of the shuttle's flow control valve in the main engine. The new date is pending further analysis of the flow control valve and everything checking out okay for pre-flight tests. Discovery's STS-119 14-day mission will deliver the station's fourth and final set of solar arrays, completing the orbiting laboratory's truss, or backbone. The arrays will provide the electricity to fully power science experiments and support the station's expanded crew of six in May."
Windows

MS Confirms Six Different Versions of Windows 7 758

Posted by CmdrTaco from the totally-learned-that-lesson dept.
darien writes "Microsoft has confirmed that Windows 7 will be offered in six different editions. In a seeming admission that the numerous versions of Vista were confusing to consumers, the company says that this time its marketing will focus on just two editions — 'Home Premium' and 'Professional.' But the reality is more complex, with different packages offering different subsets of the total range of Windows 7 features."

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