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Submission + - Interactive Map Exposes The World's Most Murderous Places (fastcompany.com)

Lashdots writes: In 2012, 437,000 people were killed worldwide, yielding a global average murder rate of 6.2 per 100,000 inhabitants. A third of those homicides occurred in Latin America and the Caribbean, home to just 8% of the world's population. But data on violent death can be difficult to obtain, since governments are often reluctant to share their homicide statistics. What data is available is sometimes inconsistent and inconclusive.

To make this data clear and to better address the problem of global homicide, a new open-source visualization tool, the Homicide Monitor, tracks the total number of murders and murder rates per country, broken down by gender, age and, where the data is available, the type of weapon used, including firearms, sharp weapons, blunt weapons, poisoning, and others. For the most violent region in the world, the 40 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, you can also see statistics by state and city. That geographic specificity helps to underscore an important point about murders, says Robert Muggah, the research director and program coordinator for Citizen Security at the Rio de Janeiro-based Igarapé Institute. "In most cities, the vast majority of violence takes place on just a few street corners, at certain times of the day, and among specific people."

Submission + - MIT Report Says Current Tech Enables Future Terawatt-Scale Solar Power Systems (computerworld.com)

Lucas123 writes: Even with today's inefficient wafer-based crystalline silicon photovoltaics, terawatt-scale solar power systems are coming down the pike, according to a 356-page report from MIT on the future of solar energy. Solar electricity generation is one of "very few low-carbon energy technologies" with the potential to grow to very large scale, the study states. In fact, solar resources dwarf current and projected future electricity demand. The report, however, also called out a lack of funds for R&D on newer solar technology, such as thin-film wafers that may be able to achieve lower costs in the long run. Even more pressing than the technology are state and federal policies that squelch solar deployment. For example, government subsidies to solar are dwarfed by subsidies to other energy sources, and trade policies have restricted PV module and other commodity product imports in order to aid domestic industry. Additionally, even though PV module and inverter costs are essentially identical in the United States and Germany, total U.S.residential system costs are substantially above those in Germany.

Submission + - Proof-of-Concept Linux Rootkit Leverages GPUs for Stealth

itwbennett writes: A team of developers has created a rootkit for Linux systems that uses the processing power and memory of graphics cards instead of CPUs in order to remain hidden. The rootkit, called Jellyfish, is a proof of concept designed to demonstrate that completely running malware on GPUs (graphics processing units) is a viable option. Such threats could be more sinister than traditional malware programs, according to the Jellyfish developers, in part because there are no tools to analyze GPU malware, they said.

Submission + - Technology and Ever-Falling Attention Spans (bbc.com)

An anonymous reader writes: The BBC has an article about technology's effect on concentration in the workplace. They note research finding that the average information worker's attention span has dropped significantly in only a few years. "Back in 2004 we followed American information workers around with stopwatches and timed every action. They switched their attention every three minutes on average. In 2012, we found that the time spent on one computer screen before switching to another computer screen was one minute 15 seconds. By the summer of 2014 it was an average of 59.5 seconds." Many groups are now researching ways to keep people in states of focus and concentration. An app ecosystem is popping up to support that as well, from activity timing techniques to background noise that minimizes distractions. Recent studies are even showing that walking slowly on a treadmill while you work can have positive effects on focus and productivity. What tricks do you use to keep yourself on task?

Submission + - NoSQL Ecosystem (rackspacecloud.com)

abartels writes: Unprecedented data volumes are driving businesses to look at alternatives to the traditional relational database technology that has served us well for over thirty years. Collectively, these alternatives have become known as NoSQL databases. The fundamental problem is that relational databases cannot handle many modern workloads. There are three specific problem areas: scaling out to data sets like Diggs (3 TB for green badges) or Facebooks (50 TB for inbox search) or eBays (2 PB overall), per-server performance, and rigid schema design.
Mandriva

Mandriva Linux 2010 Is Finally Out 267

ennael writes "We finally did it. Mandriva Linux 2010 is out and comes with many improvements and innovations. We still go on supporting in the same level of integration GNOME 2.28 and KDE 4.3.2. Support for netbooks is improved as users can now easily test Moblin 2.0 environment. 'Smart desktop' coming from European research is now fully integrated and is the first real working semantic desktop. Mandriva Control Center also brings improvements in tools: a new netprofile management tool, a GUI for Tomoyo security framework, and parental control. A big thanks to our community, who worked hard and made this release possible."
Earth

Submission + - Panasonic's New LED Bulbs Shine for 19 Years (inhabitat.com)

Mike writes: "As lighting manufacturers leapfrog the incandescent bulb and CFLs looks set to define the future of lighting, Panasonic recently unveiled a remarkable 60-watt household LED bulb that they claim can last up to 19 years. With a lifespan 40 times longer than their incandescent counterparts, Panasonic's new EverLed bulbs are the most efficient LEDs ever to be produced and are set to debut in Japan on October 21st. Hopefully as the technology is refined we'll see them break down their significant cost barrier — $40 dollars is still pretty pricey for a light bulb."
Social Networks

Submission + - Crytographic Tools to Keep You Hidden on Facebook (technologyreview.com)

Al writes: "Many people reveal way too much personal information on social networking sites--something that can easily lead to identity theft or unwanted attention from employers etc. Technology Review has a story about several tools cryptographic tools that can be used to hide your activity on Facebook, from both untrusted users and from Facebook itself. Urs Hengartner, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Waterloo, developed a Firefox plugin that obfuscates anything marked with "@@" on Facebook and only reveals the correct information to trusted users who have the right keys. The sensitive data itself is even stored on an outside server so that even Facebook cannot access it. The piece mentions two other projects, NOYB and flybynight, that also aim to make personal information more secure on Facebook."
Technology (Apple)

Submission + - Snow Leopard Snubs Document Creator Codes (tidbits.com)

adamengst writes: "In this TidBITS article, Matt Neuburg explores how Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard changes how the operating system handles preferred application binding, dropping support for the creator codes that have been part of the Mac OS from the early days. He also explains how to work around the problem, if you want, for instance, text documents created with BBEdit to open in BBEdit even when TextEdit is the default handler for text files."
OS X

Submission + - Inside Mac OS X Snow Leopard Exchange Support (appleinsider.com)

imamac writes: Apple Insider has an interesting perspective on the MS Exchange support built into Mac OS X 10.6 and how it essentially frees Apple from all things Microsoft.

Windows Enthusiasts like to spin Apple's support for Exchange on the iPhone and in Snow Leopard as endorsement of Microsoft in the server space. From another angle, Apple is reducing its dependance upon Microsoft's client software, weakening Microsoft's ability to hold back and dumb down its Mac offerings at Apple's expense. More importantly, Apple is providing its users with additional options that benefit both Mac users and the open source community.


Intel

Submission + - Andy Grove to Industry: Get off your Ass

lousyd writes: Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel and present instructor at Stanford Business School, has a message for industry. He believes that health care and energy, especially, could learn a lesson from computing's innovative and relatively government-free history. He asks students to imagine if mainframe vendors had asked government to prop them up in the same way that General Motors has recently had. On the issue of computer patents, he insists that firms must use their patents or lose them: "You can't just sit on your ass and give everyone the finger."
Data Storage

Submission + - Intel's Braidwood could crush SSD market (computerworld.com)

Lucas123 writes: "Intel is planning to launch its native flash memory module, code named Braidwood, in the first or second quarter of 2010. The inexpensive NAND flash will reside directly on a computer's motherboard as cache for all I/O and it will offer performance increases and other benefits similar to that of adding a solid state disk drive to the system. One new report states that by achieving SSD performance without the high cost will essentially erode the SSD market, which, ironically, includes Intel's two popular SSD models. 'Intel has got a very good [SSD] product. But, they view additional layers of NAND technology in PCs as inevitable. They don't think SSDs are likely to take over 100% of the PC market, but they do think Braidwood could find itself in 100% of PCs,' the report's author said."
Idle

Submission + - NZ woman fired for using uppercase in email (nzherald.co.nz)

tomachi writes: "This is hilarious. An accountant in NZ has been awarded $17,000 NZD for unfair dismissal after her boss fired her without warning for using uppercase letters in a single email to co-workers. The email, which advises her team how to fill out staff claim forms, specifies a time and date highlighted in bold red, and a sentence written in capitals and highlighted in bold blue. It reads: "To ensure your staff claim is processed and paid, please do follow the below checklist.""
Portables

Submission + - SPAM: FBI Investigating Laptops Sent to US Governors 1

itwbennett writes: "The FBI is trying to find out who is sending laptops to state governors across the U.S, including the governors of Wyoming and West Virginia. The West Virginia laptops were delivered to the governor's office on August 5, according to the Charleston Gazette, which first reported the story. Kyle Schafer, West Virginia's chief technology officer says he doesn't know what's on the laptops, but he handed them over to the authorities. 'Our expectation is that this is not a gesture of good will,' he said. 'People don't just send you five laptops for no good reason.'"
Link to Original Source
Mozilla

Submission + - Porn collection put people off upgrading Firefox (pcpro.co.uk)

Barence writes: "Mozilla's Security team has disclosed a very interesting piece of research which suggests people refused to upgrade to Firefox 3 because they were afraid the browser would expose their porn collection. Mozilla's research found that the number one reason for not upgrading was the new location bar, and the fact that it delved into people's bookmark collections to suggest sites as they typed. "When we expanded the capabilities of the location bar to search against all history and bookmarks in Firefox 3, a lot of people contacted us to say that they had certain bookmarks they didn't really want to have displayed," Firefox's principal designer, Alex Faaborg, tactfully explains. "In some cases users had intentionally hidden these bookmarks in deep hierarchies of folders, somewhat similar to how one might hide a physical object.""

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