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Power

Jet Stream Kites Could Power New York City 263

Damien1972 writes to tell us that researchers from the Carnegie Institution and California State University claim that a fleet of kites could harvest enough energy to run New York and other major cities, especially if they are affected by polar jet streams. "Using 28 years of data from the National Center for Environmental Prediction and the Department of Energy, Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology and Cristina Archer of California State University, Chico compiled the first global survey of wind energy available at high altitudes in the atmosphere. They found that the regions best suited for harvesting this energy align with population centers in the eastern U.S. and East Asia, although they note that 'fluctuating wind strength still presents a challenge for exploiting this energy source on a large scale.'"

Comment Re:The current web is too complex (Score 2, Insightful) 256

HTTP

I don't know about that one, how much do you really need to know?

XML

There is next to no XML in anything I've ever written, most communication between services is done in JSON - I doubt there would be much XML in Wave either.

SQL

If you've got a good ORM back-end, there shouldn't be any need to hand-code SQL for most server-side applications.

That whittles it down to four, and I think it's a small price to pay for the advantages of web-based applications (on which I need not expand).

Also, server-side JavaScript is really coming along and will knock out the requirement for one of those skills.

Earth

Technology Scans Giant Fish Schools 31

rhettb writes "Employing a new technology, MIT engineers have studied the origins of a mass gathering of hundreds of millions of fish and their subsequent migration. This is the first time a mass migration of animals has been studied from beginning to end, according to their paper published in Science. Until now biologists have depended on theory rather than data from the field, employing computer simulations and experiments in the lab. The MIT engineers employed a new technology, Ocean Acoustic Waveguide Remote Sensing (OAWRS), to record the mass migrations in detail. Developed by Makris and his team in 2006, the OAWRS is able to take images of an area 62 miles (100 kilometers) in diameter every 75 seconds. The system relies on sending sound waves that locate objects by bouncing off of them."
Power

AMD — "We're Not Entirely Honest" About Batteries 154

Slatterz writes "In an apparent attack of the bleeding-obvious, an AMD rep has come clean and admitted (on behalf of the industry) that notebook and phone battery life figures are completely unreliable. AMD's senior vice president Nigel Dessau says that 'we are not being entirely honest with users about what PC battery life they can expect to actually experience.' He says AMD will now use a combination of idle time (where the machine is left to sit idle, and timed to see how long it takes for the battery to go dead), and 3DMark06 to measure battery life. Great in theory but some of the industry already bases battery figures on a two-test measurement, and the results are still wildly inaccurate."

Comment This article is rubbish... (Score 1) 371

We tested the version of Firefox (called Minefield) that does include the V8 code and listed those results below our "official" findings.

No version of Firefox includes "V8 code" - the engine is called Tracemonkey, or at least that's the name of the significant improvement over the last engine in Firefox.

Based purely on this example of the writer's ignorance, I would ignore this article.
Security

US Financial Quagmire Bringing Out the Scammers 272

coondoggie contributes this snippet from NetworkWorld: "You could probably see this one coming. With all of the confusion and money involved you knew there would be cyber-vultures out there looking to cash in. Well the Federal Trade Commission today issued a warning that indeed such increased phishing activities are taking place. Specifically the FTC said it was urging user caution regarding e-mails that look as if they come from a financial institution that recently acquired a consumer's bank, savings and loan, or mortgage. In many case such emails are only looking to obtain personal information — account numbers, passwords, Social Security numbers — to run up bills or commit other crimes in a consumer's name, the FTC stated."

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