Fri 2013-05-24
10:33
Bandages That Can Turn Off Genes Encourages Wound Healing
MTorrice writes "Medical researchers think specially tailored RNA sequences could kill tumor cells or encourage wound healing by turning off genes in patients' cells. Now researchers have developed a nanocoating for bandages or other medical materials that could deliver these fragile gene-silencing RNAs right where they're needed. The team hopes to produce a bandage that shuts down genes standing in the way of healing in chronic wounds."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Landingsbanen Heathrow dicht na incident
Beide start- en landingsbanen van de Londense luchthaven Heathrow zijn vrijdagochtend gesloten na een incident met een toestel van British Airways.
'Syrië komt naar vredesconferentie Genève'
De Syrische overheid heeft zich in principe bereid verklaard om deel te nemen aan een internationale vredesconferentie om burgeroorlog in het land te beëindigen.
Kalfs- en rundvlees in schappen vaak besmet met ESBL
Na kipfilet blijken ook biefstuk en kalfsvlees besmet te zijn met de gevaarlijke bacterie ESBL.
'Google IS a capitalist country... er, company'
Plus: 'Apple execs, I apologise for this theatre of the absurd'
Quotw This was the week when the tax row shifted into high gear, with politicos on both sides of the pond railing at Google and Apple, while respective chiefs Eric Schmidt and Tim Cook presented defences that amounted to yelling "If you don't like it, you fix it" and running away.…
INSIDE GCHQ: Welcome to Cheltenham's cottage industry
'If this nerve centre didn't exist, neither would I' says Reg man
Geek's Guide to Britain For staff at the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in Cheltenham, there’s an air of Fight Club about the place. The first rule about GCHQ is you don’t talk about GCHQ.…
Googorola loses bid to ban US Xbox sales after ITC slapdown
Microsoft escapes $4bn payout
The International Trade Commission (ITC) has denied an attempt by Google to impose a US-wide sales ban on Microsoft's Xbox by rejecting the claim that might have cost Redmond $US4bn in royalties.…
10:13
Eén op de drie 75-plussers gebruikt internet
Eén op de drie 75-plussers maakt gebruik van internet waarbij e-mailen en internetbankieren de belangrijkste activiteiten zijn. Sociale media worden weinig gebruikt.
09:33
BT Runs an 800GBps Channel On Old Fiber
judgecorp writes "BT has demonstrated an 800Gbps 'superchannel' on a 410km fiber in its core network, which was not able to carry 10Gbps channels using older technology. The superchannel is an advanced dense wave division multiplexing (DWDM) technique, created by combining multiple coherent optical signals into one channel, which had previously been shown in laboratory tests. BT ran the test on a fiber with optical characteristics (high polarization mode dispersion) that made it unsuitable for 10GBps using current techniques. That's a good result for BT, because it means its existing core fiber network can be upgraded to handle more data. It's also a good customer story for Ciena, which makes the optical switches used in the test."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Grim outlook for Big Storage as revenues dip across board
Snapping up the minnows only keeps the wolf at bay for so long
Mainstream storage vendors seem to be in trouble as Dell, HP and IBM's storage revenues have tanked over the past two years.…
08:33
Robert Haas: Query Planning Gone Wrong
Over the past few years, I've been making notes on pgsql-performance postings, specifically those postings which relate to query performance issues. Today, I gave a talk at PGCon on the data I've been able to gather.
If you attended the talk, please leave feedback through the PGCon web site or feel free to leave a comment below with your thoughts. If not, you can find the slides on my Presentations web page. A few people asked me to post the raw data on which the talk was based, including links to the original threads. I have created a Query Performance section on my Google Site and posted the information there.
The version posted on the web site incorporates a few minor corrections as compared to what I presented in the talk; and I have left out (for the sake of politeness) the cases I attributed to user error. There were actually only 2 such cases, not 3 as I said in the talk, but either way it seems more polite not to post specific links. Please contact me if you find other mistakes in what I have posted and I will correct them.
Many thanks to all those who said nice things about my talk!
Bruce Momjian: New Presentation Online
I delivered my presentation "Nulls Make Things Easier?" today at PGCon, so I have placed my slides online. The presentation is based on a series of eleven blog posts about NULLs I did a few months ago.
'Mogelijk opnieuw onderzoek naar concurrentiepraktijken Google'
De FTC begint mogelijk opnieuw een onderzoek naar Google om concurrentiebelemmering. Google misbruikt mogelijk zijn positie in de online-advertentiemarkt. In januari besloot de FTC in een ander onderzoek dat Google niets te verwijten viel.
Google Chrome krijgt 'notification center'
Google Chrome krijgt een notification center, waar extensies en Chrome-apps boodschappen kunnen tonen. Daarnaast krijgen notificaties meer functionaliteit. Beide features zijn toegevoegd aan Chrome 28, waarvan sinds donderdag een betaversie te downloaden is.
Eve No Jikan
Looks interesting.
Also posted at Dreamwidth, where there are comment(s); comment here or there.
CBS Radio Workshop: The Record Collectors
The Record Collectors
This is an interview with two avid record collectors, one a man who adopted the title of doctor on the basis of a passing comment and the other a fellow who constructs nightmarish monsters for Christmas parades. Both are fanatical about their hobby, firmly reject impure innovations past the wax cylinder as well as modern singers and generally fail to do anything that would convince people not already part of their folie à deux that records are worth anyone's time.
I know of no persons like the pair in this play.
Also posted at Dreamwidth, where there are comment(s); comment here or there.
CBS Radio Workshop: Living Portrait - William Zekendorf, Tycoon
Living Portrait - William Zekendorf, Tycoon
Bio of a man who helped shape modern New York. Since he was a known associate of Le Corbusier, this may have been a mixed blessing.
Also posted at Dreamwidth, where there are comment(s); comment here or there.
China’s state-run rags brand Mars One mission a scam
Beijing doesn't like the idea of its citizens visiting RED planet
Chinese state-run media has branded the Mars One mission designed to land successful applicants on the Red Planet in 2023 a “hoax” and probable “scam”, in what appears to be a co-ordinated attempt to undermine the non-profit behind the project.…
08:13
US Senator introduces 'Patent Abuse Reduction Act'
Rackspace and industry groups like it, trolls maybe not so much
US Senator John Cornyn, who represents Texas, has introduced the “Patent Abuse Reduction Act of 2013”.…
'Catastrophic failure' of 3D-printed gun in Oz Police test
Panic on the streets of Sydney, as US says printed guns 'unstoppable'
The New South Wales Police Force, guardians of Australia's most-populous state, have gotten themselves into a panic over the Liberator, the 3D-printable pistol.…
07:53
Onlusten Stockholm slaan over
De onlusten die al dagen de voorsteden van de Zweedse hoofdstad Stockholm plagen, zijn in de nacht van donderdag op vrijdag overgeslagen naar het stadje Södertälje.
07:33
'Minder Nederlanders op zomervakantie'
Er lopen momenteel minder Nederlanders met vakantieplannen voor de zomer rond dan vorig jaar.
'Overnamestrijd Google en Facebook om navigatiebedrijf Waze'
Google zou net als Facebook en Apple het navigatiebedrijf Waze willen overnemen. Google en Facebook zouden elkaar mogelijk flink gaan overbieden.
'Verbod printen 3D-wapens vrijwel onmogelijk'
Het verbieden van printen van wapens op een 3D-printer is lastig zoal niet onmogelijk.
07:13
Peak Facebook: British users lose their Liking for Zuck's ad empire
One in 10 UK Facebookers: I quit this... bitch
Facebook's popularity is slumping in the UK as users become fed up with being bombarded with advertising, a YouGov survey has revealed.…
06:53
Australian Police Move To Make 3D Printed Guns Illegal
lukehopewell1 writes "'Untraceable, undetectable, cheap and freely available.' That's how Australian police have described the 3D-printable gun known as The Liberator today as they announce that they will be seeking to make the download, construction and possession of these weapons illegal. In their tests, Police printed the 15 parts required to assemble The Liberator in 27 hours and assembled it within 60 seconds with a firing pin fashioned out of a steel nail. The two guns were test fired into a block of resin designed to simulate human muscle, and the first bullet penetrated the resin block up to 17 centimeters. NSW Police Ballistics division confirm that it would be a fatal wound if pointed at someone."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Dood grensrechter wellicht niet door schoppen
De dood van grensrechter Richard Nieuwenhuizen kwam mogelijk niet door schoppen en trappen, maar kan het resultaat zijn van een spontaan ontstaan sneetje in zijn halsslagader.
06:33
SoftBank gives Washington veto over Sprint board job
The things you do to stop spooks worrying about Huawei
Japanese company SoftBank, currently wrapping a deal to buy 70 per cent of US mobile carrier Sprint, has taken the unusual step of giving the US government veto power over one member to be elected to the board of its acquisition target.…
06:13
'Vrouwen nog altijd achtergesteld bij mannen'
Het is in Nederland nog altijd slecht gesteld met de rechten van vrouwen. Dat concludeert het College voor de Rechten van de Mens in het vrijdag gepresenteerde jaarverslag.
STROKE this mouse to make apps POP, says Microsoft
Windows 8 Start button comes to Redmond's rodents
Microsoft has unveiled two mice that for the first time pack a button that sends users straight to the Windows 8 Start screen, the unloved abode of The interface Formerly Known As Metro (TIFKAM).…
05:33
Amerikaanse scouting laat jonge homo's toe
Openlijk homoseksuele jongeren mogen in de toekomst lid worden de Amerikaanse padvinderij. Een meerderheid van de Nationale Raad van de jeugdorganisatie besloot donderdag om het toelatingsverbod voor jonge homo's te schrappen.
04:53
Cockroaches Evolving To Avoid Roach Motels
sciencehabit writes "Only a few years after roach motels were introduced in the 1980s, they lost their allure for an increasing number of German cockroaches. Researchers soon realized that some roaches had developed an aversion to glucose—the sugary bait disguising the poison—and that the insects were passing that trait on to their young. Now, scientists have figured out how this behavior evolved."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
04:13
Oz shared services collapse looks bad for NetApp
Central IT agency didn't deliver, likely to quit storage-as-a-service caper
Opponents of shared IT services in government have a new case study they point to, and NetApp's busy executives have another tricky item to consider after a major Australian shared services organisation failed.…
03:53
Meet the 23-Ton X-Wing, the World's Largest Lego Model
First time accepted submitter awaissoft writes "There's big, then there's really big, and then there's colossal, which might be a good word to use when describing a near 46,000-pound Lego X-Wing that made a triumphant debut Thursday in New York's Times Square. The full-size replica, about 42 times the size of the Lego Star Wars X-Wing set available on store shelves, celebrates the debut of Cartoon Network's The Yoda Chronicles, which premieres on May 29 at 8 p.m. It took a small army of 32 Lego master builders, housed in a facility in the Czech Republic, to build the 45,980-pound, or 23-ton, Lego ship. It stands 11 feet high and 43 feet long, and contains more than 5 million Lego pieces."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
03:33
Neergeschoten man gered van brand Groningen
Een neergeschoten man is in de nacht van donderdag op vrijdag in Groningen aangetroffen op het dak van een brandende sportschool.
02:53
Android Malware Intercepts Text Messages, Forwards To Criminals
An anonymous reader writes "A new piece of Android malware has been discovered that can intercept your incoming text messages and forward them on to criminals. Once installed, the trojan can be used to steal sensitive messages for blackmailing purposes or more directly, codes which are used to confirm online banking transactions. The malware in question, detected as "Android.Pincer.2.origin" by Russian security firm Doctor Web, is the second iteration of the Android.Pincer family according to the company. Both threats spread as security certificates, meaning they must be deliberately installed onto an Android device by a careless user."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Samsung, carriers tout first Tizen mobes for late 2013
HTML5 seen as key to open source smartphone success
TDC2013 You could be forgiven for thinking there's not much going on with Tizen, the Linux Foundation's open source mobile OS. It's been two years since the project was launched and there still are no Tizen devices on the market. But that's about to change – and there has been a lot happening behind the scenes, as well.…
02:13
Greg Smith: Seeking Revisited: Intel 320 Series and NCQ
Running accurate database benchmark tests is hard. I’ve managed to publish a good number of them without being embarrassed by errors in procedure or results, but today I have a retraction to make. Last year I did a conference talk called “Seeking PostgreSQL” that focused on worst case situations for storage. And that, it turns out, had a giant error. The results for the Intel 320 Series SSD were much lower in some cases than they should have been, because the drive’s NCQ feature wasn’t working properly. When presenting this talk I had a few people push back that the results looked weird, and I was suspicious too. I have a correction to publish now, and I think the way this slipped by me is itself interesting. The full updated SeekingPostgres talk is also available, with all of the original graphs followed by an “Oops!” section showing the next data.
Native Command Queueing is an important optimization for seek heavy workloads. When trying to optimize work for a mechanical disk drive, it’s very important to know where the drive is currently at when deciding where to go next. If you have a read for that same area of the drive in the queue, you want to read that one now, get the I/O out of the way while you’re nearby, and then move to another physical area of the disk.
However, on a SSD, you might think that re-ordering commands isn’t that important. If reads are always inexpensive, taking a constant and small period of time on a flash device, their order doesn’t matter, right? Well, that’s wrong on a few counts. The idea that reads always take the same amount of time on SSD is a popular misconception. There’s a bit of uncertainty around what else is happening in the drive. Flash cells are made of blocks larger than a single database read. What happens if you are reading 8K of a cell that is being rewritten right now, because someone is updating another 8K section? Coordinating that is likely to pause your read for a moment. It doesn’t take much lag at SSD speeds to result in a noticable slowdown. Partially due to contention concerns, and partially due to nature of I/O, keeping the command queue full is still very important to keeping the drive usefully busy all of the time.
On the 120GB Intel 320 Series drive I used for testing, the drive tops out at around 28MB/s of transfers if you’re not pipelining requests via NCQ. It goes a whole lot faster than that once the queue is full:
You might think such a huge difference would be immediately obvious in all test results, right? It’s not though, and that’s how the error slipped by me. Normally all of my tests are done by two similar machines, and then I validate they match. I did that for some of the Seeking Postgres results, such as the write heavy tests. For comparison, here are results from database’s pgbench tool executing its standard, TPC-B-like write test:
The write rate test is barely impacted by whether NCQ is turned on or off, so it wasn’t obvious that one drive had the feature enabled while the other didn’t. I was using this to validate my test server was operating similar to a second system with one of these drives. But I picked the one test here where NCQ doesn’t really matter.
The general conclusion of the original presentation is that the Intel SSDs are much faster than regular disk, but still a good bit slower than the more expensive FusionIO flash. That I knew to be true from real-world workloads, so I’d have been surprised if things didn’t turn out that way. But it turns out that is true whether or not NCQ is working. The Intel 320 line in these results is better with NCQ than without, but the relative ranking isn’t any different now. It’s just the case that the Intel SSD is more competative in some tests than I gave it credit for.
The seeking read results show a much large gap with NCQ enabled:
You might notice a small drop in TPS on that brown line at low scales. That’s a test error I can’t correct for at this point. The original server I used for these tests was gone before I figured out what was wrong. The replacement has the same type of CPU chip, but it’s clocked a bit slower. (Was an Intel i7 870, now is an Intel i7 860) That’s why the CPU limited results at low scales dropped. On any of the I/O limited tests, that original CPU and the slower new one are almost identical, so I still think I’m being fair here.
Finally, I turned the random seek throughput into a business oriented question by asking how long it would take to refill all of RAM after something like a server reboot. My original test placed the Intel drive as taking 5 minutes to read 16GB of random data with 32 clients reading. This is exactly what NCQ helps with, and the correctly working drive only takes 1 minute to refill cache:
Thankfully, I don’t have to say I was completely wrong before. The relative ranking of the various storage options is still the same. The FusionIO drive I tested was and still is at the top of heap, especially if you need high write throughput. But the worst case for reading on the Intel 320 series drives (and the very similar 710 series) is much closer to specifications than my tests showed.
With this old territory sorted out, next up I’m testing Intel’s latest enterprise drive, the DC S3700, which replaces the 710 drives in their lineup. Initial test results look great so far; detailed ones are coming soon.
Andrew Dunstan: Blackhole FDW
My Blackhole FDW talk seemed to go well. The line about no unintentional data loss got the best laugh. Here are the slides.
Besides being a bit of fun, this did have a serious purpose - creating a skeleton for building an FDW, including the writable API. The code has the contents of the docs on writing an FDW as comments in the appropriate functions, to help a new FDW writer.
The code is on bitbucket.
Pierre Ducroquet: Review – “Instant PostgreSQL Starter”
Thanks to Shaun M. Thomas, I have been offered a numeric copy of the “Instant PostgreSQL Backup” book from Packt publishing, and was provided with the “Instant PostgreSQL Starter” book to review. Considering my current work-situation, doing a lot of PostgreSQL advertising and basic teaching, I was interested in reviewing this one…
Like the Instant collection ditto says, it’s short and fast. I kind of disagree with the “focused” for this one, but it’s perfectly fine considering the aim of that book.
Years ago, when I was a kid, I discovered databases with a tiny MySQL-oriented book. It teaches you the basis : how to install, basic SQL queries, some rudimentary PHP integration. This book looks a bit like its PostgreSQL-based counterpart. It’s a quick travel through installation, basic manipulation, and the (controversy) “Top 9 features you need to know about”. And that’s exactly the kind of book we need.
So, what’s inside ? I’d say what you need to kick-start with PostgreSQL.
The installation part is straight forward : download, click, done. Now you can launch pgadmin, create an user, a database, and you’re done. Next time someone tells you PostgreSQL ain’t easy to install, show him that book.
The second part is a fast SQL discovery, covering a few PostgreSQL niceties. It’s damn simple : Create, Read, Update, Delete. You won’t learn about indexes, functions, advanced queries here. For someone discovering SQL, it’s what needs to be known to just start…
The last part, “Top 9 features you need to know about”, is a bit more hard to describe. PostgreSQL is a RDBMS with included batteries, choosing 9 features must have been a really hard time for the author, and I think nobody can be blamed for not choosing that or that feature you like : too much choice… The author spends some time on pg_crypto, the RETURNING clause with serial, hstore, XML, even recursive queries… This is, from my point of view, the troublesome part of the book : mentioning all these features means introducing complicated SQL queries. I would never teach someone how to do recursive queries before teaching him joins, it’s like going from elementary school to university in fourty pages. But the positive part is that an open-minded and curious reader will have a great teaser and nice tracks to follow to increase his knowledge of PostgreSQL. Mentioning hstore is really cool, that’s one of the PostgreSQL feature one have to know…
To sum up my point of view about this book : it’s a nice book for beginners, especially considering the current NoSQL movement and people forgetting about SQL and databases. It’s a bit sad we don’t have more books like this one about PostgreSQL. I really hope Packt publishing will try to have a complete collection, from introduction (this book) to really advanced needs (PostgreSQL High Performance comes to mind) through advanced SQL queries, administration tips and so on… They have a book about PostgreSQL Server Programming planned next month, I’m really looking forward to this one.
Scientists Growing New Crystals To Make LED Lights Better
coondoggie writes "When to comes to offering warm yet visually efficient lighting, LEDs have a long way to go. But scientists with the University of Georgia and Oak Ridge and Argonne national laboratories are looking at new family of crystals they say glow different colors and hold the key for letting white LED light shine in homes and offices as well as natural sunlight."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
01:33
Google to double encryption key lengths for SSL certs by year's end
2048-bit keys will be the norm
Google is about to start the first upgrade to its SSL certification system in recent memory, and will move to 2048-bit encryption keys by the end of 2013. The first tranche of changes is planned for August 1.…
01:13
Google Takes Street View To the Galapagos Islands
Nerval's Lobster writes "In the early days, Street View must have been a relatively easy project for Google to execute, considering the financial resources and employees at its disposal: strap a set of high-tech cameras to a fleet of vehicles and drive the latter around urban areas all over the world, recording every inch for viewers' clicking-and-dragging pleasure. But there's only so much of the world accessible via well-paved roads (or close to gas stations, for that matter), which meant Google had to regress a bit: instead of cars, it began strapping all that fancy camera equipment to human beings, who are a little bit maneuverable over rough terrain and narrow dirt paths than a four-door sedan. Google sent its Street View cyborgs into the Grand Canyon, where they recorded the craggy pathways and steep cliffs. Then it sent them to some of the world's highest peaks. Now comes the next exotic locale: the Galapagos Islands, land of giant tortoises and other unique species, where Charles Darwin researched his famous theory of evolution. 'It's critical that we share images with the world of this place in order to continue to study and preserve the islands' unique biodiversity,' read a May 23 note on the Google Lat Long blog. 'Today we're honored to announce, in partnership with Charles Darwin Foundation (CDF) and the Galapagos National Parks Directorate (GNPD), that we've collected panoramic imagery of the islands with the Street View Trekker.' That imagery will appear on Google Maps later in 2013. Nobody's asked the tortoises how they feel about it."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Facebook Home phone plans canned in the UK
Support for new devices put on ice as well
The HTC First "Facebook phone" is not coming to the UK after its frigid reception in the US, and the social networking company is going back to work on the app after mass user apathy.…
00:33
Bitcoin's Success With Investors Alienates Earliest Adopters
holy_calamity writes "Digital currency Bitcoin is gaining acceptance with mainstream venture capitalists, reports Technology Review, but at the price of its famed anonymity and ability to operate without central authority. Technology investors have now ploughed millions of dollars into a handful of Bitcoin-based payments and financial companies that are careful to follow financial regulations and don't offer anonymity. That's causing tensions in the community of Bitcoin enthusiasts, some of whom feel their currency's success has involved abandoning its most important features."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Thu 2013-05-23
23:53
WIPO Panel Says Ron Paul Guilty of Reverse Domain Name Hijacking
An anonymous reader writes "Ron Paul lost his two cybersquatting complaints against RonPaul.com and RonPaul.org. In the case of RonPaul.org, Paul was been found guilty of 'reverse domain name hijacking'. A reverse domain name hijacking finding means that the arbitration panel believes the case was filed in bad faith, resulting in the abuse of the administrative process. The panel ruled this way since Paul filed the case after the owner of RonPaul.org had already offered to give him the domain for free. The panel also ruled against Paul for the RonPaul.com domain name."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
23:33
Joyent cuts prices on cloudy infrastructure
Aligns with AWS instances, and offers the same or lower prices
Joyent, one of the upstart cloudy infrastructure providers that is taking a custom software stack to market to peddle virty server and storage, has done a major revamp of the way it carves up slices on its Joyent Compute Service cloud.…
23:13
HiPEAC 2013 Berlin HLCGB
[Wherein we review an academic conference in the High/Low/Crush/Goal/Bane format used for reviewing juggling conventions on rec.juggling.]
High: My old Codeplay colleague Ally Donaldson's FAT-GPU workshop. He was talking about his GPUVerify system, which takes CUDA or OpenCL programs and either proves them free of data races and synchronisation-barrier conflicts, or finds a potential bug. It's based on an SMT solver; I think there's a lot of scope to apply constraint solvers to problems in compilation and embedded system design, and I'd like to learn more about them.
Also, getting to see the hotel's giant fishtank being cleaned, by scuba divers.
Low: My personal low point was telling a colleague about some of the problems my depression has been causing me, and having him laugh in my face - he'd been drinking, and thought I was exaggerating for comic effect. He immediately apologised when I told him that this wasn't the case, but still, not fun. The academic low point was the "current challenges in supercomputing" tutorial, which turned out to be a thinly-disguised sales pitch for the sponsor's FPGA cards. That tends not to happen at maths conferences...
Crush: am I allowed to have a crush on software? Because the benchmarking and visualisation infrastructure surrounding the Sniper x86 simulator looks so freaking cool. If I can throw away the mess of Makefiles, autoconf and R that serves the same role in our lab I will be very, very happy.
Goal: Go climbing on the Humboldthain Flakturm (fail - it turns out that Central Europe is quite cold in January, and nobody else fancied climbing on concrete at -7C). Get my various Coursera homeworks and bureaucratic form-filling done (fail - damn you, tasty German beer and hyperbolic discounting!). Meet up with 
maradydd, who was also in town (fail - comms and scheduling issues conspired against us. Next time, hopefully). See some interesting talks, and improve my general knowledge of the field (success!).
Bane: I was sharing a room with my Greek colleague Chris, who had a paper deadline on the Wednesday. This meant he was often up all night, and went to bed as I was getting up, so every trip into the room to get something was complicated by the presence of a sleeping person. He also kept turning the heating up until it was too hot for me to sleep. Dually, of course, he had to share his room with a crazy Brit who kept getting up as he was going to bed and opening the window to let freezing air in...
Falsehoods programmers believe about build systems
Inspired by Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names, Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Time, and far, far too much time spent fighting autotools. Thanks to Aaron Crane, totherme and zeecat for their comments on earlier versions.
It is accepted by all decent people that Make sucks and needs to die, and that autotools needs to be shot, decapitated, staked through the heart and finally buried at a crossroads at midnight in a coffin full of millet. Hence, there are approximately a million and seven tools that aim to replace Make and/or autotools. Unfortunately, all of the Make-replacements I am aware of copy one or more of Make's mistakes, and many of them make new and exciting mistakes of their own.
I want to see an end to Make in my lifetime. As a service to the Make-replacement community, therefore, I present the following list of tempting but incorrect assumptions various build tools make about building software.
All of the following are wrong:
- Build graphs are trees.
- Build graphs are acyclic.
- Every build step updates at most one file.
- Every build step updates at least one file.
- Compilers will always modify the timestamps on every file they are expected to output.
- It's possible to tell the compiler which file to write its output to.
- It's possible to tell the compiler which directory to write its output to.
- It's possible to predict in advance which files the compiler will update.
- It's possible to narrow down the set of possibly-updated files to a small hand-enumerated set.
- It's possible to determine the dependencies of a target without building it.
- Targets do not depend on the rules used to build them.
- Targets depend on every rule in the whole build system.
- Detecting changes via file hashes is always the right thing.
- Detecting changes via file hashes is never the right thing.
- Nobody will ever want to rebuild a subset of the available dirty targets.
- People will only want to build software on Linux.
- People will only want to build software on a Unix derivative.
- Nobody will want to build software on Windows.
- People will only want to build software on Windows.
(Thanks to David MacIver for spotting this omission.) - Nobody will want to build on a system without
straceor some equivalent. statis slow on modern filesystems.- Non-experts can reliably write portable shell script.
- Your build tool is a great opportunity to invent a whole new language.
- Said language does not need to be a full-featured programming language.
- In particular, said language does not need a module system more sophisticated than
#include. - Said language should be based on textual expansion.
- Adding an Nth layer of textual expansion will fix the problems of the preceding N-1 layers.
- Single-character magic variables are a good idea in a language that most programmers will rarely use.
- System libraries and globally-installed tools never change.
- Version numbers of system libraries and globally-installed tools only ever increase.
- It's totally OK to spend over four hours calculating how much of a 25-minute build you should do.
- All the code you will ever need to compile is written in precisely one language.
- Everything lives in a single repository.
- Files only ever get updated with timestamps by a single machine.
- Version control systems will always update the timestamp on a file.
- Version control systems will never update the timestamp on a file.
- Version control systems will never change the time to one earlier than the previous timestamp.
- Programmers don't want a system for writing build scripts; they want a system for writing systems that write build scripts.
[Exercise for the reader: which build tools make which assumptions, and which compilers violate them?]
New Year's Resolutions
I don't normally make New Year's resolutions, but what the hell.
1. Start tracking my weight and calorie intake again, and get my weight back down to a level where I'm comfortable. This morning it was 12st 1.9 - not terribly high in the scheme of things, but it's almost as high as it was when I first started dieting (though I think a bit more of it may be muscle now) and it's definitely high enough to negatively impact my sense of well-being.
What went wrong? Well, I'm gonna quote from Hyperbole and a Half: "trying to use willpower to overcome the apathetic sort of sadness that accompanies depression is like a person with no arms trying to punch themselves until their hands grow back. A fundamental component of the plan is missing and it isn't going to work." A scheme for weight loss that depends on willpower is similarly doomed if you're too depressed to stick to it. So this time I'm going to try to make changes to my eating habits that require less willpower. Any suggestions would be most welcome.
2. Start making (and testing!) regular backups of my data. I lost several years of mountain photographs last year when the external hard drive I was keeping them on died: I don't want that to happen again.
3. Get my Gmail account down to Inbox Zero and keep it there. It's currently at Inbox 1713, most of which is junk, but it's just *easier* to deal with an empty inbox, and not have to re-scan the same old things to look for the interesting new stuff.
I have a few more Ambitious Plans, but they don't really count as resolutions:
1. Do some more Stanford online courses. I'm currently signed up to Human-Computer Interaction, Design and Analysis of Algorithms, Software Engineering for Software as a Service, and Information Theory. Fortunately they don't all run concurrently!
[BTW, they're not all computing courses: wormwood_pearl is signed up to Designing Green Buildings, for instance.]
2. Enter (and complete!) the Meadows Half-Marathon in March. I started training for this back in December, but then I got ill and Christmas happened, so today was my first run for a while and it wasn't much fun. Never mind; I've got time to get back on course.
3. If that goes well, enter (and, ideally, complete...) the Lowe Alpine Mountain Marathon. As I understand things, it's basically two 20km-ish fell runs back-to-back, with a night camping in between. Oh, and you have to carry all your camping kit with you. In the high classes people do the whole thing at a run, but in the lower classes (which I'd be entering) there's apparently a bit more run/walk/run going on. Philipp and I did nearly 40km in one day on the South Glen Shiel ridge in November, and then went for another hike the next day, so I should be able to at least cover the distance. Providing I don't get too badly lost, of course :-)
The only way to progress in anything. The trick, of course, is not biting off enough to cause you damage.
On (not) sucking at my job
Previously on posts tagged with 'angst' (mostly friendslocked): our hero became depressed, sought help, and is now (mostly) feeling better. Now read on...
John Walker, in his excellent book The Hacker's Diet, distinguishes two approaches to tackling problems, which he calls the Manager's approach and the Engineer's approach. Management is about monitoring and ameliorating chronic problems to keep their symptoms to within an acceptable level; engineering is about solving problems outright. Most difficult problems, he claims, must be tackled using a combination of both approaches.
My problem, which might be summarised as "I became depressed because I suck at my job", has so far responded well to a management approach: leaning on friends, attending CBT workshops, prioritizing exercise, talking to my supervisor about my problems. I'm very grateful to all of you for your support, and to the Glasgow NHS mental health team. Now that I'm feeling a bit more spoonful, it's time to apply the engineer's approach, and suck less at my job.
[A perhaps more honourable alternative would be to find another job at which I wouldn't suck, but that would be fraught with risk, and my current job has much to recommend it. Besides, I'm not sure that such a job exists.]
I have three basic problems:
- I'm not a good enough programmer;
- I don't know enough about the problem domain;
- I am now effectively an experimental scientist, but I don't know anything about experiment design.
On the first point, I'm reasonably happy with the readability of my code, but I'm unhappy with its testability and correctness, and I'm very unhappy with the time it takes me to produce it. I'm frequently struck by analysis paralysis. I've spent most of my programming career working with high-level languages, so I'm not very good at lower-level programming. I think the only solution to this problem is to write (hundreds of) thousands of lines of code, at as low a level as possible.
On the second point: before starting this job, I'd previously worked at a compiler vendor and at a web startup which did some machine-learning; back in high school, I'd done some assembly programming for an embedded system. I'd also done a bit of background reading on compiler theory. It turned out that this was insufficient preparation for a job using machine-learning to improve the state of the art in compilers targetting embedded systems. Astonishing, I know.
There used to be a cute slide in the Edinburgh University first compilers course:
Now, that's true for compiler theory, and it explains why compiler research is still a going concern after sixty years, but it doesn't explain why day-to-day hacking on compilers is hard. For me at least, that's because hacking on compilers is systems programming. You need to know, at least to the level of "understand the basic principles of and can look up the details if needed", about things like addressing modes, instruction set architecture design, executable layout, and calling conventions. Forget the fat guys who know C++ who apparently keep Silicon Valley running; I work with guys who know Verilog and the GNU ld control language.
[Betcha didn't know that the GNU linker embeds a Turing-equivalent programming language :-)]
Now, none of this stuff is especially difficult as far as I can see. But it's a lot of background knowledge to have, and if you lack it then you'll be constantly hitting problems that you lack the mental toolkit to address. So here's what I'm doing about it:
- To address the patchiness of my knowledge about machine-learning, I went to the library and got out a couple of ML textbooks, one of which I've now read. I've also signed up to the free online machine-learning class from Stanford, and, while I was at it, the Introduction to AI class too.
- To address my ignorance of architectural issues, I'm auditing the computer design undergrad course at Edinburgh; when I've finished that, I'll audit the follow-on course in computer architecture. So far it's mostly been the sort of boolean algebra and digital electronics that I learned at my mother's knee, but there's a lot of stuff I don't know later on in the course.
- Linkers are a particular problem for me; I think linker errors are the Universe's way of telling me what it's like for a non-techie who thinks they need to press the "any" key. zeecat kindly lent me a copy of Levine's book Linkers and Loaders, which I am now reading; as an unexpected bonus, one of the early chapters is a 30,000ft tour of computer architecture. To my delight, the book walks you through the construction of a simple linker in Perl.
- To address my lack of C and assembly language experience, to solidify my understanding of basic compiler theory, and to give me a testbed for implementing some optimisation algorithms later on, I started writing a simple compiler in C. Currently it accepts a simple term/factor/expression grammar and outputs x86 assembly; the plan is to extend it so it accepts a subset of C. "Compiler" is currently a bit of a joke; it is technically a compiler, but one that does really aggressive constant folding :-) I haven't hacked on this for a while, because work got in the way, but intend to pick it up again soon.
- To address my ignorance of C minutiae, I started reading through the comp.lang.c FAQ, at Aaron Crane's suggestion. This is also stalled, as is a project to convert said FAQ to a collection of Mnemosyne flashcards.
- The world seems to be standardising on Hadoop as a clustering solution; I should try that out at some point.
So, anything else I should be doing? Anything in that list I should not be doing?
I have no real idea how to start addressing my third problem, namely my ignorance of experimental design. Go to the library and get another book out, I guess. Anyone got any recommendations?
Link
In the coffee room yesterday with michiexile, who has just started a postdoc in cloud-scale computational algebra:
[Insert ten-minute discussion of the extreme cleverness he had to employ to make the calculations tractable in the face of O(n3s) runtime and memory usage.]
Red Hat's Diane Mueller Talks About OpenShift (Video)
OpenShift, says Wikipedia, "is a cloud computing platform as a service product from Red Hat. A version for private cloud is named OpenShift Enterprise. The software that runs the service is open-sourced under the name OpenShift Origin, and is available on GitHub." This is a video interview in which Diane Mueller Explains OpenShift in depth. You may want to watch this OpenStack demo video as well.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Fabrikanten tonen hun GTX 780-videokaarten
Nadat Nvidia donderdag zijn GTX 780 presenteerde, is het nu de beurt aan de partners van Nvidia om hun versie van de kaart uit te brengen. Sommige fabrikanten laten de features van de standaard-versie vrijwel ongemoeid, anderen hebben de videokaart wel aangepast.
WinUAE 2.6.0
Versie 2.6.0 van WinUAE is uitgekomen. Deze Windows-port van de UAE Amiga-emulator is in staat om een Commodore Amiga perfect te emuleren. Alle modellen, vanaf de allereerste Amiga 1000 tot en met de Amiga 4000, worden ondersteund. Wel moet je er rekening mee houden dat WinUAE zonder kickstart (bij wijze van spreken het bios/de firmware van een Amiga) of andere software wordt geleverd. Meer informatie kan in de Amiga Emulator FAQ worden gevonden. WinUAE draait op Windows 2000 en hoger, en de download is nog geen 4MB groot. Voor een kickstart en programma's is Amiga Forever een mogelijke oplossing, met prijzen vanaf 10 euro. Hieronder kan worden gevonden wat er allemaal sinds versie 2.5.0 veranderd is.
Pale Moon 20.1
Versie 20.1 van Pale Moon is uitgekomen. Deze webbrowser maakt gebruik van de broncode van Mozilla Firefox, maar is geoptimaliseerd voor moderne hardware. De Windows-versie van Mozilla Firefox wordt namelijk ontwikkeld met een zo groot mogelijke compatibiliteit in gedachten. Mede door concessies aan oudere hardware is de browser niet zo snel als hij zou kunnen zijn, aldus Pale Moon-maker Moonchild Productions.
Microsoft kondigt muis met Windows 8-knop en -touchstrook aan
Microsoft heeft nieuwe hardware in zijn Sculpt-serie aangekondigd. De Sculpt Comfort Mouse heeft een Windows-knop die gebruikt kan worden voor verschillende features in Windows 8. Ook komt er een kleinere versie van de muis uit.
'Mededingingsonderzoek bij Google staat op stapel'
De Amerikaanse toezichthouder Federal Trade Commission (FTC) staat op het punt een onderzoek te beginnen naar de handel en wandel van Google in de online advertentiemarkt.
Twitter gaat korte video's van partners in tweets tonen
Twitter geeft populaire merken de mogelijkheid om in tweets een korte video te plaatsen die direct via de website of app bekeken kan worden.
22:53
Yahoo! continues quest for youth with yet another acquisition
PlayerScale purchase gives foothold in gaming market
Marissa Mayer has continued her acquisitions spree with the purchase of gaming software house PlayerScale for an undisclosed sum.…
22:33
5-Pound UAV Flies For 50 Minutes, Streams HD From Over 3 Miles
An anonymous reader writes "Looks like those guys from Aeryon Labs are at it again. Today they announced the SkyRanger a bigger brother to their Scout drone (the one that the Libyan rebels used back in 2011). This one claims flight time of close to an hour, streaming 1080p30 HD video, a range of over 3 miles and a camera that can shoot 15 Megapixel stills and thermal video simultaneously. Not only that but it pops out of a backpack and is ready to fly instantly. It ain't cheap, but it can fly at 40 mph!"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Sears Is Turning Shuttered Stores Into Data Centers
miller60 writes "Servers may soon fill the aisles where shoppers once roamed. Sears Holdings is seeking to convert former Sears and Kmart stores into Internet data hubs. Some stand-alone stores and distribution centers may be repurposed as data centers, while mall-based stores can be converted into disaster recovery sites, the company says, offering access to stores and eateries for displaced workers who may be on site for weeks. Then there's the wireless tower opportunity. Seventy percent of the U.S. population lives within 10 miles of a Sears or Kmart store, and these rooftops can be leased to fill gaps in cell coverage. It's not the first effort to convert stores into IT infrastructure, as Rackspace is headquartered in an old mall, and companies have built data centers in malls in Indiana and Maryland. But Sears, which operates 25 million square feet of real estate, hopes to make this strategy work at scale." Also at Slash DataCenter.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
22:13
Internet2 superfast boffin network peers with Azure cloud
Microsoft waives data egress rates for US researchers
Ultra-fast US academic network Internet2 is going to peer with Microsoft's cloud to give researchers from over 200 institutions high-speed reliable access to Azure at a discounted rate.…
21:53
Google Code Deprecates Download Service For Project Hosting
New submitter c0d3g33k writes "Google Project Hosting announced changes to the Download service on Wednesday, offering only 'increasing misuse of the service and a desire to keep our community safe and secure' by way of explanation. Effective immediately, existing projects that offer no downloads and all new projects will no longer be able to create downloads. Existing projects which currently have downloads will lose the ability to create new downloads by January 2014, though existing downloads will remain available 'for the foreseeable future.' Google Drive is recommended as an alternative, but this will likely have to be done manually by project maintainers since the ability to create and manage downloads won't be part of the Project Hosting tools. This is a rather baffling move, since distributing project files via download is integral to FOSS culture."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
'Wiels bepaalde wanneer hij werd beveiligd'
De op 5 mei vermoorde Curaçaose politicus Helmin Wiels bepaalde zelf of hij met of zonder bodyguard de straat opging. Op de dag van zijn dood had Wiels zelf aangegeven geen bewaking te willen hebben.
Vijfduizend grottekeningen ontdekt in Mexico
Archeologen hebben in het noordoosten van Mexico 4926 grottekeningen ontdekt die in goede staat verkeren.
21:13
Google slashes App Engine NoSQL data storage prices by 25 per cent
Amazon cuts DynamoDB costs, and Google follows suit
Amazon doesn't care much about profits and both Google and Microsoft have monopolies that give them deep pockets. And so it is no surprise that the three companies will be engaged in a cloud price war that will very likely leave a lot of smaller cloud providers dead by the side of the road in the coming years.…
20:33
Ethernet Turns 40
alancronin writes "Four decades ago the Ethernet protocol made its debut as a way to connect machines in close proximity, today it is the networking layer two protocol of choice for local area networks (LANs), wide area networks (WANs) and everything in between. For many people Ethernet is merely the RJ45 jack on the back of a laptop, but its relative ubiquity and simplicity belie what Ethernet has done for the networking industry and in turn for consumers and enterprises. Ethernet has in the space of 40 years gone from a technology that many in the industry viewed as something not fit for high bandwidth, dependable communications to the default data link protocol."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Obama stelt grenzen aan gebruik drones
De Amerikaanse president Barack Obama komt donderdagavond met een nieuw beleid voor het gebruik van drones, onbemande vliegtuigjes waarmee terroristen worden aangevallen.
Slachtoffer moord Londen was 25 jaar
Het slachtoffer van de kennelijk politiek gemotiveerde moord woensdag op straat in de Londense wijk Woolwich was de 25-jarige militair Lee Rigby.
'Visser en Severein dinsdag nog gezien in hotel'
De vermiste oud-volleybalster Ingrid Visser en haar partner Lodewijk Severein, die worden vermist in de Spaanse plaats Murcia, zijn dinsdagochtend nog gezien door personeel van het hotel waarin zij verbleven.
19:53
Main US Weather Satellite Fails As Hurricane Season Looms
First time accepted submitter Rebecka writes with bad news, quoting an IB Times report: "Just as the 2013 hurricane season is about to begin, one of the U.S.' main weather satellites failed this week. The Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite, also known as GOES-13, reportedly ceased to operate as of Tuesday, making it impossible to predict weather patterns on the East Coast." A note at NOAA's page for the GOES family of satellites says "GOES-13 imaging and sounding operations suspended. Recovery efforts for GOES-13 continue and the spacecraft health and safety are nominal. GOES-14 is being activated." You can follow the progress on the agency's page of General Satellite Messages.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Ask Slashdot: How To Determine If a Video Has Been Faked?
BStorm writes "The Toronto Mayor Rob Ford has been making headlines around the world, for allegedly smoking crack. This story was first broken by gawker.com, which is now crowd-funding $200,000 to buy the video in question. What do you look for to determine if a video has been faked? Of course I am only interested in the technical details and not the tawdry details related to this case ;) I live in Toronto, so the video still frame posted on Gawker certainly does look like Rob Ford."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
KPN gaat 'eerlijke smartphone' FairPhone leveren
KPN heeft bekendgemaakt de FairPhone te zullen gaan leveren. Het toestel, dat volgens de makers zo gemaakt is dat veel rekening is gehouden met mens en milieu, zal in productie gaan zodra er 5000 klanten zich hebben aangemeld. KPN gaat een beperkte oplage van 1000 stuks leveren.
AMD introduceert nieuwe Temash-, Kabini- en Richland-apu's voor laptops
AMD heeft nieuwe Richland-, Kabini- en Temash-apu's uitgebracht. De Temash-apu's gaan voortaan door het leven als AMD Elite Mobility Apu, Kabini gaat AMD Mainstream Apu heten en Richland krijgt de aanduiding AMD Elite Performance Apu.
Amazon brengt Kindle HD en Appstore naar Nederland
Amazon levert zijn Kindle HD- en Fire HD 8.9"-tablets vanaf 13 juni ook in Nederland. De tablet is vanaf donderdag te bestellen bij de onlinewebwinkel. Behalve naar Nederland brengt Amazon de tablets ook naar een groot aantal andere landen, waaronder België.
Plasma Workspaces to go into feature freeze with version 4.11
Plasma Workspaces 4.11 is to receive two years of stabilisation updates from its release, under a long-term support (LTS) scheme. KDE applications are not affected by the freeze and more feature releases of the desktop are expected
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Symantec putting an end to PC Tools security products
Current customers can still use the products until their subscription runs out. Symantec says that customers who are affected by the change should switch to Norton products
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Open Recall: siduction, Puppy Linux, Diaspora, Moodle
This edition of the Open Recall catches up with a number of open source project releases: siduction 13.1.0, Puppy Linux 5.6, Wifislax 4.4, Diaspora 0.1.0.0 and Moodle 2.5
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For no good reason
Authors in 1967's Dangerous Visions by year of debut (length of career at the time DV came out indicated in brackets):
1930s (5):
Isaac Asimov: 1934 (33)
Robert Bloch: 1934 (33)
Fritz Leiber: 1934 (33)
Lester del Rey: 1938 (29)
Theodore Sturgeon: 1938 (29)
1940s (8):
Damon Knight: 1940 (27)
Frederik Pohl: 1940 (27)
Brian W. Aldiss: 1946 (21)
Miriam Allen deFord: 1946 (21)
Philip Jose Farmer: 1946 (21)
Poul Anderson: 1947 (20)
Harlan Ellison: 1949 (18)
Kris Neville: 1949 (18)
1950s (11):
John Brunner: 1951 (16)
Philip K. Dick: 1952 (15)
Joe L. Hensley: 1953 (14)
Roger Zelazny: 1953 (14)
Carol Emshwiller: 1954 (13)
Robert Silverberg: 1954 (13)
Henry Slesar: 1955 (12)
J. G. Ballard: 1956 (11)
David R. Bunch: 1957 (10)
R. A. Lafferty: 1959 (8)
Keith Laumer: 1959 (8)
1960s (9):
Sonya Dorman: 1961 (6)
Samuel R. Delany: 1962 (5)
Larry Eisenberg: 1962 (5)
Jonathan Brand: 1963 (4)
John Sladek: 1963 (4)
Norman Spinrad: 1963 (4)
Larry Niven: 1964 (3)
James Cross: 1967 (0)
Howard Rodman: 1967 (0)
Also posted at Dreamwidth, where there are comment(s); comment here or there.
19:33
PVV en SP zeggen vertrouwen in Schippers op
De PVV en de SP hebben geen vertrouwen meer in minister Edith Schippers (Volksgezondheid). De PVV diende donderdag na een lang debat over de zorgfraude een motie van wantrouwen in, die gesteund werd door de SP.
18:53
Numerous security issues in X Window System clients
X.Org has disclosed a long list of vulnerabilities that have been fixed in the X Window System client libraries; most of them expose clients to attacks by a hostile server. "Most of the time X clients & servers are run by the same user, with the server more privileged from the clients, so this is not a problem, but there are scenarios in which a privileged client can be connected to an unprivileged server, for instance, connecting a setuid X client (such as a screen lock program) to a virtual X server (such as Xvfb or Xephyr) which the user has modified to return invalid data, potentially allowing the user to escalate their privileges." There are 30 CVE numbers assigned to these vulnerabilities; expect the distributor updates to start flowing shortly.
Sharp: Linux Kernel Internships (OPW) Update
Sarah Sharp reports on the response to the availability of a set of Outreach Program for Women internships working on the Linux kernel. "As coordinator for the Linux kernel OPW project, I was really worried about whether applicants would be able to get patches into the kernel. Everyone knows that kernel maintainers are the pickiest bastards^Wperfectionists about coding style, getting the proper Signed-off-by, sending plain text email, etc. I thought a couple applicants would be able to complete maybe one or two patches, tops. Boy was I wrong!" In the end, 41 applicants submitted 374 patches to the kernel, of which 137 were accepted.
Nederland en Duitsland halen band verder aan
Nederland en Duitsland halen de volgens premier Mark Rutte toch al ''hele sterke banden'' nog verder aan. Dat bleek donderdag na overleg tussen een groot aantal Nederlandse en Duitse bewindslieden in het Duitse Kleef, net over de grens bij Nijmegen.
Orange customer clobbered with SIX FIGURE phone bill
If your handset's overheating, check your data connection
EE's Orange arm managed to bill a customer £163,000 for a month's data use, thanks to a dodgy handset which was opening a data connection every 20 minutes.…
18:33
Curiosity Rewarded: Florida Teen Heading to Space Camp, Not Jail
Kiera Wilmot, the Florida high school student who was expelled from her school after an unauthorized science experiment was misperceived as a weapon (at least for purposes of arrest and charging), won't be going to jail. She will, though, be going to Space Camp, thanks to a crowdfunding campaign started by author and former NASA engineer Homer Hickham. All charges against her have been dropped.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
18:13
Niet één veiligheidsregio voldoet aan eisen
Geen van de zogeheten veiligheidsregio’s in ons land voldoet echt helemaal aan de eisen.
17:53
A Cold Look at Cold Fusion Claims: Why E-Cat Looks Like a Hoax
In the past few days, several readers have submitted word of a paper published on Arxiv allegedly confirming the efficacy of Andrea Rossi's "E-Cat," a device Rossi says transmutes nickel into copper, producing cheap energy in the process. (Mentioned before on Slashdot.) Ethan Siegel of ScienceBlogs takes a skeptical look at the buzz surrounding this paper, and asks some seemingly obvious questions, pointing out various ways in which the cold-fusion / cheap-energy claims could be either confirmed or debunked. First time accepted submitter CdXiminez writes with a capsule of Siegel's points: "What would it take to convince a reasonable observer that you've got a controlled nuclear reaction going on here? Things not shown in the earlier report: Show that nuclear transmutation has in fact taken place; Start the device operating by whatever means you want, then disconnect all external power to it, and allow it to run; Place a gamma-ray detector around the device; Accurately monitor the power drawn from all sources to the device at all times, while also monitoring the energy output from the device at all times."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Offers 2,304 Cores For $650
Vigile writes "When NVIDIA released the GTX Titan in February, it was the first consumer graphics card to use the GK110 GPU from NVIDIA that included 2,688 CUDA cores / shaders and an impressive 6GB of GDDR5 frame buffer. However, it also had a $1000 price tag that was the limiting specification for most gamers. With today's release of the GeForce GTX 780 they are hoping to utilize more of the GK110 silicon they are getting from TSMC while offering a lower cost version with performance within spitting range. The GTX 780 uses the same chip but disables a handful more compute units to bring the shader count down to 2,304 — still an impressive bump over the 1,536 of the GTX 680. The 384-bit memory bus remains though the frame buffer is cut in half to 3GB. Overall, the performance of the new card sits squarely between the GTX Titan ($1000) and AMD's Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition ($439), just like its price. The question is, are PC gamers willing to shell out $220+ dollars MORE than the HD 7970 for somewhere in the range of 15-25% more performance?" As you might guess, there's similarly spec-laden coverage at lots of other sites, including Tom's, ExtremeTech, and TechReport. HotHardware, too.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
A28 korte tijd dicht wegens olie op wegdek
De A28 is donderdagmiddag tussen Assen en Groningen in noordelijke richting enige tijd afgesloten geweest voor het verkeer. Er lagen ter hoogte van Vries was olie op de weg gekomen, zo meldt Rijkswaterstaat.
Tipsters exposed after South Africa's national police force hacked
Whistleblowers, crime victims laid bare by 'Anon splinter group'
The identities of more than 15,000 South Africans who reported crimes or provided tip-offs to the police have been exposed following an attack on a SAPS (South African Police Service) website.…
17:13
LAKS ontvangt honderdduizendste examenklacht
Het LAKS heeft donderdagmiddag de honderdduizendste klacht over de eindexamens ontvangen. Voor de scholierenvakbond kwam de mijlpaal als een verrassing.
Samsung flogs slim, flashy new model: Protection included
Server-level SSD gets endurance, capacity upgrade
Samsung has upgraded its SM843 server-level SSD, doubling its capacity and tripling its endurance.…
16:53
French Police End Missing Persons Searches, Suggest Using Facebook
itwbennett writes "According to an announcement on a French government website, police have stopped current searches for missing adults and will not accept new search requests. 'Such 'searches in the interests of the family' were conducted under an administrative procedure almost a century old, introduced to help families separated during the upheavals of World War I to find missing relatives,' according to the French Ministry of the Interior. In a letter to police chiefs announcing the changes, the Ministry advised them to instead 'direct people towards social networks on the Internet, which offer interesting possibilities.'"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Kim Dotcom Wants Money From Google, Twitter For 2-Factor Authentication
Nyder writes "Kim Dotcom posted via Twitter, with a link to Torrentfreak, that he owns a security patent US6078908, titled 'Method for authorizing in data transmission systems.'" Techdirt points out that Dotcom isn't just asking for financial help: Instead, he's asking companies which use two-factor authentication "to help fund his defense, in exchange for not getting sued for the patent. He points out that his actual funds are still frozen by the DOJ and (more importantly) that his case actually matters a great deal to Google, Facebook and Twitter, because the eventual ruling will likely set a precedent that may impact them -- especially around the DMCA." Update: 05/23 14:23 GMT by T : Why is this relevant to Twitter? If you're not an active Twitter user, you might not realize that (after some well publicized twitter-account hijackings), the company is trying to regain some ground on security. Nerval's Lobster writes "Twitter is now offering two-factor authentication, a feature that could help prevent embarrassing security breaches. Twitter users interested in activating two-factor authentication will need to head over to their account settings page and click the checkbox beside 'Require a verification code when I sign in.'"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Microsoft and pals: Save the global economy by NOT ripping us off
World to get $73bn if it would only use licensed software - survey
Ditching dodgy software can rescue not just the UK from its financial worries, but the entire world, or so says the latest study from the Business Software Alliance.…
16:33
Verbolgen security-expert openbaart Windows 0-day
De bekende security-expert Tavis Ormandy openbaart opnieuw een 0-day gat in Windows. Omdat "Microsoft vijandig is naar externe researchers".
Nederlandse startup komt met open source Java-office
Het Nederlandse Japplis komt met een Office-pakket dat op Java is gestoeld. De open source-software is nu nog behoorlijk basaal.
Lenovo breekt records op pc-markt
Lenovo boekt nieuwe records in pc-verkopen, marktaandelen en winsten, terwijl concurrenten klap op klap krijgen op de pc-markt.
Introducing Boot to Qt
The Qt Blog introduces "Boot to Qt", which is "a light-weight UI stack for embedded linux, based on the Qt Framework - Boot to Qt is built on an Android kernel/baselayer and offers an elegant means of developing beautiful and performant embedded devices." Access is invitation-only currently; a release is forecast for sometime around the end of the year.
Thursday's security updates
Debian has updated request-tracker4 (eight CVE numbers), and the kfreebsd kernel (code execution).
Fedora has updated python-virtualenv (F17, F18: temporary file and information disclosure vulnerabilities), krb5 (F17, "UDP ping-pong vulnerability" from 2002), and nginx (F18: denial of service and information disclosure).
openSUSE has updated samba (CIFS share attribute verification failure).
Oracle has updated kernel (EL5: denial of service).
Red Hat has updated java-1.5.0-ibm (RHEL5-6: 16 "unspecified" vulnerabilities).
Andrew Dunstan: Buildfarm download location
It was just pointed out to me that the download link on the buidfarm server front page wasn't updated when I fixed the other links after switching to publishing them on the buildfarm server itself. That's been fixed now. The only valid link for downloading the client is http://www.pgbuildfarm.org/downloads/. Sorry for any confusion.
Andrew Dunstan: Developer meeting went well
There seems to be a consensus, which I share, that the annual PostgreSQL Developers Meeting went much better this year that in the previous couple of years.
One item of note: the commit fest managers are going to be much more vigilant about making sure that if you have signed up for a review you will work on it right away, and about removing reviewers who are not producing reviews. So you will be able to have much more confidence that if someone is signed up as a reviewer for a patch they will actually be doing the work.
After the meeting and the obligatory visit to the Royal Oak, a number of us went out and had a pleasant Indian meal, and then I came back to the hotel, fixed a customer problem, and wrote up some slides for my proposed lightning talk. More on this later.
Now, on to the conference proper!
One-Time Pad From Caltech Offers Uncrackable Cryptography
zrbyte writes "One-time pads are the holy grail of cryptography — they are impossible to crack, even in principle. However, the ability to copy electronic code makes one-time pads vulnerable to hackers. Now engineers at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, have found a way around this to create a system of cryptography that is invulnerable to electronic attack. Their solution is based on a special kind of one-time pad that generates a random key through the complexity of its physical structure, namely shining a light through a diffusive glass plate."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Muziekuitgevers dienen 20 miljoen takedown-verzoeken in bij Google
Amerikaanse platenmaatschappijen hebben sinds mei 2011 ruim 20 miljoen notice and takedown-verzoeken ingediend bij Google, blijkt uit het transparantierapport van dat bedrijf. Google verwijdert auteursrechtelijk beschermde content als dat moet van de auteursrechthebbende.
Nvidia introduceert de GTX 780-videokaart
Nvidia heeft donderdag zijn eerste kaart in de nieuwe 700-serie geïntroduceerd. De GTX 780 heeft een GK110-gpu aan boord, die ook in de GTX Titan gebruikt is en over 3GB gddr5-geheugen beschikt. De GTX 780 is langzamer dan de Titan, maar gaat ook minder kosten.
Titaantje: Nvidia's GTX 780
Nvidia's nieuwe GeForce GTX 780 moet met een op de Titan gebaseerde gpu de concurrentie het leven flink zuur maken. Tweakers heeft de kaart uitgebreid getest.
Kroes: Europa moet VS verslaan op chipgebied
Er moet veel geld worden gestoken in de Europese productie van chips, zodat er in Europa meer chips worden geproduceerd dan in de Verenigde Staten. Dat is het doel van Eurocommissaris Neelie Kroes van ict-zaken. Onder meer in Eindhoven wordt geïnvesteerd.
HTC: Ongeveer vijf miljoen HTC Ones verkocht sinds introductie
Volgens een hoge functionaris van HTC zijn er al ongeveer 5 miljoen stuks van de HTC One verkocht sinds de introductie van het topmodel vorige maand. Een flinke meevaller voor het bedrijf, dat de laatste tijd in zwaar weer verkeert.
'Samsung en LG voeren productie lcd-tv's op'
Samsung en LG gaan zich volgens Bloomberg meer op lcd-televisies richten. Beide bedrijven hadden ingezet op oled, maar het lukt ze nog niet om oled-tv's op een zodanig grote schaal te produceren dat de prijzen omlaag kunnen.
New Maven plugins for simpler architecture management
NoPackageCyclesEnforcerRule automatically detects cyclical dependencies between classes from different packages; Macker helps define specific dependencies between packages and automatically verifies those rules
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Apple closes QuickTime vulnerabilities on Windows
Apple has released QuickTime 7.7.4, fixing 12 critical security holes causing memory corruption and buffer overflows when processing a number of media formats
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I have an opinon!
On the question of whether the Stieg Larsson Award For Hottest Teenage Hacker Punk Who Falls In Love With The Protagonist's Self-Insert" is a fan or a pro award, I say it's clearly a pro award.
Also posted at Dreamwidth, where there are comment(s); comment here or there.
So, is it just that these are now being reported or are incidents like this more frequent?
4!
A sergeant first class and officer in charge of the “health, welfare and discipline” of cadets at the United States Military Academy at West Point has been accused of videotaping female cadets without their consent, including when the women were showering or otherwise unclothed.
Also posted at Dreamwidth, where there are comment(s); comment here or there.
So, is it just that these are now being reported or are incidents like this more frequent?
4!
A sergeant first class and officer in charge of the “health, welfare and discipline” of cadets at the United States Military Academy at West Point has been accused of videotaping female cadets without their consent, including when the women were showering or otherwise unclothed.
Also posted at Dreamwidth, where there are comment(s); comment here or there.
Politie analyseert nieuwe beelden vindplaats broertjes
De politie heeft nieuwe camerabeelden uit de omgeving van de vindplaats van de broertjes Ruben en Julian geanalyseerd, waarop mogelijk de auto van de vader te zien is.
Republikeinse actievoerder wil gesprek met koning
Hans Maessen van het Nieuw Republikeins Genootschap wil een gesprek met koning Willem-Alexander. Dat schrijft hij in een brief die aan het staatshoofd is gericht.
One-Shot vs. Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma
This post by Aleatha Parker-Wood is very applicable to the things I wrote in Liars & Outliers:
A lot of fundamental social problems can be modeled as a disconnection between people who believe (correctly or incorrectly) that they are playing a non-iterated game (in the game theory sense of the word), and people who believe that (correctly or incorrectly) that they are playing an iterated game.For instance, mechanisms such as reputation mechanisms, ostracism, shaming, etc., are all predicated on the idea that the person you're shaming will reappear and have further interactions with the group. Legal punishment is only useful if you can catch the person, and if the cost of the punishment is more than the benefit of the crime.
If it is possible to act as if the game you are playing is a one-shot game (for instance, you have a very large population to hide in, you don't need to ever interact with people again, or you can be anonymous), your optimal strategies are going to be different than if you will have to play the game many times, and live with the legal or social consequences of your actions. If you can make enough money as CEO to retire immediately, you may choose to do so, even if you're so terrible at running the company that no one will ever hire you again.
Social cohesion can be thought of as a manifestation of how "iterated" people feel their interactions are, how likely they are to interact with the same people again and again and have to deal with long term consequences of locally optimal choices, or whether they feel they can "opt out" of consequences of interacting with some set of people in a poor way.
"The Global Cyber Game"
This 127-page report was just published by the UK Defence Academy. I have not read it yet, but it looks really interesting.
Executive Summary: This report presents a systematic way of thinking about cyberpower and its use by a variety of global players. The urgency of addressing cyberpower in this way is a consequence of the very high value of the Internet and the hazards of its current militarization.Cyberpower and cyber security are conceptualized as a 'Global Game' with a novel 'Cyber Gameboard' consisting of a nine-cell grid. The horizontal direction on the grid is divided into three columns representing aspects of information (i.e. cyber): connection, computation and cognition. The vertical direction on the grid is divided into three rows representing types of power: coercion, co-option, and cooperation. The nine cells of the grid represent all the possible combinations of power and information, that is, forms of cyberpower.
The Cyber Gameboard itself is also an abstract representation of the surface of cyberspace, or C-space as defined in this report. C-space is understood as a networked medium capable of conveying various combinations of power and information to produce effects in physical or 'flow space,' referred to as F-space in this report. Game play is understood as the projection via C-space of a cyberpower capability existing in any one cell of the gameboard to produce an effect in F-space vis-a-vis another player in any other cell of the gameboard. By default, the Cyber Game is played either actively or passively by all those using network connected computers. The players include states, businesses, NGOs, individuals, non-state political groups, and organized crime, among others. Each player is seen as having a certain level of cyberpower when its capability in each cell is summed across the whole board. In general states have the most cyberpower.
The possible future path of the game is depicted by two scenarios, N-topia and N-crash. These are the stakes for which the Cyber Game is played. N-topia represents the upside potential of the game, in which the full value of a globally connected knowledge society is realized. N-crash represents the downside potential, in which militarization and fragmentation of the Internet cause its value to be substantially destroyed. Which scenario eventuates will be determined largely by the overall pattern of play of the Cyber Game.
States have a high level of responsibility for determining the outcome. The current pattern of play is beginning to resemble traditional state-on-state geopolitical conflict. This puts the civil Internet at risk, and civilian cyber players are already getting caught in the crossfire. As long as the civil Internet remains undefended and easily permeable to cyber attack it will be hard to achieve the N-topia scenario.
Defending the civil Internet in depth, and hardening it by re-architecting will allow its full social and economic value to be realized but will restrict the potential for espionage and surveillance by states. This trade-off is net positive and in accordance with the espoused values of Western-style democracies. It does however call for leadership based on enlightened self-interest by state players.
Another Chinese thing you can see from space: Lenovo's sales
'Lenovo', or 'what we call PCs now'
PC maker Lenovo appears to drawing ever closer to its goal of seizing the global box-shifting crown from giant HP.…
16:13
Meet Pidora, the New Official Fedora Remix For Raspberry Pi
An anonymous reader writes "Today Fedora and the Seneca Centre for Development of Open Technology (CDOT) announced the release of Pidora 18, an optimized Fedora remix for the Raspberry Pi. It's based on a brand new build of Fedora for the ARMv6 architecture with greater speed and includes packages from the Fedora 18 package set. It's also the launch of the Pidora name. (The older version of Fedora for the Pi was called the Fedora Raspberry Pi Remix.)"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
New York cop in alleged love-polyhedron email hack spree
Veteran plod 'blew $4k on romanta-rival logins'
A New York detective allegedly hired hackers to spy on 19 fellow cops and at least 11 others - apparently in a bid to discover if any of them were sleeping with his ex.…
15:53
Terrorist Murder In London Could Revive Snooper's Charter
judgecorp writes "Supporters of the Communications Data Bill (also known as the Snooper's Charter) have lost no time in calling for the Bill to be revived, in response to yesterday's brutal murder of a soldier on the streets of Woolwich, South London. The Bill would have allowed monitoring of all online communications — including who people contact and what websites they visit — but was shelved after Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg opposed it, effectively splitting Britain's coalition government on the issue. Now the fear of new terrorism could rekindle support, based on the argument that even 'lone wolf' attackers use the Internet."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Penguin pays $75m to settle ebook price-fixing case
Apple left to swing it out with DoJ
Penguin has agreed to hand over $75m along with costs to sort out US antitrust allegations over ebook price fixing.…
15:13
'Leccy car biz baron Elon Musk: Thanks for the $500m, taxpayers...
Tesla repays the Feds nine years early
Electric car manufacturer Tesla has paid back a government loan of half a billion dollars almost a decade earlier than expected.…
14:53
Apple cored: Samsung sells 10 million Galaxy S4 in a month
Beware of South Koreans bearing Android
Samsung's Galaxy S4 has become the South Korean firm's fastest selling smartphone after shifting some 10 million units since its launch in April.…
Virgin Media slides fat 10Gbps pipes into Murdoch's BSkyB
I wanna be your backhaul man
The business end of Virgin Media has revealed more details about a £49m deal to beef up BSkyB's broadband network.…
14:33
Why We Should Celebrate Snapchat and Encourage Ephemeral Communication
An anonymous reader writes "Within a few months of launching, Snapchat has made an enormous and lasting impact on the culture of communication on the Internet – and we should all be grateful. They have simplified a security process enough to the point that anybody can use it, while validating the market of the next generation of privacy-preserving ephemeral communication. Most importantly, we may finally get a break from the forced permanence of the Facebook and Google world, where everything you do and share is a data point to be monetized and re-sold to the highest bidder."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
First Government Lawsuit Against a Patent Troll
walterbyrd writes "Late last year, a vigorous and secretive patent troll began sending out thousands of letters to small businesses all around the country, insisting that they owed between $900 and $1,200 per worker just for using scanners. The brazen patent-trolling scheme, carried out by a company called MPHJ technologies and dozens of shell companies with six-letter names, has caught the attention of politicians. MPHJ and its principals may have gone too far. They're now the subject of a government lawsuit targeting patent trolling—the first ever such case. Vermont Attorney General William Sorrell has filed suit in his home state, saying that MPHJ is violating Vermont consumer-protection laws."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
14:13
Brit spooks bugged Edward VIII's phones, records reveal
Plus Churchill and Stalin had a massive drinkathon in Moscow
Intelligence files kept hidden for nearly 80 years have shown that the British government was bugging King Edward VIII's phones in the days leading up to his abdication.…
13:33
Kroes: Europa moet meer chips bakken dan VS
Eindhoven moet samen met Leuven een van de drie "wereldwijd toonaangevende clusters" op het gebied van halfgeleiders worden.
Android trekt Google Drive naar Google-look (foto's)
Google trekt de Drive-app voor Android gelijk met andere Google-apps. De offline-functionaliteit blijft beperkt.
Bestaand WiFi opgevoerd naar 1,7 Gbps
Een nieuwe WiFi-chipset weet met 4 antennes een snelheid van 1,7 Gbps te halen. Op een al gebruikte WiFi-standaard.
SURFnet wil aanpak botnets structureren
SURFnet gaat een beleid opstellen voor de aanpak van botnets. Daarnaast moet er een 'maatschappelijke discussie' worden opgestart hierover.
Groningen maakt alle gegevens openbaar
De gemeente Groningen gaat nagenoeg al zijn gegevens openbaar maken om plaatselijke ICT-bedrijven in staat te stellen apps te ontwikkelen.
Windows 8 gekraakt via legacy-browsertech
De recent onthulde kraak van Windows 8 dankt zijn bestaan aan oude browsertechnologie. 0-day ontdekker Vupen legt zijn exploit uit.
Heikki Linnakangas: pg_rewind, a tool for resynchronizing after failover
I’ve been hacking on a tool to allow resynchronizing an old master server after failover. Please take a look: https://github.com/vmware/pg_rewind.
Synology Disk Station Manager 3.1 build 1637
Synology heeft kortgeleden een nieuwe versie uitgebracht van Disk Station Manager, de beheersoftware die op diverse nas-producten van het bedrijf draait. Deze update is bedoeld voor de 'oudere' producten waarvan het modelnummer eindigt op een 7. Versie 4.2 van Disk Station Manager bevat nieuwe functionaliteit, maar is alleen beschikbaar voor de nieuwere nas-modellen, die vaak over een snellere processor en meer geheugen beschikken. Deze update maakt het mogelijk om een backup te maken van een nas die DSM 4.2 draait, naar een nas waarop DSM 3.1 staat.
Atari verkoopt rechten op Rollercoaster Tycoon, Test Drive en Total Annihilation
Een faillissement dreigt voor uitgever Atari en omdat het niet gelukt is een partij te vinden die het hele bedrijf op wil kopen, gaat de uitgever nu de rechten op games verkopen. Zo worden de rechten op Rollercoaster Tycoon, Test Drive en Total Annihilation geveild.
Kim Dotcom claimt patent op two-step-authentication
MegaUpload-oprichter Kim Dotcom claimt dat hij two step-authenticatie heeft uitgevonden, en heeft een patent om dat te bewijzen. In ruil voor gebruik van het patent wil hij dat bedrijven als Google, Facebook en Twitter meebetalen aan de verdediging van MegaUpload.
SABnzbd 0.7.12
Versie 0.7.12 van SABnzbd is uitgebracht. Met dit programma kunnen bestanden van usenet worden gedownload. De opensourceapplicatie is beschikbaar voor Windows, Linux en OS X. Het programma biedt de mogelijkheid om nzb-bestanden te laden, waarna de juiste files van usenet worden geplukt. Met de ingebouwde webinterface is het mogelijk om het programma via een webbrowser te bedienen. Versie 0.7.12 is een bugfix-release en moet de volgende problemen verhelpen:
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