6/27 Slashdot

Slashdot         Nailing the Cause of Recent Linux Power Issues June 27, 2011 at 5:36 PM   An anonymous reader writes "For the Linux kernel power regressions that were found a few months ago, and hit in Ubuntu 11.04, Phoronix has found the regression that's still present in the Linux 3.0 kernel. The power regression is caused by a change in ASPM, the Active-State Power Management, for PCI Express support." Read more of this story at Slashdot.         Gray Whale, Southern-Hemisphere Algae Seen In N. Atlantic June 27, 2011 at 2:46 PM   oxide7 writes "The gray whale hasn't strayed to the Northern Atlantic since the 18th century. The Neodenticula seminae, a species of algae, hasn't been there in 800,000 years. Now, members of both species have been spotted in the Northern Atlantic." Read more of this story at Slashdot.         Geohot Joins Facebook As Product Developer June 27, 2011 at 11:49 AM   Numerous sources are reporting that famed iPhone and PlayStation hacker George Hotz, better known as Geohot, has taken a job at Facebook in product development; Make Magazine and others report that he'll be working on iOS apps. Read more of this story at Slashdot.         AMD Gains In the TOP500 List June 27, 2011 at 8:56 AM   MojoKid writes "AMD recently announced its share of the TOP500 supercomputer list has grown 15 percent in the past six months. The company credits industry trends, upgrade paths, and competitive pricing for the increase. Of the 68 Opteron-based systems on the list, more than half of them use the Opteron 6100 series processors. The inflection point was marked by AMD's launch of their Magny-Cours architecture more than a year ago and includes the twelve-core Opteron 6180 SE at 2.5GHz at one end and two low-power parts at the other. Magny-Cours adoption is important. Companies typically don't upgrade HPC clusters with new CPUs, but AMD is billing their next-gen Interlagos architecture as a drop-in option for Magny-Cours. As such, it'll offer up to 2x the cores as well as equal-to or faster clock speeds." Read more of this story at Slashdot.         Is Google Playing Fair With Groupon, et al? June 27, 2011 at 7:34 AM   An anonymous reader writes with the claim (illustrated with what seems like damning screen-shot evidence) that "Google is using Gmail's priority inbox to give special treatment to its own daily deal emails over all the rest." Read more of this story at Slashdot.         Google Boots Transdroid From Android Market June 27, 2011 at 6:10 AM   fysdt writes with a TorrentFreak story that starts: "Google has pulled one of the most popular torrent download managers from the Android Market because of policy violations. Before Google booted the application, Transdroid had been available for two years and amassed 400,000 users during that time. Thus far Google hasn't specified what the exact nature of Transdoid's violations are, but it's not unlikely that they relate to copyright infringement." Read more of this story at Slashdot.         Google Boots Transdroid From Android Market June 27, 2011 at 6:10 AM   fysdt writes "Google has pulled one of the most popular torrent download managers from the Android Market because of policy violations. Before Google booted the application, Transdroid had been available for two years and amassed 400,000 users during that time. Thus far Google hasn't specified what the exact nature of Transdoid's violations are, but it's not unlikely that they relate to copyright infringement." Read more of this story at Slashdot.         Flood Berm Collapses At Nebraska Nuclear Plant June 27, 2011 at 5:01 AM   mdsolar writes "A berm holding the flooded Missouri River back from a Nebraska nuclear power station collapsed early Sunday, but federal regulators said they were monitoring the situation and there was no danger. The Fort Calhoun Nuclear Station shut down in early April for refueling, and there is no water inside the plant, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission said. Also, the river is not expected to rise higher than the level the plant was designed to handle. NRC spokesman Victor Dricks said the plant remains safe." Read more of this story at Slashdot.         Black Market Database Access To Scholarly Journals June 27, 2011 at 4:02 AM   An anonymous reader writes "University libraries offer access to a vast array of valuable materials — if you have a login and password. Now people are buying and selling university credentials online, or giving them away on warez sites. They're used by upstart companies aboard who need access to the latest industrial compounds or other valuable info on databases like SciFinder." Read more of this story at Slashdot.         Twitter As Realtime Sports Reporter June 27, 2011 at 2:51 AM   mikejuk writes that a "group of researchers at Rice University think that '[t]he global human population can be regarded as geographically distributed, multimodal sensors.' When it comes to sporting events, it seems that all you have to do is look to the Twitter frequency. The system that they created seems to work for most games. The exception to this is the Super Bowl for the reason that the sheer number of tweets about the game saturated the Twitter distribution system and so they couldn't pick out the maximum in tweet frequencies. They also have some interesting observations on how fast tweets follow an event." Sports reporting via Twitter makes me think of the stories about Ronald Reagan's broadcasting exploits creating "live" play-by-play based on telegraphed updates — and sometimes the wire went dead. I wonder whether the control-happy local franchises will do anything to prevent in-person fans creating and sharing such instant play-by-play accounts. Read more of this story at Slashdot.         If You're Working For Stock, Read the Fine Print June 27, 2011 at 1:54 AM   cratermoon writes with a story of interest to anyone interested in working at a start-up, or compensated even partly in company stock: "Former Skype guy Yee Lee finds out that for people working at companies controlled by private equity firm Silver Lake, 'vested' doesn't mean what you think it means, and gets no money from the stock options he thought he could exercise. 'Skype spokesman Brian O'Shaughnessy said, "You've got to be in it to win it. The company chose to include that clause in the contract in order to retain the best and the brightest people to build great products. This individual chose to leave, therefore he doesn't get that benefit."' Fortune also has the story." Some of the commentary on the confusing language surrounding the stock grant says the company was doing nothing out of the ordinary, but it seems that's because opaque language is the norm. Read more of this story at Slashdot.         Ask Slashdot: Stepping Sideways Into Programming? June 27, 2011 at 12:30 AM   thundertron writes "I'm a 28-year-old, non-technical, UX-focused Product Manager at a startup. Overall I'm very happy with my work, but I'm endlessly frustrated that I'm not committing code. I love the few occasions where I commit some front-end code or put together a fairly sophisticated query, but if the onus were on me to put together an entire site my hands would be tied. I've thought about going back to school (or even taking time off from my career to take courses) in CS to immerse myself in programming. The flip side is that I know I won't want to do that forever — I won't want to be employed primarily as an engineer because I like too many other aspects of the business. My best option seems to be to dive into Ruby on Rails and just pick up what I can in my spare time. Perhaps others in the Slashdot community have some suggestions/recommendations?" Read more of this story at Slashdot.         KDE 4.7 RC Is Here: GRUB2 Integration, KWin Mobile June 26, 2011 at 11:27 PM   dkd903 writes "KDE 4.7 is almost here and brings along with it a number of features and performance improvements such as a better Dolphin with a faster file search, ability of KWin to run on Mobile devices, Grub2 integration in KDM and offline search support in the KDE virtual globe, Marble." Here's KDE's own announcement of the release candidate; the final release is planned for July 27. Reader jrepin quotes the KDE announcement: "With API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the KDE team's focus is now on fixing last-minute showstopper bugs and finishing translation and documentation that comes along with the releases." Read more of this story at Slashdot.         Citi Hackers Got Away With $2.7 Million June 26, 2011 at 10:26 PM   angry tapir writes "Citigroup suffered about US$2.7 million in losses after hackers found a way to steal credit card numbers from its website and post fraudulent charges. Citi acknowledged the breach earlier this month, saying hackers had accessed more than 360,000 Citi credit card accounts of U.S. customers. The hackers didn't get into Citi's main credit card processing system, but were reportedly able to obtain the numbers, along with the customers' names and contact information, by logging into the Citi Account Online website and guessing account numbers." Read more of this story at Slashdot.         Sony Develops Technology To Hack Your Hand June 26, 2011 at 9:22 PM   An anonymous reader writes "A device created by the University of Tokyo and Sony Laboratories called PossessedHand allows researchers to control a subject's hand via electrical stimulation. While currently being used to teach students to play the koto, a Japanese traditional stringed instruments, just imagine the possibilities! Twilight Zone anyone?" Read more of this story at Slashdot.         The Intentional Flooding of America's Heartland June 26, 2011 at 8:24 PM   Hugh Pickens writes "Joe Herring writes that sixty years ago, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began the process of taming the Missouri by constructing massive dams at the top to moderate flow to the smaller dams below, generating electricity while providing desperately needed control of the river's devastating floods, but after about thirty years of operation, as the environmentalist movement gained strength throughout the seventies and eighties, the Corps received a great deal of pressure to include specific environmental concerns into their Master Water Control Manual, the 'bible' for the operation of the dam system, as preservation of habitat for at-risk bird and fish populations soon became a hot issue among the burgeoning environmental lobby. The Corps began to utilize the dam system to mimic the previous flow cycles of the original river, holding back large amounts of water upstream during the winter and early spring in order to release them rapidly as a spring pulse. 'Whether warned or not, the fact remains that had the Corps been true to its original mission of flood control, the dams would not have been full in preparation for a spring pulse,' writes Herring. 'The dams could further have easily handled the additional runoff without the need to inundate a sizable chunk of nine states.' The horrifying consequence is water rushing from the dams on the Missouri twice as fast as the highest previous releases on record while the levees that protect the cities and towns downstream were constructed to handle the flow rates promised at the time of the dam's construction." Read more of this story at Slashdot.         UK Hacker Ryan Cleary Has Asperger's Syndrome, Court Told June 26, 2011 at 5:20 PM   An anonymous reader writes "Ryan Cleary, the British teenager accused of launching DDoS attacks at the likes of the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) has been diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, a court heard [Saturday]." Read more of this story at Slashdot.         Afghans Build Open Source Internet From Trash June 26, 2011 at 2:18 PM   An anonymous reader writes "Residents of Jalalabad have built the FabFi network: an open-source system that uses common building materials and off-the-shelf electronics to transmit wireless ethernet signals across distances of up to several miles." Read more of this story at Slashdot.         Head of ChronoPay Arrested In Moscow June 26, 2011 at 11:06 AM   Trailrunner7 writes "Pavel Vrublevsky, the head of a prominent Russian payment-processing company, ChronoPay, was arrested in Russia on suspicion of hiring someone to launch a denial-of-service attack against one of his company's main competitors. The arrest is the latest in a series of high-profile actions against people and groups around the world suspected of being involved in the global cybercrime ecosystem." Read more of this story at Slashdot.         LulzSec Announces That It Is Done June 26, 2011 at 8:01 AM   MaxBooger writes "LulzSec, the notorious hacker group that's been on a rampage, just announced that it's disbanding. This follows 50 days chaos during which time it took down several websites (including CIA.gov at one point), exposed passwords, exposed documents of the Arizona penal system, and at one point threatened to hit Too Big To Fail banks. Obviously, it's possible that the group will not abide by its promise to quit. Nobody knows." Read more of this story at Slashdot.         Asteroid To Pass Near Earth On Monday June 26, 2011 at 6:56 AM   TigerNut writes "Asteroid 2011 MD was discovered on June 22 by LINEAR, and its flight path will take it within 8000 miles (12000 km) of Earth. Orbital predictions indicate that its flight path will be significantly altered by this close approach." Read more of this story at Slashdot.         Off-Duty Police Officer Steals iPad From TSA Checkpoint June 26, 2011 at 6:22 AM   SpaceCadetTrav writes "A recent arrest report shows that an off-duty police officer from Fullerton, CA was arrested on felony grand theft charges for stealing an iPad at a TSA checkpoint in the Miami International Airport. The theft was captured on video surveillance last month and the officer was tracked down just before boarding her plane." Read more of this story at Slashdot.         Is Final Cut Pro X Apple's Biggest Mistake In Years? June 26, 2011 at 5:50 AM   Hugh Pickens writes "It isn't like Apple to stumble but the latest version of Final Cut Pro, the widely used tool in the professional video editing world was getting the reputation as the app that launched a thousand complaints, as the 955 reviewers and raters on iTunes collectively rated FCP as, "Two and a half stars," with 45% are giving the software one star, the lowest rating possible, bestowing on the program the dubious honor of being the lowest rated Apple software hosted by the company's digital store. Many complaints center around lost features. We used to be able to do this, and now we can't. You can't work with existing FCP Suite projects. There's no external video monitoring, no EDL imports, no backup application disk so good luck re-installing the software on the road without a good internet connection, and lots of unanswered questions about site licensing." Read more of this story at Slashdot.         EVE Online Players Rage, Protest Over Microtransactions June 26, 2011 at 4:39 AM   Several readers have written with news of a controversy that's been slowly building in space-based MMO EVE Online. "It all began with the Incarna update, which added an item shop to the long-running sci-fi sandbox. Players began to voice their concerns over the bizarrely high prices of items in the shop, with one particular item reaching an insane $68 US. Before this hullabaloo had the chance to so much as come to a simmer, an internal newsletter from CCP was leaked to the internet. The document outlined the introduction of microtransactions into EVE and mentioned that at some point, ships, ammunition, and so forth may be available for purchase with real-world currency. This naturally sent players into even more of a frenzy." Reader Ogre332 points out additional coverage, but notes that many publications are missing the punchline: "Players are angry that CCP has blatantly lied about their intentions and have responded to these customers concerns by basically telling us they know what we want better than we do. The purported e-mail from CCP CEO Hilmar Pétursson was like gas on a fire, and a response to some concerns in the form of a dev blog was not well received at all. Players are protesting, and many claim to be canceling their accounts left and right." Read more of this story at Slashdot.         Could Wikipedia Become a Supercomputer? June 26, 2011 at 3:37 AM   An anonymous reader writes "Large websites represent an enormous resource of untapped computational power. This short post explains how a large website like Wikipedia could give a tremendous contribution to science, by harnessing the computational power of its readers' CPUs and help solve difficult computational problems." It's an interesting thought experiment, at least — if such a system were practical to implement, what kind of problems would you want it chugging away at? Read more of this story at Slashdot.         Proposing a Model For Locally Imposed Net Neutrality June 26, 2011 at 2:40 AM   newscloud writes "Envision Seattle has posted a model legal ordinance (pdf) for communities wishing to enshrine status quo net neutrality as law. The ordinance is co-authored by the legal group that helped Pittsburgh's city council ban fracking and corporate personhood last November. The concept of local municipalities defying FCC authority is troubling to some but the group counters that FCC authority actually violates certain rights that we hold as people, and the right to govern our own communities as an element of the right to community and local self-government. If we have a 'right to internet access' or a 'right to communicate' via these pathways, there are certain actions that can be taken by government which infringe on those rights. In our view, it's up to us to create these rights frameworks, and then enforce them at higher levels." Read more of this story at Slashdot.         Long Now Clock Advances With Bezos Cash June 26, 2011 at 1:35 AM   heptapod writes "Wired has an in-depth article about the 10,000 Year Clock and The Long Now Foundation which has begun moving forward with Jeff Bezos's investment of $42 million. Recently he put up a website with more information." My favorite-yet article about the 10,000 Year Clock appeared on Kevin Kelly's site earlier this month. (Kelly always seems to be involved in interesting projects, and is one of the movers behind this one.) Read more of this story at Slashdot.         Two More Google Software Dogs Go To Heaven June 26, 2011 at 12:34 AM   theodp writes "Two more software products will be going to Google Software Heaven shortly. On Friday, Google issued a death certificate for Google Health (date of death = Jan. 1, 2012), and added that the lights will go out on Google PowerMeter on Sep. 16, 2011. 'We've observed that Google Health is not having the broad impact that we hoped it would,' said Google. 'There has been adoption among certain groups of users like tech-savvy patients and their caregivers, and more recently fitness and wellness enthusiasts. But we haven't found a way to translate that limited usage into widespread adoption in the daily health routines of millions of people.' Regarding PowerMeter, Google's 'Green Energy Czar' had this to say: 'We're pleased that PowerMeter has helped demonstrate the importance of this access and created something of a model. However, our efforts have not scaled as quickly as we would like, so we are retiring the service.' Google added that the White House will carry on the fight after being inspired by success stories like the Harker School (tuition: $36,435), which used grant money to acquire off-the-shelf sub-metering technology that revealed their energy bill could be reduced by not air conditioning the gym from 9pm-3am." Read more of this story at Slashdot.         Record-Seeking Bloodhound SSC Goes Partially Open Source June 25, 2011 at 11:33 PM   jd writes "I've been monitoring the progress of Bloodhound SSC (the car aiming for the 1,000 MPH record) and it looks like they're opting for some interesting tactics. In April, the car itself went partially open source, with a complete set of schematics and specifications and an invite for engineering bugfixes. According to them, it's the first time a racing team has done this. Sounds likely enough. The latest patches to be released were a tripling in fin size and a switch to steel brakes because carbon fibre would explode." Read more of this story at Slashdot.         New Process Allows Fuel Cells To Run On Coal June 25, 2011 at 10:58 PM   Zothecula writes "Lately we're hearing a lot about the green energy potential of fuel cells, particularly hydrogen fuel cells. Unfortunately, although various methods of hydrogen production are being developed, it still isn't as inexpensive or easily obtainable as fossil fuels such as coal. Scientists from the Georgia Institute of Technology, however, have recently taken a step towards combining the eco-friendliness of fuel cell technology with the practicality of fossil fuels — they've created a fuel cell that runs on coal gas." Read more of this story at Slashdot.         Ask Slashdot: CS Degree Without Gen-Ed Requirements? June 25, 2011 at 10:32 PM   davidjbeveridge writes "I'm interested in getting a CS degree. I've been programming since I was 13, and like many of us, taught myself. I am familiar with a number of languages, understand procedural, functional, and object-oriented paradigms; I'm familiar with common design patterns and am a decent engineer. I learn quickly. I work 2 jobs and I have a life. I want to get a CS degree from an accredited school (a BS, that is), but I have no interest in wasting any of my precious time taking classes in English, Philosophy, History, Art and the like. While these fields are useful and perhaps enriching, they will not contribute to making me better at my job. Moreover, I attended an excellent high school that covered these fields of study in great detail, and I feel no need or desire to spend more time studying these things. I want a BS in Computer Science with no general education requirements. Any suggestions?" Read more of this story at Slashdot.         Winklevoss Twins To Continue Fighting Facebook June 25, 2011 at 9:30 PM   An anonymous reader writes "Facebook's longest legal saga, which has lasted seven years so far, looked like it was finally closed, but that was just a false alarm. In a filing earlier this week with the federal court in San Francisco, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's former Harvard classmates Cameron Winklevoss and Tyler Winklevoss, who accuse him of stealing their idea for the social network, decided not to seek US Supreme Court review of the $65 million settlement made in 2008. Everyone thought this meant they had finally given up. It turns out that the twins have decided to keep fighting after all, just with a different lawsuit." Read more of this story at Slashdot.         Moon Dust Back In NASA's Hands June 25, 2011 at 8:58 PM   gabbo529 writes with this excerpt: "It's only a speck but some moon dust from the original Apollo 11 mission is back in NASA's hands. The speck of moon dust was only one-eighth of an inch (3 millimeters) wide and was attached to a transparent piece of tape. To an auction house in St. Louis it was worth between $1,000 and $1,500. However, NASA got wind of the dust and was able to get it back." Read more of this story at Slashdot.         Conficker Blamed In $72M Scareware Ring June 25, 2011 at 8:28 PM   tsu doh nimh writes with an update on the previously mentioned crackdown on scammers peddling fake antivirus products, who were apparently taking advantage of the worm that just won't go away: "Police in Ukraine said the thieves fleeced unsuspecting consumers with the help of the infamous Conficker worm, although it remains unclear how big a role the fast-spreading worm played in this crime. Interestingly, the picture showing the stack of PCs confiscated by Ukrainian authorities (SBU) in this raid is identical to the one shown in an SBU press release last fall, when the SBU detained five individuals connected to high-profile ZeuS Trojan attacks." Read more of this story at Slashdot.         WIPO Talks May Portend Sweeping Broacast-Based Copyright June 25, 2011 at 7:31 PM   An anonymous reader writes "It seems the nasty 'Broadcast Treaty' is rearing its head again in the WIPO talks. This would give a new copyright to what is uncopyrighted or out of copyright material to anyone who broadcasts the material. It essentially re-ups the copyright — not to the original copyrights holder, but to the broadcaster, without any contract to the original holder." Read more of this story at Slashdot.             This email was sent to wellimauludani@gmail.com. Delivered by Feed My Inbox PO Box 682532 Franklin, TN 37068 Create Account Unsubscribe Here