Dmitri Baughman writes "I'm the IT guy at a small software development company of about 100 employees. Everyone is technically inclined, with disciplines in development, QA, and PM areas. As part of a monthly knowledge-sharing meeting, I've been asked to give a 30-minute presentation about our computing and networking infrastructure. I manage a pretty typical environment, so I'm not sure how to present the information in a fun and engaging way. I think network diagrams and bandwidth usage charts would make anyone's eyes glaze over! Any ideas for holding everyone's interest?"
gzipped_tar writes "Whether the fundamental constants really stay the same is always a question worth asking. In particular, the constancy of Planck's Constant is something that cannot be simply ignored, owing to its universal importance in linking the quantum and classical pictures of our world. Using publicly available GPS data and terrestrial clocks, researchers form the California State University were able to verify that the value of h indeed stays the same across different positions in the vicinity of our Earth. Their result says the local position invariance of h is satisfied within a limit of 0.007. The paper is published in the journal Physical Review Letters (abstract), and a free-to-read preprint is available on arXiv. In short: by the well-known formula E = h * f, a hypothetical variation on h induces changes in f, the transition frequency that keeps the time in atomic clocks, both on earth and aboard the satellites. When taking account of other time variations, such as general relativistic time dilation, and assuming the invariance of E (atomic transition energy) on physical grounds, we can figure out an upper bound on the variation of h reflected in the measured variation in f."
troyhunt writes "While we've long known that China takes a fairly aggressive stance on internet censorship, I thought a visit to Shanghai this week would pose a good opportunity to look at just how impactful this was to software developers behind the Great Firewall of China. It turns out that the access control policies make life very difficult at all sorts of levels when accessing simple technology resources we use every day from other countries. But I also found an amazing level of inconsistency with sites and services intended to be off limits being accessible via other means. It's an interesting insight into how our developer peers can and can't work in the country with the world's largest internet population."
An anonymous reader writes "Antivirus maker Avast is suspending its relationship with iYogi, a company it has relied upon for the past two years to provide live customer support for its products. The move comes just one day after an investigation into iYogi showed the company was using the relationship to push expensive and unnecessary support contracts onto Avast users. In a blog post, Avast's CEO wrote, 'We had initial reports of this behavior a few weeks ago and met with iYogi's senior executives to ensure the behavior was being corrected. Thus, we were shocked to find out about Mr. Krebs' experience. As a consequence, we have removed the iYogi support service from our website and shortly it will be removed from our products.'"
bednarz writes "The Smithsonian's 'Art of Video Games' exhibition opens today. To kick it off, they're holding a three-day festival with panel discussions, live action gaming, and crafting activities. 'Video games allow us as human beings to explore our dreams, our fears, our thoughts, our morals, and engage with each other in a way that no other medium allows us to. I find that inspiring and beautiful, and I am so happy to be alive during this time. We are going to experience, I think, one of the greatest surges of artistic intent in human history, and I believe that the majority of it will come through video games,' said Chris Melissinos, former Sun exec and guest curator of the new exhibition."
snydeq writes "Python creator Guido van Rossum discusses the prospects and criticisms of Python, noting that critics of Python performance should supplement with C/C++ rather than re-engineering Python apps into a faster language. 'At some point, you end up with one little piece of your system, as a whole, where you end up spending all your time. If you write that just as a sort of simple-minded Python loop, at some point you will see that that is the bottleneck in your system. It is usually much more effective to take that one piece and replace that one function or module with a little bit of code you wrote in C or C++ rather than rewriting your entire system in a faster language, because for most of what you're doing, the speed of the language is irrelevant.'"
longacre writes "One dull morning last week, two teams of NASA technicians simultaneously gathered at two iconic buildings — the 525-foot Vehicle Assembly Building and the shorter, but equally important Orbital Processing Facility 1 at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, tasked with moving a space shuttle orbiter from one building to the other. The 'shuttle shuffle' would have Space Shuttle Discovery (the oldest and most flown orbiter surviving in the three-ship fleet) in OPF-1 swapping places with her sister ship, Atlantis, the second oldest and second most flown orbiter. Fleet leader Discovery would emerge from OPF-1 as a preserved spacecraft, gutted and mummified for museum display."
New submitter Hartree writes "This American Life aired an episode in January about visiting Foxconn's factory in Shenzhen China that supplies Apple with iPhones and iPads. It was the most downloaded of all of its episodes. That show helped prompt Apple to release, for the first time, a list of its suppliers and allow outside audits of working conditions at its suppliers. This American Life has now retracted the episode after finding out that Mike Daisey, whose visit to the factory the show was based on, fabricated portions of the story. This included a number of minor items, but also major ones such as his saying that he personally met underage workers and those poisoned by hexane exposure. To set the record straight, this weekend's episode of This American Life will present how they were mislead into airing a flawed story (PDF)."
ananyo writes "Neutrinos obey nature's speed limit, according to new results from an Italian experiment. The finding, posted to the preprint server arXiv.org, contradicts a rival claim from the OPERA experiment that neutrinos could travel faster than the speed of light. ICARUS, located just a few meters from OPERA, clocked neutrinos traveling at the speed of light, and no faster, after monitoring a beam of neutrinos sent from CERN in late October and early November of last year. The neutrinos were packed into pulses just four nanoseconds long. That meant the timing could be measured far more accurately than the original OPERA measurement, which used ten microsecond pulses. The new findings are yet another blow to OPERA's results. Researchers there had announced possible timing problems with their original measurements. For many, this will pretty much be case closed."
New submitter AstroPhilosopher writes "The National Security Agency is building a complex to monitor and store 'all' communications in a million-square-foot facility. One of its secret roles? Code-breaking your private, personal information. Everybody's a target. Quoting Wired: 'Breaking into those complex mathematical shells like the AES is one of the key reasons for the construction going on in Bluffdale. That kind of cryptanalysis requires two major ingredients: super-fast computers to conduct brute-force attacks on encrypted messages and a massive number of those messages for the computers to analyze. The more messages from a given target, the more likely it is for the computers to detect telltale patterns, and Bluffdale will be able to hold a great many messages. "We questioned it one time," says another source, a senior intelligence manager who was also involved with the planning. "Why were we building this NSA facility? And, boy, they rolled out all the old guys—the crypto guys." According to the official, these experts told then-director of national intelligence Dennis Blair, "You’ve got to build this thing because we just don’t have the capability of doing the code-breaking." It was a candid admission.'"
An anonymous reader writes "Last month we discussed news of a controversial method Google was using to bypass Safari's privacy settings in order to enable certain features for users who were logged in to Google. Now, U.S. regulators are investigating Google's actions to see whether the search giant has violated the privacy protection agreement they signed last year that includes a clause prohibiting Google from misrepresenting how users control the collection of their data. 'The fine for violating the agreement is $16,000 per violation, per day. Because millions of people were affected, any fine could add up quickly, depending on how it is calculated. ... A group of state attorneys general, including New York's Eric Schneiderman and Connecticut's George Jepsen, are also investigating Google's circumvention of Safari's privacy settings, according to people familiar with the investigation. State attorneys general can have the ability to levy fines of up to $5,000 per violation.' European regulators are adding the Safari investigation to their review of Google's consolidated privacy policy."
New submitter greatgreygreengreasy writes "According to NPR, 'Lawmakers in New York approved a bill that will make the state the first to require DNA samples from almost all convicted criminals. Most states, including New York, already collect DNA samples from felons, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. What's remarkable about the New York bill is that it would expand the state's database to include DNA from people convicted of almost any crime, even misdemeanors as minor as jumping over a subway turnstile.' Gattaca seems closer than we may have thought. Richard Aborn, one of the bill's backers, said, 'We know from lots of studies and lots of data now that violent criminals very often begin their careers as nonviolent criminals. And the earlier you can get a nonviolent criminal's DNA in the data bank, the higher your chances are of apprehending the right person.'"
mask.of.sanity writes "A working proof of concept has been developed for a dangerous vulnerability in Microsoft's Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP). The hole stands out because many organizations use RDP to work from home or access cloud computing services. Only days after a patch was released, a bounty was offered for devising an exploit, and later a working proof of concept emerged. Chinese researchers were the first to reveal it, and security professionals have found it causes a blue screen of death in Microsoft Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 machines. Many organizations won't apply the patch and many suspect researchers are only days away from weaponizing the code."
Cisco is in negotiations to create a new type of network switch that would tap into the movement towards "software-defined networking," according to a report citing people with knowledge of the talks. On Friday, the reported that three of Cisco's top engineers are exploring a switch designed specifically for data centers that use software-defined networking, which involves moving many traditional networking tasks off of expensive hardware and into software.
A variety of new and up-and-coming music apps attempt to win over users at the South by Southwest festival each year in Austin, Texas. Here are the offerings from 2012.
China has developed a missile that would turn an aircraft carrier into a two-billion-dollar hulk of twisted metal, flame, and dead sailors. Publicly, the U.S. Navy downplays its importance. Privately, the sailors are working out several different options to kill it before it kills them.
PayPal is basically just porting its utilitarian model for online payments into meatspace. With Register and Card Case, Square strikes me as having rethought shopping for both customer and merchant in a much more fundamental way.
Aircraft carrier crews already use a set of hand gestures and body positions to guide pilots around the deck. With an increase in unmanned planes, MIT researchers are setting out to do the same with the autonomous robots.
The Pentagon's looking to send way more satellites beyond the skies. To do it, though, it's starting on the highway -- by using race car parts to make spacecraft-construction quicker and cheaper than it is today.
Downhill ice skating is just as dangerous, and weird, as it sounds, so of course Canada loves it.
Acclaimed Public Radio International program is retracting an entire episode about working conditions inside Foxconn, the Chinese manufacturer that builds much of Apple's most popular hardware, after learning the reporter "partially fabricated" information about his visit to the factories.
MeLLmo -- one of the first software developers to embrace the iPhone and the iPad as business devices -- has released new versions of its Roambi applications for the new iPad and its Retina display. On Friday -- the day the new iPad went on sale -- MeLLmo unveiled new versions of its Roambi Analytics and Roambi Flow applications, two tools that give corporate types instant access to information stored in business tools such as SAP Crystal Reports and Salesforce.com.
Vander Caballero, designer of the upcoming PlayStation 3 puzzle adventure game , which will be available via the PlayStation Network game download service later this year.
We now have yet another indication that neutrinos cannot travel faster than the speed of light after all, provided by a neighbor of the OPERA detector that set off the fuss in the first place.
Hannibal Gadhafi?son of the assassinated Libyan dictator?built a ship with a 120-ton sea water aquarium inside. Why? To put six sharks inside, including two bull sharks and two whites, the most dangerous in the world.
The personal cloud isn't just a remote hard disk. The things you put there can participate in an open ecosystem of data services, writes Jon Udell.
The U.S. Navy already has more seapower off Iran's shores than most of the world's navies combined. And it's not enough. Joining the two aircraft carrier strike groups are new minesweepers, helicopters, tricked-out patrol boats with Gatling guns and missiles, infrared night vision -- and maybe even more carriers. Get ready for the new surge. And hope Iran doesn't freak out.
IT consumerization and the cloud will actually elevate the importance of IT within a company, as both a service and a strategic focus, writes Peter Kretzman.
The third iteration of the iPad went on sale Friday morning in the U.S., greeted by the usual throngs of early adopters. Yet this time it also attracted protesters who have been campaigning for Apple to improve working conditions for the people who actually assemble the company's iconic mobile devices.
The new photo book documents the artist's five-day mission to embellish 270 square feet of hotel wall space with illustrations, an art stunt that paved the way for her oh-so-current project . Enter to win a copy.
Planet-hunting with a zeppelin? The massive, easily manueverable will tow NASA's first starshade into the skies.
Scoot Network wants to be the ZipCar of electric scooters in San Francisco.
Preston Gannaway?s ongoing project, , documents the many sides of her ailing, seaside neighborhood of Ocean View in Norfolk, Virginia. Its unique location and history have created a vivid mix of luxury, crime, blue-collar struggles and Americana.
Mariner 10, the first spacecraft to visit two planets, completes its third and final fly-by of Mercury.
Now that you've got your brand new iPad in hand, here are the 10 apps you should download first to best take advantage of that gorgeous high-resolution display.
succeeds as a wickedly fun adventure comedy.
Google's daily brainteaser helps hone your search skills.
From bats and blood to bushmeat and booze, Superbug author and blogger Maryn McKenna is on the ground at the International Conference on Emerging Infectious Diseases reporting on the latest infectious-disease studies.
If you're a Yahoo employee and you flee the embattled company for business social networking outfit Yammer within the next 60 days, you'll get a $25,000 signing bonus.
No one ever dies in sci-fi. It's the comeback that matters.By that reincarnate metric, Darth Maul's animated resuscitation in cinema neutralized his menace all too early, and sadly its recent 3-D reboot could not change that.
The National Security Agency's immensely secret project in the Utah desert will intercept, analyze, and store yottabytes of the world's communications—including yours.