Will Fotofunktionen von Google+ aufpeppen.
Gogi Gupta über Musik-Marketing.
"The French Job" erneut ausgezeichnet.
2 Millionen Vorbestellungen für das neue Smartphone.
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from the Christian Science Monitor: "'Russia has just declassified news that will shake world gem markets to their core: the discovery of a vast new diamond field containing 'trillions of carats,' enough to supply global markets for another 3,000 years. The Soviets discovered the bonanza back in the 1970s beneath a 35-million-year-old, 62-mile diameter asteroid crater in eastern Siberia known as Popigai Astroblem. They decided to keep it secret, and not to exploit it, apparently because the USSR's huge diamond operations at Mirny, in Yakutia, were already producing immense profits in what was then a tightly controlled world market."
An anonymous reader writes "Presenting at the IEEE High Performance Extreme Computing conference, a researcher from the University of Tennessee presented evidence that the iPad 2 is as fast as the original Cray-2 supercomputer. Performance improvements were made to the iPad 2 LINPACK software by writing Python for generating and testing various Assembly routines. The researcher also found that the ARM Cortex-A9 easily beats the NVIDIA/AMD GPUs and latest Intel/AMD workstation CPUs in performance-per-Watt efficiency."
1sockchuck writes "Data centers operators often tout their diesel backup generators as a symbol of their reliability. So why does Microsoft want to get rid of them? Microsoft says diesel generators are 'inefficient and costly' and is looking at alternatives to supply emergency backup power for its server farms, including fuel cells powered by natural gas. One possible option is the 'Bloom box,' which both Apple and eBay are using in their data centers (albeit with biogas as the primary fuel). Bloom is positioning its fuel cells as a way to forego expensive UPS units and generators, using the Bloom box for primary power and the utility grid for backup. It's a pitch that benefits from the current low price of natural gas." (Microsoft would like to stop using so much water, too.)
Amiga Trombone writes "Christopher Stringer is one of the world's foremost paleoanthropologists. He is a founder and most powerful advocate of the leading theory concerning our evolution: Recent African Origin or 'Out of Africa.' He now calls the theory into question: 'I'm thinking a lot about species concepts as applied to humans, about the "Out of Africa" model, and also looking back into Africa itself. I think the idea that modern humans originated in Africa is still a sound concept. Behaviorally and physically, we began our story there, but I've come around to thinking that it wasn't a simple origin. Twenty years ago, I would have argued that our species evolved in one place, maybe in East Africa or South Africa. There was a period of time in just one place where a small population of humans became modern, physically and behaviourally. Isolated and perhaps stressed by climate change, this drove a rapid and punctuational origin for our species. Now I don't think it was that simple, either within or outside of Africa.'"
jammag writes "Who better for a developer to love than another developer? Yet as a veteran coder describes, it's not always a good idea for a programmer to fall for another programmer. He describes his experience observing — and getting partially pulled into — a romance within a development team. Part of the problem, perhaps, is that some developers spend so much time buried in code that, well, they quickly find themselves out of their league. Then again, why not love among the code?"
BButlerNWW writes "VMware is in OpenStack now, but not everyone thinks that's such a good idea. One member of the newly created OpenStack Board of Directors says allowing VMware into the open source cloud project was a 'huge mistake' that could damage the project's market perception. Boris Renski is co-founder of OpenStack integration consultancy Mirantis and he says every enterprise he's worked with so far has been interested in OpenStack because they view it as an alternative to VMware. The board's vote earlier this month has now muddled the differences, he says. 'If OpenStack isn't an alternative to VMware, then what the hell is it?' Renski says."
First time accepted submitter nerdyalien writes "In the academic world, it's publish or perish; getting papers accepted by the right journals can make or break a researcher's career. But beyond a cushy tenured position, it's difficult to measure success. In 2005, physicist Jorge Hurst suggested the h-index, a quantitative way to measure the success of scientists via their publication record. This score takes into account both the number and the quality of papers a researcher has published, with quality measured as the number of times each paper has been cited in peer-reviewed journals. H-indices are commonly considered in tenure decisions, making this measure an important one, especially for scientists early in their career. However, this index only measures the success a researcher achieved so far; it doesn't predict their future career trajectory. Some scientists stall out after a few big papers; others become breakthrough stars after a slow start. So how we estimate what a scientist's career will look like several years down the road? A recent article in Nature suggests that we can predict scientific success, but that we need to take into account several attributes of the researcher (such as the breadth of their research)."
SkinnyGuy writes "Roomba, the world’s first multi-million unit-selling home-helper robot, turns 10 today. iRobot has cooked up a self-congratulatory infographic filled with a collection of interesting and occasionally bizarre facts to mark the occasion. Did you know that dogs, cats and babies have ridden iRobot's iconic home cleaning robot since it was introduced exactly a decade ago?"
Lucas123 writes "The price of 2.5-in solid state drives have dropped by 3X in three years, making many of the most popular models less than $1 per gigabyte or about 74 cents per gig. Hybrid drives, which include a small amount of NAND flash cache alongside spinning disk, in contrast have reached near price parity with hard drives that hover around the .23 cents per gig. While HDDs cannot compare to SSDs in terms of IOPS generated when used in a storage array or server, it's debatable whether they offer performance increases in a laptop significant enough that justify paying three times as much compared with a high-end a hard drive or a hybrid drive. For example, an Intel 520 Series SSD has a max sequential read speed of 456MB/sec compared to a WD Black's 122MB/sec. The SSD boots up in 9 seconds compared to the HDD's 21 seconds and the hybrid drive's 12-second time. So the question becomes, should you pay three times as much for an SSD for twice the performance, or almost the same speeds when compared to a hybrid drive?"
cylonlover writes "In mankind's attempts to gain some understanding of this marvelous place in which we live, we have slowly come to accept some principles to help guide our search. One such principle is that the Universe, on a large enough scale, is homogeneous, meaning that one part looks pretty much like another. Recent studies by a group of Australian researchers have established that, on sizes greater than about 250 million light years (Mly), the Universe is indeed statistically homogeneous, thereby reinforcing this cosmological principle."
First time accepted submitter darkstar019 writes "India is planning to build a computer that is going to be at least 61 times faster than the current fastest super computer, IBM Sequoia. Right now the most powerful supercomputer in India is 58th in the list of top 100 supercomputers. From the article: 'Telecom and IT Minister Kapil Sibal is understood to have written to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh sharing the roadmap to develop "petaflop and exaflop range of supercomputers" at an estimated cost of Rs 4,700 crore over 5 years.'"
An anonymous reader writes "Pictures of a new Chinese stealth fighter prototype started showing up recently on the web. The airplane prototype was photographed at a Shenyang aircraft facility and seems to be a twin-engined lightweight fighter in the F-35 class. US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta is scheduled to visit China this week in the midst of tension regarding territorial disputes in the region."
Nerval's Lobster writes "Freshly minted Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is promising the company's U.S. employees a new smartphone of their choice. There's just one catch: it can't be a BlackBerry. According to Business Insider, which posted significant portions of Mayer's memo, employees will have a choice of the Samsung Galaxy S3, HTC One X, HTC EVO 4G LTE, Nokia Lumia 920, or the upcoming iPhone 5. 'We'd like our employees to have devices similar to our users, so we can think and work as the majority of our users do,' she wrote, adding that Yahoo will shift away from BlackBerry as its corporate device of choice. Somewhere up in Waterloo, at least one Research In Motion executive could be screaming in frustration over this development. Not because Yahoo is a bellwether for corporate smartphone use; its U.S. employees shifting to an iOS, Windows Phone or Android device won't automatically drive other major companies will follow suit. But as a symbol of RIM's current issues, it's difficult to find a better one than a high-profile technology company dumping its collective BlackBerry stock in favor of pretty much any other platform."
mask.of.sanity writes "A security researcher has demonstrated a series of attacks that are capable of disabling touch tone and voice activated phone systems, forcing them to disclose sensitive information. The commands can be keyed in using touchtones or even using the human voice. In one test, a phone system run by an unnamed Indian bank had dumped customer PINs. In another, a buffer overflow was triggered against a back-end database. Other attacks can be used to crash phone systems outright."