Slashdot Mirror

mikejuk writes "A new paper from Microsoft Research (PDF) suggests a radical but slightly mad scheme for dealing with some of the more basic problems of the data center. Rather than build server farms that produce a lot of waste heat, why not have distributed Data Furnaces, that heat home and offices at the same time as providing cloud computing? This is a serious suggestion and they provide facts and figures to make it all seem viable. So when it gets cold all you have to do is turn up the number crunching ..."

An anonymous reader writes "Firefox product manager Asa Dotzler determined that figuring out the 64-bit confusion surrounding Firefox it will be 'near the top' of his to-do list this summer and fall. One could conclude that Mozilla has no idea at this point what people are expecting from a 64-bit version of Firefox, so Dotzler is asking for some feedback. More speed? More security? What about plug-in availability? All of the above, please."

A new app from CBS interactive can help you figure out the trouble with tribbles once and for all. Star Trek PADD for iPad includes all the official data on ships, aliens, technologies, an episode guide, and uses a Starfleet-like interface. Live long and prosper.

An anonymous reader writes "Wild Facebook parties tend to occur when a Facebook Event invitation to a typical small gathering is mistakenly posted publicly, and then goes viral. This results in injuries and arrests as hundreds or even thousands show up for a party meant for a handful of people. A recent wave of these out-of-control Facebook parties has left German officials and politicians trying to figure how to deal with the trend."

Honken writes with a report from The Guardian that "'One of the world's most prominent scientific figures to be sceptical about climate change has admitted to being paid more than $1m in the past decade by major US oil and coal companies.' This somewhat contradicts that [Harvard researcher Willie] Soon in a 2003 US senate hearing said that he had 'not knowingly been hired by, nor employed by, nor received grants from any organisation that had taken advocacy positions with respect to the Kyoto protocol or the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.'"

jfruhlinger writes "Mobile app developers who build for multiple platforms need to figure out how to conserve their resources somehow, and many are choosing to do so by not bothering to build apps for BlackBerry phones. It's a combination of declining market share and the general difficulty of building apps for the BlackBerry platform, one developer told Bloomberg: 'RIM brought in a touchscreen and mixed it with a thumbwheel, a keyboard and shortcut keys, it made it really difficult and expensive to develop across devices.'"

An anonymous reader writes "There's been a lot of talk recently about $0.99 Kindle eBooks, after publishers were accused of spamming the market with low-quality titles. Author Keir Thomas published two $0.99 computing books in March and has some figures for those who might want to have a go, as part of his Adventures in Publishing series of blog postings. Thomas says he loves the democratic nature of the Kindle Direct Publishing system, and points out one of his self-published books tops Amazon's Linux charts, besting titles by all the major publishers."

Hugh Pickens writes "Blake Snow writes that evidence suggests that a small but increasing number of users — at least in North America, where Facebook use is especially saturated — may be shunning the site with Facebook losing nearly 6 million users, falling from 155.2 million at the start of May to 149.4 million at the end of the month, the first time the US has lost users in the past year. Some users complain they're spending so much time on Facebook that they're short-changing the rest of their lives. 'I figured out that I wouldn't look back as an old man and wish I had spent more time on Facebook,' says David Cole, an IT manager from Boston, adding that he believes the popular social-networking site is a useful tool, but not a replacement for what he calls 'realbook' experiences. Kip Krieger, a college student from Virginia, says Facebook has become predictable. 'It's really gotten to a point where I know pretty much what my friends are going to post. They usually just write the same thing over and over again, and I am getting sick of that.' Still there are a lot more satisfied customers of Facebook than disgruntled ones, so are Facebook shunners a tiny minority or part of a growing trend? 'Having that connection with others is a very powerful thing,' says Toby Bushman who felt so much pressure that she decided to rejoin Facebook, and is glad she did. 'It makes me feel like I'm a part of something bigger and more grand than just my life as a stay-at-home mother.'"

Orome1 writes "The problem of poor passwords is not confined to computer use, and that fact was illustrated by an app developer who has added code to capture user passcodes to one of its applications. 'Because Big Brother's [the app in question] passcode setup screen and lock screen are nearly identical to those of the actual iPhone passcode lock, I figured that the collected information would closely correlate with actual iPhone passcodes,' says Daniel Amitay. It turns out that of the 204,508 recorded passcodes, 15% were one of the most common ten."

An anonymous reader writes "The Canadian IP Council, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce's IP lobby arm, has been caught floating false claims about the scope of counterfeiting in Canada. Recent claims include citing a figure based on numbers the FBI rejects ($22.5 billion), a figure the Canadian police won't support ($30 billion), and when pressed on the issue, it now points to yet another source that upon review indicates it fabricated its claims."

Zothecula writes "Adventurous motorcyclists might be familiar with the thrill of getting airborne at the top of a rise, but the Hoverbike is set to take catching some air to a whole new level. With a 1170 cc 4-stroke engine delivering 80 kW driving two ducted propellers, the inventor of the Hoverbike, Chris Malloy, says with its high thrust to weight ratio, the Hoverbike should be able to reach an estimated height of more than 10,000 feet and reach an indicated airspeed of 150 knots (278 km/h or 173 mph). At the moment these are only theoretical figures as the Hoverbike hasn't been put through its paces yet, but Malloy has constructed a prototype Hoverbike and plans to conduct real world flight tests in a couple of months."

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft researchers have rubbished figures from cybercrime surveys, deeming them subject to the types of distortions that have long bedeviled sex surveys. All it takes is a few self-styled Don Juans to hopelessly distort the sex-survey figures. Similarly, cybercrime surveys tend to get dominated by a minority of responses, normally those who have or think they have lost a great deal as a result of hacking or malware attack, and are vocal about it. 'Cybercrime surveys are so compromised and biased that no faith whatever can be placed in their findings,' the researchers write."

necro81 writes "It has long been recognized that adding capacitors in parallel with batteries can improve the performance of hybrid and electric vehicles by accepting and supplying spikes of power, which reduces stress on the battery pack, extending range and improving cycle life. The challenge has been figuring out where to put them, when batteries already compete for space. A new research prototype from Imperial College London has integrated them into the body panels and structural frame of the vehicle itself. In their prototype, carbon fiber serves as both the structure for the vehicle and electrode for the energy storage sandwiched within."

crutchy writes "When I was setting up my secure website I got really paranoid about SSL encryption, so I created a certificate using OpenSSL for SHA-512 encryption. I don't know much about SHA (except bits that I can remember from Wikipedia), but I figure that if you're going to go to the trouble (or expense) of setting up SSL, you may as well go for the best you can get, right? Also, what would be the minimum level of encryption required for, say, online banking? I've read about how SHA-1 was 'broken', but from what I can tell it still takes many hours. What is the practical risk to the real internet from this capability? Would a sort of rolling key be a possible next step, where each SSL-encrypted stream has its own private/public key pair generated on the fly, and things like passwords and bank account numbers were broken up and sent in multiple streams with different private/public key pairs? This would of course require more server grunt to generate these keys (or we could take a leaf from Google's book and just have separate server clusters designed solely for that job), but then if computing performance was a limiting factor, the threat to security of these hashes wouldn't be a problem in the first place." (Continued below.) "I guess with all security infrastructure, trust becomes a more important factor than technical abilities. Can I trust that my SSL provider hasn't been hacked (or at least snooped)? How do I know some disgruntled IT admin hasn't sold the private key of his company's root CA to the same organization that developed the conficker virus? It would certainly make for a more profitable payload. I've read some of Bruce Schneier's work (I'm subscribed to Cryptogram) and he tends to highlight the FUD that surrounds internet security, and I agree that there is a lot of FUD, but complete ignorance and blase attitude toward security can also be taken advantage of. Where is the middle ground?"

ragnvaldr writes "I'm the 'IT guy' for an office of about a dozen people. And when I say IT guy, I mean I'm the only one here who can use google well enough to figure out how to make things work. We have a 500GB Mac server with a Drobo with 6TB of storage attached. So far all this server does is back up data, and I want to make it a little more useful. We also have a Filemaker server on it, which I have yet to learn how to use at all, let alone efficiently. Any suggestions to make this machine a little more useful?"

iONiUM writes "Last year, greenhouse gas emissions rose to a record amount of 30.6 gigatons, according to estimates from the International Energy Agency. From an article at the Guardian: 'Professor Lord Stern of the London School of Economics, the author of the influential Stern Report into the economics of climate change for the Treasury in 2006, warned that if the pattern continued, the results would be dire. "These figures indicate that [emissions] are now close to being back on a 'business as usual' path. According to the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's] projections, such a path... would mean around a 50% chance of a rise in global average temperature of more than 4C by 2100," he said.'" jamie points out a recent report that the cost of solar cells has dropped about 21 percent this year, leading to predictions that solar power may become cheaper than nuclear and fossil power within five years.

dotarray writes "Activision has denied it and denied it, but now it's been revealed – Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 will feature an online service (that's what Call of Duty Elite is), complete with monthly subscription fees. 'Activision executives said they haven't yet figured out how much to charge for the service, but they expect the cost to be less than fees for comparable online-entertainment services, such as a $7.99-a-month Netflix Inc. movie subscription. Portions of the service will be free, including features inspired by Facebook Inc. that will let Call of Duty players meet for online gun battles with others who share various affiliations and interests. Another feature of the service will give Call of Duty players tools, modeled on those from stock-trading websites, to analyze their performance within the game, gauging factors such as which weapons have been most successful for them in killing enemies.'"

destinyland writes "Amazon just doubled the reported battery life for their Kindle digital readers — but they did it by cutting the estimated daily usage in half. Monday Amazon's competitor Barnes and Noble released a new touch-screen version of their Nook reader, and C|Net notes that apparently Amazon 'took issue with how its competitor was calculating and presenting its battery life numbers.' When Barnes and Noble claimed that the Nook's charge lasted twice as long based on a half hour a day of usage, Amazon simply recalculated the Kindle's battery life using the same formula. By Wednesday, Barnes and Noble was insisting that the Nook's charge still lasted twice as long as the Kindle's. 'If that's true, then Barnes and Noble mangled the launch of their touch-screen Nook,' reports one Kindle blog, 'by botching their description of one of its main selling points.'"

alphadogg writes "Sony expects the PlayStation Network hack will cost it $170 million this financial year, it said Monday. Unknown hackers hit the network gaming service for PlayStation 3 consoles in April, penetrating the system and stealing personal information from the roughly 77 million accounts on the PlayStation Network and sister Qriocity service. A second attack was directed at the Sony Online Entertainment network used for PC gaming. Sony responded to the attacks by taking the systems offline." Does the $170 million figure include compensation for PSN subscribers who suffered from the outage?

Minneapolis police have a new weapon in the war against drugs: stoners. Police say it's easy to tell when someone is drunk, but it can be much more difficult to determine if someone is high. To help teach officers what to look for, the department is recruiting people under the influence of drugs for training exercises. High volunteers are given rewards, such as a meal, for helping trainees figure out what drug they are on. From the article: "Officers from all over the state have come to Minneapolis’ Fifth Precinct for two weeks of intense training that will certify them as one of Minnesota’s Drug Recognition Experts. 'It’s not your typical police-subject interaction,' said Sgt. Don Marose of the Minnesota State Patrol, who trains officers for the state’s DRE program."