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martyb writes:

Ars Technica On Sunday reported that Elon Musk (of SpaceX and Tesla fame) and Sir Richard Branson (Virgin Galactic, etc.) are each preparing to launch LEO (low earth orbit) constellations of satellites to provide world-wide internet coverage:

It was an interesting week for ideas about the future of the Internet. On Wednesday, satellite industry notable Greg Wyler announced that his company OneWeb, which wants to build a micro-satellite network to bring Internet to all corners of the globe, secured investments from Richard Branson's Virgin Group and Qualcomm. Then in a separate announcement on Friday, Elon Musk said that he would also be devoting his new Seattle office to creating "advanced micro-satellites" to deliver Internet.

[...] OneWeb, formerly WorldVu Satellites Ltd, aims to target rural markets, emerging markets, and in-flight Internet services on airlines, the Wall Street Journal reported. Both Branson and Qualcomm Executive Chairman Paul Jacobs will sit on the company's board, but Wyler did not say how much Virgin and Qualcomm invested in his company.

Wyler said that his company's goal is to create a network of 648 small satellites that would weigh in at around 285 pounds each. The satellites would be put in orbit 750 miles above the Earth and ideally cost about $350,000 each to build using an assembly line approach. Wyler also said that Virgin, which has its own space segment, would be launching the satellites into orbit. “As an airline and mobile operator, Virgin might also be a candidate to resell OneWeb’s service,” the Journal noted. Wyler has said that he projects it to take $1.5 billion to $2 billion to launch the service, and he plans to launch in 2018.

[...] On the other hand there's Musk, who's a seasoned space-business launcher that's starting fresh in the world of satellite Internet services. The Telsa and SpaceX founder announced his plans to launch 700 satellites weighing less than 250 pounds each in November.

His satellites would also orbit the Earth at 750 miles above. Musk spoke to Bloomberg on Friday evening explaining that 750 miles above the Earth is much closer than the tens of thousands of miles above the Earth at which traditional telecommunications satellites operate.

Then it got even more interesting.

Ars is now reporting Google might pour money into SpaceX — that it really wants satellite internet:

The Information reported on Monday that, according to “several people familiar with the talks,” Google is considering investing in SpaceX to support its plan to deliver hundreds or thousands of micro satellites into a low (750 mile) orbit around the globe to serve Internet to rural and developing areas of the world. The Information's sources indicated that Google was in the “final stages” of investing in SpaceX and valued the company at “north of $10 billion.” SpaceX is apparently courting other investors as well.

[...] The Information added another interesting tidbit that was not widely reported in previous discussions of SpaceX's plans for global Internet service: “Mr. Musk appears to be trying to get around his lack of spectrum rights by relying, in part, on optical lasers.”

SuperCharlie writes:

The next generation of Mint Box is on its way second quarter of 2015, and a brief look at the size and specs seem pretty impressive for a little powerhouse with a $295 price tag.

The first interesting spec is that it is passively cooled. Low noise and no fans to burn out.

Within its 10.8 x 8.3 x 2.4 cm (4.25 x 3.27 x 0.95 in) enclosure, CompuLab, the manufacturer, has managed to pack in an AMD A4 6400T quad core processor, a Radeon R3 GPU, 4 GB of DDR3 RAM (supports up 8 GB) and 64 GB of solid state storage.

Also crammed into this small form factor box is 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi, Gigabit Ethernet, three USB 2.0 ports and two USB 3.0, a microSD reader, an audio jack and two HDMI ports as well as a 5 year warranty

The MintBox Mini will run the Linux Mint 17.1 MATE 64-bit edition OS in OEM mode out of the box.

I know some here will moan about this being an advertisement, but I have no connection with this other than being a Mint fan and really impressed at the specs, size, and most of all an inexpensive user grade Linux box.

Pics and original story here

andrew_t366 writes:

My 2002-vintage Dell laptop with Windows 2000 has a battery life that could best be measured in seconds, and the hinges are literally crumbling apart. It's overdue for retirement...and I'm very interested in finding a suitable replacement.

But what? Ideally, it should be a rugged machine that will last another decade of normal wear and tear. It should have a CD-ROM drive. And it should be compatible with 16- and 32-bit applications, running the oldest version of Windows that is viable.

While searching the web, I was very interested to discover a vendor that still offered new Windows XP laptops for sale. I've seriously considered buying one...but I'm hesitant to hitch my wagon to XP because the operating system's combination of product activation and revoked support means any computer running it could easily become a glorified paperweight down the road.

Windows 8.x is unusable, Windows 2000 is incompatible with new hardware, and the 64-bit version of Windows 7 lacks the ability to run 16-bit executables and 32-bit programs with 16-bit installers...which precludes my ability to use half the software I rely on. Do any vendors ship new, good-quality laptops with the 32-bit version of Windows 7?

sigma writes:

With Windows 10 intended to unify Microsoft’s PC and mobile platforms with a single operating system and app store, Microsoft needs a plan to win back consumer support to their mobile devices. 2014 was a very bad year for Windows Phone, with stagnant market share and few new devices on offer.

Android Authority says

[...] according to a former Microsoft employee, the biggest priority for Microsoft this time around is to “stop the leakage” and prevent Android and iOS users from completely abandoning Microsoft’s operating system. Apparently, this has led Microsoft to discuss whether or not Android apps should be allowed to run on Windows Phones.

Both ZDNet and Android Authority say that MS insiders have stated that the company plans to first try other ways to increase developer enthusiasm and close the “app gap", but will open the platform to Android apps if all else fails.

http://bgr.com/2014/12/30/microsoft-windows-10-android-apps/

AnonTechie writes:

An interesting article about memories and how the brain processes them.

Throughout our lives we have multitudes of experiences that shape how we then behave in the world. Some of these lessons are learnt rapidly, such as why we shouldn’t put our hand on a hot pan on the stove. Other, more autobiographical experiences can be stored and recalled explicitly as our memories.

These memories can be recalled and described, such as what we did for certain birthdays, or experiences from our holidays. We can also learn to perform certain actions and behaviours that are totally new to us – for example, learning to ride a bike and drive a car. These actions can be thought of as muscle memories, or “non-declarative” memory.

However, it seems we don’t retain all of our memories and experiences. There are times in your life when you find yourself pondering basic general knowledge questions and wonder where these gaps in information have sprung from. Despite all those hours of study at school, many of us can’t remember how to say “two beers please” in Spanish when we are on holiday, or how to work out a specific angle of a triangle, despite being proficient in these skills some years ago.

http://theconversation.com/what-happens-in-the-brain-when-you-no-longer-need-the-information-youve-learnt-36245

fliptop writes:

An article in der Spiegel on Friday reported that documents leaked by Snowden reveal the US government installed backdoor software into North Korea's computer systems years before the Sony hack ever happened:

The NSA used South Korea's established inroads to install malware on North Korean networks, which was able to provide enough evidence to pinpoint the nation as the source of the Sony hack, according to anonymous government officials. This leads to the question, if the NSA had enough intel, why wasn't it able to advise Sony of the attack ahead of time? Administration officials said that the "spear-phishing" attacks -- which entice e-mail users to download infected files -- didn't look out of the ordinary or raise any alarms. But those attacks allowed the hackers to steal a key system admin's credentials, which they used to carefully infiltrate the system, search out key files and eventually destroy or leak them.

The New York Times reported on Sunday (paywalled) the NSA used what they knew to help gather evidence against North Korea.

AnonTechie writes:

In 2014, the bottom 80% controlled only 5.5% of the world's wealth

Global income inequality is headed for a new milestone with the world’s richest 1% on track to control more wealth than everyone else on the planet by 2016, according to an Oxfam International report released Monday. ( http://www.oxfam.org.uk/blogs/2015/01/richest-1-per-cent-will-own-more-than-all-the-rest-by-2016 )

The charity also warns that spiraling inequality hampers the fight against global poverty at a time when 1 in 9 people do not have enough to eat and more than a billion people still live on less than $1.25 per day.

http://time.com/3673360/oxfam-global-inequality-study/

Hugh Pickens writes:

Jean-Louis Gassée writes in Monday Note that the painful gestation of OS X 10.10 (Yosemite) with its damaged iWork apps, the chaotic iOS 8 launch, iCloud glitches, and the trouble with Continuity, have raised concerns about the quality of Apple software. “It Just Works”, the company’s pleasant-sounding motto, has became an easy target, giving rise to jibes of “it just needs more work”.

"I suspect the rapid decline of Apple’s software is a sign that marketing is too high a priority at Apple today," writes Marco Arment. "having major new releases every year is clearly impossible for the engineering teams to keep up with while maintaining quality." Many issues revolve around the general reliability of OS X.

"With Yosemite, I typically have to reboot my laptop at least once a day, and my desktop every few days of use," writes Glenn Fleishman. "The point of owning a Mac is to not have to reboot it regularly. There have been times in the past between OS X updates where I've gone weeks to months without a restart."

I know what I hope for concludes Gassée. "I don’t expect perfection, I’ve lived inside several sausage factories and remember the smell. If Apple were to spend a year concentrating on solid fixes rather than releasing software that’s pushed out to fit a hardware schedule, that would show an ascent rather than a slide."

fliptop writes:

Effective today (Monday), Panetta is the 12th member on Oracle's board:

Secretary Panetta served in the Obama Administration from 2011 to 2013, and as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 2009 to 2011. Previously, Panetta worked as White House Chief of Staff and Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Bill Clinton.

Panetta also currently directs the Panetta Institute for Public Policy, based at California State University, with his wife. In addition, the former US official has served as a Presidential Professor at Santa Clara University.

Larry Ellison commented:

"Secretary Panetta is a dynamic leader with a distinguished record of public service at the highest levels of government. He will add deep expertise and brings a fresh perspective to our Board."

martyb writes:

New Scientist is reporting Giant Flashlight Illuminates Cosmic Network:

The cobwebby filaments that stretched between galaxies in the early universe have shown themselves for the first time. Light from the activity of a distant supermassive black hole is serving as a giant cosmic flashlight, illuminating an enormous strand of gas held together by invisible dark matter.

[...] The geometry of large-scale cosmic structures helps us piece together the processes that formed the universe. Though this first glimpse mostly fits with existing models, there is one surprise that suggests some processes are currently missing in our understanding.

[...] They searched for some of the brightest sources of radiation in the universe: discs of hot gas surrounding supermassive black holes at the centres of distant galaxies, called quasars. When the light from these beacons shines on the gas in a cosmic filament, the gas can absorb and re-emit the light in another wavelength.

Detecting such light is still a challenge. The team had to build a custom filter tuned specifically to the wavelength of the light from each quasar, and put it on the camera of the 10-metre Keck telescope in Hawaii, one of the largest telescopes on Earth.

So it was a surprise when the first quasar [Sebastiano] Cantalupo [University of California, Santa Cruz] observed at Keck, called UM 287, shone on a filament right away. "It was a very lucky night," he says. "I thought these things might be extremely rare, and so was very surprised when my first night at Keck we detected this filament." It turned out he was right about their rarity: none of the 10 other quasars they observed revealed anything.

[...] However, the filament does contain one surprise: it is much more massive than simulations predicted, containing gas that weighs the equivalent of a thousand billion suns. "This is probably telling us that we are missing some physical processes in our models of intergalactic gas at large scales."

Archive.org has an abstract and full report (pdf) available.

SuperCharlie writes:

I would like to throw this out to the community for a little guidance.

In the last year my wife and I jumped on the tablet bandwagon and are very happy with our respective Android tablets for regular email and web surfing from the couch. In our house we also have a Linux laptop where I do a lot of work and such as well as a Windows Vista box I have basically made a file and media machine (hay it's been good to me).

So now it has become time to do some easy sharing and syncing across all these machines and installing a personal cloud server on the Vista box seems like what I need to do. I have looked at ownCloud and Tonido so far which both look similar but require the enterprise or paid versions for mobile sync apps although they do both have free regular access clients. So before I start spending money, as the sync is important to me, I would like to ask my fellow Soylerantes..um Soylas..uhh.. Soylanistas.. have you had any luck with personal cloud servers and specifically have you got one syncing with Android?

PiMuNu writes:

The BBC reports on frustration in the media regarding the release of data from the Rosetta mission. Jean-Jacques Dordain, ESA Director General (DG):

"Even I've tried to get more data," Mr Dordain said. "I might be the DG but I'm also a fan of Rosetta and [its lander] Philae. It's a problem; I don't deny it's a problem. But it's a very difficult problem, too."

I recall many comments on SN regarding difficulty in finding images during the landing of the probe — I guess NASA spoils us. Most funding agencies in Europe require publication of results and data. For example, UK funding agency policy is here. But a data embargo is common to prevent others from publishing first, and not a problem for most science which does not receive so much public attention.

AnonTechie writes:

Bangladeshi telecom authorities shut down smartphone messaging and voice services Viber and Tango, which have become a popular communication medium for supporters of the anti-government protests now in their third week.

The Bangladesh Telecommunications and Regulatory Commission closed down the apps “for the time being” on orders from law enforcement and security agencies, a commission spokesman told AFP. He did not give reasons for the decision, but local television station Channel 24 said Viber and Tango were shut down to prevent protesters from “exchanging information” across the country.

Viber and Tango have been popular among opposition protesters, including activists from the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and its Islamist allies who have launched a crippling nationwide transport blockade to try to topple the government. The protests have turned increasingly violent with activists firebombing hundreds of buses and trucks, and security forces retaliating with live bullets or tear gas. At least 25 people have died in the latest violence including about a dozen burnt to death after protesters firebombed buses.

http://www.bgr.in/news/bangladesh-shuts-down-messaging-services-viber-and-tango-to-quell-violence/

[Also Covered By]: http://phys.org/news/2015-01-bangladesh-messaging-quell-violence.html

Do you think that such measures really work, either in the short term or in the long term ?? Given the above situation how would you handle it ?

AnonTechie writes:

A strange phenomenon has been observed by astronomers right as it was happening - a 'fast radio burst'. The eruption is described as an extremely short, sharp flash of radio waves from an unknown source in the universe. The results have been published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Over the past few years, astronomers have observed a new phenomenon, a brief burst of radio waves, lasting only a few milliseconds. It was first seen by chance in 2007, when astronomers went through archival data from the Parkes Radio Telescope in Eastern Australia. Since then we have seen six more such bursts in the Parkes telescope's data and a seventh burst was found in the data from the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico. They were almost all discovered long after they had occurred, but then astronomers began to look specifically for them right as they happen.

A team of astronomers in Australia developed a technique to search for these 'Fast Radio Bursts', so they could look for the bursts in real time. The technique worked and now a group of astronomers, led by Emily Petroff (Swinburne University of Technology), have succeeded in observing the first 'live' burst with the Parkes telescope. The characteristics of the event indicated that the source of the burst was up to 5.5 billion light years from Earth.

http://phys.org/news/2015-01-snapshot-cosmic-radio.html

[Abstract]: http://mnras.oxfordjournals.org/content/447/1/246

[Paper]: A real-time fast radio burst: polarization detection and multiwavelength follow-up: http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.0342

Appalbarry writes:

The Stephen Harper government in Canada is pretty much legendary for their distrust of scientists and scientific thought, so it's little surprise that, despite DECADES of research that say that cell phones don't cause brain tumours, or anything else, some dim-bulb Tory wants warning labels on cell phones. Honestly I'll vote for whatever candidate promises to leave science to the scientists.

If passed, Young's new bill would force manufacturers to place warnings on cellphone packaging, telling users that radio frequencies emitted from some electronic devices could pose a health threat. Currently, electronic devices come with advice booklets inside the boxes. Young said he wants the law to require manufacturers to put the advice that is now provided in booklets on the outside of the boxes instead.

He said one of the warnings these booklets now provide is to keep cellphones 25 millimetres away from the body.*

"If there's no risk, why do they tell you that?" Young asked. "It's all based on the precautionary principle; the precautionary principle is better safe than sorry."

He said there may not be any evidence now, but he is confident that one day it will be shown that cell phones do cause cancer.

* do they really say that? My Moto G says "When using the mobile phone next to your body (other than in your hand or against your head) maintain a distance of 1.5 cm from your body to be consistent with how the mobile phone is tested."