SoylentNews

lhsi writes:

"Mozilla are investigating reports that Dell is charging customers £16 to install the Firefox browser, according to The Register.

Mozilla's trademark policy says that you can't charge for distributing unaltered binaries of the software.

According to the BBC, Dell said that the money was being charged for the time and labour involved.

"In this particular situation, the customer would not be charged for the Mozilla Firefox software download, rather the fee would cover the time and labour involved for factory personnel to load a different image than is provided on the system's standard configuration."

A preliminary consultation with legal teams has stated at Mozilla, but is at an early stage."

AnonTechie writes:

"Three new planets classified as habitable-zone super-Earths are amongst eight new planets discovered orbiting nearby red dwarf stars by an international team of astronomers from the UK and Chile. The study identifies that virtually all red dwarfs, which make up at least three quarters of the stars in the Universe, have planets orbiting them. The research also suggests that habitable-zone super-Earth planets (where liquid water could exist and making them possible candidates to support life) orbit around at least a quarter of the red dwarfs in the Sun's own neighbourhood."

janrinok writes:

"There is still much research being carried out with rotating drive technology despite the arrival of SSDs on the scene. When using an electrical field in conjunction with a magnetic field, it is possible to change the magnetic arrangement in a material much more quickly than is possible using magnetic field alone.

A report from Science Daily notes:

Researchers from the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI and ETH Zurich have now changed the magnetic arrangement in a material much faster than is possible with today's hard drives. The researchers used a new technique where an electric field triggers these changes, in contrast to the magnetic fields commonly used in consumer devices. This method uses a new kind of material where the magnetic and electric properties are coupled. Applied in future devices, this kind of strong interaction between magnetic and electric properties can have numerous advantages. For instance, an electrical field can be generated more easily in a device than a magnetic one.

In the experiment, the changes in magnetic arrangement took place within a picosecond (a trillionth of a second) and could be observed with x-ray flashes at the American x-ray laser LCLS. The flashes are so short that you can virtually see how the magnetization changes from one image to the next - similar to how we are able to capture the movement of an athlete with a normal camera in a series of images with a short exposure time. In future, such experiments should also be possible at PSI's new research facility, the x-ray laser SwissFEL. The results will be published in the journal Science.

Whether this becomes economically viable for mass-produced drives is yet to be seen."

McGruber writes:

An Air Malaysia 777 bound to Beijing has apparently crashed into the South China Sea:

http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/07/world/asia/malaysia- airlines-plane-missing/index.html

That CNN article reports that there was one Italian passenger onboard... however the Italian who was supposedly onboard says his passport was stolen 6 months ago.

A Daily Telegraph article is currently claiming (08 Mar 18:27 UTC) that two stolen passports have apparently been used to board the missing aircraft; the first belonging to the Italian mentioned in the CNN report, and the second to an Austrian. The Austrian passport was reported stolen 2 years ago in Thailand. The Austrian Foreign Ministry reported that their citizen is safe and not on board the aircraft.

janrinok writes:

"Scientist believe that the explanation might be magnetism. Material released by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) discusses how the mystery has been solved:

Astronomers say that magnetic storms in the gas orbiting young stars may explain a mystery that has persisted since before 2006.

Researchers using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope to study developing stars have had a hard time figuring out why the stars give off more infrared light than expected. The planet-forming disks that circle the young stars are heated by starlight and glow with infrared light, but Spitzer detected additional infrared light coming from an unknown source.

A new theory, based on three-dimensional models of planet-forming disks, suggests the answer: Gas and dust suspended above the disks on gigantic magnetic loops like those seen on the sun absorb the starlight and glow with infrared light.

However, the report goes into considerably more detail and is an interesting read."

elias writes:

"Persona was supposed to be Mozilla's 'single sign-on' solution, but it appears that the project is transitioning to community ownership.

According to Mozilla, Persona has received less adoption than they had hoped for by this point, so developers are being reassigned to other projects. Mozilla will continue to handle critical bugs, but any further development will need to come from the community. If you would like to get your hands dirty, LWN has a nice overview of the project, and the code can be obtained from Mozilla's GitHub repo.

Passwords are still one of the bottlenecks for safe internet use. Few people make a practice out of creating a unique password for every single website and system they access. What do you think, has OpenID won as the defacto standard for federated authentication? Does the 'Sign in with Facebook or Twitter' option offered on many sites already cover the people who would use a single sign-on, or is there room for innovation?"

janrinok writes:

"An article in Science Daily describes how a new dinosaur species, thought to be the largest predator found in Europe, has been discovered in Portugal. Originally thought to be Torvosaurus tanneri, a dinosaur species from North America, it was renamed after differences in the shin bone, upper jawbone, teeth, and partial tail vertebrae were noted. The new nomenclature, if approved, will be Torvosaurus gurneyi.

The article goes on:

T. gurneyi had blade-shaped teeth up to 10 cm long, which indicates it may have been at the top of the food chain in the Iberian Peninsula roughly 150 million years ago. The scientists estimate that the dinosaur could reach 10 meters long and weigh around 4 to 5 tons. The number of teeth, as well as size and shape of the mouth, may differentiate the European and the American Torvosaurus. The fossil of the upper jaw of T. tanneri has 11 or more teeth, while T. gurneyi has fewer than 11. Additionally, the mouth bones have a different shape and structure. The new dinosaur is the second species of Torvosaurus to be named.

'This is not the largest predatory dinosaur we know. Tyrannosaurus, Carcharodontosaurus, and Giganotosaurus from the Cretaceous were bigger animals,' said Christophe Hendrickx. 'With a skull of 115 cm, Torvosaurus gurneyi was however one of the largest terrestrial carnivores at this epoch, and an active predator that hunted other large dinosaurs, as evidenced by blade shape teeth up to 10 cm.' Fossil evidences of closely related dinosaurs suggest that this large predator may have already been covered with proto-feathers. Recently described dinosaur embryos from Portugal are also ascribed to the new species of Torvosaurus.

The research paper from which the article above is drawn gives considerably more detail."

Papas Fritas writes:

"Michelle Rindel reports at AP that despite being two of the largest cities in the Southwest, Las Vegas and Phoenix are linked by a road that narrows to two lanes, hits stoplights in a Depression-era town and until recently backed up traffic over the Hoover Dam. An effort to improve what's now a 4 1/2-hour drive to cover the 300 miles of desert between Sin City and the Valley of the Sun with a more reliable road has heavy-hitting allies, including business leaders and the Republican governor of each state. 'Long-term jobs are created by our connectivity,' says Steve Betts, noting that the stretch would be the first piece of a new shipping route between Mexico and Canada.

That the cities aren't already linked by an interstate is a fluke of timing. The Phoenix and Las Vegas populations exploded just after the national road-building frenzy that started in the 1950s. The Las Vegas metro area, population 2 million, is 40 times larger than it was in 1950. The Phoenix area, population 4.3 million, has grown 13-fold over that span. Highway supporters won a key victory last year when Congress formally designated Interstate 11. The legislation provides no funding, but it allows builders to tap into interstate construction dollars. An interstate could link Los Angeles, Phoenix and Las Vegas as partners in a 'megaregion' that competes with other regions, and could open a trade route from Mexico to Pacific Ocean ports and Canada. Arizona and Nevada are currently losing much of that flow and its attendant development to Texas and California, according to Betts, chairman of CAN-DO, an acronym for Connecting Arizona and Nevada-Delivering Opportunities. Still, other critics worry that pushing further toward the interstate dream would contribute to urban sprawl and hurt the environment. 'The last thing we need is another freeway,' says Sandy Bahr, president of the Arizona chapter of the Sierra Club. 'We need to look for other transportation modes.'"

swisskid writes:

"Christopher Schafer writes up about his experience in the Western Region's Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition's Qualifiers round. CCDC is a competition in securing and defending a business environment against an active team of Penetration testers. Read more at http://securityblog.ch/?p=62"

The competitors are at a relatively early stage of what might become a long and illustrious career. The idea behind the competition is to garner the knowledge that will be useful in protecting networks in the future. If you have any genuine suggestions as to how they might do better next time, tell us below.

Potato Battery writes:

"ZDNet has posted an overview comparing Debian and three first- and second-generation derivatives. LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) is derived directly from Debian Testing, unlike its more famous Ubuntu-derived relative; SolydXK is somewhat of a spinoff from LMDE; and Tanglu is a new offering based on Debian Testing and the Tanglu development team expects to provide a lot of the testing, integration, packaging and distribution of patches and updates to avoid the long development delays and freezes that Debian goes through in the development/distribution cycle.

Everyone knows Debian, and I've dabbled with the Ubuntu-related Mint, but the other two were new to me. Has anyone put them through their paces?"

Subsentient writes:

"I'm a C programmer and Linux enthusiast. For some time, I've had it on my agenda to build the new version of my i586/Pentium 1 compatible distro, since I have a lot of machines that aren't i686 that are still pretty useful.

Let me tell you, since I started working on this, I've been in hell these last few days! The Pentium Pro was the first chip to support CMOV (Conditional move), and although that was many years ago, lots of chips were still manufactured that didn't support this (or had it broken), including many semi-modern VIA chips, and the old AMD K6.

Just about every package that has to deal with multimedia has lots of inline assembler, and most of it contains CMOV. Most packages let you disable it, either with a switch like ./configure --disable-asm or by tricking it into thinking your chip doesn't support it, but some of them (like MPlayer, libvpx/vp9) do NOT. This means, that although my machines are otherwise full blown, good, honest x86-32 chips, I cannot use that software at all, because it always builds in bad instructions, thanks to these huge amounts of inline assembly!

Of course, then there's the fact that these packages, that could otherwise possibly build and work on all types of chips, are now limited to what's usually the ARM/PPC/x86 triumvirate (sorry, no SPARC Linux!), and the small issue that inline assembly is not actually supported by the C standard.

Is assembly worth it for the handicaps and trouble that it brings? Personally I am a language lawyer/standard Nazi, so inline ASM doesn't sit well with me for additional reasons."

Daniel Dvorkin writes:

"When I first started studying bioinformatics almost fifteen years ago (!) what drew me to the field was the promise that we might soon be able to provide effective, personalized treatments for a wide variety of diseases. There have been some successes along the way, like genetic tests for warfarin dosage, but for the most part our gains in understanding of basic biology haven't been matched by clinical advances. Now it looks like that is at long last about to change, and it's about time.

Too many people suffer and die from too many diseases that we more or less understand, but can't effectively treat. I hated it when I worked in hands-on patient care, and I hate it now in the lab. We are, finally, getting there."

mattie_p writes

"Getty Images, an American stock photo agency with over 80 million still photographs and more than 50,000 hours of video in its catalog, is offering about 35 million images for non-profit use for free, according to a report from the BBC and recent changes to its terms of use, in an effort to combat piracy.

Getty Images realized that many of their photographs have been utilized in the past without attribution, and embeds the photographs in code that links back to its own site. By offering the ability to embed photos, Getty is saying it cannot effectively police the use of its images in every nook and cranny of the internet. Yet it also may use the code to serve advertisements in the future, allowing it to make revenue by sharing its catalog.

Getty has been both the plaintiff and defendant in several lawsuits regarding use of their images online. This experiment may bode well for the future of freely (as in beer) distributed intellectual property in a free and connected society, but then again, maybe not."

janrinok writes:

The BBC reports that warmer temperatures are causing the spread of malaria to higher altitudes.

The report goes on to say:

'Researchers have found that people living in the highlands of Africa and South America are at an increased risk of catching the mosquito-borne disease during hotter years. They believe that temperature rises in the future could result in millions of additional cases in some areas.

The research is published in the journal Science. Prof Mercedes Pascual, from the University of Michigan in the US, who carried out the research, said: "The impact in terms of increasing the risk of exposure to disease is very large." He goes on to say: "We have estimated that, based on the distribution of malaria with altitude, a 1C rise in temperature could lead to an additional three million cases in under-15-year-olds per year."'

martyb writes:

"Remember that one bug that had you tearing your hair out and banging your head against the wall for the longest time? And how it felt when you finally solved it? Here's a chance to share your greatest frustration and triumph with the community.

One that I vividly recall occurred back in the early 90's at a startup that was developing custom PBX hardware and software. There was the current development prototype rack and another rack for us in Quality Assurance (QA). Our shipping deadline for a major client was fast approaching, and the pressure level was high as development released the latest hardware and software for us to test. We soon discovered that our system would not boot up successfully. We were getting all kinds of errors; different errors each time. Development's machine booted just fine, *every* time. We swapped out our hard disks, the power supply, the main processing board, the communications boards, and finally the entire backplane in which all of these were housed. The days passed and the system still failed to boot up successfully and gave us different errors on each reboot.

What could it be? We were all stymied and frustrated as the deadline loomed before us. It was then that I noticed the power strips on each rack into which all the frames and power supplies were plugged. The power strip on the dev server was 12-gauge (i.e. could handle 20 amps) but the one on the QA rack was only 14-gauge (15 amps). The power draw caused by spinning up the drives was just enough to leave the system board under-powered for bootup.

We swapped in a new $10 power strip and it worked perfectly. And we made the deadline, too!

So, fellow Soylents, what have you got? Share your favorite tale of woe and success and finally bask in the glory you deserve."

SN Member McGruber points us a study by TriNet that provides (buzzword alert!) 'cloud-based human resources services.' The study concludes that Austin is the place to go.

From the article:

"Austin ranks Number 1 in the nation when it comes to offering the largest tech salaries that have been adjusted for cost of living expenses, such as housing, groceries, utilities and other necessities.

The seven major tech hubs, ranked by cost of living adjusted average salaries:

1. Austin: $105,000

2. Atlanta: $103,000

3. Denver-Boulder: $98,000

4. Boston: $79,000

5. Silicon Valley: $78,000

6. Los Angeles: $70,000

7. New York: $56,000"