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martyb writes:

What happens when lava meets snow? Ars Technica has a report and it's not what you might think:

Depending on the context, volcanic eruptions are either terrifying or transfixing—sometimes both, but rarely neither. The opportunity to safely view the otherworldly spectacle of lava rarely fails to ignite a child-like, giddy wonder. The damage currently being done by a lava flows in the Cape Verde Islands, on the other hand, is heart-breaking.

We study these things because they are both lovely and terrible. We want to see a lava flow spill across a snowfield out of curiosity, and we want to better understand the hazards surrounding snow-capped volcanoes out of caution. Benjamin Edwards of Dickinson College and Alexander Belousov and Marina Belousova of Russia’s Institute of Volcanology and Seismology got the opportunity to witness one of these events last year in Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula. For nine months, Tolbachik spewed basaltic lava flows that ultimately covered 40 square kilometers, reaching as far as 17 kilometers from their source.

The article describes two kinds of lava flow, their very different behaviors in contact with the snow, and provides a video of these in action. Having never seen a lava flow, I found watching the video to be very interesting — and just as amazing — the sound made as these flows progressed. (I can only imagine what it smelled like!)

I'm interested in whether anyone here has personally witnessed an eruption and/or lava flow and what your experience was like.

Free abstract available at Nature Communications.

Hugh Pickens writes:

Claire Cain Miller writes at the NYT that economists long argued that, just as buggy-makers gave way to car factories, technology used to create as many jobs as it destroyed. But now there is deep uncertainty about whether the pattern will continue, as two trends are interacting. First, artificial intelligence has become vastly more sophisticated in a short time, with machines now able to learn, not just follow programmed instructions, and to respond to human language and movement. At the same time, the American work force has gained skills at a slower rate than in the past — and at a slower rate than in many other countries. Self-driving vehicles are an example of the crosscurrents. Autonomous cars could put truck and taxi drivers out of work — or they could enable drivers to be more productive during the time they used to spend driving, which could earn them more money. But for the happier outcome to happen, the drivers would need the skills to do new types of jobs.

When the University of Chicago asked a panel of leading economists about automation, 76 percent agreed that it had not historically decreased employment. But when asked about the more recent past, they were less sanguine. About 33 percent said technology was a central reason that median wages had been stagnant over the past decade, 20 percent said it was not and 29 percent were unsure. Perhaps the most worrisome development is how poorly the job market is already functioning for many workers. More than 16 percent of men between the ages of 25 and 54 are not working, up from 5 percent in the late 1960s; 30 percent of women in this age group are not working, up from 25 percent in the late 1990s. For those who are working, wage growth has been weak, while corporate profits have surged. “We’re going to enter a world in which there’s more wealth and less need to work,” says Erik Brynjolfsson. “That should be good news. But if we just put it on autopilot, there’s no guarantee this will work out.”

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Noted Linux expert Chris Siebenmann has described two catastrophic failures involving systemd.

One of the problems he encountered with systemd became apparent during a disastrous upgrade of a system from Fedora 20 to Fedora 21. It involved PID 1 segfaulting during the upgrade process. He isn't the only victim to suffer from this type of bad experience, either. The bug report for this problem is still showing a status of NEW, nearly a month after it was opened.

The second problem with systemd that he describes involves the journalctl utility. It displays log messages with long lines in a way that requires sideways scrolling, as well as displaying all messages since the beginning of time, in forward chronological order. Both of these behaviors contribute to making the tool much less usable, especially in critical situations where time and efficiency are of the essence.

Problems like these raise some serious questions about systemd, and its suitability for use by major Linux distros like Fedora and Debian. How can systemd be used if it can segfault in such a way, or if the tools that are provided to assist with the recovery exhibit such counter-intuitive, if not outright useless, behavior?

Editor's Comment: I am not a supporter of systemd, but if there are only 2 such reported occurrences of this fault, as noted in one of the links, then perhaps it is not a widespread fault but actually a very rare one. This would certainly explain - although not justify - why there has been so little apparent interest being shown by the maintainers. Nevertheless, the fault should still be fixed.

Hugh Pickens writes:

Sarah LeTrent reports at CNN that NASA just "emailed" the design of a socket wrench to astronauts so that they could print it out in the orbit. The ratcheting socket wrench was the first "uplink tool" printed in space, according to Grant Lowery, marketing and communications manager for Made In Space, which built the printer in partnership with NASA. The tool was designed on the ground, "emailed" to the space station and then manufactured where it took four hours to print out the finished product. The space agency hopes to one day use the technology to make parts for broken equipment in space and long-term missions would benefit greatly from onboard manufacturing capabilities. "I remember when the tip broke off a tool during a mission," recalls NASA astronaut TJ Creamer, who flew aboard the space station during Expedition 22/23 from December 2009 to June 2010. "I had to wait for the next shuttle to come up to bring me a new one. Now, rather than wait for a resupply ship to bring me a new tool, in the future, I could just print it."

Blackmoore writes:

Science Daily - New conversion process turns biomass 'waste' into lucrative chemical products

A new catalytic process is able to convert what was once considered biomass waste into lucrative chemical products that can be used in fragrances, flavorings or to create high-octane fuel for racecars and jets.

A team of researchers from Purdue University's Center for Direct Catalytic Conversion of Biomass to Biofuels, or C3Bio, has developed a process that uses a chemical catalyst and heat to spur reactions that convert lignin into valuable chemical commodities. Lignin is a tough and highly complex molecule that gives the plant cell wall its rigid structure.

"We are able to take lignin -- which most biorefineries consider waste to be burned for its heat -- and turn it into high-value molecules that have applications in fragrance, flavoring and high-octane jet fuels," Abu-Omar said. "We can do this while simultaneously producing from the biomass lignin-free cellulose, which is the basis of ethanol and other liquid fuels. We do all of this in a one-step process."

Blackmoore writes:

I've had a few people send me a link to a Kickstarter for Codename: Morningstar

At first glance this is a fantastic update to tabletop RPG; instead of lugging around a pile of hardcover books the DM and the Players can use their readers/pads/smart devices to get back to the game. Or is it just about locking you into some kind of subscription service to use those books you already own? I'm so torn on this I think i need the community to help.

The technology to build Morningstar didn't exist two years ago. Now, we can integrate all the components of a complex role-playing game into a single application that can be run on your tablet, laptop or phone.

Everything about the game is at your fingertips from rulebooks, adventures, characters, and maps to the most specific character customization - even a hard-earned badge from an epic homebrew campaign. Tracking campaigns and compiling logbooks are no longer chores, but an integrated, shareable experience. And game night is streamlined. Rules lookups are instantaneous - the right information is at your fingertips. Sharing of content, maps and secret notes is a single tap away. Spend more time role-playing and less time rules-playing.

We firmly believe that the best adventures are sitting on the shelves and in the minds of passionate players and game masters like you. We are publishers by trade. Morningstar is designed to allow writers to publish and get paid for their creativity and imagination.

Nuke writes:

In his blog, Scott Adams describes his exasperating experience following a change of motherboards. Central to the story is the fact that he has two phone numbers for Windows re-activation, both of which claim they are an official Microsoft call center and that the other is a scam. Neither are any help anyway. Seems to be a topical issue right now.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

A Debian user has recently discovered that systemd prevents the skipping of fsck while booting:

With init, skipping a scheduled fsck during boot was easy, you just pressed Ctrl+c, it was obvious! Today I was late for an online conference. I got home, turned on my computer, and systemd decided it was time to run fsck on my 1TB hard drive. Ok, I just skip it, right? Well, Ctrl+c does not work, ESC does not work, nothing seems to work. I Googled for an answer on my phone but nothing. So, is there a mysterious set of commands they came up with to skip an fsck or is it yet another flaw?

One user chimed in with a hack to work around the flaw, but it involved specifying an argument on the kernel command line. Another user described this so-called "fix" as being "Pretty damn inconvenient and un-discoverable", while yet another pointed out that the "fix" merely prevents "systemd from running fsck in the first place", and it "does not let you cancel a systemd-initiated boot-time fsck which is already in progress."

Further investigation showed that this is a known bug with systemd that was first reported in mid-2011, and remains unfixed as of late December 2014. At least one other user has also fallen victim to this bug.

How could a severe bug of this nature even happen in the first place? How can it remain unfixed over three years after it was first reported?

tonyPick writes:

IEEE Spectrum has an article on building your own Enigma machine from a supplied kit:

Nearly a century after its invention, the electromechanical Enigma cipher machine still strikes a deep chord among the digerati. Used by the German military to encode communications in the run-up to and during World War II, the Enigma has achieved a mythic quality in computing history—the Medusa slain by the hero Turing with the new weapon of digital logic.

This is built around the kit from S&T GeoTronics, which was funded through a kickstarter in April.

Additional background on the Enigma machine from wikipedia and at Bletchley park, as well as a software emulated machine are also available for the curious.

ghost writes:

NTP, the Network Time Protocol, has announced six serious vulnerabilities. Not surprising, I guess, for 192,870 lines of code dating back to the early 80s. For anyone else that's shocked by that bloat, OpenBSD's OpenNTPD manages to get the job done in under 5,000 lines. [Ed's Comment: To be fair, the linux implementation of ntp does achieve far more than the OpenBSD version. This is acknowledged in one of the links below.]

Note: Additionally, noted Danish FreeBSD developer extraordinaire Poul-Henning Kamp (PHK), operating under the influence of the Linux Foundation's cash hoard, has been working on an ntp replacement which is expected to preview this weekend.

"gewg_" writes:

El Reg reports

Linux is saved! Again!

[...]Last year, SCO managed to secure approval to re-open the case against IBM.

Groklaw's now posted a ruling(PDF) from last week in which Judge David Nuffer of the US District Court for the District of Utah appears to deliver good news for IBM.

The crucial bit of the ruling looks to be this paragraph:

SCO is bound by, and may not here re-litigate, the rulings in the Novell judgement that Novell (not SCO) owns the copyrights to the pre-1996 UNIX source code, and that Novell waived SCO's contract claims against IBM for alleged breaches of the licensing agreements pursuant to which IBM licensed such source code.

Interestingly, it looks like IBM is hurrying this one along: the ruling says Big Blue moved for partial summary [judgement] in the case. The ruling also appears to knock out SCO's claims that IBM has indulged in unfair competition or other commercial no-nos.

Blackmoore writes:

Ars technica - Computer intrusion inflicts massive damage on German steel factory

A German steel factory suffered significant damage after attackers gained unauthorized access to computerized systems that help control its blast furnace, according to a report published Friday by IDG News.

The attackers took control of the factory's production network through a spear phishing campaign, IDG said, citing a [pdf] report published Wednesday by the German government's Federal Office for Information Security. Once the attackers compromised the network, individual components or possibly entire systems failed.

Hugh Pickens writes:

Osvaldo Nunez reports that a recent study out of UC Berkeley says that golden-winged warblers can predict the coming of storms and tornadoes while the closest tornado is still hundreds of miles away. In April, a massive thunderstorm ravaged central and southern United States, causing more than $1 billion in damage across 17 states. The birds nest and breed around the Great Lakes and the Appalachian Mountains every summer. After flying 1,500-miles down to Tennessee, two days before the storms, flocks of songbirds and golden-winged warblers departed the areas and flew 900-miles to Florida and Cuba. They escaped just south of the tornadoes' path - and then went straight home again. By May 2, five tagged birds were back in their nesting area. "At the same time that meteorologists on The Weather Channel were telling us this storm was headed in our direction, the birds were apparently already packing their bags and evacuating the area," says Henry Streby.

The most likely tip-off was the deep rumble that tornadoes produce, well below what humans can hear. Noise in this "infrasound" range travels thousands of kilometers, and may serve as something of an early warning system for animals that can pick it up. "It's very unlikely that this species is the only group doing this," says Streby. The new study is the first time that migratory birds have been seen taking such dramatic evasive action. "We know that birds can alter their route to avoid things during regular migration. But it hadn't been shown before that they would leave once the migration is over, and they'd established their breeding territory, to escape severe weather." With the predicted increase in severity and frequency of similar storms as anthropogenic climate change progresses, understanding large-scale behavioral responses of animals to such events will be an important objective of future research.

Blackmoore writes:

boing boing brings us - Usbdriveby: horrifying proof-of-concept USB attack

Samy Kamkar has a proof-of-concept attack through which he plugs a small USB stick into an unlocked Mac OS X machine and then quickly and thoroughly compromises the machine, giving him total, stealthy control over the system in seconds, even reprogramming the built-in firewall to blind it to its actions.

Unlike most hacks, this one is visually pretty spectacular, since the attack emulates a keyboard and mouse, making windows appear and disappear at speed, while phantom words appear in the terminal and a phantom hand clicks the mouse on interface items deep in the OS.

tonyPick writes:

Last week Imagination Technologies put up a set of videos of the MIPS based CI20 board in action.

And on a related note Tom's Hardware is running a hands on review of the latest board with the stock Linux Debian and Android images, and is slightly less than impressed by the performance of the Android images, however:

The CI20 is a Dual Core MIPS32 board built around the Ingenic JZ4780 SoC running at 1.2GHz with a PowerVR SGX540 GPU, 1GB of DDR3 RAM and various connectivity and storage connections. More detailed specifications are available, as well as a comparison against Raspberry Pi/B+ and BeagleBone black boards. Note that the original revision had 8GB of NAND Flash, but the newer version only has 4GB, which appears to be the only difference between RevA & RevB.

Imagination ran a giveaway for the RevA boards in August (and rapidly ran out), but the next batch of CI20 boards (Rev B) is stated as being available from the end of January 2015, and Imagination appears to be taking pre-orders now, with links to buy available at the Imagination site.