SoylentNews

AnonTechie writes:

In the near future, you may hear about the appointment of a Chief Internet of Things (IoT) Officer. Before you roll your eyes and chortle at the thought of another chief-of-something, consider the problem.

First, companies are beginning to make and implement smart, connected, data-producing products. That can be anything—automobiles, assembly line robots, washing machines and even coffee makers. This data can be used in predictive analytics to avoid product failures, as well as to schedule maintenance around when a product actually needs it. These products, mechanical and electronic, will likely get ongoing software updates.

Second, connected products are now part of a broader system. Or as Michael Porter, a Harvard economist, pointed out at this week's ThingWorx conference, you aren't just selling a tractor, you are selling a tractor that is becoming part of a smart farm, a system. Things have to be able to work together.

http://www.computerworld.com/article/2919702/it-careers/all-hail-the-next-big-job-the-chief-iot-officer.html

Hugh Pickens writes:

George Haikalis writes in the NYT that last week, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey put off, yet again, deciding between two proposals for a nearly $4 billion project to rehabilitate the dilapidated Central Terminal Building at La Guardia Airport. But piling billions of taxpayer dollars into upgrading La Guardia, which has been likened to an experience “in a third world country," won’t solve its fundamental problems. "It can’t easily expand," says Haikalis. "Its two runways and four terminals are surrounded on three sides by water, making landing difficult and hazardous. Parking is a nightmare."

There are precedents for replacing airports close to the center city with modern, more outlying airports. Hong Kong and Denver are two examples; Berlin will soon follow suit. With the consolidation of the major United States airlines and the sluggishness in the global economy, the much larger Kennedy and Newark airports could accommodate La Guardia’s passenger load, by adding more frequent service and using larger aircraft, if the F.A.A. were to lift the caps on the number of flights allowed there. Kennedy, with its two sets of parallel runways, could handle many more flights, particularly as new air-traffic control technology is introduced in the next few years. The money budgeted for the La Guardia upgrades would be better used to create a long-proposed one-ride express-rail link between Manhattan and J.F.K., by reviving a long-disused, 3.5-mile stretch of track in central Queens and completing the modernization of the terminals at Kennedy. "By avoiding the costly replacement of outmoded terminals at La Guardia and by creating a new express rail link and upgrading terminals at Kennedy, the increased economic activity could more than make up for the lost jobs," concludes Haikalis. "New York’s importance to America’s economy demands a first world vision to shutter this third world airport."

sigma writes:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-05-07/jade-helm-15-prompts-texas-takeover-conspiracy/6452810

A paper published last year found that around half of the American public consistently endorses at least one conspiracy theory, and that many popular conspiracy theories are differentiated along ideological dimensions. Having said that, their research was pre-Snowden revelations, so many of the conspiracy theories may have been well founded.

Even so, the hysteria surrounding Operation Jade Helm 15 seems unusually shrill, with Chuck Norris (ex fake Texas Ranger) urging Texans not to believe government reassurances that it is just an exercise, and Governor Greg Abbott ordering the National Guard to monitor the US military's activities.

So what do Soylentils think? Will conservative Texas, in the words of Freedom Fighter 2127 on YouTube be, "The first state, according to our military source, these are not just drills. Texas will be the first state to be under martial law"?

There are plenty of people willing to point out the lunacy of the conspiracy theorists. Of course, Jon Stewart is one:

"There is no Texas takeover," Stewart said. "The United States government already controls Texas — since like the 1840s. And you left and then you came back. Just borrow a textbook from a neighboring state. It's all in there.

frojack writes:

We have all read about the seizure of computers and cell phones by Customs and Border Protection officers when people cross into the US from other countries. Some have sarcastically called the the region within 50 miles of the border a Constitution Free Zone, as the 4th Amendment doesn't seem to apply there.

Today The Associated Press is reporting that one US District Court Judge is putting the brakes on this practice by suppressing any evidence from such a search.

This search had all the ear marks of a case of Parallel Construction, as the seizure and search of the laptop "was supported by so little suspicion of ongoing or imminent criminal activity" and "was so invasive of Kim's privacy," according to the Judge. The laptop in question was transported 150 miles from Kim's port of entry, and was held indefinitely.

The search of the laptop went beyond routine border inspection. The Justice Department claimed that Kim was suspected of conspiracy to buy US navigation technology, but apparently did not have enough evidence for a warrant. Instead, the warrant-less border crossing seizure was used as a ruse to gather additional evidence,

In spring 2013, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the government should have reasonable suspicion before conducting a comprehensive search of an electronic device.

CoolHand writes:

This Daily Beast article titled "The Nerds Who Won World War II" details a book describing the influence of great technical minds in winning WWII for the alllies.

In Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War, historian, international security authority, and Yale professor Paul Kennedy turns on their heads many standard notions about how the Allies won.

Kennedy dwells lovingly on the eccentric scientists, naval officers, and others who outfitted the British Admiralty unit called the Department of Miscellaneous Weapons Development, locally known as Wheezers and Dodgers. Men brought up on H.G. Wells and Jules Verne science fiction set their minds to solving the convoy crisis. They studied where the U-boats preyed on ships and convinced the air services to add an extra fuel tank to extend aircraft coverage enough to close the North Atlantic gap. They came up with the U-boat-killer shipboard multiple-grenade launcher called the Hedgehog, for its spiked look, as a supplement to less effective depth charges and tinkered with other weaponry to reach the deep-diving subs. Add to that the development of cavity magnetrons: escort ships and aircraft began to carry these small microwave radars enabling them to spot and chase down wolfpacks lurking in wait for the convoys, sometimes hundreds of miles away.

Although nerds have definitely gotten some widely publicized credit, especially for encryption, in films such as Enigma, is it enough? Should other nerd archetypes like engineers be receiving more credit in media with regards to WWII?

Hugh Pickens writes:

Carolyn Y. Johnson reports at the Boston Globe that a 16-person team at Harvard has solved one of the toughest problems in the field of food preparation: How to build a foolproof smoker that can repeatedly produce the perfect brisket, to be judged on texture, taste, and appearance. Tested by countless computer simulations of virtual brisket smoking, nearly two dozen weekend smoking sessions — often in snow or sub-zero temperatures — and 220 pounds of meat, the smoker is a rigorous, data-driven tool for making a feast. Making a perfectly smoked piece of meat may seem to be as far as you can get from an engineering conundrum, but engineering professor Kevin Kit Parker saw it as a problem that required a deep understanding of chemistry, heat transfer, materials science, prototyping, and solving problems. According to Parker, Barbecue has been a veritable Wild West in which pit masters build mishmash setups that incorporate garbage cans, cinder blocks, a giant rotisserie. “They are the biggest contraptions and pieces of junk you’ve ever seen,” says Parker. “Everyone had their own little mojo they brought to the problem.”

In the end, the secret was to precisely control the temperature both in the smoker and in the meat over the “low and slow” smoke. They had to keep the meat below 120 degrees long enough to let the enzymes in the meat break down the collagen and make it tender; they wanted the smoker’s shape to cause “cyclonic airflow,” meaning the smoke would circulate down toward the brisket. While the wood would burn at 700 degrees, the meat would gradually rise over a 15-hour period to about 190 degrees. The class settled on a material — ceramic — and a shape that resembles a cooling tower at a power plant. The design solved one of the big problems with the commercial smoker they used, by eliminating hot spots where the meat might cook too quickly and dry out. They built an app that would allow cooks to monitor the conditions inside the smoker and share their experiences through social media. How to measure success? "They look for perfectly cooked brisket to take on a mahogany hue," says Johnson. "When sliced, there should be a slightly pink section around the edge, called the smoke ring. The meat must be tender, but not falling apart." “They’ve gone from basic science," says Patrick Connolly, chief strategy officer for Williams-Sonoma, who plans to bring the design back to the company’s leaders, "to really understanding how you optimize for flavor and texture."

AndyTheAbsurd writes:

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/deadly-ebola-virus-lurked-grew-eye-cured-physician-doctors-discover-1500253

wantkitteh writes:

BBC News reports that the Conservatives have defied pre-election polls and all the exit polls to win an overall majority in the House of Commons. The race was thought to be much closer than the final results have shown, with many predicting either another coalition government or possibly a minority Conservative government being formed.

The Conservatives made gains in England and Wales and are forecast by the BBC to secure 331 seats in the Commons, giving them a slender majority. Sources say [Labour leader] Ed Miliband is expected to stand down after Labour was all but wiped out by the [Scottish National Party] in Scotland. [Liberal Democrat] leader Nick Clegg has already said he will quit, with his party set to be reduced from 57 to eight MPs. [United Kingdom Independence Party] leader Nigel Farage is also quitting after he failed to win Thanet South, losing by nearly 2,800 votes to the Conservatives.

The Conservatives have taken 331 of the 650 seats available. However, when Sinn Fein's continued boycott of Westminster is taken into account, along with the four seats they current hold, 324 is enough for a practical majority. An overall turnout of 66% is expected, marginally up on the previous general election in 2010.

Shortly after the results of the exit polls were revealed, Lord Ashdown, former leader of the Liberal Democrats, stated in a live interview on the BBC that he would "eat his hat" if the predicted losses for the Liberal Democrats came true. The poll showed the Lib Dems losing 45 seats - in the end they lost 47. Lord Ashdown mentioned shortly after he made the statement that he had received through Twitter ten offers of hats if he didn't have one of his own.

For those of us not familiar with UK politics, what are the views of the Conservatives we should be concerned about (if any)? How will their viewpoints affect the world political stage and/or the technology world?

AnonTechie writes:

A staggering 95 percent of enterprise SAP installations contain high-severity vulnerabilities that could allow systems to be hijacked, researchers say. Researchers from SAP security tools vendor Onapsis say attackers can target the SAP installs to pivot from low to high integrity systems, execute admin privilege commands, and create J2EE backdoors.

Onapsis chief executive Mariano Nunez says the 250,000 SAP customers are exposed for an average of 18 months from when vulnerabilities surface, with SAP taking some 12 months to develop patches.

"The big surprise is that SAP cyber security is falling through the cracks at most companies due to a responsibility gap between the SAP operations team and the IT security team,” Nunez says. "The truth is that most patches applied are not security-related, are late or introduce further operational risk." The Boston firm found SAP pumped out 391 patches last year of which half were labeled high priority.

Nunez lay blame in part on SAP HANA which he says is responsible for a whopping 450 percent increase in the number of security patches. "This trend is not only continuing, but exacerbating with SAP HANA ... positioned in the center of the SAP ecosystem [where] data stored in SAP platforms now must be protected both in the cloud and on-premise,” Nunez says.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/05/08/sap_95_percent_vulnerable/

takyon writes:

Researchers at Penn State have measured responses to avatars rated on a scale of attractiveness:

In a study of how people interacted with avatars in an online game, women received less help from fellow players than men when they operated an unattractive avatar and when they used a male avatar, said T. Franklin Waddell, a doctoral candidate in mass communications, Penn State.

"It doesn't matter if you have an ugly avatar or not, if you're a man, you'll still receive about the same amount of help," said Waddell, who worked with James Ivory, associate professor of communication, Virginia Tech. "However, if you are a woman and operate an unattractive avatar, you will receive significantly less help."

The researchers used six different avatars to study reactions to help requests among 2,300 players of the online game, World of Warcraft. The avatars represented male and female creatures across three different levels of attractiveness. Prior to this study, participants had evaluated the levels of attractiveness as high, medium and low.

WoW racism at work: the highly attractive avatars were blood elves, the somewhat attractive avatars were night elves, and the unattractive avatars were orcs.

AndyTheAbsurd writes:

Andy Hunt - one of the originators of the Agile Manifesto, and NOT your humble submitter - has concluded that Agile has lost its way:

The basis of an agile approach is to embrace change; to be aware of changes to the product under development, the needs and wishes of the users, the environment, the competition, the market, the technology; all of these can be volatile fountains of change. To embrace the flood of changes, agile methods advise us to “inspect and adapt.” That is, to figure out what‘s changed and adapt to it by changing our methods, refactoring our code, collaborating with our customers, and so on. But most agile adopters simply can‘t do that, for a very good reason. When you are first learning a new skill—a new programming language, or a new technique, or a new development method—you do not yet have the experience, mental models, or ability to handle an abstract concept such as “inspect and adapt.” Those abilities are only present in practitioners with much more experience, at higher skill levels

Andy also has some thoughts on how to correct this - starting with the idea that Agile methodologies must be applied to Agile methodologies, to allow them to adapt to changing needs.

Teckla writes in with an article promoting "Death to C":

Ladies and gentlemen, the C programming language. It’s a classic. It is blindingly, quicksilver fast, because it’s about as close to the bone of the machine as you can get. It is time-tested and ubiquitous. And it is terrifyingly dangerous.

The author's biggest issue with the C language seems to be security holes:

If you write code in C, you have to be careful not to introduce subtle bugs that can turn into massive security holes — and as anyone who ever wrote software knows, you cannot be perfectly careful all of the time.

The author claims that the Rust language is a modern answer to these issues and should replace C (and C++). It does look that Rust can run C code, so it looks like an interesting proposition. What do Soylent's coders think about this?

sigma writes:

makezine.com has an article on a new $9 SBC.

An Oakland, CA based team of artists and engineers have built $9 Single Board Computer (SBC) called Chip. Chip runs Debian Linux as its operating system and includes a 1Ghz quad core R8 ARM processor, 512MB of RAM, and 4GB of storage as well as 8 GPIO ports, onboard wifi, bluetooth, battery controller and other goodies.

While the Chip is capable enough to manage office and other general purpose computing, it's mainly intended as a project board. The team has some optional extras, including Pocket Chip, a portable, handheld enclosure with an LCD screen, full QWERTY keyboard, and internal battery. With this combination, the Pocket Chip is a fully functioning $50 computer.

If you’re wondering how Chip could be this inexpensive, you can thank cheap Chinese tablets. The System-on-Chip used in the development board is based on an A13 processor by Allwinner, a Shenzhen-based semiconductor company. As recently as 2013, Allwinner was the second largest tablet manufacturer in the world, and the A13 was the most successful processor in Allwinner’s lineup.

Could this be a Raspberry Pi killer?

AnonTechie writes:

We've previously covered how standby mode in game consoles suck. Well, it seems like many devices across the US are sucking a whole lot of power--$19 Billion/yr worth. That is just the US estimation, it is not extrapolated out across the globe.

Approximately $19 billion worth of electricity, equal to the output of 50 large power plants, is devoured annually by U.S. household electronics, appliances, and other equipment when consumers are not actively using them, according to a ground breaking study released today by the Natural Resources Defense Council.

The report, "Home Idle Load: Devices Wasting Huge Amounts of Electricity When Not in Active Use," found most of the devices either plugged in or hard-wired into America's homes consume electricity around-the-clock, even when the owners are not using them or think they are turned off. The annual cost for this vampire energy drain, which provides little benefit to consumers, ranges from $165 per U.S. household on average to as high as $440 under some utilities' top-tier rates.

"One reason for such high idle energy levels is that many previously purely mechanical devices have gone digital: Appliances like washers, dryers, and fridges now have displays, electronic controls, and increasingly even Internet connectivity, for example," says Pierre Delforge, the report's author and NRDC's director of high-tech sector energy efficiency. "In many cases, they are using far more electricity than necessary."

sigma writes:

Engadget reports that ZTE's premium brand, Nubia has announced their Z9 phone with what they call "Frame interactive Technology" or "FiT", which enables grip and gesture-based control on the aluminum frame.

Gestures included in the standard build include squeezing the phone twice to switch to single-hand mode so the screen automatically moves to your thumb's side, opening the camera by holding the phone horizontally with four finger (thumb) tips, and changing screen brightness by swiping up or down along both sides. Note that there's no mention of any additional action if this motion is performed repeatedly.

The FiT technology is open to customization and 3rd party apps, so extensions are very likely to be on the horizon.