SoylentNews

crossroads1112 writes:

After 4.5 years of development, Google announced on May 5 that it will be discontinuing PageSpeed -- an optimizing proxy that aimed at improving website performance.

Google has alerted users of its PageSpeed Service for making websites zippier that it will be killing off the tools as of Aug. 3. The company, which this week introduced a new offering called Cloud Bigtable for storing large amounts of data online, apparently has bigger things to worry about these days.

If you are using PageSpeed Service, you must change your DNS before 3rd August 2015 or your site(s) will become completely unavailable on that date, Google stated in their announcement.

Google recommended several alternatives including mod_pagespeed -- an Apache module.

CoolHand writes:

The Register reports that Microsoft has released a new Powershell DSC tool to manage configuration of Linux boxes from the powershell interface. This would be similar to Puppet and friends that are used for this task today.

In yet another sign that Microsoft is a very different animal these days, the company has released PowerShell DSC (desired state configuration) for Linux.

PowerShell DSC is a server configuration tool that has hitherto driven Windows Server boxen. But Microsoft's now decided it has a “commitment to common management of heterogeneous assets in your datacenter or the public cloud”, so has added Linux-wrangling features to the tool.

The new code can cope with CentOS, Debian GNU/Linux, Oracle Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, and Ubuntu Server.

The github site for the project says:

Windows PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC) provides a configuration platform built into Windows that is based on open standards. DSC is flexible enough to function reliably and consistently in each stage of the deployment lifecycle (development, test, pre-production, production), as well as during scale-out, which is required in the cloud world.

It looks like this Powershell DSC is actually built with Python and will run on Linux, not just Windows systems with Powershell.

There have been a few signs recently that Microsoft may be becoming a bit more open and less of the MS we knew in the Gates/Ballmer eras. Is this another sign that MS is actually pursuing that trend? Or is it a bid to gain more control over the Linux-sphere? Would any Soylentils think about using this for configuration management over Puppet, Chef, cfengine, or Ansible?

frojack writes:

According to an article by the AP - via an ad-free site several of the self driving cars licensed to drive in California have been involved in accidents.

Most are slow speed accidents, apparently with no injuries.

Neither the companies involved, nor the State of California will release details of these accidents, which rankles some critics.

Four accidents involving these 50 cars in 8 months may seem a little high. Google's 23 cars have driven 140,000 miles in that time and racked up 3 accidents all by them selves. That is an order of magnitude higher than the National Transportation Safety Board's figures of 0.3 per 100,000 for non injury accidents. However the NTSB doesn't collect all fender bender accidents.

The article says that none of the other states that permit self driving cars have any record of accidents.

Hugh Pickens writes:

Nico Pitney reports that the urban poor in the United States are experiencing accelerated aging at the cellular level, and that chronic stress linked both to income level and racial-ethnic identity is driving this physiological deterioration. Researchers analyzed telomeres, tiny caps at the ends of DNA strands that protect cells from aging prematurely, of poor and lower middle-class black, white, and Mexican residents of Detroit and found that low-income residents of Detroit, regardless of race, have significantly shorter telomeres than the national average. "There are effects of living in high-poverty, racially segregated neighborhoods -- the life experiences people have, the physical exposures, a whole range of things -- that are just not good for your health," says Nobel laureate. Dr. Arline Geronimus, the lead author of the study, described as the most rigorous research of its kind examining how "structurally rooted social processes work through biological mechanisms to impact health." White Detroit residents who were lower-middle-class had the longest telomeres in the study. But the shortest telomeres belonged to poor whites. Black residents had about the same telomere lengths regardless of whether they were poor or lower-middle-class. And poor Mexicans actually had longer telomeres than Mexicans with higher incomes. Geronimus says these findings demonstrate the limitations of standard measures -- like race, income and education level -- typically used to examine health disparities. "We've relied on them too much to be the signifiers of everything that varies in the life experiences of difference racial or ethnic groups in different geographic locations and circumstances."

One co-author of this new study is Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn who helped to discover telomeres, an achievement that won her the Nobel Prize in physiology in 2009. Blackburn ticked off a list of studies in which people's experiences and perceptions directly correlated with their telomere lengths: whether people say they feel stressed or pessimistic; whether they feel racial discrimination towards others or feel discriminated against; whether they have experienced severely negative experiences in childhood, and so on. "These are all really adding up in this quantitative way," says Blackburn. "Once you get a quantitative relationship, then this is science, right?"

gishzida writes:

Reuters tells us:

As Jon Stewart winds down his 19-year stint as host of Comedy Central's The Daily Show, he and Stephen Colbert sit at the peak of American punditry despite their left-leaning view of life, the universe and everything.

In an era of diffused voices and divided politics, they are well known, widely admired, and speak to Americans in ways that no one else does, according to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll.

This poll tracks 10 different pundits. Split evenly between conservative and liberal. It is also worth noting that four of the five on the liberal side are comedians, while none of the conservative pundits are trained to tell jokes.

MichaelDavidCrawford writes:

Signed into law yesterday by Governor Jerry Brown, California Civil Code Section 1670.8 now provides that:

A contract or proposed contract for the sale or lease of consumer goods or services may not include a provision waiving the consumer's right to make any statement regarding the seller or lessor or its employees or agents, or concerning the goods or services.

This statute comes with a fine of up to $2,500 for the first violation, up to $5,000 for the second and subsequent violations, as well as up to $10,000 for a willful, intentional, or reckless violation.

Software product EULAs are sometimes used to forbid negative reviews, and while this is not mentioned specifically in the text of the law, it is a fairly reasonable argument to think that this provision will apply there as well as in places like Yelp.com.

This law only applies in California, not in other states, or in other nations. Even so, it is a step in the right direction.

nitehawk214 writes:

This article shows that the future merging of the Andromeda and Milky Way galaxies may be sooner than previously thought:

Recent analysis of past observations made by the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope have found a massive halo of hot, heavy gas surrounding our neighboring galaxy, Andromeda. This expansive mass of material around Andromeda could mean that it will begin merging with the Milky Way ahead of schedule.

In fact, the articles goes on to say the merge may have already begun if the Milky Way contains a similarly sized halo.

theronb writes:

According a summary in Chemical & Engineering News of a much more technical paper in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (referenced in the C&EN summary):

Hospitals keep stores of universal, type O blood for situations when a patient with an unknown blood type needs an emergency transfusion. The other types—A, B, and AB blood—can trigger a potentially fatal immune response in an unmatched recipient. Now, bioengineers have taken a step on the path toward making all blood universal—by broadening an enzyme’s ability to remove antigens on the surface of red blood cells (J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2015, DOI: 10.1021/ja5116088).
The quest for universal blood has tempted researchers since the discovery in the 1980s of coffee bean enzymes that could turn type B blood into O. The four main blood types each have distinctive sugar chains on the surface of their red blood cells.

Soylentils will note the intersting link to coffee.

Meanwhile, other scientists have claimed to have developed an enzyme that convert other blood types to that of the universal donor.

“We produced a mutant enzyme that is very efficient at cutting off the sugars in A and B blood, and is much more proficient at removing the subtypes of the A-antigen that the parent enzyme struggles with,” said David Kwan, the lead author of the study and a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Chemistry. Their job, however, is not yet done. Whilst the enzyme was able to remove the vast majority of antigens from type A and B blood, they were not able to remove all of them. As the immune system is incredibly sensitive to blood groups—so much so that even small amounts of residual antigen can trigger an immune response—the scientists must first be certain that all antigens are absent.

fliptop writes:

On May 11, the first spacecraft ever to visit Pluto will begin looking for tiny debris as it approaches the dwarf planet at 48,000 kph:

To minimize the risk of hitting debris from Charon or another, unknown moon, scientists will conduct seven 45-minute observation sessions between 11 May and 1 July. If they find a potential hazard, the team can change the spacecraft's course.

...The mission is almost certain to discover new moons in the process. The Hubble Space Telescope found two during its hazard searches before the Pluto mission: Kerberos, which measures 14-40 kilometres across, in 2011, and the smaller Styx in 2012.

If something dangerous is spotted, 4 July is the last chance to divert the spacecraft to one of three available alternate routes.

fliptop writes:

Spotted on acm.org:

Technology developed at the Polytechnic University of Valencia and the University of Stuttgart could serve as a text-entry system for wearable devices that have touchscreens. The tiny QWERTY soft keyboard could enable users to answer or enter text on wearable devices that have limited onscreen space, such as smart watches, smart glasses, and digital jewelry.

The Spanish and German researchers designed two keyboard prototypes for different screen sizes, between 16 and 32 mm. The first, named Callout, creates a callout showing a character that is about to be entered in a non-occluded location, such as the upper part of the screen. The second, called ZShift, improves on Callout by enhancing the callout area with one level of zoom of the occluded area, while also providing visual feedback on the key touched.

Screens the size of a coin? Not without my reading glasses.

gishzida writes:

According to a story at International Business Times, growing up poor can have a range of consequences for a person’s status and future opportunities — and it can also make someone more likely to catch colds later in life, a new study shows. Writing in the journal Brain, Behavior and Immunity, Carnegie Mellon University psychologist Sheldon Cohen and colleagues say they’ve found a connection between childhood poverty and a middle age with more sniffles, coughs and sneezes.

"We have found initial evidence for a biological explanation of the importance of childhood experiences on adult health," Cohen said in a statement. "The association we found in young and midlife adults suggests why those raised by parents of relatively low socioeconomic status may be at increased risk for disease throughout adulthood."

http://www.ibtimes.com/poverty-childhood-makes-you-more-susceptible-colds-later-life-study-1452070

darkfeline wrote in with an Ars Technica article entitled "Mystery person puts shuttered music site Grooveshark back online", and this:

Provides an example of how laws only matter insofar as the people agree to follow them. If everybody wants something, it will be had, irrespective of corporate fiddling.

Grooveshark was a music-streaming site that was finally shut down by the music industry last week due to the revelation of deliberate violations of copyright by employees. Employees had uploaded music tracks themselves to bolster Grooveshark's catalog, in contrast to other services (e.g. YouTube) that simply take down user-uploaded content in response to DMCA notices and are not liable for copyright infringement of the users.

TorrentFreak reports that the widely-reported "clone" that emerged soon after Grooveshark's demise is actually a reskin of another site, MP3Juices.se:

We concede that to some the idea of a reincarnated Grooveshark will be a somewhat romantic one but as we highlighted at the weekend, the practice of passing one site off as another is now really getting out of hand.

Only time will tell if Grooveshark.io will magically transform into a proper replacement for the now defunct site, complete with playlist and community features for example, but it seems unlikely.

As things stand Grooveshark.io appears to be just a re-badged/re-skinned clone of MP3Juices.se, a low-traffic clone of the original MP3Juices. In the scheme of things it's hardly likely to be an important target for the RIAA, except for one small detail. The labels now own all of Grooveshark's intellectual property – brand names and trademarks included...

canopic jug writes:

An SSD stored without power can start to lose data in as little as a single week on the shelf, depending on several factors. When most drives storage were mechanical, there was little chance of data loss or corruption so quickly as long as the environment in the storage enclosure maintained reasonable thresholds. The same is not true for SSDs and the Joint Electron Device Engineering Council (JEDEC), which defines standards for the microelectronics industry including standards for SSDs, shows in a presentation that for every 5 degrees C (9 degrees F) rise in temperature beyond the optimal where the SSD is stored the data retention period is approximately halved.

In a presentation by Alvin Cox on JEDEC's website titled "JEDEC SSD Specifications Explained" [PDF warning], graphs on slide 27 show that for every 5 degrees C (9 degrees F) rise in temperature where the SSD is stored, the retention period is approximately halved. For example, if a client application SSD is stored at 25 degrees C (77 degrees F) it should last about 2 years on the shelf under optimal conditions. If that temperature goes up 5 degrees C, the storage standard drops to 1 year.

[...] When you receive a computer system for storage in legal hold, drive operating and ambient storage temperature are probably not the first things on tap to consider. You cannot control the materials that comprise the drive and the prior use of the drive. You can control the ambient temperature of the storage which will potentially aid in data retention. You can also ensure that power is supplied to the drives while in storage. More importantly, you can control how the actual data is retained.

[...] What started this look into SSDs? An imaging job of a laptop SSD left in storage for well over the 3-month minimum retention period quoted by the manufacturer of the drive before it was turned over to us. This drive had a large number of bad sectors identified during the imaging period. Not knowing the history, I did not consider the possibility of data loss due to the drive being in storage. Later, I learned that the drive was functioning well when it had been placed into storage. When returned to its owner a couple of months after the imaging, the system would not even recognize the drive as a valid boot device. Fortunately, the user data and files were preserved in the drive image that had been taken, thus there was no net loss.

Now imagine a situation in which an SSD was stored in legal hold where the data was no longer available for imaging, much less use in court. Ignorance of the technology is no excuse, and I am sure the opposing counsel would enjoy the opportunity to let the court know of the "negligent" evidence handling in the matter.

Ethanol-fueled's Hairy Palms writes:

The Independent reports:

Psychologist and professor emeritus at Stanford University Phillip Zimbardo (who led the team of researchers who conducted the Stanford Prison Experiment) has made the warnings, which form a major part of his latest book, Man (Dis)Connected.

Zimbardo says (in this TED talk) there is a "crisis" amongst young men, a high number of whom are experiencing a "new form of addiction" to excessive use of pornography and video games. Citing the research he and his team conducted for the book, he says: "It begins to change brain function. It begins to change the reward centre of the brain, and produces a kind of excitement and addiction."

An article from Psychology Today, however, argues that there are no demonstrable scientific links between porn consumption and the disputed phenomenon called 'Porn-Induced Erectile Dysfunction.'

Could this problem be manifesting itself as the rise of the Hikikomori?

darkfeline writes in with an article from ArsTechnica:

It’s not just popular imagination: mosquitoes bite some people more than others. We don't really understand why, but a recent paper in PLOS One suggests that genes could play a role in the attraction.

We’ve known for a while that smell is at least a partial explanation for why some people are mosquito fodder while others return from the outdoors unscathed. A number of different studies have found that differences in body odor are related to interest from mosquitoes. What we don’t properly understand is what causes those differences in smell.

A widespread myth is that certain foods can repel or attract mosquitoes, but there’s no clear explanation for how diet could change attraction levels, write the authors of the new study. What evidence we have seems to lean away from food as a factor. This makes sense: if mosquitoes use smell to find a suitable meal, they’d evolve to sniff out stable smells, not smells that change with every meal.