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"gewg_" writes:

Coreboot is an Open Source firmware alternative to proprietary stuff that contains e.g. Secure Boot or binary blobs or malware pre-installed by a whitebox vendor.

Phoronix reports

Coreboot developers are taking to their Git tree and dropping support for old motherboards and chipsets.

Yesterday saw the removal in Git of many Tyan motherboards as well as some from IWILL and Newisys and IBM.

Per the recent mailing list discussion, they are starting to remove code for obsolete/end-of-life motherboards and chipsets. Generally this is coming down to getting rid of hardware older than ten years or code that's not being maintained, such as the VIA code with VIA Technologies no longer appearing involved with Coreboot.

Of course, thanks to Git, if you have a stake in any of the removed hardware you can always go back and fetch the older code.

Coreboot developers are also looking at ways to figure out what Coreboot code is actually still being used versus dormant motherboard ports.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Cornell biomedical engineers have developed specialized white blood cells - dubbed "super natural killer cells" - that seek out cancer cells in lymph nodes with only one purpose: destroy them. This breakthrough halts the onset of metastasis, according to a new Cornell study published this month in the journal Biomaterials.

"We want to see lymph node metastasis become a thing of the past," said Michael R. King, the Daljit S. and Elaine Sarkaria Professor of Biomedical Engineering and senior author of the paper, "Super Natural Killer Cells That Target Metastases in the Tumor Draining Lymph Nodes".

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The Register's Chris Mellor interviewed Robert Novak, who most recently spent 8 years at Sun Microsystems, worked as Director of Enterprise Systems at Supermicro from July 2007 to April 2012, then moved to Nexenta as Director of Systems Architecture at Nexenta until December 2014, then was at HP "until recently", where he is now "searching for funding for a startup he's been working on since July, and has filed two patents for some new ways of managing object storage."

And what sensational clickbait does Mellor use to start the interview? "Why is block storage dead?" Novak then proceeds to compare block storage to Hollerith punch cards, and concludes with "That is why I contend that the 'block' storage that we use for computers is 125 years old." He then gushes about the Seagate Kinetic drive, complete with "No tickee, no laundry" analogies, and then somehow asserts that "object storage can actually outperform block storage" with lossy recollections of the history of hard disk drives, and claims that a "bit-torrent effect" can be achieved with object storage. He then proceeds to belittle backups as unnecessary, and gushes about "Ethernet-attached storage devices that use stateless UDP access."

I'm not candy-coating this: the interview is garbage, the "block storage is dead" viewpoint is ridiculous, and no concrete supporting evidence was brought to the interview, though I do feel that the interview itself is a window into the fanaticism of tech startup entrepreneurs attempting to push and shove their way into the marketplace, regardless of how ridiculous their claims may be. I felt that there were far more statements grounded in fact in the comments section, such as, "A key problem with Kinetic [drives] is the CPU overhead on the client side. Let's assume I access many drives or flash: it would eat up all my CPU, versus a SAS HBA or NVMe, which do 6 GB/s all in hardware." Or this one: "Oh, and accessing storage congests networks. Blindly using UDP is fatally flawed in nontrivial installations. Layering one of the emerging congestion control protocols over UDP is fine. But I predict that [in] 100 years we will still have physical devices which store linear arrays of bytes, and within them we will store smaller linear arrays of bytes. If block storage is dead, long live block storage II!"

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Device drivers commonly execute in the kernel to achieve high performance and easy access to kernel services. However, this comes at the price of decreased reliability and increased programming difficulty. Driver programmers are unable to use user-mode development tools and must instead use cumbersome kernel tools. Faults in kernel drivers can cause the entire operating system to crash. User-mode drivers have long been seen as a solution to this problem, but suffer from either poor performance or new interfaces that require a rewrite of existing drivers.

This paper introduces the Microdrivers architecture that achieves high performance and compatibility by leaving critical path code in the kernel and moving the rest of the driver code to a user-mode process. This allows data-handling operations critical to I/O performance to run at full speed, while management operations such as initialization and configuration run at reduced speed in user-level. To achieve compatibility, we present DriverSlicer, a tool that splits existing kernel drivers into a kernel-level component and a user-level component using a small number of programmer annotations. Experiments show that as much as 65% of driver code can be removed from the kernel without affecting common-case performance, and that only 1-6 percent of the code requires annotations.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Millennials and younger generations expect to use their own technologies and biological data to help doctors deliver more personal care.

Caring for a rapidly ageing population is challenging. Experts working to revitalize healthcare for the 21 century are tackling this challenge by shifting from a one-size-fits-all to a more personalized healthcare approach, one that is heavily influenced by how young people use technology.

To combat skyrocketing healthcare costs for an American population of 326 million people spanning six generations, experts are turning to bioscience and new technologies as well as to young, tech-savvy digital natives who are already nudging healthcare into the Internet age.

"We're already seeing that millennials and younger generations won't be the same kinds of patients as their parents," said Eric Dishman, an Intel Fellow and general manager of Intel's Health and Life Sciences.

"These 18-to-34 year olds already expect to have data and tools to help them manage their health just like they do for everything else in their lives."

Original Submission

"exec" writes:

Evidence shows that women are less self-assured than men—and that to succeed, confidence matters as much as competence. Here's why, and what to do about it.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/05/the-confidence-gap/359815/

-- submitted from IRC

The elusive nature of confidence has intrigued us ever since we started work on our 2009 book, Womenomics, which looked at the many positive changes unfolding for women. To our surprise, as we talked with women, dozens of them, all accomplished and credentialed, we kept bumping up against a dark spot that we couldn't quite identify, a force clearly holding them back. Why did the successful investment banker mention to us that she didn't really deserve the big promotion she'd just got? What did it mean when the engineer who'd been a pioneer in her industry for decades told us offhandedly that she wasn't sure she was really the best choice to run her firm's new big project? In two decades of covering American politics as journalists, we realized, we have between us interviewed some of the most influential women in the nation. In our jobs and our lives, we walk among people you would assume brim with confidence. And yet our experience suggests that the power centers of this nation are zones of female self-doubt—that is, when they include women at all.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

A bunch of small Welsh business folk are playing the likes of Amazon and Google at their own game, by proposing to move their tax domiciles offshore – with the connivance of the publicly funded Beeb.

According to an upcoming BBC documentary – The Town That Went Offshore – five businesses based in Crickhowell, Powys have banded together to try and emulate their much bigger rivals. They include a baker, a coffee shop, an optician, an outdoors retailer and, strangely, a smoker.

Apparently, coffee shop owner Jo Carthew reckons "we've put our heads together, and worked out a way to mimic these big tax dodgers. It's jolly clever."

Local optician Irena Kolaleva said that having worked out a way to register themselves abroad, "we've got a moral obligation".

We assume Irena means "a moral obligation" to expose such financial chicanery, rather than lumping herself in with Goldmans' boss Lloyd Blankfien, who claimed back in 2009 that bankers "do God's work".

Original Submission

FunnyItWorkedLastTime writes:

Guess we came a bit late to this news, our subspace receiver must have failed..

After a promising 1st episode were produced of this Star Trek, the producers are looking towards crowdfunding again to expand the series with a further two episodes.
ST:Renegades follows the same universe set out in DS9/Voyager and pick up in year 2388 a decade after Voyagers return.
Many well loved trek actors return to reprise their roles in the ambitious fan production incl. Walter Koenig(Chekov), Terry Farell(Jadzia). Robert Beltran(Chakotay), Tim Russ(Tuvov). Just to name a few.
You can watch the first episode on Youtube here and judge for yourself is this is a worthy alternative or supplement to CBS new paywalled series.

The first episode is available on Youtube.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

During the Inca civilization, which thrived in South America before the arrival of Europeans, these ritual sacrifices were known as "capococha." One of the victims was a 7-year-old boy who lived more than 500 years ago. His frozen, mummified remains were discovered at the edge of Argentina's Aconcagua, the tallest mountain outside of Asia.

Hikers found the mummy in 1985. Now, 30 years later, scientists have sequenced some of the boy's DNA and used it to learn more about the rise and extent of the Inca Empire. Their findings were published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports.
...
Those results placed the boy "perfectly" within a genetic population, or haplogroup, known as C1b that is typical of Native Americans, the study authors reported. Previous research has established that one of the people who first populated the Americas brought this genetic signature from Beringia (the land mass that once connected Siberia and Alaska) or the northern tip of North America.

However, the boy's mitochondrial genome had 10 distinct mutations that had not been seen together before in either ancient or modern DNA. The researchers named this branch of the haplotype "C1bi" (the "i" stands for Inca). The fact that his genetic signature was unique offers further evidence that the DNA sample wasn't contaminated, the researchers wrote.

Some of those 10 mutations are or were shared by others, and the researchers used that information to make some educated guesses about the boy's life and times. Most likely, his ancestors had been in South America for a long time, originating near the Andes about 14,000 years ago, they wrote.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

As smartphones become people's primary computers and their primary cameras, there is growing demand for mobile versions of image-processing applications.

Image processing, however, can be computationally intensive and could quickly drain a cellphone's battery. Some mobile applications try to solve this problem by sending image files to a central server, which processes the images and sends them back. But with large images, this introduces significant delays and could incur costs for increased data usage.

At the Siggraph Asia conference last week, researchers from MIT, Stanford University, and Adobe Systems presented a system that, in experiments, reduced the bandwidth consumed by server-based image processing by as much as 98.5 percent, and the power consumption by as much as 85 percent.

The system sends the server a highly compressed version of an image, and the server sends back an even smaller file, which contains simple instructions for modifying the original image.

Original Submission

"gewg_" writes:

The European Union's interoperability page reports:

The council of the Swiss capital of Bern on 12 November ordered the IT department to end its dependence on proprietary software. The council halved the city's request for a six-year [license] contract and insisted on an exit plan. A majority of [councilors] wants the city to replace proprietary software by open source solutions such as Linux and LibreOffice.

The exit plan should be based on pilot projects that consider alternatives, the city council decided. With 53 of the total 67 votes, the council changed the city's desktop software plans. The [councilors] want applications to become independent from PC operating system or office productivity tools. And in late 2018, when desktop operating and office [licenses] expire, Bern has to publish an open call for tender, using vendor-neutral specifications.

"Basically, from now on, the IT department may only procure and implement solutions that are platform-independent", the [councilors] agreed on Thursday.

[...] In a statement on 13 November, the Swiss Parliamentary Group on Digital Sustainability welcomed the change in IT strategy of the capital. The group offered to help the city with its exit plan, pointing to documentation such as a checklist to help public administrations to procure open source software solutions.

Original Submission

hybristic writes:

CloudFlare has released a new feature - Universal DNSSEC. For those unaware DNSSEC is an attempt to add a layer of trust to the Domain Name System, or DNS, by creating a chain of trust between the root domain and the TLD (Top Level Domain). This comes a few weeks removed from the open beta in which they claimed to have protected 150 million people and 21 billion web requests. How does the community feel about such an aggressive push for DNSSEC?

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Drones could become useful for surveillance and remote monitoring in many industries, and perhaps one day will even ferry the latest Amazon order to your front door. But there's one big limiting factor: drones can stay in the air for only so long on a charge.

Not the latest model developed by the Boston-based drone maker CyPhy Works, though. Called Parc, the drone can perform aerial surveillance indefinitely, using a "microfilament" that transmits power and data. Of course the fact that it's tethered means the drone can't travel very far. CyPhy Works expects it to be used for reconnaissance or as a communications relay.

Wind?

Original Submission

tonyPick writes:

Hackaday has a story on the proof of concept for a new low cost Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT) system, Tomo.

Tomo uses pair-wise impedance measurements from a ring of eight surface electrodes to reconstruct the internal geometry of the users arm. This provides a low cost hand gesture recognition system, and an example application in a smartwatch is demonstrated.

While this doesn't have the resolution of an X-ray or CT, there's still a large amount of information that can be gathered from using this method. Different structures in the body, like bone, will have a different impedance than muscle or other tissues. Even flexed muscle changes its impedance from its resting state, and the team have used their sensor as proof-of-concept for hand gesture recognition.

The Tomo project page contains additional details, as well as a decent definition of Tomography (quoted below) and a link to the Carnegie Mellon University paper (PDF) which goes into details on the hardware prototype.

Tomography analyzes the inner structure and composition of objects by examining them with excitations such as electricity and radiation in a cross-sectional manner. Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT), proposed in 1978, uses pair-wise impendence measurements from surface electrodes surrounding an object to recover the impedance distribution of the inner structure. Like other tomographic methods – such as CT scans (x-rays), PET scans (gamma rays) and magnetic resonance imaging – medical EIT devices tend to be large and expensive, precluding integration into consumer electronics.

In this research, we describe our efforts to create a small, low-powered and low-cost EIT sensor, one that could be integrated into consumer worn devices, such as smartwatches. Achieving these design properties comes at the cost of reduced precision and resolution compared to medical EIT systems. However, as our work shows, our system is still able to resolve considerable detail. This ability to non-invasively look inside a user's body opens many new and interesting application possibilities. For example, muscles change their cross-sectional shape and impedance distribution when flexed. Therefore, as a proof-of-concept application domain, we use our EIT sensor for hand gesture recognition. We call this system Tomo – a sensing armband that can be worn on the wrist or arm.

Original Submission

"exec" dropped in this story from Wired:

WHEN FINISHED, SALESFORCE Tower will be the tallest building in San Francisco. For now, it's a big hole in the ground. And at the bottom of that hole is a new, massive concrete slab—14 feet thick, spread nearly an acre in breadth, and ready to support 1,070 feet of glass, steel ... and a lot more concrete.

Pouring it all took more than 18 hours on a cloudy San Francisco Sunday. An armada of trucks delivered nearly 49 million pounds of concrete and brontosaurine pumps vomited it into the hole while a small army of rubber-booted workers scurried about, directing the flow. It was one of the biggest, longest concrete pours in history.

And it's all to keep the building upright. "Skyscrapers are basically big sticks coming out of the ground, so obviously one concern is the whole thing toppling over," says Leonard Joseph, structural engineer at Thornton Tomasetti, a firm in Los Angeles. High wind or quaking earth can make buildings bend and wriggle, and if the wriggling takes the upper mass too far off center, the bottom of the building will begin to lift. This is called hinging, and it is very, very, bad: Buildings that hinge tend to collapse.

Holding back the hinge means attaching the structure to something big, solid, and subterranean. In places like Manhattan, developers can drill down and affix buildings directly to the island's shallow bedrock. But San Francisco's bedrock is below 300 feet of mud and clay, which is why the engineers for Salesforce Tower had to build a big, shallow, fake rock using concrete and metal.

As an aside, the longest continuous concrete pour took 49 hours.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission