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takyon writes:

Seagate will demo a 10 GB/s (sequential read speed) SSD at the Open Compute Project Summit 2016 in San Jose, California, from March 9-10:

Seagate is going to demonstrate a 10GB/sec PCI flash card that spews out bits like a fire hose on steroids at the coming Open Compute Project Summit.

There will actually be two cards shown: an 8-lane and a 16-lane product. Both are compatible with Facebook's Open Compute Project (OCP), which aims to drive down the costs of IT hardware components for hyperscale data centres. We are not told any performance details at all apart from the 10GB/sec throughput for the 16-lane card, which will make it the fastest SSD available, and a 6.7GB/sec throughput rating for the 8-lane card. Both use an NVMe interface.

Seagate's Brett Pemble, SSD products VP and GM, provided a canned quote: "Whether for consumer cloud or business applications, this SSD will help improve on demands for fast access to information, where split seconds drive incremental value gains."

Potential customers are thought to be large-scale cloud providers and web applications, weather modelling, and statistical trends analysis. It could be used to process data for object storage or real-time needs, according to Seagate.

Also at AnandTech.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

An unexpected mountain has been discovered on Ceres in images sent by NASA's Dawn orbiter:

One year ago, on March 6, 2015, NASA's Dawn spacecraft slid gently into orbit around Ceres, the largest body in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Since then, the spacecraft has delivered a wealth of images and other data that open an exciting new window to the previously unexplored dwarf planet.

"Ceres has defied our expectations and surprised us in many ways, thanks to a year's worth of data from Dawn. We are hard at work on the mysteries the spacecraft has presented to us," said Carol Raymond, deputy principal investigator for the mission, based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.

Among Ceres' most enigmatic features is a tall mountain the Dawn team named Ahuna Mons. This mountain appeared as a small, bright-sided bump on the surface as early as February 2015 from a distance of 29,000 miles (46,000 kilometers), before Dawn was captured into orbit. As Dawn circled Ceres at increasingly lower altitudes, the shape of this mysterious feature began to come into focus. From afar, Ahuna Mons looked to be pyramid-shaped, but upon closer inspection, it is best described as a dome with smooth, steep walls.

Dawn's latest images of Ahuna Mons, taken 120 times closer than in February 2015, reveal that this mountain has a lot of bright material on some of its slopes, and less on others. On its steepest side, it is about 3 miles (5 kilometers) high. The mountain has an average overall height of 2.5 miles (4 kilometers). It rises higher than Washington's Mount Rainier and California's Mount Whitney. Scientists are beginning to identify other features on Ceres that could be similar in nature to Ahuna Mons, but none is as tall and well-defined as this mountain.

"No one expected a mountain on Ceres, especially one like Ahuna Mons," said Chris Russell, Dawn's principal investigator at the University of California, Los Angeles. "We still do not have a satisfactory model to explain how it formed."

Original Submission

c0lo writes:

The Guardian reports:

A Bristol company is planning to create an official “period policy” designed to allow women to take time off without being stigmatised in the hope it will make its workplace more efficient and creative.

Bex Baxter, the director of Coexist, said the move [is] an attempt to synchronise work with the body’s natural cycles.

"I have managed many female members of staff over the years and I have seen women at work who are bent over double because of the pain caused by their periods. Despite this, they feel they cannot go home because they do not class themselves as unwell. And this is unfair. At Coexist we are very understanding. If someone is in pain – no matter what kind – they are encouraged to go home. But, for us, we wanted a policy in place which recognises and allows women to take time for their body’s natural cycle without putting this under the label of illness."

[...] "There is a misconception that taking time off makes a business unproductive – actually it is about synchronising work with the natural cycles of the body. For women, one of these is their menstrual cycles. Naturally, when women are having their periods they are in a winter state, when they need to regroup, keep warm and nourish their bodies."

[...] The spring section of the cycle immediately after a period is a time when women are actually three times as productive as usual.

[...] Baxter and her team plan to formulate the policy as part of a seminar at Hamilton House on 15 March called Pioneering Period Policy: Valuing Natural Cycles in the Workplace.

[...] “The purpose of this policy initiative is to create a positive approach to menstruation and the menstrual cycle that empowers women and men and supports the effectiveness and wellbeing of the organisation. To restore the menstrual cycle as the asset it is.”

She says her seminar will “present a radically new model of the menstrual cycle as an asset for your entire organisation”.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Researchers compared the maze navigation ability of rats, rats implanted with a wireless microstimulator, and a simple maze solving algorithm:

Rat cyborgs: The rats were implanted with a wireless microstimulator mounted on the back of the rat to deliver electric stimuli via microelectrodes into their somatosensory cortex and medial forebrain bundle, which releases dopamine to the nucleus accumbens and is a key node of the brain's reward system. The computer tracked the rats, analyzed the explored maze information, and decided when and how to intervene when the rats needed help in traversing unique paths and avoiding dead ends and loops (by stimulating the rats' left and right somatosensory cortex to prompt them to move left or right).

Performance of the rats, computer and rat-cyborgs were compared by evaluating how many times they visited the same location (steps), how many locations they visited, and total time spent to reach the target. Although the cyborgs and computers took roughly the same number of steps, the cyborgs took fewer than the rats, a sign of more efficient problem solving. The cyborgs also visited fewer locations than computers or rats, and took less time than the rats to solve the mazes.*

The researchers suggest that the experiment shows that optimal intelligence may reside in the integration of animals and computers.

In future work, the researchers plan to introduce more tasks and the complexity of tasks will be quantified. "To avoid excessive intervention with the rats, the strength of the computer's assistance will be graded," the authors say in the paper. "In addition, more practical rat cyborgs will be investigated: the web camera will be replaced by sensors mounted on rats, such as tiny camera, ultrasonic sensors, infrared sensors, electric compass, and so on, to perceive the real unknown environment in real time; and the computer-aided algorithms can be housed on a wireless backpack stimulator instead of in the computer."

Intelligence-Augmented Rat Cyborgs in Maze Solving (open, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0147754)

Original Submission

CoolHand writes:

Mame's announcement of freedom:

After 19 years, MAME [originally stood for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator -Ed.] is now available under an OSI-compliant and FSF-approved license! Many thanks to all of the contributors who helped this to go as smoothly as possible!

We have spent the last 10 months trying to contact all people that contributed to MAME as developers and external contributors and get information about desired license. We had limited choice to 3 that people already had dual-license MAME code with.

As a result, a great majority of files (over 90% including core files) are available under the 3-Clause BSD License but project as a whole is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2 or later (GPL-2.0+), since it contains code made available under multiple GPL-compatible licenses.

For those that don't know:

MAME's purpose is to preserve decades of software history. As electronic technology continues to rush forward, MAME prevents this important "vintage" software from being lost and forgotten. This is achieved by documenting the hardware and how it functions.

[This pertains strictly to the MAME software itself; getting ROM images that would run on MAME is a separate matter. -Ed.]

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

LJWorld reports on the Lawrence, Kansas school district's plans to use only openly licensed educational materials for a class; one of the first attempts in the country:

Several district administrators and teachers participated in a conference on [Open Knowledge] material in education [the week of February 22] as the district prepares to roll out its first class using only [Open Knowledge] sources.

The conference was part of a U.S. Department of Education campaign, #GoOpen, to encourage states, school districts, and educators to use openly licensed educational materials. In October, it was announced that the Lawrence school district was one of 10 districts nationwide to take up the #GoOpen challenge to replace at least one textbook with openly licensed educational resources within the year.

Angelique Nedved, assistant superintendent of teaching and learning, is one of the district administrators involved in the #GoOpen effort. Nedved previously said that the district already has about 20 courses that use openly licensed resources to some degree, but no course curriculum that relies entirely on such content.

District administrators have since selected seventh-grade English language arts as the subject area for the #GoOpen initiative, according to the USDE Office of Educational technology website. The goal is to launch the subject as the district's first to use entirely openly licensed material next school year.

Original Submission

Bobs writes:

Canadian province Ontario is taking the next step toward offering a standard income to all citizens: a Universal Basic Income pilot project, set to unroll this year.

The UBI is seen by some as a better, more efficient and effective replacement for a large collection of public services, (possibly including the minimum wage) and a way to mitigate reduced need for labor as automation eliminates jobs.

They are still working out the details but this could be the widest implementation yet, large enough to give meaningful, reality-based data and provide useful insights about how it might work at scale in other places.

Related: Silicon Valley Startup Funder Eyes Universal Basic Income
Technologists Propose 'Universal Basic Income' in Case Robots Take all our Jobs

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The Let's Encrypt Certificate Authority has issued its millionth certificate:

At 9:04am GMT today, the Let's Encrypt Certificate Authority issued its millionth certificate. This is an amazing success, coming only 3 months and 5 days since a beta version of the service became publicly available. We're very excited to be building a more secure and fully encrypted future for the World Wide Web.

A million certificates is in itself pretty good progress. But a single certificate can cover multiple domain names, and the million certificates Let's Encrypt has issued are actually valid for 2.5 million fully-qualified domain names, over 90% of which had never been reachable by browser-valid HTTPS before.

[...] EFF co-founded the Let's Encrypt CA with Mozilla and researchers from the University of Michigan. Akamai and Cisco provided significant financial support for the launch, and many other organizations have stepped up to sponsor the project since launch. If you'd like to help, you can donate to EFF or ISRG, or if you're a coder, help us to improve the server or client software.

Also at Tom's Hardware.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Guardtime, a startup that uses technology similar to that underpinning bitcoin to secure public and private data, has signed a deal with the Estonian government to secure all the country's 1 million health records with its technology.

Guardtime uses blockchain technology, made famous as the underpinning of bitcoin, to verify data and prove that it's trustworthy. It has created a network that citizens, private companies, and the government can also access to verify information on it. While similar to bitcoin's network, it is distinct and in fact predates the original white paper on bitcoin.

The company had revenues of $25 million last year, and has contracts with Ericsson, Lockheed Martin, and the US military.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The FBI has quietly revised its privacy rules for searching data involving Americans' international communications that was collected by the National Security Agency, US officials have confirmed to the Guardian.

A government civil liberties watchdog, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Group (PCLOB), alluded to the change in its recent overview of ongoing surveillance practices.

The watchdog confirmed in a 2014 report that the FBI is allowed direct access to the NSA's massive collections of international emails, texts and phone calls – which often include Americans on one end of the conversation. The activists also expressed concern that the FBI's "minimization" rules, for removing or limiting sensitive data that could identify Americans, did not reflect the bureau's easy access to the NSA's collected international communications.

Original Submission

danomac writes:

In recent news articles Microsoft has announced a sort of "restructuring" around its gaming platform. This included an announcement that they will be combining PC and Xbox Live platforms.

Now it appears Microsoft has started to close game studios - most notably Lionhead Studios (known for the Fable series. Fable Legends has been cancelled.) They have also announced other studios that are closing.

It seems Microsoft is sending a fairly clear message about getting out of gaming.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

researchers mixed the graphene oxide with water. They then printed the lattice framework on a surface of -25°C. The graphene is sandwiched between the layers of frozen ice, which act as a structural support.

After the process is completed, the lattice is dipped in liquid nitrogen, which helps form even stronger hydrogen bonds. The lattice is then placed in a freeze dryer, where the ice is changed into gas and removed. The end result is a complex, three-dimensional structure made of graphene aerogel that retains its shape at room temperature.

"By keeping the graphene in a cold environment, we were able to ensure that it retained the shape we designed. This is an important step toward making graphene a commercially viable material," says Dong Lin, assistant professor of industrial and manufacturing systems engineering at Kansas State University and the study's other corresponding author.

Traditional approaches mix graphene with polymer that is later removed with a heating process that can damage the graphene structure. Original study here (DOI: 10.1002/smll.201503524).

Original Submission

HughPickens.com writes:

The Independent reports that smartwatches that allow students to cheat on exams are being openly sold on Amazon. An advert for one such watch, called a "New 2016 Student 8GB cheating watch," is offered on Amazon for $51.68. "This watch is specifically designed for cheating on exams with a special programmed software. It is perfect for covertly viewing exam notes directly on your wrist, by storing text and pictures in the 8GB memory storage. It supports various file formats, such as: TXT, MP3, JPG, GIF, WAV, WMV, AVI, etc. It has an emergency button, so when you press it - the watch's screen display changes from text to a regular clock, and blocks all other buttons." The watch has garnered good reviews. "this is amazing. it helps me cheat on my test and it is smart and i never got caught," writes one reviewer.

Joe Sidders, the deputy head at Monkton Combe senior school, in Bath, told BBC News that such devices were making exams a "nightmare to administer". "I expect the hidden market for these sorts of devices is significant, and this offering on Amazon is just the tip of the iceberg." A spokesman for Amazon said the company did not want to comment on the sale of the cheating watches. But professors are striking back. "My microbiology professor does a watch check every time we have a test," says Abigail Lauze. "If it's not an old school analog it has to come off and go in the cell phone bin."

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Norway has just announced a new tool in its fight against transit emissions: a new network of bike highways.

As part of a plan announced last week, the country will spend a massive 8 billion Norwegian Kroner ($923 million) creating 10 broad, two-lane, cross-country bike tracks in and near Norway's nine largest cities, allowing longer-distance cyclists to travel with a speed and safety hitherto impossible. A key component of plans to slash Norway's transit emissions by half, the bike highway scheme still faces some resistance. Not only is cycling in Norway relatively uncommon by Scandinavian standards, but the new highways will be constructed in a mountainous country that is cold and dark for much of the year.

...These broad, twin-lane tracks will do more than offer protection, per se. They'll allow cyclists to speed up safely, riding at up to 40 kilometers (25 miles) per hour and thus making longer commutes feasible. If they succeed, they should take pressure off roads and public transit and help to cut Norway's fossil fuel use.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Verizon will pay $1.35 million to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) over its use of "supercookies". Under the terms of the settlement, Verizon will have to inform customers when supercookies are used, give an opt-out option, and receive consent before sharing/selling supercookies with a third party:

Verizon Wireless has agreed to pay a $1.35 million fine to settle with the Federal Communications Commission over allegations that it improperly used "supercookies." The unique identifiers, which Verizon uses to target advertising to its mobile users, remain on wireless devices even when a customer clears a devices cache.

Investigators had found that Verizon had been using "supercookies" since December 2012, but the company didn't disclose it was doing so until October 2014.

"Consumers care about privacy and should have a say in how their personal information is used, especially when it comes to who knows what they're doing online," FCC Enforcement Bureau Chief Travis LeBlanc said in a statement. "Privacy and innovation are not incompatible. This agreement shows that companies can offer meaningful transparency and consumer choice while at the same time continuing to innovate."

Previously: Under Senate Pressure, Verizon Plans Supercookie Opt-Out

Original Submission