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takyon writes:

Seagate has put a new lower limit on the maximum amount of NAND flash that can be crammed into a 3.5" enclosure, by demonstrating a 60 TB solid state drive:

With the Nytro XP7200 moving toward production, Seagate has brought out another SSD tech demo with eye-catching specifications. The unnamed SAS SSD packs 60TB of 3D TLC into a 3.5" drive. In order to connect over a thousand dies of Micron's 3D TLC NAND to a single SSD controller, Seagate has introduced ONFi bridge chips to multiplex the controller's NAND channels across far more dies than would otherwise be possible. The rest of the specs for the 60TB SSD look fairly mundane and make for a drive that's better suited to read-intensive workloads, but the capacity puts even the latest hard drives to shame.

The 60TB SSD is currently just a technology demonstration, and won't be appearing as a product until next year. When it does, it will probably have a very tiny market, but for now it will give Seagate some bragging rights.

Previously: Seagate Unveils Fastest Ever Solid State Drive

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

Common Dreams reports

In a much-hailed, if modestly problematic, act of righteous revenge, [on Thursday August 4,] an African-American inmate allegedly sucker-punched [...] Dylann Roof--an act that sparked much online praise for the "vigilante hero", a fundraiser for donations to his commissary account, and, finally, the posting of his $100,000 bond by a supporter.

Roof is in protective custody at the Charleston County Detention Center for killing nine African-American churchgoers in South Carolina in 2015. He was in the shower when Dwayne Stafford, a 26-year-old inmate reportedly doing time for either weed violations or strong arm burglary, allegedly got out of his cell, reached Roof, and landed a couple of punches to his face. The sheriff said Roof was attacked "for no reason", which many would argue was less than accurate.

Roof suffered only minor injuries, and his lawyer declined to press charges.

[...] The next day, 18 months after he'd originally been arrested, an anonymous supporter posted [Stafford's] bond, and on Friday he was reportedly freed.

I find that heavy.com typically has the facts quickly on violent crimes.

Previous: [Racially-Motivated Mass Murder in] Charleston, SC

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takyon writes:

A class of materials previously thought to be exclusively man-made has been discovered in coal mines:

One of the hottest new materials is a class of porous solids known as metal-organic frameworks, or MOFs. These man-made materials were introduced in the 1990s, and researchers around the world are working on ways to use them as molecular sponges for applications such as hydrogen storage, carbon sequestration, or photovoltaics.

Now, a surprising discovery by scientists in Canada and Russia reveals that MOFs also exist in nature -- albeit in the form of rare minerals found so far only in Siberian coal mines.

The finding, published in the journal Science Advances, "completely changes the normal view of these highly popular materials as solely artificial, 'designer' solids," says senior author Tomislav Friščić, an associate professor of chemistry at McGill University in Montreal. "This raises the possibility that there might be other, more abundant, MOF minerals out there."

Minerals with metal-organic framework structures (open, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1600621)

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c0lo writes:

Australian Broadcast Corp reports:

Research released from RMIT [Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology] University has found gaming helps boost results in maths, science and reading.

But researchers said scrolling through Facebook, Instagram or chat sites had the reverse effect, by hindering academic success in high school.
...
Associate Professor Posso used data from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) to analyse the online habits of 12,000 Australian 15 year olds, which he then compared to their academic results.

He said the PISA data revealed that online gaming helped young people develop analytical and problem-solving skills.
...
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the study found spending hours on social media was mostly wasted time for teenagers, in terms of academic performance.

Australian teenagers who used Facebook or chat sites every day scored 20 points worse in maths than students who never used social media, the research said.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Cringley speculates like hell:

Delta Airlines last night suffered a major power outage at its data center in Atlanta that led to a systemwide shutdown of its computer network, stranding airliners and canceling flights all over the world. You already know that. What you may not know, however, is the likely role in the crisis of IT outsourcing and offshoring.

Do any Soylentils have inside/better information?

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Fluffeh writes:

The Census and Australian Bureau of Statistics websites have crashed on their most important day of the year [Census day for Australians], leaving Australians frustrated and unable to complete their form online. Many trying to log on to the Census and ABS sites were met with an error message on Tuesday evening saying the site could not be reached.

In a first, the census requires a full name to be filled in, though many including politicians are concerned about privacy issues. Crossbench senators including Nick Xenophon, Scott Ludlam and Sarah Hanson-Young are pledging not to comply with rules for the census will be treated like any other citizen and risk fines of $180 per day, the Australian Bureau of Statistics said on Tuesday.

Some took to Twitter to slam the ABS, with one user sarcastically saying they were "definitely technically competent enough to keep our most private data safe."

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

The Los Angeles Times reports

Pete Fountain [born Pierre Dewey LaFontaine Jr.], the goateed clarinetist who became a global ambassador of New Orleans jazz with his flawlessly slippery technique and joyful sound, died Saturday of heart failure while in hospice care in New Orleans.

[...] Fountain combined the Swing Era sensibility of jazz clarinetist Benny Goodman with the down-home, freewheeling style characteristic of traditional New Orleans jazz to become a national star in the 1950s, when he was hired as a featured soloist on the "The Lawrence Welk Show".

[...] After Fountain played a typically loose and limber arrangement of the Christmas song "Silver Bells" during one show, the band leader known as the "Champagne music maker" fired Fountain, he noted in his autobiography, "A Closer Walk With Pete Fountain".

"Champagne and bourbon don't mix", Fountain quipped about the incident to an interviewer later.

[...] Fountain [...] often performed at his own club in New Orleans' French Quarter, regaling audiences with his performances of New Orleans standards, gospel songs, and reworked versions of pop hits.

The Washington Post continues

Pete Fountain, whose rousing performances on clarinet made him a star of Dixieland music, a familiar figure on television and in nightclubs, and one of the most popular musical ambassadors of his native New Orleans, died Aug. 6 in his home town. He was 86.

[...] From 1957 to 1959, when Mr. Fountain was a standout soloist on The Lawrence Welk Show, he was perhaps the most widely recognized jazz musician on TV.

[...] Known for his shaved head, goatee, and dapper wardrobe, Mr. Fountain was as effervescent as his music. For years, he owned Crescent City nightclubs in which he held court as the bandleader, featured performer, and raconteur.

Few musicians, with the possible exceptions of trumpeter Al Hirt and the ­members of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, were so deeply identified with the early music of New Orleans, the birthplace of jazz.

He appeared nearly 40 times at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and was a guest on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show more than 50 times. He performed at five White House state dinners and before Pope John Paul II during a 1987 papal visit to New Orleans.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

NASA has caught on to the High Dynamic Range craze:

While thousands turned out watch NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) recently complete a full-scale test of its booster, few were aware of the other major test occurring simultaneously. NASA's High Dynamic Range Stereo X (HiDyRS-X) project, a revolutionary high-speed, high dynamic range camera, filmed the test, recording propulsion video data in never before seen detail.

The HiDyRS-X project originated from a problem that exists when trying to film rocket motor tests. Rocket motor plumes, in addition to being extremely loud, are also extremely bright, making them difficult to record without drastically cutting down the exposure settings on the camera. Doing so, however, darkens the rest of the image, obscuring other important components on the motor.

[...] When the team reviewed the camera footage, they saw a level of detail on par with the other successful HiDyRS-X tests. The team saw several elements never before caught on film in an engine test. "I was amazed to see the ground support mirror bracket tumbling and the vortices shedding in the plume," Conyers says. The team was able to gather interesting data from the slow motion footage, and Conyers also discovered something else by speeding up the playback. "I was able to clearly see the exhaust plume, nozzle and the nozzle fabric go through its gimbaling patterns, which is an expected condition, but usually unobservable in slow motion or normal playback rates."

The camera was developed as part of the Game Changing Development Program. An enhanced version is already in the works. Video on YouTube. Here is a stabilized version without the slow motion.

Also submitted by fork(2) who noted coverage in Gizmodo:

According to a statement from NASA, scientists tried out the camera while testing its booster, QM-2. They monitored the camera from a safe distance, but its automatic timer failed to go off, meaning scientists had to start it manually.

And apparently, the force of the booster test was so great that it disconnected the camera's power source. So NASA got confirmation that its camera works, but also that its rocket is very powerful.

Original Submission #1
Original Submission #2

takyon writes:

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/netflix-efficient-https-video-streams,32420.html

Netflix announced that it has implemented efficient HTTPS encryption for its video streams. To this point, the company has used only HTTPS to protect user information. Netflix has been reluctant to adopt HTTPS for its video streams so far because delivering video is already a bandwidth-heavy task, and adding encryption on top of that risked adding too much overhead. To solve this problem, the company searched for the ideal cipher and its fastest implementation.

Netflix eventually chose the the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) cipher in Galois/Counter Mode (GCM), which is available only in TLS 1.2 and later. The company chose GCM over the Cipher Block Chaining (CBC) method because it can encrypt and authenticate the message simultaneously, whereas AES-CBC requires an additional pass over the data to generate keyed-hash message authentication code (HMAC). The latter can still be used as fallback for older browsers and client software that don't support TLS 1.2. However, it shouldn't be too long until virtually all Netflix users can play video streams over TLS 1.2 or later.

The company also tested which were the fastest implementations of AES-GCM in various TLS libraries such as OpenSSL, Google's BoringSSL, and Intel's Intelligent Storage Acceleration Library (ISA-L). The implementations had to work best with AES-NI, the instruction set for Intel and AMD processors that significantly accelerates encryption and decryption. [...] Netflix then tested the BoringSSL and ISA-L AES-GCM implementations and compared them with a baseline OpenSSL implementation. Both managed to increase the performance over the baseline OpenSSL implementation by 30%. Ultimately, Netflix chose the ISA-L library for slightly better performance than BoringSSL. The company is now optimistic that it can add HTTPS encryption to all of its streaming clients without suffering too much of a performance hit compared to the unencrypted versions.

Original Submission

Open4D writes:

The Telegraph reports: First new asthma pill in 20 years hailed as 'wonder drug' by sufferers

The new drug, called Fevipiprant, works by stopping inflammatory cells getting into the airways while also repairing damage to prevent attacks. It is likely to halve the number of severe attacks, and potentially save hundreds of lives each year. Asthma charities said the new medication showed 'massive promise,' while sufferers trialing the drug said it had changed their lives.

"A unique feature of this study was how it included measurements of symptoms, lung function using breathing tests, sampling of the airway wall, and CT scans of the chest to give a complete picture of how the new drug works," said Professor Christopher Brightling, Clinical Professor in Respiratory Medicine at the University of Leicester. "Most treatments might improve some of these features of disease, but with Fevipiprant improvements were seen with all of the types of tests"

[...] The drug, which is produced by the pharmaceutical company Novaratis[sic. Novartis], is now in phase three trials. Dr Samantha Walker, Director of Research and Policy at Asthma UK, said: "This research shows massive promise and should be greeted with cautious optimism. "More research is needed and we're a long way off seeing a pill for asthma being made available over the pharmacy counter, but it's an exciting development and one which, in the long term, could offer a real alternative to current treatments."

But in an additional quote reported in the Guardian, Brightling seems to indicate more optimism than Walker for a quick turnaround: 'If further trials confirm the drug's potential, it could become available to patients on prescription from a doctor in "more than two but less than three years' time"'. If you want to get an idea of significance of a 'phase three trial', the NHS has an overview of phases one to four.

Additional Coverage:

pharmatimes.com,
The Lancet , and
abstract on PubMed.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The Shoubu supercomputer at RIKEN in Japan continues to lead the Green500 supercomputer efficiency list, but at a lower power efficiency than previously measured now that more processors have been added. Power consumption of Shoubu has tripled from 50.32 kW to 150 kW, and efficiency has declined from 7.03158 gigaflops per Watt to 6.67384 gigaflops per Watt. Say goodbye to that 7 GFLOPS/W milestone for a little while.

Another system at RIKEN, Satsuki, has taken the #2 spot, with 6.19522 GFLOPS/W. Both of these RIKEN supercomputers use Intel Xeon CPUs and PEZY-SCnp "manycore" accelerators. The world's fastest supercomputer, China's Sunway TaihuLight, takes the #3 spot at 6.0513 GFLOPS/W. That supercomputer solely uses a homegrown 260-core processor and consumes a total of 15.371 MW of power.

Despite little movement near the top of the list, there are many new entries this time around:

The Satsuki and TaihuLight supercomputers are the only new entries in the top 10. Overall, there are 157 new systems in the June 2016 edition of the Green500, representing nearly a third of the list. Aside from those systems mentioned, the remaining seven supercomputers in the top 10 use GPUs as accelerators paired with Xeon CPUs. The most energy-efficient systems continue to be dominated by heterogeneous systems like these. In the current list, 40 of the top 50 systems employ some sort of accelerator.

[...] China has 21 of the top 50 greenest supercomputers, while the US claims 8 such systems. Germany has 5 of the top 50 systems, with Japan and France each claiming 4 systems. Looking at the entire list, China has 168 systems, the US has 165, Japan has 29, Germany has 26, and France has 18.

The average energy efficiency in the current list is 1116.8 MFLOPS/Watt or a little over 1 GFLOPS/Watt. While Shoubu, the greenest supercomputer, is more than 6 times as efficient as the average, the goal of a 20 MW exaflop system would require an energy efficiency of 50 GFLOPS/Watt. Using the current trend line, the first 20 MW supercomputer capable of an exaflop would not appear until after 2022.

The TOP500 and Green500 lists have "merged", but the old site is being maintained.

Previously: Shoubu Supercomputer Tops Green500 List at Over 7 Gigaflops Per Watt
TOP500 Analysis Shows "Nothing Wrong with Moore's Law" and the November 2015 Green500 List
TOP500 and Green500 Lists to "Merge"

Original Submission

n1 writes:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/aug/08/census-privacy-fears-nick-xenophon-to-withhold-name-in-push-for-test-case

The independent senator Nick Xenophon says he will refuse to include his name on his census form on Tuesday, knowing he could be prosecuted for it, because he is not convinced the national census does not present a huge privacy risk.

He says he is willing to make himself a test case to challenge the government's ability to prosecute Australians for withholding their name from the census and he has not changed his mind despite speaking to the chief statistician of the Bureau of Statistics.

"I understand that, by refusing to provide my name, I will be given a notice under the act to comply and the $180-a-day fine starts from then," Xenophon said on Monday. "I will contest any such notice and, by doing so, I will in effect turn it into a test case for the ability of this request.

"In the meantime, I will be seeking amendments to section 14 of the act so that a person cannot be prosecuted if they fail to provide their name. In other words, it will ensure such information is unambiguously non-compulsory.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Evidence mounts that neutrinos are the key to the universe's existence.

New experimental results show a difference in the way neutrinos and antineutrinos behave, which could explain why matter persists over antimatter.

The results, from the T2K experiment in Japan, show that the degree to which neutrinos change their type differs from their antineutrino counterparts. This is important because if all types of matter and antimatter behave the same way, they should have obliterated each other shortly after the Big Bang.

So far, when scientists have looked at matter-antimatter pairs of particles, no differences have been large enough to explain why the universe is made up of matter — and exists — rather than being annihilated by antimatter. Neutrinos and antineutrinos are one of the last matter-antimatter pairs to be investigated since they are difficult to produce and measure, but their strange behaviour hints that they could be the key to the mystery.

Neutrinos (and antineutrinos) come in three 'flavours' of tau, muon and electron, each of which can spontaneously change into the other as the neutrinos travel over long distances. The latest results, announced today by a team of researchers including physicists from Imperial College London, show more muon neutrinos changing into electron neutrinos than muon antineutrinos changing into electron antineutrinos.

This difference in muon-to-electron changing behaviour between neutrinos and antineutrinos means they would have different properties, which could have prevented them from destroying each other and allow the universe to exist.

[...] The latest results were concluded from relatively few data points, meaning there is still a one in 20 chance that the results are due to random chance, rather than a true difference in behaviour. However, the result is still exciting for the scientists involved.

Dr Morgan Wascko, international co-spokesperson for the T2K experiment from the Department of Physics at Imperial said: "This is an important first step towards potentially solving one of the biggest mysteries in science. T2K is the first experiment that is able to study neutrino and antineutrino oscillation under the same conditions, and the disparity we have observed is, while not yet statistically significant, very intriguing."

The results were presented at the 38th International Conference on High Energy Physics in Chicago. More detailed information is available at the T2K website and in the presentation (pdf).

Original Submission

fork(2) writes:

SpaceNews reports that the US Air Force will award United Launch Alliance a contract to build two Delta 4 Heavy rockets for National Reconnaissance Office missions. The award comes without competitive bidding (think SpaceX).

The announcement comes as the Air Force is working to re-introduce competition into the national security launch industry. In April, SpaceX won the first of nine launch contracts the Defense Department intends to put out for bid in the next three years.

But in this case, in a pre-solicitation notice posted to the Federal Business Opportunities website Aug. 4, the Air Force said it opted for a sole-source contract for classified National Reconnaissance Office missions slated to launch in 2020 and 2023. The NRO builds and operates the country's spy satellites.

The Air Force said it chose ULA due to the timing and complexity of the integration of the satellites to the rockets, unique requirements, and the need to have a certified launch vehicle by the award date.

ULA is "currently the only responsible source," the notice said.

Conventional wisdom is that the ULA Delta 4 Heavy rocket is a competitor for SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket in these types of launches.

But SpaceX, which sued the Air Force in federal court in 2014 for the right to compete for national security missions, said it understood the Air Force's decision.

"These particular missions had very specific technical requirements," John Taylor, a SpaceX spokesman said in an email to SpaceNews. "We worked closely with the DoD and the USAF on this action and decided jointly it was the right approach."

Based on a previous statement by ULA that a Delta 4 Heavy rocket costs around $350 million (US), it's reasonable to assume that the value of the contract is at least roughly $700 million (US).

Original Submission

cafebabe writes:

Published in 1965, the title of this book hasn't aged well but fits into a formerly popular meme. This fictional book is set in a future where one conglomerate, The Joymaker Corporation, runs a network of speech recognition cell phones, rapid delivery services, job boards, restaurants, healthcare and other services. Indeed, it is fairly much an amalgamation of all of the biggest contemporary tech and Internet companies plus many of the foreseeable innovations expected within the next five years or so.

The protagonist, Charles Forrester, is transported from the present to this future in a manner very much like Buck Rogers: frozen for 500 years and then revived. (This plot point is largely irrelevant with the exception that few of us may have to be frozen or wait that long to see it happen.) Forrester struggles in a world of unknown unknowns where apartments are rented by the day and collaborative multicast media makes shared nicknames ubiquitous. He can ask his Joymaker anything but he just doesn't know what to ask.

The service industry is largely filled with life-like androids which all interface with The Joymaker Corporation. If you so desire, you can do your banking via your waitress or do your job hunting via your nurse. Indeed, when a fad or emergency occurs, androids may be deployed with incorrect uniforms. "We are all alike, Man Forrester," says one waitress from the very middle of the uncanny valley. In some regards, the outright psychopathy of Westworld is a welcome alternative to this economically-efficient dystopia which covers the economics of cryogenics, employment, psychological suitability thereof, leisure, success, destitution and alienation.

[Continues...]