Glyn Moody writes "In an interview, Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript and currently CIO at Mozilla, reveals that Microsoft tried to buy Netscape at the end of 1994. They were turned down because the offer was too low, but imagine if Netscape had accepted: no browser wars, no open Web standards, no Mozilla, no Firefox. How might the Web — and the world — have looked today if that had happened?"Trailrunner7 writes "The EFF, through the use of its SSL Observatory, has taken a look at the data from certificate revocation lists for SSL certificates in recent months, and found that there were four separate CAs compromised in the last four months. The only widely known CA compromise since June is the attack on DigiNotar this summer that completely compromised that company's CA infrastructure and eventually led to it being shut down. All of the major browser vendors were forced to revoke their trust in the DigiNotar root certificates and the attacker who claimed credit for the attack said that he also had compromised several other CAs. There are apparently three other CAs that have discovered compromises since June, but have not made them public."

Make Public = Out of Business?

Short of the companies wanting to the good/legal thing, how do you get them to make it public if it quickly puts them out of business? This is the same problem as with any security breach, except aggravated because the CAs basically have just five "customers" (the five major browsers), all of which compete in the realm of being the "safest" and so all five have to pull the root certificate for anyone who announces a problem.

Useless

This post is useless without naming them

OverTheGeicoE writes "TSA's VIPR program may be expanding. According to the Washington Times, 'TSA has always intended to expand beyond the confines of airport terminals. Its agents have been conducting more and more surprise groping sessions for women, children and the elderly in locations that have nothing to do with aviation.' In Tennessee earlier this month, bus passengers in Nashville and Knoxville were searched in addition to the truck searches discussed here previously. Earlier this year in Savannah, Georgia, TSA forced a group of train travelers, including young children, to be patted down. (They were getting off the train, not on.) Ferry passengers have also been targeted. According to TSA Administrator John Pistole's testimony before the Senate last June, 'TSA conducted more than 8,000 VIPR operations in the [previous] 12 months, including more than 3,700 operations in mass-transit and passenger-railroad venues.' He wants a 50% budget increase for VIPR for 2012. Imagine what TSA would do with the extra funding."

Re:Patting down people on Trains?? WTF

What makes you think this has anything to do with terrorists.

Re:Godwin time!

Let's see, the TSA authorization bill was sponsored by an R in the house a D in the senate signed into law by an R, became Federal employees due to a D advanced to choice of digital strip search or being felt-up session under a D administration.

The pattern is clear, both major parties care little about personal liberty. Like you, I am surprised to see anyone thinks that either major party cares about the constitution anymore. The R's give more lip service to some parts of the constitution, may actually care about other parts of the constitution. The D's, not so much those parts, but they have other parts they like more than the R's.

If I want to repeal the 16th amendment (the income tax), that does not mean I don't respect the constitution, I just means I want to alter it as provided by the constitution. If I decide that a don't like the 16th and refuse to pay income taxes, then it is truth that I don't really care about the constitution either, just the parts I like. It would be nice if people understand the difference.

Re:Well, so much for...

Leftists want to test the public's submissiveness to government intrusion

ROFL! Which leftist was that who first proposed TSA? It was that famous lefty George Bush.

Using terms like that make you sound like some mid-60's Fox News watcher who tunes into Glenn Beck's radio show on the way to Branson, MO.

CELEBRATE ENDLESS GODWIN

The Nazi's didn't go this far.

The threat to buses and trains can be effected from miles/hours away. Case? Stick a large, crooked wedge of metal on a train track to derail the engine. Cost? Almost zero. Effectiveness of the TSA wiping their asses on the Bill of Rights? Less than zero.

Someday, they will tar and feather those who preferred a job with TSA, over panhandling.

Re:Well, so much for...

You won't be laughing when a terrorist hijacks a train and crashes it into the White House.

Or smashes a Ferry into Mt. Rushmore.

An anonymous reader writes "Italian roboticists have built a quadruped robot called HyQ that can walk, trot, jump, and rear. Unlike with another quadruped project, the famous BigDog from Boston Dynamics, the Italian team wants to make their design 'as open as possible,' so other research groups can use it to collaborate. HyQ is a hydraulic system with torque-controlled, compliant legs. It's currently tethered, but the researchers plan to make the robot self-contained with an on-board pump, add a head with cameras and laser-range finder, and take it for tests outdoors."

Nice mechanics

The mechanics of the thing are nice. They have variable compliance in the legs, like real muscles. A muscle can be thought of as a spring/damper system where the spring constant and zero point of the spring are adjustable. This provides energy recovery from stride to stride. Humans get about 70% of the energy back from stride to stride when running efficiently. Cheetahs, 90%. This is a nice model for force control, but hard to realize with real machinery.

I've seen this done mechanically (the design was bulky, complex, and had way too many cables and pulleys) and pneumatically (at CWRU, a nice design, but needs external air power). Pneumatics are nice for this; with a cylinder you can pressurize from both ends, you really can create a spring with a settable spring constant and zero point.

There's a way to fake it with electric motors called "series elastic actuators", with a stiff spring in series with a fast electric-powered leadscrew, but there's no energy recovery. Hydraulic systems tend not to have energy recovery, although there are things you can do with hydraulic accumulators. The original BIgDog has almost no elastic energy recovery; there is a hydraulic accumulator in the system, but it's just to smooth out noise from the pump lobes.

I look forward to seeing more detail on this.

An anonymous reader writes "It appears Microsoft's Skype Division is cracking down on reverse-engineering of the Skype client. Skype recently rolled out a new set of APIs for integration into other desktop applications, but they have issued multiple DMCA takedown notices to a researcher publishing open-source code to send Skype messages."

RIP Skype

To all those people asking "Why do you hate MS so much?"
This is why.

When MS bought Skype I told people that Skype would die soon *because* MS bought it. Didn't know how or when but soon.
Now, MS will kill all the various clients that made Skype ubiquitous and useful. The new Skype will not run on as many platforms and (in true MS EEE fashion) will not work with previous versions either

Like Metalica, and Hurt Locker, Skype will now be shunned.
A new *open* protocol will take over.

I don't get it...

Skype and their PR people are calling the project "malicious" and "nefarious", but it sounds like all it does is emulate Skype, so that you can send messages to Skype users while not having a proper account

They mention the possibility that it could be used for spam, but that sounds like blaming the tool. Is there some other way that this thing could be inherently "nefarious" that I'm not understanding? Because it doesn't look dangerous to me.

Unless you count the risks of an independent developer making something interoperable with, and potentially better than, the original product. We all know that's a grave and terrible danger to the safety of the free world.

Hiding Something

An engineer buddy of mine was doing reverse-engineering work on the Skype protocol for a job he had a few years back, he would come to me with shock and tell me about how dumb and insecure the Skype clients are and how trivially easy it is to get any Skype client to work as an invisible proxy for you without that person's knowledge by just using the skype protocol.

If they're making such a huge deal about it, you have to wonder why. They've got some problems and they'd rather have security through obscurity. *sigh*

Does the DMCA really prevent cleanroom / chinese wall reverse-engineering? Damnit politicians just have no clue...

Re:Know what would be hillarious?

Won't happen. SIP and IAX are out there, all free and decentralized, but all the proprietary junk continues to be adopted by the technologically-challenged masses.

Re:Good

SIP, a brilliant protocol that likes to negotiate a random port between 10000 and 20000 to open your RTP stream. Why not IAX2, which is a hundred times better and not gay as fuck like SIP to handle.

astroengine writes "Asteroids visited by spacecraft have all turned out to be piles of rubble or chunks broken off of larger bodies, but that's not the case with 21 Lutetia, a 75-mile long, 47-mile wide body orbiting in the main belt of asteroids between Mars and Jupiter. Europe's comet-bound Rosetta probe flew by Lutetia last year and gave scientists a big surprise. With its dense body and an interior that seems to have survived intact, the large asteroid appears more like a protoplanet — a leftover building block from the formation of the solar system."

Soon to be ...

Demoted to "Dwarf-Protoplanet" by a minority of IAU in a meeting held after all the sensible people have left the conference ...

Dimensions?

21 Lutetia, a 75-mile long, 47-mile wide body orbiting in the main belt of asteroids between Mars and Jupiter.

This is a science article on a science website. Why is there only two dimensions listed for a three dimensional object, and why are those dimensions measured in miles?

Re:Dimensions?

21 Lutetia, a 75-mile long, 47-mile wide body orbiting in the main belt of asteroids between Mars and Jupiter.

This is a science article on a science website. Why is there only two dimensions listed for a three dimensional object, and why are those dimensions measured in miles?

It's flat ... and carried on the backs of four enormous hippopotami (there were five, but one slipped and impacted into the surface of Lutetia) on the back of a giant newt.

Re:@Editor

Most of the world population doesn't read Slashdot.

The majority of Slashdot readers know what miles are.

Yes.

We are even familiar with Miles Statute, Miles Nautical and Miles Standish.

Re:Dimensions?

It's newts all the way down.crookedvulture writes "The initial reviews of the first Bulldozer-based FX processors have revealed the chips to be notably slower than their Intel counterparts. Part of the reason is the module-based nature of AMD's new architecture, which requires more intelligent thread scheduling to extract optimum performance. This article takes a closer look at how tweaking Windows 7's thread scheduling can improve Bulldozer's performance by 10-20%. As with Intel's Hyper-Threading tech, Bulldozer performs better when resource sharing is kept to a minimum and workloads are spread across multiple modules rather than the multiple cores within them."

Re:no one got fired buying intel

A dell R815 with 2 twelve-core AMD processors (although they were not bulldozer ones) 256GB of ram, and a pair of hard drives was $8k cheaper than a similarly configured Dell R810 with 2 10-core Intel Processors when we ordered a few weeks ago. That difference in price is enough to buy a nice Fusion-IO drive, which will make much, much more of a performance impact than a small percentage higher CPU speed

It's a Windows limitation

This is really more of an OS-level problem. CPU scheduling on multiprocessors needs some awareness of the costs of an interprocessor context switch. In general, it's faster to restart a thread on the same processor it previously ran on, because the caches will have the data that thread needs. If the thread has lost control for a while, though, it doesn't matter. This is a standard topic in operating system courses. An informal discussion of how Windows 7 does it is useful.

Windows 7 generally prefers to run a thread on the same CPU it previously ran on. But if you have a lot of threads that are frequently blocking, you may get excessive inter-CPU switching.

On top of this, the Bulldozer CPU adjusts the CPU clock rate to control power consumption and heat dissipation. If some cores can be stopped, the others can go slightly faster. This improves performance for sequential programs, but complicates scheduling.

Manually setting processor affinity is a workaround, not a fix.

It was already beating all intel in highly threade

applications, like photosop cs5 or truecrypt, including some more :

http://www.overclock.net/amd-cpus/1141562-practical-bulldozer-apps.html

also, if you set your cpuid to genuineintel in some of the benchmark programs, you will get suprising results :

try changing cpuid=genuineintel for +47% INCREASE IN SCORES.

changing cpuid to GenuineIntel nets 47.4% increase in performance:
[url]http://www.osnews.com/story/22683/Intel_Forced_to_Remove_quot_Cripple_AMD_quot_Function_from_Compiler_[/url]

PCMark/Futuremark rigged bentmark to favor intel:
[url]http://www.amdzone.com/phpbb3/viewtopic.php?f=52&t=135382#p139712[/url] [url]http://arstechnica.com/hardware/reviews/2008/07/atom-nano-review.ars/6[/url]

intel cheating at 3DMark vantage via driver: [url]http://techreport.com/articles.x/17732/2[/url]

relying on bentmarks to "measure performance" is a fool's errand. dont go there.

Re:So basically...

"User". That summarizes half of the nonsense being posted here. This is a techie forum, isn't it? Techies tweak when no tweaking is needed. If you're a "user", then you're not even authorized to be in a server room. GTFO a STAY OUT!

(listens for door slamming as the dweeb runs out)

I just hate it when children blurt out their juvenile bullshit, interrupting the adults. Happens all the time . . .

Re:So basically...

No, It's because AMD is lying to the OS. The "8 core" BD is not really 8, core. It only has 4 cores with some duplicated integer resources. Basically a better version of hyper-threading, but not a proper 8 core design.

The problem is that the BD says to Windows "I have 8 cores" and thus Windows schedules assuming that is true. If BD said "I have 4 cores with 8 threads" then Windows would schedule it just like it does with Intel CPUs and performance would improve just like in the FA.

There shouldn't need to be any OS level tweaks because Windows already knows how to schedule for hyper-threading optimally. If BD reported it's true core count properly then no OS level changes would be needed.

djeps sends in this excerpt from the Physics arXiv Blog: "Japanese scientists have built a cellular automaton from individual molecules that carries out huge numbers of calculations in parallel. ... At the heart of their experiment is a ring-like molecule called 2,3-dichloro-5,6-dicyano-p-benzoquinone, or DDQ. This has an unusual property: it can exist in four different conducting states, depending on the location of trapped electrons around the ring. What's more, it's possible to switch the molecule from one to state to another by zapping it with voltages of various different strengths using the tip of a scanning tunnelling microscope. It's even possible to bias the possible states that can form by placing the molecule in an electric field. Place two DDQ molecules next to each other and it's possible to make them connect. ... When one molecule changes its state, the change in configuration ripples from one molecule to the next, forming and reforming circuits as it travels."

Last year's news

This is impressive discovery, but it's no longer news. The paper was published in April 2010: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nphys1636 Admittedly the authors only recently uploaded a copy to arXiv on October 17, but can we not pretend this is some breaking news for nerds?

Re:Last year's news

Indeed- many things I read on slashdot I read online elsewhere the week before.

(I still come over to the story to compulsively comment even if I have nothing useful to say)

I don't mind the delay- gives me time to gather my thoughts on the issue first.

I've got a great article on Microsoft's next OS, Windows 7, I'm planning on submitting tonight- supposedly it's going to fix all the problems in Vista...

Cool, but not a CA and not parallel

This is an awsome project, but the researchers make some claims that are not true. First, this is not a CA, as molecules affect other molecules in a big radius not just their neighbours. Second, a computer is not massively parallel just because it's realized on a CA. That's like saying that silicon-based chips are massively parallel because each of the great number of electrons "computes" its path on its own.

mvar writes "The Linux Foundation today released technical guidance to PC makers on how to implement secure UEFI without locking Linux or other free software off of new Windows 8 machines. The guidance included a subtle tisk-tisk at Microsoft's Steven Sinofsky for suggesting that PC owners won't want to mess with control of their hardware and would happily concede it to operating system makers and hardware manufacturers." Canonical and Red Hat have also published a white paper (PDF) suggesting that all OEMs "allow secure boot to be easily disabled and enabled through a firmware configuration interface," among other things.

Re:I'd say that's "mostly" true.

I've installed windows countless times, I'm a software developer, I build computers, I have made custom (legal) windows installation disks that have drivers and updates slip streamed on them. I've hex edited DVD ROM firmware updates, rooted plenty of Android devices. I'm also pretty good with regular expressions and can use vim in a pinch. Suffice to say, I'm pretty technically inclined and when Linux doesn't recognise my wireless adapter out of the box, I haven't a fucking clue what to do, either.

EU

I just hope they sent a copy to the EU Competition Committee, as jack-shit will be done by USFedGov.

Re:Antitrust but verify

Other responses to this have replied that RedHat and Google don't spend the campaign contribution $$$ that Microsoft does, and therefore Microsoft can buy Ju$tice here.

The other side of reality is that the server space is heavily Linux, much of that on workstation-class machines, but also many farms are based on commodity-class machines, too. So in this case, it's not just RedHat and Google complaining, it's also IBM, Oracle, Disney/Pixar, Dreamworks, atmospheric modeling people, the petrochemical industry, etc.

My prediction is that the workstation-class market will have the switch from the get-go. Almost all of the commodity-class market will not have the switch, per Microsoft's wishes. But not all - because a few of those commodity-class manufacturers will have special boxes, probably at a slight, but tolerable premium, for the above-mentioned companies. Those few manufacturers will pick up the Linux business, lock, stock, and barrel. After a few quarters of that, some other commodity-class manufacturers will introduce their "Linux-capable" boxes in order to grab that same premium. It'll "race to the bottom" after that.

The real question will then be how do the rest of us get our fingers on those "special Linux machines." At that point, we may not, but some motherboard vendor will realize that he can sell the "Linux-capable motherboard" at a slight premium to those who know that they will get crappy non-Windows support, and also let them shave the Windows support cost into their profit margin, too.

Plus I need to write my Congress-critters. This Microsoft move is curiously soon after they've been released from Antitrust oversight. Maybe it's innocent and in the name of security and all of that, but the timing really stinks. Of course my Congress-critters don't give a hoot that I can't build and boot my own kernel. But I'd hope that they understand that we're shoving yet another piece of science and technology overseas, away from the US, reducing our competitiveness. The tinkerers who become future scientists and engineers will be on foreign shores, as well as those new ideas, products and business opportunities that my not fit into Microsoft's business plans. THAT's what I'll emphasize in my letters.

Re:Antitrust but verify

Being able to shut off "secure boot" doesn't do a thing to make Windows 8 less secure. In order to boot Windows 8, secure boot has to be turned on. If being able to run the computer with secure boot turned off somehow compromises the integrity of the Windows 8 installation, then the entire concept is broken before it started. (Hint... You can always remove the hard drive and put it in a non-UEFI computer as a secondary drive. That's essentially equivalent to booting another OS on the same machine.)

At this point, I'd have to say that the first screwup is that from what I've heard, Microsoft messed up the kernel signing process and hasn't signed their kernels the "correct" way supported by general tools. One piece of correct solution is to allow RedHat and others to sign their kernels and LiveCDs. For this reason, Microsoft should NOT be the signing authority - they should just be another company submitting their software for signing.

I suspect that the real/better solution to this problem would be a little more smarts in the UEFI itself. I get a signed Gentoo LiveCD image which, because it's properly signed, will boot. I then install my Gentoo onto the hard drive and tell the UEFI-aware GRUB about the kernel I just compiled.

Then I restart the machine back to BIOS and tell it to talk to GRUB, find my new kernel, and "approve" it - I guess a local signing. After that, I can boot my kernel. It's more pain than it is today, but probably less pain than the old days of lilo and forgetting to run lilo after building a new kernel. When that happened I had to boot a LiveCD to fix it. With this the fix involves at most booting my old kernel and using UEFI BIOS.

Re:Antitrust but verify

Microsoft faced those lawsuits because they were not yet politically savvy enough to buy off politicians. Now that they are, it's not happening again.

larry bagina writes "It's no secret that rock stars have riders — provisions on their contractual appearances that require a bowl of brown-free M&Ms or specify the exact brand of bottled water, cocaine purity, etc. Well, Richard Stallman has his own quirky list of provisions." Some of the best stuff is at the end, including: "I do not eat breakfast. Please do not ask me any questions about what I will do [for] breakfast. Please just do not bring it up," and "One situation where I do not need help, let alone supervision, is in crossing streets. I grew up in the middle of the world's biggest city, full of cars, and I have crossed streets without assistance even in the chaotic traffic of Bangalore and Delhi. Please just leave me alone when I cross streets."

Re:Just seems like a well thought out list

Just for good measure:

http://www.snopes.com/music/artists/vanhalen.asp

Brown Out

Claim: Van Halen's standard performance contract contained a provision calling for them to be provided with a bowl of M&Ms, but with all the brown candies removed.

Status: True.

Example: [Harrington, 1981]

Van Halen tends to make the news portion of radio more often than it gets airplay. There was the M&M riot in New Mexico where the band did thousands of dollars of damage to a hall when they were served brown M&Ms — their contract said the brown ones had to be removed.

Origins: Rock concerts have come a long ways since the days when the Beatles performed in boxing rings and hockey rinks, and made no greater demand of Van Halen promoters than they be provided with clean towels and a few bottles of soft drinks. As the audiences grew larger, promoters stood to make more and more money from staging concerts, which meant that not only could rock stars command higher prices for their performances, but they were able to demand other perks as well, such as luxurious accommodations, lavish backstage buffets, and chauffeured transportation. It was inevitable that some high-demand acts, all their financial and pampering whims satisfied, would exercise their power and start making frivolous demands of promoters, simply because they could.

By far the most notorious of these whimsical requests is the legend that Van Halen's standard concert contract called for them to be provided with a bowl of M&Ms backstage, but with provision that all the brown candies must be removed. The presence of even a single brown M&M in that bowl, rumor had it, was sufficient legal cause for Van Halen to peremptorily cancel a scheduled appearance without advance notice (and usually an excuse for them to go on a destructive rampage as well).

The legendary "no brown M&Ms" contract clause was indeed real, but the purported motivation for it was not. The M&Ms provision was included in Van Halen's contracts not as an act of caprice, but because it served a practical purpose: to provide an easy way of determining whether the technical specifications of the contract had been thoroughly read (and complied with). As Van Halen lead singer David Lee Roth explained in his autobiography:
Van Halen was the first band to take huge productions into tertiary, third-level markets. We'd pull up with
nine eighteen-wheeler trucks, full of gear, where the standard was three trucks, max. And there were many, many technical errors — whether it was the girders couldn't support the weight, or the flooring would sink in, or the doors weren't big enough to move the gear through.

The contract rider read like a version of the Chinese Yellow Pages because there was so much equipment, and so many human beings to make it function. So just as a little test, in the technical aspect of the rider, it would say "Article 148: There will be fifteen amperage voltage sockets at twenty-foot spaces, evenly, providing nineteen amperes . . ." This kind of thing. And article number 126, in the middle of nowhere, was: "There will be no brown M&M's in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation."

So, when I would walk backstage, if I saw a brown M&M in that bowl . . . well, line-check the entire production. Guaranteed you're going to arrive at a technical error. They didn't read the contract. Guaranteed you'd run into a problem. Sometimes it would threaten to just destroy the whole show. Something like, literally, life-threatening.
Nonetheless, the media ran exaggerated and inaccurate accounts of Van Halen's using violations of the "no brown M&Ms" clause as justification for engaging in childish, destructive behavior (such as the newspaper article quoted at the top of this page). David Lee Roth's version of such events was decidedly different:
The folks in Pueblo, Colora

Re:Parrots?

And the pattern for the parrot must be open and free so others can compile their own parrots from scraps of material and discarded belly button lint.

Re:Strangely inspirational

RMS gets a lot of mockery for this, but for all the eccentricity, it reveals him as a man who thinks really hard about what he does, and making sure it fits his moral code. How many of us would avoid long-distance trains, or ask conference organisers to use pseudonyms for hotel rooms, because we were so stubbornly committed to the idea of privacy? I'm too much of a pragmatist to put up with that sort of nonsense but I admire the integrity on display.

Not quite. It shows that he expects other people to go to extreme lengths to provide him with very trivial wants (not needs), things that he should be able to deal with like anyone else in society. People in power get there because they enjoy power, and they enjoy watching other people jump through flaming hoops for them. It's how they show their superiority. Compare this to Woz, who hangs out in line at the Apple store for the new phone just because he prefers to live a normal life, as opposed to pulling strings and having people cater to him.

Re:Just seems like a well thought out list

Real life is a downer if one take a good hard look at it.

Re:Just seems like a well thought out list

Maybe not so bad for the poor sap (e.g., someone's kid), who promptly ate them as they picked them out.

An anonymous reader writes "The days of dealing with very reflective glass panels may soon be behind us. Nippon Electric Glass has used the FPD International 2011 conference in Japan this week to show off its new 'invisible glass' panel. What NEG has done is added anti-reflection films to both the front and back of the glass that are only nanometers thick. Look at a typical sheet of glass and you will see about 8% of the light reflected off of it. With NEG's anti-reflection film in place, that is reduced to just 0.5%."

We've been visited by the future...

...and they brought us transparent glass. What's next, non-floating bricks?

another fine victory

for GLORIOUS NIPPON!

Re:Cool, how durable is it?

I have anti-glare coating on my glasses and I have none of the problems you describe. My glasses aren't scratch anywhere noticeable, and cleaning it with a lint-free cloth is ridiculously simple.

Hopefully your glasses aren't as old as your UID; this may explain the problem otherwise as I change mine rather regularly.

News?

This isn't news, this is an advertisement.

1. AR (anti-reflection) coatings have been available on photographic lenses for decades. Even the ultra tiny lenses in your iPhone/Blackberry/Android phone have AR coating. AR coatings are *always* nanometers thick, by their very nature.

2. AR coatings have been available on eyeglass lenses for nearly as long. Most people these days get some sort of AR coating on their lenses.

3. AR coatings have been available on framing glass to protect valuable paintings, photographs, and other items in picture frames for the same scale of time. Drop by your local framing / art supply store and check out what's usually called museum glass.

4. AR coatings were used on nearly every CRT by the time sales started to plummet in favor of the LCD. I use a couple of them in my lab to this day.

5. AR coatings are already available on some laptop screens (eg, by Sony and Samsung, no doubt among others).

So, news about a new technology ("Solves Screen Reflection Problems")? No. Product announcement? Yes.

Re:News?

I have a painting with AR glass. It's a big improvement over regular glass, but it's way, way more reflective than the glass seen in the photo.

Also note from the WP article you cited:

It is possible to obtain reflectivities as low as 0.1% at a single wavelength. Coatings that give very low reflectivity over a broad band can also be made, although these are complex and relatively expensive.

TFA claims broadband 0.5% reflectivity.

eldavojohn writes "As detailed in the journal Science (abstract), a new compound composed of cobalt, iron and oxygen with other metals presents us with the most efficient way (found so far) of splitting oxygen atoms from water. These ten known compounds provide a reactivity rate that is at least an order of magnitude higher than what is currently known as the gold standard in such reactions. During their research, the team discovered that the reactivity is dependent on the configuration of the outermost electron of transition metal ions, which they exploited to develop this efficient catalyst. For rechargeable batteries and hydrogen fuel, this is exciting work from MIT's Jin Suntivich, Kevin J. May, Hubert A. Gasteiger, and Yang Shao-Horn, and the University of Texas's John B. Goodenough."

Re:Some questions here.

Second, what is the cost and availability of the materials needed for the catalyst? Does this require some kind of unobtainium? The article is very vague here.

If I'm not mistaken, the materials are listed right there, in the abstract:

Ba0.5Sr0.5Co0.8Fe0.2O3

(Barium, Strontium, Cobalt and Iron, all abundant)

Re:Hydrogen

Unless of course the hydrogen binds to another chemical in the process of catalysing.

How does this catalyst work?

Do you still run electricity through the water, but first you 'dope' the water with the catalyst, and the hydrogen/oxygen separation happens with same rate with less energy input/faster rate with same input?

They mentioned something in the article about an "artificial leaf", so does that mean that you use sunlight as the energy input instead of electricity, and the sunlight drives the reaction with the catalyst?

Re:Catalyst Theory?

I wouldn't consider myself a catalysis expert, but I do computational materials research to predict how atoms are arranged in the surfaces of alloys in order to understand how that affects their catalytic properties, so I do know a thing or three about it. The answer to your question is mostly no. There are good explanations of how catalysts work in many particular cases, but there is certainly no known straightforward way to design a catalyst to do arbitrarily specified chemistry.

Think about this paper. I haven't read it yet, but from the abstract, it looks like it's about a group of researchers finding a single parameter that controls the activity of a particular, narrow class of materials for a particular reaction, and then exploiting that to create an optimal catalyst within this class of materials for that reaction. And for doing that, they were published in Science, which suggests that it's fairly clever, important, and original work. That should give you an idea about what the state of the art is in catalyst design.

John Goodenough, by the way, is about 90 years old, still sharp as a tack, and a world expert in metal oxides (what the catalysts in this study were made out of). Back in the 70s, he "invented" (that's probably not the best word) the cathode material that's still being used in most commercial Li-ion batteries. I just say that to make the point that this research was probably not something that many people have the depth of understanding to do.

Re:Hydrogen

No, but other things may bind to the hydrogen, especially if the reaction occurs in open air. I thought about this after I posted, and went and checked the article. The article states that another catalyst is needed to separated out the hydrogen, indicating that it does bind to something other than the oxygen or the catalyst. The reason the article focusses on the oxygen-separating catalyst is that it is the bottle-neck, and not the hydrogen-separating catalyst.

New submitter landofcleve writes "When the writing is on the wall, you fight harder — or at least that's what we've seen from Apple in recent months. Now we know why: Samsung has reached a market share above Apple's for smartphone sales. 'Samsung shipped 27.8 million smartphones in the last quarter, taking 23.8 percent of the market ... Apple’s 17.1 million shipments, comprising 14.6 percent of the market, pushed the Cupertino, California-based company to second place. Nokia maintained its third position.'"

Re:Welcome to today's oblig. apple/android throwdo

With articles like this, you would think it really mattered who made more of what in a quarter... Never mind that geographies are different, carriers are different, and features are different. Time to buckle down for the hordes of apple and android gang-bangers to fill another thread with vitriol and made up words.

Well, according to Apple and Samsung, these guys are stealing so many of each other's ideas they are practically selling the same phones, if you believe the testimony.

This is based on analysts guesses

This is based on analysts guesses. Samsung didn't release any numbers.

Re:High-end models?

Quite a few - Samsung's hottest seller in late spring/early summer was the international variant of the Galaxy S II - a device which was undoubtebly above the iPhone 4 in all regards.

In fact, in some areas, it's still ahead of the iPhone 4S - the 4S has a nicer GPU but a weaker CPU, and still has a crappy 3.5" screen.

Shipped vs Sold...

Android "ships" phones, Apple "sells" phones -- this misleading comparison of apples and oranges continues. When will Android manufacturers start quoting "actual sales"?

Lets see how Apple recovers in "sales" figures now that their newly released phone is out, the last quarter was expected to dip due to anticipation of many wanting to purchase the new model.

quarterly reporting and reality

Samsung released their Galaxy II s in the previous quarter. apple did not release the overdue and widely expected 4S till this quarter. Combine that with the fact that the smart phone market is expanding (not zero sum) so that apple does not have to sell less for Samsung to sell more, and it's pretty clear this statistic is just an anomoly due to the way sales get binned by quarter. We won't know much about it till a few more quarters have passed to average it out. My guess is the 4s is the hot cake for Q4.

Coisiche writes "To address the many responses to their original findings, the OPERA team who reported the detection of faster-than-light neutrinos is starting a new and improved version of their experiment. 'The neutrinos that emerge at Gran Sasso start off as a beam of proton particles at CERN. Through a series of complex interactions, neutrino particles are generated from this beam and stream through the Earth's crust to Italy. Originally, CERN fired the protons in a long pulse lasting 10 microseconds (10 millionths of a second). ... [In the new experiment], protons are sent in a series of short bursts — lasting just one or two nanoseconds, thousands of times shorter — with a large gap (roughly 500 nanoseconds) in between each burst. This system, says Dr Bertolucci, is more efficient: "For every neutrino event at Gran Sasso, you can connect it unambiguously with the batch of protons at CERN," he explained.'"

Applied particle physics?

I've always found particle physics fascinating, though I won't claim to understand any of it.
I'm disappointed that people are so vehemently against nuclear reactors these days that Germany is shutting some of them down.
And, of course, we're not in a hurry to use nuclear weapons either.
Radiation therapy has been a good application, but I would like to believe it will eventually be replaced by something less aggressive and more specific. Super-heavy atoms are really cool, but they're always so unstable we can barely measure them.
What other practical applications can we hope to achieve?
Will fusion be cleaner than fission and more publicly acceptable?
Inquiring minds want to know.

Helpful but not that helpful

This is helpful but not that helpful. There are at this point a variety of potential explanations for what went wrong in the OPERA experiment. These include mismeasuring the tunnel length, issues with the clock calibration, and issues with the statistical analysis among other issues. It is important to note that while the OPERA group is double checking most of these issues, this experiment only really helps deal with a single problem, the statistical analysis of the neutrinos. If they are associated to individual bursts, the statistical test will be much simpler. So even if this still gets the same result, this won't be that strong evidence that there's something real going on here.

A better replication attempt is that which is being done by MINOS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MINOS, the equivalent experiment at Fermilab in the US. One reason that OPERA was paying careful attention to the arrival times (when their main interest was actually in measuring neutrino oscillation) was that MINOS had earlier reported data that tentatively suggested that some neutrinos might be going too fast. Now that OPERA has done their work, MINOS is working on doing a more detailed analysis that should be out by around February.

Overall, I still think that there's a mistake here, but it is interesting to see how long this is taking to find where the mistake was. The apparent initial sprint by physicists to find the error is turning into a marathon. The data though still needs to be somehow reconciled with the fact that neutrinos from SN 1987a (a supernova that occurred close to Earth and whose light and neutrinos reached Earth in 1987 ahref=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SN_1987Arel=url2html-7691http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SN_1987A> had the neutrinos arrive when conventional theory predicted them, that is a few hours before the light. This isn't due to neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light, but due to the fact that neutrinos are produced at the way beginning of a supernova in the core and then fly out with a headstart because they can easily avoid most of the matter in the star but the light takes time to get through the star. But, if the neutrinos traveled faster than light to the extent OPERA data suggests then SN 1987A neutrinos should have arrived years earlier.

There are some other possibilities that would reconcile the two claims. For example, it is possible that neutrinos actually travel faster in a denser medium. This would be really weird. It is also possible that the reactions we think produce neutrinos actually produce a very short lived tachyon which itself decays into a neutrino. This starts running afoul of Occam's razor, but would explain why one would see too much velocity in the OPERA setting but not from the supernova. This hypothesis is actually also pretty easily testable: one needs to use a shorter distance for one's neutrino detectors and see if the apparent velocity goes up.

Overall, I still suspect that this is a fluke or error of some kind. But I really hope it isn't. This could be the Michelson–Morley experiment of our error, the first anomaly which leads to a glimpse of some fantastically deeper understanding of the universe. But I really wouldn't bet on it.

Re:Applied particle physics?

I'm disappointed that people are so vehemently against nuclear reactors these days that Germany is shutting some of them down.

Yeah? Just wait until Germany gets hit with a tsunami, like Japan did. That decision won't seem so dumb then.

Re:Helpful but not that helpful

This could be the Michelson–Morley experiment of our error

There's a Freudian slip for ya.

How can they be sure?

They changed the outcome by observing it! This is just another example of Big Physics ruining the results of science by observing the location of particles.angry tapir writes "In less than a decade, a microprocessor core could be no bigger than a red blood cell, the CTO of ARM has predicted. ARM has already helped develop a prototype, implantable device for monitoring eye-pressure in glaucoma patients that measures just 1 cubic millimeter, CTO Mike Muller said at ARM's TechCon conference. At the conference the company also introduced its first 64-bit chip. The ARMv8 adds 64-bit addressing capabilities, an improvement over the current ARMv7-A architecture, which is capable of up to 40-bit addressing. The architecture puts ARM into more direct competition with Intel and its 64-bit Xeon processors."

Actual implementations

It is worth pointing out that current x86-64 implementations are limited to addressing "only" 48 bits so it's not like that ARM was way beyond the curve with their 40 bit address space (that's 1 TB).

Not just Intel

The architecture puts ARM into more direct competition with Intel and its 64-bit Xeon processors.

Gee, what about AMD and the AMD64 architecture that they developed? You know, the one that Intel eventually had to adopt (license?) when their 64-bit Itanium didn't quite live up to their expectations of being the next architecture that everyone moved to?

Oh, and ARM Holdings don't make chips. They design architectures and implementations that others license and put into actual chips. The summary wasn't so clear on that, and it's a point that lots of people often overlook.

Direct Competition?

The architecture puts ARM into more direct competition with Intel and its 64-bit Xeon processors

Maybe I've just got a certain prejudice, but I don't see any direct comparison, let alone competition, between ARM processors and Xeon processors, no matter how wide their addressing is. ARM processors run some really sophistocated stuff ... in my smartphone. A Xeon processor allows my CAD workstation to handle 3D models with thousands of components, or run an ANSYS simulation that solves the equivalent of 10 million simultaneous equations.

Re:Really needed?

I'd expect it within 5 years, which seems to be the rough time-frame in which ARM expects the first of these CPUs to be built. This is just the architecture announcement. They need to get it out there so people can begin building tools, etc. There's barely enough time to get all that work done in time before this becomes a serious handicap for ARM, so that's my definition of soon.
 

Re:Direct Competition?

ARM is *NOT* based on the 68000 design, it was an original CPU design by Acorn computers of Cambridge, England (ARM originally stood for Acorn Risc Machine) for their desktop computers in the late 1980s and during the 90s. ARM bears absolutely no resemblance to 68000.

Sophie Wilson and Steve Furber, the designers of the ARM, were inspired by the simple architecture of the 6502, but the ARM is not based on that either (the ARM does not resemble the 6502 either, nor is it based on the 6502).