kenmay

Linux 3.12 Released, Linus Proposes Bug Fix-Only 4.0

An anonymous reader writes “Linus Torvalds announced the Linux 3.12 kernel release with a large number of improvements through many subsystems including new EXT4 file-system features, AMD Berlin APU support, a major CPUfreq governor improvement yielding impressive performance boosts for certain hardware/workloads, new drivers, and continued bug-fixing. Linus also took the opportunity to share possible plans for Linux 4.0. He’s thinking of tagging Linux 4.0 following the Linux 3.19 release in about one year and is also considering the idea of Linux 4.0 being a release cycle with nothing but bug-fixes. Does Linux really need an entire two-month release cycle with nothing but bug-fixing? It’s still to be decided by the kernel developers.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Netflix Is Doing Streaming Tests With 4K Video

Everything from ads to porn is getting the 4K treatment lately, and now Netflix is experimenting with it too. This week the company posted six 4K videos at various frames per second rates to test their streaming performance. They’re all standard Netflix stock footage called “El Fuente.” Read more…

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Netflix Is Doing Streaming Tests With 4K Video

HealthCare.gov: What Went Wrong?

New submitter codeusirae writes “An initial round of criticism focused on how many files the browser was being forced to download just to access the site, per an article at Reuters. A thread at Reddit appeared and was filled with analyses of the code. But closer looks by others have teased out deeper, more systematic issues.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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HealthCare.gov: What Went Wrong?

Surface Pro 2 Gets Significant Battery Boost

SmartAboutThings writes “The original Surface Pro didn’t have quite a good battery life and that’s why Microsoft tried to fix this with the Surface Pro. After the Surface Pro 2 has hit general availability, Microsoft has silently pushed out a firmware update which, according to some new battery benchmarks run by Anandtech, made significant improvements to the battery life of the Surface Pro 2. After the new web browsing battery life test it was discovered that the Surface Pro 2 now manages better battery life than the ARM Surface 2, which is pretty impressive. With the firmware update, Microsoft was targeting over 8 hours, and AnadTech’s benchmarks show Microsoft has succeeded, registering a 25% increase in battery life over the no-firmware version. The unpatched Surface Pro 2 lasted for 6.68 hours while with the firmware update installed, its battery life increased to 8.33 hours. The video playback test involved playing a movie until the battery died, and here, albeit smaller, improvements with the battery life have also been noticed: 7.73 hours compared to 6.65 hours.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Surface Pro 2 Gets Significant Battery Boost

People are building enormous farms in the ruins of Detroit

Detroit isn’t a decaying city anymore — it’s a city in transition. Though its population dropped by 50 percent in the past half-century, and roughly a third of its buildings are abandoned, the place is coming to life again. Farmers are taking over the industrial wastes. Read more…

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People are building enormous farms in the ruins of Detroit

APK Downloads Lets You Pull APK Files Directly From Google Play

Being unable to install an app on your device from the Play Store is a pain. Fortunately, a developer has created a tool that lets you pull an APK directly from Google’s servers and side load it yourself . Handy! Read more…

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APK Downloads Lets You Pull APK Files Directly From Google Play

Just six people got insurance through HealthCare.gov on day one

HealthCare.gov, as it looked to the few who saw it on the first day of operation. We now know how many people were able to get through the bugs in HealthCare.gov the first day and register for insurance: six. That’s according to meeting notes from a “war room” meeting on the afternoon of October 2 at the Center for Consumer Information and Insurance (CCII), the organization inside the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) responsible for oversight of the Affordable Care Act insurance program. The notes, which were released October 31 by Republican members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee , detail the woes the site experienced on its first day. The six lucky people who scored insurance on day one managed to succeed because their unique circumstances didn’t run into a fine sieve of feature problems that blocked most who tried from getting through the front door and derailed others quickly afterward. The litany of woes detailed in the meeting: Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Just six people got insurance through HealthCare.gov on day one

New HIV antibodies show potential

The structure of an antibody latched on to a protein found on the surface of HIV. NIAID/National Institutes of Health The dream of an HIV vaccine has been thwarted again and again because the virus evolves so rapidly that the immune system can’t keep up. But the results from a new trial in monkeys suggest that certain antibodies have a powerful enough therapeutic effect that they may warrant clinical trials. Many researchers had given up on antibodies, which are used by the immune system to identify the signature proteins on the outside of invading cells, targeting them for destruction. The HIV virus changes so rapidly that any antibodies that target the virus only work for a little while—the virus stays one step ahead while the immune system struggles to play catch-up. But researchers discovered antibodies that target the converse part of the virus’s structure—the features that are critical to its function and don’t change much over time. These antibodies were discovered in HIV-infected people whose immune systems seemed to keep most strains of HIV in check. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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New HIV antibodies show potential

This is the amazing Lockheed Martin SR-72—the space Blackbird

Aviation Week’s Guy Norris has an exclusive article on the successor for the Lockheed Martin SR-71 Blackbird, the mythical spy plane that may be the favorite of every airplane nerd in the world. The hypersonic SR-72 is the first aircraft that can fit perfectly in Star Wars or Galactica, a true space age ship. Read more…

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This is the amazing Lockheed Martin SR-72—the space Blackbird

Mysterious Google barge is a massive showroom, “party deck”

Google’s four-story shipping-container product marketing paradise. KPIX5 The mysterious Google barge discovered floating in San Francisco Bay will be used as a party space and showroom just for Google’s Glass and “other gadgets,” according to sources speaking to KPIX5 in San Francisco. The boat will be stationed near Google’s campus in Mountain View, CA and will host “invitation-only clients.” The existence of Google’s watercraft—one on the West Coast and one on the East Coast in Portland, ME—has been a topic of discussion over the past week. The barges are held under an LLC called By And Large, apparently a reference to Pixar’s “ Buy n Large ” of WALL·E, which is itself a reference to the phrase “by and large.” It is not uncommon for high-profile companies like Google to take cover under an LLC to prepare a secret project. Google filed a patent in 2009 for a floating data center, leading outlets like CNET and AllThingsD to believe that the structures might be Google’s first attempt at realizing this idea. The second theory was that the barges were going to be retail presences for Google Glass as the date of the product’s commercial launch nears. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Mysterious Google barge is a massive showroom, “party deck”

Ken May

Author: kenmay