The Federal Register , the daily journal of the United States government, still uses floppy disks to carry out important tasks , including the transfer of the text of executive orders, proposed rule changes, and presidential proclamations. Yes, floppy disks. Read more…
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Federal Agency Still Uses Floppy Disks
An anonymous reader writes “Michael Nielsen has written a detailed article describing the nuts and bolts of a Bitcoin transaction. He builds the concepts from the ground up, starting with a basic, no-frills digital currency. He then examines it for flaws and tweaks the currency to patch up areas where we run into technical or security problems. Eventually, he ends up with Bitcoin, and explains how a transaction works. It’s an interesting, technical read; much more in-depth than any explanation I’ve heard. Here’s a brief snippet from a walkthrough of the transaction data: ‘One thing to note about the input is that there’s nothing explicitly specifying how many bitcoins from the previous transaction should be spent in this transaction. In fact, all the bitcoins from the n=0th output of the previous transaction are spent. So, for example, if the n=0th output of the earlier transaction was 2 bitcoins, then 2 bitcoins will be spent in this transaction. This seems like an inconvenient restriction – like trying to buy bread with a 20 dollar note, and not being able to break the note down. The solution, of course, is to have a mechanism for providing change. This can be done using transactions with multiple inputs and outputs…'” Bitcoin is going through another period of heavy fluctuation: it fell from a high of around $1, 200 per bitcoin to roughly half that, and as of this writing trade around $760 per bitcoin. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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How a Bitcoin Transaction Actually Works
As earth’s population surges, mankind faces an increasingly limited supply of fresh water. Thankfully, Australian scientists report this week that they’ve found vast new fresh water supplies. Unfortunately, it’s in one of earth’s least accessible places: under the ocean floor . Read more…
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Researchers Discover Huge Freshwater Reserves Under Ocean Floors
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Just Four People are Making This Stunning Video Game
On April Fool’s Day 2012 , ThinkGeek featured the Technomancer Digital Wizard Hoodie among their fake products. Now they’ve introduced the real thing, a hooded jacket that lights up and makes spell sounds based on the movement of the wearer’s arms. Read more…
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Light-up wizard hoodie transforms its wearer into a Technomancer
MojoKid writes “A leaked Intel roadmap for solid state storage technology suggests the company is pushing ahead with its plans to introduce new high-end drives based on cutting-edge NAND flash. It’s significant for Intel to be adopting 20nm NAND in its highest-end data center products, because of the challenges smaller NAND nodes present in terms of data retention and reliability. Intel introduced 20nm NAND lower in the product stack over a year ago, but apparently has waited till now to bring 20nm to the highest end. Reportedly, next year, Intel will debut three new drive families — the SSD Pro 2500 Series (codenamed Temple Star), the DC P3500 Series (Pleasantdale) and the DC P3700 Series (Fultondale). The Temple Star family uses the M.2 and M.25 form factors, which are meant to replace the older mSATA form factor for ultrabooks and tablets. The M.2 standard allows more space on PCBs for actual NAND storage and can interface with PCIe, SATA, and USB 3.0-attached storage in the same design. The new high-end enterprise drives, meanwhile, will hit 2TB (up from 800GB), ship in 2.5″ and add-in card form factors, and offer vastly improved performance. The current DC S3700 series offers 500MBps writes and 460MBps reads. The DC P3700 will increase this to 2800MBps read and 1700MBps writes. The primary difference between the DC P3500 and DC P3700 families appears to be that the P3700 family will use Intel’s High Endurance Technology (HET) MLC, while the DC P3500 family sticks with traditional MLC.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Intel SSD Roadmap Points To 2TB Drives Arriving In 2014
Cartoonist Ed Piskor’s latest book, The Hip Hop Family Tree (Fantagraphic Books) collects his non-fiction comic strip history of Hip Hop, serialized weekly here on Boing Boing. The Hip Hop Family Tree follows the success of his debut graphic novel last year, Wizzywig (Top Shelf Comics), the tale of a computer hacker. Piskor has a special knack for creating comics that appeal to audiences beyond those of us who frequent comic book shops and bookmark webcomics for daily reading. We caught up with him after a busy month of promotional activity for the new book, including stops at Miami Book Fair, Chicago Ideas Week, Brooklyn Book Fair, and the Small Press Expo. GET TMSIDK: RSS | On iTunes | Download episode | Listen on Stitcher Follow TMSIDK on Twitter Tell Me Something I Don’t Know is produced and hosted by three talented cartoonists and illustrators: Jim Rugg , a Pittsburgh-based comic book artist, graphic designer, zinemaker, and writer best known for Afrodisiac , The Plain Janes , and Street Angel . His latest project is SUPERMAG . Jasen Lex is a designer and illustrator from Pittsburgh. He is currently working on a graphic novel called Washington Unbound. All of his art and comics can be found at jasenlex.com . Ed Piskor is the cartoonist who drew the comic, Wizzywig , and draws the Brain Rot/ Hip Hop Family Tree comic strip at this very site, soon to be collected by Fantagraphics Books and available for pre-order now .
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Tell Me Something I Don’t Know 019: Ed Piskor and The Hip Hop Family Tree
itwbennett writes “An estimated one in four user applications sent from HealthCare.gov to insurance providers have errors introduced by the website, an official with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said during a press briefing Friday. The errors include missing forms, duplicate forms and incorrect information in the applications, such as wrong information about an applicant’s marital status, said Julie Bataille, communications director for HHS Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). While the software bugs leading to the errors have largely been fixed, as many as 10 percent of insurance applications may still have errors and consumers who have used HealthCare.gov to buy insurance and have concerns that their applications haven’t been processed or have errors should contact their insurers, Bataille said.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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About 25% of HealthCare.gov Applications Have Errors
Scary. Insane. Ridiculous. Invasive. Wrong. The Washington Post reports that the FBI has had the ability to secretly activate a computer’s camera “without triggering the light that lets users know it is recording” for years now. What in the hell is going on? What kind of world do we live in? Read more…
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FBI can secretly turn on laptop cameras without the indicator light
SkyGuide’s creator Nick Risinger had to travel more than 60, 000 miles by airplane and car to collect 37, 000 individual photos to create this single image, the largest true-color image of the entire sky ever made: 100, 000 by 50, 000 pixels. Read more…
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Largest true-color photo of the sky ever took 60,000 miles of travel