When things aren’t working the way you want them to, or you feel you’re surrounded by problems, it can be tempting to look outward and try to change the things that you feel are causing issues. Chances are the issues you’re facing aren’t so cut and dry. The solution to the problem might just be your attitude. That’s what pastor and educator Charles R. Swindoll believes: More »
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"Life is 10% of What Happens to Me and 90% of How I React to It" [Quotables]
diegocg writes “Linux 3.2 has been released. New features include support for Ext4 block size bigger than 4KB and up to 1MB, btrfs has added faster scrubbing, automatic backup of critical metadata and tools for manual inspection; the process scheduler has added support to set upper limits of CPU time; the desktop responsiveness in presence of heavy writes has been improved, TCP has been updated to include an algorithm which speeds up the recovery of connection after lost packets; the profiling tool ‘perf top’ has added support for live inspection of tasks and libraries. The Device Mapper has added support for ‘thin provisioning’ of storage, and a support for a new architecture has been added: Hexagon DSP processor from Qualcomm. New drivers and small improvements and fixes are also available in this release. Here’s the full list of changes.”
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Linux 3.2 Has Been Released
Macoto Murayama’s exquisite “Inorganic Herbarium” diagrams will be on display at Frantic Gallery’s booth in the Art Stage Singapore Art Fair next weekend, January 12-15. I first posted about his work back in 2009 and its evolution is nothing short of breathtaking.
This time we present exclusively large scale Botanical Diagrams by Murayama with a vast explanatory material on both botanical and technical context of his digital flowers. We will also show how the artist creates his works, beginning from vivisection of a real flower, photography, sketches and then software for 3-Dimensional drawings. For the first time, the original flowers used for the Botanical Diagrams will also be shown inside transparent vessels filled with formaldehyde.
Macoto Murayama: Botanical Diagrams
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Macoto Murayama’s incredible digital flower diagrams
MrSeb writes with this excerpt from an Extreme Tech article about the latest FreeDOS release and a bit of project history: “Some 17 years after its first release in 1994, and more than five years since 1.0, FreeDOS 1.1 is now available to download. The history of FreeDOS stems back to the summer of 1994 when Microsoft announced that MS-DOS as a separate product would no longer be supported. It would live on as part of Windows 95, 98, and (ugh!) Me, but for Jim Hall that wasn’t enough, and so public domain (PD) DOS was born. … Despite what you might think, FreeDOS isn’t an ‘old’ OS; it’s actually quite usable. FreeDOS supports FAT32, UDMA for hard drives and DVD drives, and it even has antivirus and BitTorrent clients.”
The official release announcement has more details on the improvements, and the FreeDOS website has the release for download.
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FreeDOS 1.1 Released
WiFi hacking has long been a favorite pastime of hackers, penetration testers, and people too cheap to pay for their own Internet connection. And there are plenty of targets out there for would-be hackers and war drivers to go after—just launch a WiFi scanner app in any residential neighborhood or office complex, and you’re bound to find an access point that’s either wide open or protected by weak encryption. Fortunately (or unfortunately, if you’re the one looking for free WiFi), those more blatant security holes are going away through attrition as people upgrade to newer routers or network administrators hunt down vulnerabilities and stomp them out. But as one door closes, another opens.
Last week, security researchers revealed a vulnerability in WiFi Protected Setup, an optional device configuration protocol for wireless access points. WPS lets users enter a personal identification number that is hard-coded into the access point in order to quickly connect a computer or other wireless device to the network. The structure of the WPS PIN number and a flaw in the protocol’s response to invalid requests make attacking WPS relatively simple compared to cracking a WiFi Protected Access (WPA or WPA2) password. On December 28, Craig Heffner of Tactical Network Solutions released an open-source version of an attack tool, named Reaver, that exploits the vulnerability.
To find out just how big the hole was, I downloaded and compiled Reaver for a bit of New Years geek fun. As it turns out, it’s a pretty big one—even with WPS allegedly turned off on a target router, I was able to get it to cough up the SSID and password. The only way to block the attack was to turn on Media Access Control (MAC) address filtering to block unwanted hardware.
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Hands-on: hacking WiFi Protected Setup with Reaver
The future of transportation is here, folks. We’ve spent some time with the Ford Focus Electric and have seen all the bits that make it go, but we didn’t know who’d be the first to receive one. Turns out Google got an early Christmas present, and received its Focus Electric, the first production unit, just before the holidays. That means that the gang at Big G is already enjoying the 84mph top speed and fast charging secret sauce that lets the Ford fully charge on a 240-volt outlet in just over three hours — or roughly half the time it takes a Leaf to top off its batteries. Wonder whether the EV from Dearborn is destined to join Google’s Street View fleet, its cadre of self-driving cars, or replace some of those multi-colored company bikes strewn about Mountain View?
Continue reading First Ford Focus Electric rolls off the production line into Google’s open arms
First Ford Focus Electric rolls off the production line into Google’s open arms originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 03 Jan 2012 22:02:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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First Ford Focus Electric rolls off the production line into Google’s open arms
Update: Comet has issued the following response to Microsoft’s statement which we’ve got for you in full, after the break.
Microsoft: UK Retailer ‘sold 94,000 counterfeit copies of Windows’ (Update: Comet responds) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 04 Jan 2012 06:17:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Microsoft: UK Retailer ‘sold 94,000 counterfeit copies of Windows’ (Update: Comet responds)
An anonymous reader writes “As from today, network operators in Chile are no longer allowed to sell carrier-locked phones, and must unlock free of charge all devices already sold to costumers through a simple form on their respective websites. The new regulation came into effect in preparations for the rollout of Mobile Number Portability, set to begin on January 16th. This is one among other restrictions that forbid carriers to lock in the customers through ‘abusive clauses’ in their contracts, one of which was through selling locked devices. Now if a customer wishes to change carriers he/she needs only to have the bills up to date and the process of porting the number should only take 24 hours.”
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Chile Forbids Carriers From Selling Network-Locked Phones
Microsoft is preparing an expansion of the Windows Azure virtual machine hosting technology that will let customers run either Windows or Linux virtual machines, as well as applications like SQL Server and SharePoint, according to Mary-Jo Foley at ZDNet.
Azure already has a “VM role” service in beta, letting customers deploy a Windows Server 2008 R2 image. This is similar to the type of VM hosting offered by Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, but much more limited—Azure hides much of the complexity of the operating system layer so developers can just focus on building applications.
Foley and her sources say Azure’s current VM role is not persistent, meaning data is frequently lost. But a Community Technology Preview set to launch in spring of 2012 will fix this problem and add several other capabilities, including Linux hosting, according to Microsoft partners who spoke with Foley.
“What does this mean? Customers who want to run Windows or Linux ‘durably’ (i.e., without losing state) in VMs on Microsoft’s Azure platform-as-a-service platform will be able to do so,” Foley wrote yesterday. “The new persistent VM support also will allow customers to run SQL Server or SharePoint Server in VMs, as well. And it will enable customers to more easily move existing apps to the Azure platform.”
The Register noted last June that Microsoft was already testing Linux on Azure in its internal labs. Although Microsoft has often been at odds with the Linux community, it’s a logical next step for the company, given that it has already worked on supporting Linux distributions on its Hyper-V virtualization software.
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Microsoft will add Linux virtual machines to Windows Azure
In 2002 Dinah Sanders started a personal holiday called Discardia. As she writes in her book, Discardia: More Life, Less Stuff, her quarterly festival celebrates “unconsumption, the slow movement, downshifting, and voluntary simplicity.” In other words, it’s about getting rid of stuff so you can enjoy a richer life.
Sanders (who maintains a blog called Discardia) believes that many people mistakenly seek the good life by acquiring lots of things and experiences and then try to shoehorn these into an already overcrowded life. But Sanders maintains that the good life is better achieved by taking the opposite approach: stripping away the layers of material, habitual and emotional cruft that we accumulate over time to reveal a more meaningful, engaging, and manageable way to live.
Read my review of Sanders’ book at credit.com
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Discardia: not anti-stuff, just pro-awesome
