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George R. R. Martin’s "The Winds of Winter" Wiill Not Be Published In 2015

Dave Knott (2917251) writes George R.R. Martin’s “The WInds Of Winter”, the fifth book of his bestselling fantasy saga “A Song Of Ice And Fire” (known to television fans as “Game Of Thrones”) will not be published in 2015. Jane Johnson at HarperCollins has confirmed that it is not in this year’s schedule. “I have no information on likely delivery, ” she said. “These are increasingly complex books and require immense amounts of concentration to write. Fans really ought to appreciate that the length of these monsters is equivalent to two or three novels by other writers.”Instead, readers will have to comfort themselves with a collection, illustrated by Gary Gianni, of three previously anthologised novellas set in the world of Westeros. “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” takes place nearly a century before the bloody events of the A Song of Ice and Fire series. Out in October, it is a compilation of the first three official prequel novellas to the series, The Hedge Knight, The Sworn Sword and The Mystery Knight, never before collected. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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George R. R. Martin’s "The Winds of Winter" Wiill Not Be Published In 2015

Beware: Porn-Based Malware Is Sweeping Across Facebook

Don’t click any porn links on Facebook. Just don’t. It’s a good rule of thumb, but there’s an extra good reason right now. There’s a troubling type of porn-based malware that’s apparently infected over 110, 000 Facebook users in two days. And you could get the same Click Transmitted Disease. Read more…

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Beware: Porn-Based Malware Is Sweeping Across Facebook

Drug Dealers Are Using Nokia Dumbphones To Stay Ahead Of "The Feds"

According to a story from the UK edition of Vice (a story which, I hasten to add, relies on a source named ‘K2’ and should therefore be taken with the requisite gallon of salt), drug dealers in the fair city of Birmingham have turned to dumphones in an attempt to evade the police. Read more…

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Drug Dealers Are Using Nokia Dumbphones To Stay Ahead Of "The Feds"

The First Self-Charging Smart Bracelet Is Obscenely Expensive

As smartwatches get more and more capable, many have wondered how luxury watch makers will compete. Will Rolex eventually introduce a timepiece with smartphone notifications? One company that might have the answer is Britain’s Christophe & Co. who’s developed a smart bracelet called the Armill that blends luxury and technology into a wearable accessory for the extremely wealthy. Read more…

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The First Self-Charging Smart Bracelet Is Obscenely Expensive

The Insane Camera Rig Being Used to Shoot 360-Degree Oculus Porn

Producing quality 360-degree video for Oculus Rift-like headsets is still really difficult to do, which is why high-tech porn company Huccio had the $250, 000, seven camera rig above custom-designed for its venture into the world of immersive video. Read more…

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The Insane Camera Rig Being Used to Shoot 360-Degree Oculus Porn

StillOpen Checks If Your Favorite Store or Restaurant Is Still Open

If you’ve ever gotten the craving for a late night snack and had the misfortune of an empty pantry, you might understand the very real struggle to find food. StillOpen is a webapp that checks store hours so you can quickly find out which restaurants are—well—still open. Read more…

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StillOpen Checks If Your Favorite Store or Restaurant Is Still Open

Proposed Disk Array With 99.999% Availablity For 4 Years, Sans Maintenance

Thorfinn.au writes with this paper from four researchers (Jehan-François Pâris, Ahmed Amer, Darrell D. E. Long, and Thomas Schwarz, S. J.), with an interesting approach to long-term, fault-tolerant storage: As the prices of magnetic storage continue to decrease, the cost of replacing failed disks becomes increasingly dominated by the cost of the service call itself. We propose to eliminate these calls by building disk arrays that contain enough spare disks to operate without any human intervention during their whole lifetime. To evaluate the feasibility of this approach, we have simulated the behaviour of two-dimensional disk arrays with N parity disks and N(N – 1)/2 data disks under realistic failure and repair assumptions. Our conclusion is that having N(N + 1)/2 spare disks is more than enough to achieve a 99.999 percent probability of not losing data over four years. We observe that the same objectives cannot be reached with RAID level 6 organizations and would require RAID stripes that could tolerate triple disk failures. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Proposed Disk Array With 99.999% Availablity For 4 Years, Sans Maintenance

Scientists Discover How To Track Natural Errors In DNA Replication

BarbaraHudson writes Researchers figured out how to label and keep track of new pieces of DNA, and learned to follow the enzyme responsible for copying those pieces. Their research focused on enzymes called polymerases. These enzymes create small regions in DNA that act as scaffolds for the copied DNA. Scientists assumed that the body deletes the scaffolds containing errors, or mutations, and the standard computer models supported this theory. However, the actual research showed that about 1.5 percent of those erroneous scaffolds are left over, trapped within the DNA. After running models, scientists now believe they can track how DNA replicates and find the most likely areas where these scaffolds with errors turn up. The erroneous scaffolds usually appear close to genetic switches, those regions that turn on when genes activate. The mutations damage the switch, which results in genetic disease, as well as increasing the likelihood of cancer. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Scientists Discover How To Track Natural Errors In DNA Replication