Tag: funny

FCC Officially Approves Change In the Definition of Broadband

halfEvilTech writes As part of its 2015 Broadband Progress Report, the Federal Communications Commission has voted to change the definition of broadband by raising the minimum download speeds needed from 4Mbps to 25Mbps, and the minimum upload speed from 1Mbps to 3Mbps, which effectively triples the number of US households without broadband access. Currently, 6.3 percent of US households don’t have access to broadband under the previous 4Mpbs/1Mbps threshold, while another 13.1 percent don’t have access to broadband under the new 25Mbps downstream threshold. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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FCC Officially Approves Change In the Definition of Broadband

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

YouTube Ditches Flash For HTML5 Video By Default

An anonymous reader writes: YouTube today announced it has finally stopped using Adobe Flash by default. The site now uses its HTML5 video player by default in Google’s Chrome, Microsoft’s IE11, Apple’s Safari 8, and in beta versions of Mozilla’s Firefox browser. At the same time, YouTube is now also defaulting to its HTML5 player on the web. In fact, the company is deprecating the “old style” Flash object embeds and its Flash API, pointing users to the iFrame API instead, since the latter can adapt depending on the device and browser you’re using. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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YouTube Ditches Flash For HTML5 Video By Default

Disney Turned Down George Lucas’s Star Wars Scripts

ageoffri writes: When Star Wars fans learned that George Lucas was making the prequels, most were filled with excitement and anticipation. When Episodes 1-3 were actually released, many found them unsatisfying, and became disillusioned with Lucas’s writing. Now, it appears Disney felt the same way. Though they bought Lucasfilm and began production on Episode 7, they weren’t interested in using the scripts Lucas had already worked on. In an interview, he said, “The ones that I sold to Disney, they came up to the decision that they didn’t really want to do those. So they made up their own. So it’s not the ones that I originally wrote [on screen in Star Wars: The Force Awakens].” After what happened with the prequels, that may be for the best — but others may worry about Episode 7’s plot being entirely in the hands of Disney and JJ Abrams. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Disney Turned Down George Lucas’s Star Wars Scripts

At Oxford, a Battery That’s Lasted 175 Years — So Far

sarahnaomi writes There sits, in the Clarendon Laboratory at Oxford University, a bell that has been ringing, nonstop, for at least 175 years. It’s powered by a single battery that was installed in 1840. Researchers would love to know what the battery is made of, but they are afraid that opening the bell would ruin an experiment to see how long it will last. The bell’s clapper oscillates back and forth constantly and quickly, meaning the Oxford Electric Bell, as it’s called, has rung roughly 10 billion times, according to the university. It’s made of what’s called a “dry pile, ” which is one of the first electric batteries. Dry piles were invented by a guy named Giuseppe Zamboni (no relation to the ice resurfacing company) in the early 1800s. They use alternating discs of silver, zinc, sulfur, and other materials to generate low currents of electricity. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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At Oxford, a Battery That’s Lasted 175 Years — So Far

Linus Fixes Kernel Regression Breaking Witcher 2

jones_supa writes There has been quite a debate around the Linux version of The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings and the fact that it wasn’t really a port. A special kind of wrapper was used to make the Windows version of the game run on Linux systems, similar to Wine. The performance on Linux systems took a hit and users felt betrayed because they thought that they would get a native port. However, after the game stopped launching properly at some point, the reason was actually found to be a Linux regression. Linus quickly took care of the issue on an unofficial Witcher 2 issue tracker on GitHub: “It looks like LDT_empty is buggy on 64-bit kernels. I suspect that the behavior was inconsistent before the tightening change and that it’s now broken as a result. I’ll write a patch. Serves me right for not digging all the way down the mess of macros.” This one goes to the bin “don’t break userspace”. Linus also reminds of QA: “And maybe this is an excuse for somebody in the x86 maintainer team to try a few games on steam. They *are* likely good tests of odd behavior..” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Linus Fixes Kernel Regression Breaking Witcher 2

WhatsApp vs. WhatsApp Plus Fight Gets Ugly For Users

BarbaraHudson writes WhatsApp is locking out users for 24 hours who use WhatsApp Plus to access the service. The company claims they brought in the temporary ban to make users aware that they are not using the correct version and their privacy could be comprised using the unofficial WhatsApp Plus. “Starting today, we are taking aggressive action against unauthorized apps and alerting the people who use them.” Is this a more aggressive rerun of “This site best viewed with Internet Explorer”? Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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WhatsApp vs. WhatsApp Plus Fight Gets Ugly For Users

UHD Spec Stomps on Current Blu-ray Spec, But Will Consumers Notice?

An anonymous reader writes Details have emerged on the new UHD Blu-ray spec and players set to start shipping this summer. UHD promises resolutions 4X greater than Blu-ray 1080p as well as much higher data rates, enhanced color space and more audio options. But, will consumers care, and will they be willing to upgrade their HDTV’s, AV Receivers, and Blu-ray players to adopt a new format whose benefits may only be realized on ultra large displays or close viewing distances? The article makes the interesting point that UHD isn’t synonymous with 4K, even if both handily beat the resolution of most household displays. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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UHD Spec Stomps on Current Blu-ray Spec, But Will Consumers Notice?

Microbots Deliver Medical Payload In Living Creature For the First Time

Zothecula writes: Researchers working at the University of California, San Diego have claimed a world first in proving that artificial, microscopic machines can travel inside a living creature and deliver their medicinal load without any detrimental effects. Using micro-motor powered robots propelled by gas bubbles made from a reaction with the contents of the stomach in which they were deposited, these miniature machines have been successfully deployed in the body of a live mouse. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Microbots Deliver Medical Payload In Living Creature For the First Time

Pentagon Scolds Air Force for Wasting Nearly $9 Billion on Drones

Drones are expensive. Aircraft like General Atomics’s MQ-1 Predator or MQ-9 Reaper cost millions of dollars piece, while the cost of maintaining the fleet stretches into the high tens of billions dollars over their lifespans. The Pentagon’s internal watchdog is aware of this, and recently lambasted the Air Force for not justifying the purchase of 46 Reapers— potentially wasting $8.8 billion of taxpayers’ money . Read more…

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Pentagon Scolds Air Force for Wasting Nearly $9 Billion on Drones