Tag: funny

A Look Inside the 8K Theater Technology At the Newly Renovated Fiske Planetarium

An anonymous reader writes “Sky gazers at CU-Boulder’s Fiske Planetarium are getting better, clearer and deeper views. And not just of astronomy anymore. The planetarium has been upgraded, transforming it into a digital IMAX-like theater that’s open to the public every Saturday and Sunday with a variety of programs including shows for children. ‘Fiske’s refurbished video system projects ultra high-definition pictures at 8, 000 by 8, 000 pixels in size, giving audience members a crystal-clear 360-degree view on the dome’s 65-foot screen. “The size and quality is the equivalent of 40 Blu-ray players projecting 40 sections of one video image at once, ” said [Doug Duncan, director of Fiske]. This gallery of images shows a behind-the-scenes look at the Planetarium’s brand new 8k Fulldome projection system. ‘ In addition to space odysseys and laser shows — longtime favorites of audiences — movies are now part of the Fiske lineup. ‘Just like at an IMAX theater, we can take you near a black hole, through the Grand Canyon, under the ocean, or up to a super volcano, ‘ said Duncan. “The sky is no longer the limit.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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A Look Inside the 8K Theater Technology At the Newly Renovated Fiske Planetarium

Biological Clock Discovered That Measures Ages of Most Human Tissues

starr802 writes “A biological clock capable of determining how old different human tissues and cells are has been discovered by a team of researchers from the University of California Los Angeles (abstract). ‘To fight aging, we first need an objective way of measuring it. Pinpointing a set of biomarkers that keeps time throughout the body has been a four-year challenge, ‘ Steve Horvath, a professor of human genetics at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and of biostatistics at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health said in a statement. ‘My goal in inventing this clock is to help scientists improve their understanding of what speeds up and slows down the human aging process.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Biological Clock Discovered That Measures Ages of Most Human Tissues

Visual Studio 2013 Released

jones_supa writes “Final releases of Visual Studio 2013, .NET 4.5.1, and Team Foundation Server 2013 are now available. As part of the new release, the C++ engine implements variadic templates, delegating constructors, non-static data member initializers, uniform initialization, and ‘using’ aliases. The editor has seen new features, C++ improvements and performance optimizations. Support for Windows 8.1 has been enhanced and the new XAML UI Responsiveness tool and Profile Guided Optimization help to analyze responsiveness in Windows Store apps. Graphics debugging has been furthered to have better C++ AMP tools and a new remote debugger (x86, x64, ARM). As before, MSDN and DreamSpark subscribers can obtain the releases from the respective channels, and the Express edition is available zero cost for all.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Visual Studio 2013 Released

Ethernet’s 400-Gigabit Challenge Is a Good Problem To Have

alphadogg writes “As it embarks on what’s likely to be a long journey to its next big increase in speed, Ethernet is in some ways a victim of its own success. Years ago, birthing a new generation of Ethernet was relatively straightforward: Enterprises wanted faster LANs, vendors figured out ways to achieve that throughput and hashed out a standard, and IT shops bought the speed boost with their next computers and switches. Now it’s more complicated, with carriers, Web 2.0 giants, cloud providers, and enterprises all looking for different speeds and interfaces, some more urgently than others. … That’s what the IEEE 802.3 400Gbps Study Group faces as it tries to write the next chapter in Ethernet’s history. … ‘You have a lot of different people coming in to the study group, ‘ said John D’Ambrosia, the group’s chair, in an interview at the Ethernet Alliance’s Technology Exploration Forum in Santa Clara, California, on Tuesday. That can make it harder to reach consensus, with 75 percent approval required to ratify a standard, he said.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Ethernet’s 400-Gigabit Challenge Is a Good Problem To Have

35,000 vBulletin Sites Have Already Been Exploited By Week Old Hole

realized writes “Last week Slashdot covered a new vBulletin exploit. Apparently hackers have been busy since then because according to security firm Imperva, more than 35, 000 sites were recently hacked via this vulnerability. The sad part about this is that it could have all been avoided if the administrator of the websites just removed the /install and/or /core/install folders – something that you would think the installer should do on its own.” Web applications that have write access to directories they then load code from have always seemed a bit iffy to me (wp-content anyone?) Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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35,000 vBulletin Sites Have Already Been Exploited By Week Old Hole

Unifying Undersea Wireless Communication Using TCP/IP

Nerval’s Lobster writes “Wireless and cellular networks cover beaches and extend over the ocean to ships at sea but not, so far, under the ocean. A team of researchers at the University of Buffalo believe they’ve solved at least the technical problem of how to push wireless networking signals for long distances through the deep ocean to connect offshore oil and gas platforms, floating and underwater tsunami sensors and other remote facilities without having to bounce signals off a satellite first. Radio waves tend to be smothered or distorted by travel through water; most ocean-based sensors use acoustic waves instead, which link sensors into underwater acoustic sensor networks (UWASN). The team designed a low-power IPv4/IPv6-compatible networking protocol that uses very low power, compresses headers, is tolerant of fragmented data and connection delays, allows bi-directional communication with (and reconfiguration of) existing underwater sensors and is compatible with standard TCP/IP networks and IP router proxies. The approach is more than a simple translation from one networking medium to another. It leaves the higher-level TCP/IP networking protocols intact, but adds an adaptation layer between the data-link layer and network layer that compresses headers, changes packet size, transmission time-out settings and other requirements to be compatible with slower underwater transmissions. The team tested the implementation using a Linux-based driver, both PC and ARM-based computers and a Teledyne Benthos SM-75 Modem. They sealed two network nodes in 40-pound waterproof cases, dumped them into Lake Erie near Buffalo and transmitted instant-messaging signals from the application IPTUX from one to the other. They were also able to transfer files using FTP from an underwater client to server.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Unifying Undersea Wireless Communication Using TCP/IP

D-Link Router Backdoor Vulnerability Allows Full Access To Settings

StealthHunter writes “It turned out that just by setting a browsers user-agent to ‘xmlset_roodkcableoj28840ybtide’ anyone can remotely bypass all authentication on D-Link routers. It seems that thttpd was modified by Alphanetworks who inserted the backdoor. Unfortunately, vulnerable routers can be easily identified by services like shodanHQ. At least these models may have vulnerable firmware: DIR-100, DI-524, DI-524UP, DI-604S, DI-604UP, DI-604+, TM-G5240.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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D-Link Router Backdoor Vulnerability Allows Full Access To Settings

Dangerous VBulletin Exploit In the Wild

An anonymous reader writes “vBulletin is a popular proprietary CMS that was recently reported to be vulnerable to an unspecified attack vector. Although vBulletin has not disclosed the root cause of the vulnerability or its impact, we determined the attacker’s methods. The identified vulnerability allows an attacker to abuse the vBulletin configuration mechanism in order to create a secondary administrative account. Once the attacker creates the account, they will have full control over the exploited vBulletin application, and subsequently the supported site.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Dangerous VBulletin Exploit In the Wild

AMD Intentionally Added Artificial Limitations To Their HDMI Adapters

An anonymous reader writes “NVIDIA was caught removing features from their Linux driver and days later Linux developers have caught and confirmed AMD imposing artificial limitations on their graphics cards in the DVI-to-HDMI adapters that their driver will support. Over years AMD has quietly been adding an extra EEPROM chip to their DVI-to-HDMI adapters that are bundled with Radeon HD graphics cards. Only when these identified adapters are detected via checks in their Windows and Linux Catalyst driver is HDMI audio enabled. If using a third-party DVI-to-HDMI adapter, HDMI audio support is disabled by the Catalyst driver. Open-source Linux developers have found this to be a self-imposed limitation and that the open-source AMD Linux driver will work fine with any DVI-to-HDMI adapter.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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AMD Intentionally Added Artificial Limitations To Their HDMI Adapters

Alcatel-Lucent To Cut 10,000 Workers, Calls It "Shift Plan"

Dawn Kawamoto writes “Alcatel-Lucent is planning to cut 10, 000 workers by 2015. The telecom equipment maker’s newly minted CEO calls this restructuring part of his Shift Plan. Under this plan, Alcatel-Lucent wants to save 1 billion Euros in costs and refocus its operations on next-gen IP networking, cloud and ultra-broadband access and away from legacy technologies like its 2G and 3G wireless. In the meantime, Wall Street thinks it may be cleaning itself up for a sale of some of its assets or its operations to Nokia, which will need to bolster its telecom equipment business after selling its smartphone operations to Microsoft. But a Nokia-Microsoft deal may be too little, too late.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Alcatel-Lucent To Cut 10,000 Workers, Calls It "Shift Plan"