journal – Page 143

Sci-Hub, a Site With Open and Pirated Scientific Papers

lpress writes: Sci-Hub is a Russian site that seeks to remove barriers to science by providing access to pirated copies of scientific papers. It was established in 2011 by Russian neuroscientist Alexandra Elbakyan, who could not afford papers she needed for her research and it now claims to have links to 48 million pirated and open papers. I tried it out and found some papers and not others, but it provides an alternative for researchers who cannot afford access to paid journals. After visiting this site, one cannot help thinking of the case of Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide as a result of prosecution for his attempt to free scientific literature. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Sci-Hub, a Site With Open and Pirated Scientific Papers

OCZ Toshiba Breaks 30 Cents Per GB Barrier With New Trion 150 SSD

MojoKid writes: OCZ’s Trion 150 SSD is an update to the company’s Trion 100, which was the first drive from OCZ to feature TLC NAND and all in-house, Toshiba-built technology. As its branding suggests, the new Trion 150 kicks things up a notch over the Trion 100, thanks to some cutting-edge Toshiba 15nm NAND flash memory and a tweaked firmware, that combined, offer increased performance and lower cost over its predecessor. In testing, the Trion 150 hits peak reads and writes well north of 500MB/sec like most SATA-based SSDs but the kicker is, at its higher densities, the drive weighs in at about 28 cents per GiB. This equates to street prices of $70 for a 240GB drive, $140 for 480GB and $270 for a 960GB version. It’s good to see mainstream solid state storage costs continuing to come down. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

LibreOffice 5.1 Officially Released

prisoninmate writes: After being in development for the last three months or so, LibreOffice 5.1 comes today to a desktop environment near you with some of the most attractive features you’ve ever seen in an open-source office suite software product, no matter the operating system used. The release highlights of LibreOffice 5.1 include a redesigned user interface for improved ease of use, better interoperability with OOXML files, support for reading and writing files on cloud servers, enhanced support for the ODF 1.2 file format, as well as additional Spreadsheet functions and features. Yesterday, even with the previous version, I was able to successfully use a moderately complex docx template without a hitch — the kind of thing that would have been a pipe-dream not too long ago. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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LibreOffice 5.1 Officially Released

World’s Largest Solar Power Plant To Supply Enough Energy For 1.1 Million People

Lucas123 writes: The world’s largest solar power plant is now live and will eventually provide 1.1 million people in Morocco with power and cut carbon emissions by 760, 000 tons a year. Phase 1 of the Noor concentrated solar power (CSP) plant went live last week, providing 140 megawatts (MW) of power to Morocco. Phases 2 and 3 will be completed by 2018 when the plant is expected to generate more than 500MW of power. The Noor plant, located in south-central Morocco, will cover 6, 178 acres and produce so much energy, that Morocco may eventually start exporting the clean energy to the European market. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China Just Made a Major Breakthrough In Nuclear Fusion Research

New submitter TechnoidNash writes: China announced last week a major breakthrough in the realm of nuclear fusion research. The Chinese Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), was able to heat hydrogen gas to a temperature of near 50 million degrees Celsius for an unprecedented 102 seconds. While this is nowhere near the hottest temperature that has ever been achieved in nuclear fusion research (that distinction belongs to the Large Hadron Collider which reached 4 trillion degrees Celsius), it is the longest amount of time one has been maintained. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Talos Secure Workstation Is Free-Software Centric — and $3100 [Updated]

jones_supa writes: These days, the motivation to use open source software for many people is to avoid backdoors placed by intelligence organizations and to avoid software that has hidden privacy-intruding characteristics. For the operating system and userspace software, open choices are already available. The last remaining island has been the firmware included in various ROM chips in a computer. Libreboot has introduced an open BIOS, but it is not available for newer systems featuring the Intel ME or AMD PSP management features. Talos’ Secure Workstation fills this need, providing a modern system with 8-core POWER8 CPU, 132 GB RAM, and open firmware. The product is currently in a pre-release phase where Raptor Engineering is trying to understand if it’s possible to do a production run of the machine. If you are interested, it’s worth visiting the official website. Adds an anonymous reader about the new system, which rings in at a steep $3100: “While the engineers found solace in the POWER8 architecture with being more open than AMD/Intel CPUs, they still are searching for a graphics card that is open enough to receive the FSF Respect Your Freedom certification.” Update: 02/08 18:44 GMT by T : See also Linux hacker and IBM employee Stewart Smith’s talk from the just-completed linux.conf.au on, in which he walks through “all of the firmware components and what they do, including the boot sequence from power being applied up to booting an operating system.” Update: 02/08 23:30 GMT by T :FSF Licensing & Compliance Manager Joshua Gay wrote to correct the headline originally appeared with this story, which said that the Talos workstation described was “FSF Certified”; that claim was an error I introduced. “The FSF has not certified this hardware, ” says Gay, “nor is it currently reviewing the hardware for FSF certification.” Sorry for the confusion. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Talos Secure Workstation Is Free-Software Centric — and $3100 [Updated]

Carbon Dioxide From the Air Converted Into Methanol

Zothecula writes: The danger posed by rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide has seen many schemes proposed to remove a proportion it from the air. Rather than simply capture this greenhouse gas and bury it in the ground, though, many experiments have managed to transform CO2 into useful things like carbon nanofibers or even fuels, such as diesel. Unfortunately, the over-arching problem with many of these conversions is the particularly high operating temperatures that require counterproductive amounts of energy to produce relatively low yields of fuel. Now researchers at the University of Southern California (USC) claim to have devised a way to take CO2 directly from the air and convert it into methanol using much lower temperatures and in a correspondingly simpler way. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bethesda To Unleash the Hounds of Hell On May 13th: Doom Release Date Confirmed

MojoKid writes: Bethesda and id Software are in the process rebooting the Doom franchise and it seems like it’s been in development for ages. When we last visited the upcoming Doom remake, Bethesda had posted a giblet-filled trailer which showed some pretty impressive gameplay visuals, killer hand-to-hand combat and plenty of head stomping. However, Bethesda just clued gamers in on something that Doom fans have been anticipating for years, an actual release date. Mark your calendars for May 13th, because that’s when Doom will be available for Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and of course, the PC platform. Bethesda also dropped a new campaign trailer for you to ogle. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Bethesda To Unleash the Hounds of Hell On May 13th: Doom Release Date Confirmed

Windows 10 Gets Core Console Host Enhancements

x0n writes: As of Windows 10 TH2 (10.0.1058), the core console subsystem has support for a large number of ANSI and VT100 escape sequences. This is likely to prepare for full Open SSH server/client integration, which is already underway over on github. It looks like xterm is finally coming to Windows. OpenSSH was previously announced (last year) by the very forward-looking PowerShell team. The linked article provides some context, and explains that the console host isn’t the same as either cmd.exe or powershell.exe, but there is a lot of overlap in functionality. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Windows 10 Gets Core Console Host Enhancements

In Japan, a Battle Brewing Over the Right To Record 4k and 8k Broadcasts

AmiMoJo writes: Japanese broadcasters have indicated that 4k and 8k broadcasts may have recording disabled via a ‘do not copy’ flag [via Google Translate], which receivers would be expected to obey. Now the Internet Users Association (MIAU) and Shufuren (Housewives Federation) have submitted documentation opposing the ban. The document points out that the ban will only inconvenience the majority of the general audience, while inevitably failing to prevent unauthorized copying by anyone determined to circumvent the protection. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ken May

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