In the first instance of tablets and mobile computing devices being used on the sidelines of NFL games, Microsoft Surface tablets will be used by coaches and players in the upcoming season as part of a reported $400 million multi-year deal between the NFL and Microsoft. The Sideline Viewing System is meant to help coaches and players study their opponents in realtime from the sideline, which… Read More
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NFL Will Let Teams Use Microsoft Surface Tablets On The Sidelines During Games
First time accepted submitter wijnands (874114) writes Star Wars crews have started filming on the small Irish Island of Skellig Michael. This island, listed as a Unesco world heritage site, features the remains of a 6th century monastery as well as breeding populations of puffins , manx shearwaters, storm petrels, guillemots and kittiwakes. Currently the Irish navy has deployed one vessel to maintain a 2 mile exclusion zone around the island. Unesco is now concerned about what is going on the island, which is only visited 13 times a year by tourist groups, and has asked the Irish government for an explanation. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Unesco Probing Star Wars Filming In Ireland
yyzmcleod (1534129) writes The technology to 3D print a single part from multiple materials has been around for years, but only for polymer-based additive manufacturing processes. For metals, jobs are typically confined to a single powdered base metal or alloy per object. However, researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory say they have developed a 3D printing technique that allows for print jobs to transition from one metal to another in a single object. From the article: In JPL’s technique, the build material’s composition is gradually transitioned as the print progresses. For example, the powdered build material might contain 97 percent titanium alloy and 3 percent stainless steel at the beginning of the transition. Then, in 1 percent increments between layers, the gradient progresses to 97 percent stainless steel and 3 percent Ti alloy by some defined point in the overall 3D printing process. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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NASA’s JPL Develops Multi-Metal 3D Printing Process
Nerval’s Lobster writes: Over at Dice, there’s a breakdown of the programming languages that could prove most popular over the next year or two, including Apple’s Swift, JavaScript, CSS3, and PHP. But perhaps the most interesting entry on the list is Erlang, an older language invented in 1986 by engineers at Ericsson. It was originally intended to be used specifically for telecommunications needs, but has since evolved into a general-purpose language, and found a home in cloud-based, high-performance computing when concurrency is needed. “There aren’t a lot of Erlang jobs out there, ” writes developer Jeff Cogswell. “However, if you do master it (and I mean master it, not just learn a bit about it), then you’ll probably land a really good job. That’s the trade-off: You’ll have to devote a lot of energy into it. But if you do, the payoffs could be high.” And while the rest of the featured languages are no-brainers with regard to popularity, it’s an open question how long it might take Swift to become popular, given how hard Apple will push it as the language for developing on iOS. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Programming Languages You’ll Need Next Year (and Beyond)
A newly discovered virus has been found by a San Diego State University team to live inside more than half of all sampled human gut cells sampled. Exploring genetic material found in intestinal samples, the international team uncovered the CrAssphage virus. They say the virus could influence the behaviour of some of the most common bacteria in our gut. Researchers say the virus has the genetic fingerprint of a bacteriophage – a type of virus known to infect bacteria. Phages may work to control the behaviour of bacteria they infect – some make it easier for bacteria to inhabit in their environments while others allow bacteria to become more potent. [Study lead Dr. Robert] Edwards said: “In some way phages are like wolves in the wild, surrounded by hares and deer. “They are critical components of our gut ecosystems, helping control the growth of bacterial populations and allowing a diversity of species.” According to the team, CrAssphage infects one of the most common types of bacteria in our guts. National Geographic gives some idea why a virus so common in our gut should have evaded discovery for so long, but at least CrAssphage finally has a Wikipedia page of its own. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Newly Discovered Virus Widespread in Human Gut
The recent death by overdose of Google executive Timothy Hayes has drawn attention to the phenomenon of illegal drug use (including abuse of prescription painkillers) among technology workers and executives in high-pay, high-stress Silicon Valley. The Mercury News takes a look at the phenomenon; do the descriptions of freely passed cocaine, Red Bull as a gateway drug, and complacent managers match your own workplace experiences? From the Mercury News article: “There’s this workaholism in the valley, where the ability to work on crash projects at tremendous rates of speed is almost a badge of honor, ” says Steve Albrecht, a San Diego consultant who teaches substance abuse awareness for Bay Area employers. “These workers stay up for days and days, and many of them gradually get into meth and coke to keep going. Red Bull and coffee only gets them so far.” … Drug abuse in the tech industry is growing against the backdrop of a national surge in heroin and prescription pain-pill abuse. Treatment specialists say the over-prescribing of painkillers, like the opioid hydrocodone, has spawned a new crop of addicts — working professionals with college degrees, a description that fits many of the thousands of workers in corporate Silicon Valley. Increasingly, experts see painkillers as the gateway drug for addicts, and they are in abundance. “There are 1.4 million prescriptions … in the Bay Area for hydrocodone, ” says Alice Gleghorn with the San Francisco Department of Public Health. “That’s a lot of pills out there.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Suddenly Visible: Illicit Drugs As Part of Silicon Valley Culture
MojoKid (1002251) writes The ongoing battle between Netflix and ISPs that can’t seem to handle the streaming video service’s traffic, boiled over to an infuriating level for Colin Nederkoon, a startup CEO who resides in New York City. Rather than accept excuses and finger pointing from either side, Nederkoon did a little investigating into why he was receiving such slow Netflix streams on his Verizon FiOS connection. What he discovered is that there appears to be a clear culprit. Nederkoon pays for Internet service that promises 75Mbps downstream and 35Mbps upstream through his FiOS connection. However, his Netflix video streams were limping along at just 375kbps (0.375mbps), equivalent to 0.5 percent of the speed he’s paying for. On a hunch, he decided to connect to a VPN service, which in theory should actually make things slower since it’s adding extra hops. Speeds didn’t get slower, they got much faster. After connecting to VyprVPN, his Netflix connection suddenly jumped to 3000kbps, the fastest the streaming service allows and around 10 times faster than when connecting directly with Verizon. Verizon may have a different explanation as to why Nederkoon’s Netflix streams suddenly sped up, but in the meantime, it would appear that throttling shenanigans are taking place. It seems that by using a VPN, Verizon simply doesn’t know which packets to throttle, hence the gross disparity in speed. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Enraged Verizon FiOS Customer Seemingly Demonstrates Netflix Throttling
hypnosec writes: The government of Russia has announced a ~$110, 000 bounty to anyone who develops technology to identify users of Tor, an anonymising network capable of encrypting user data and hiding the identity of its users. The public description (in Russian) of the project has been removed now and it only reads “cipher ‘TOR’ (Navy).” The ministry said it is looking for experts and researchers to “study the possibility of obtaining technical information about users and users’ equipment on the Tor anonymous network.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Russia Posts $110,000 Bounty For Cracking Tor’s Privacy
For years, Good Old Games has made a business out of selling classic PC game titles completely free of DRM. Today they announced that their platform now supports Linux. They said, We’ve put much time and effort into this project and now we’ve found ourselves with over 50 titles, classic and new, prepared for distribution, site infrastructure ready, support team trained and standing by … We’re still aiming to have at least 100 Linux games in the coming months, but we’ve decided not to delay the launch just for the sake of having a nice-looking number to show off to the press. … Note that we’ve got many classic titles coming officially to Linux for the very first time, thanks to the custom builds prepared by our dedicated team of penguin tamers. … For both native Linux versions, as well as special builds prepared by our team, GOG.com will provide distro-independent tar.gz archives and support convenient DEB installers for the two most popular Linux distributions: Ubuntu and Mint, in their current and future LTS editions. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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GOG.com Announces Linux Support
Qblinks wants to be the Swiss Army knife of iPhone remote controllers. The Bluetooth LE device, which is currently seeking $35, 000 on Kickstarter, can be used to alert you to notifications from different apps on your smartphone; as a camera remote shutter; to activate Siri; play music; and help you find missing phones by prompting it to ring even when it is in silent mode. Qblinks even has… Read More
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QBlinks Is A Multi-Use Remote Control And Notification Center For Your iPhone