Tag: management

US Army May Relax Physical Requirements To Recruit Cyber Warriors

HughPickens.com writes Clifford Davis reports that only 30% of young people between the ages of 17 and 24 are qualified to become soldiers primarily due to three issues: obesity or health problems; lack of a high school education; and criminal histories. While cognitive and moral disqualifications have held steady, weight issues account for 18% of disqualifications, and the number is rising steadily and it’s projected to hit 25% by 2025, which Batschelet calls “troubling.” The current Army policy is that every recruit, whether enlisting for infantry or graphic design, has to meet the same physical requirements to join — but that requirement may be changing. “Today, we need cyber warriors, so we’re starting to recruit for Army Cyber, ” says Batschelet. “One of the things we’re considering is that your [mission] as a cyber warrior is different. Maybe you’re not the Ranger who can do 100 pushups, 100 sit-ups and run the 2-mile inside of 10 minutes, but you can crack a data system of an enemy.” “We’re looking for America’s best and brightest just like any Fortune 500 company out there, ” says Lt. Col. Sharlene Pigg. “We’re looking for those men and women who excel in science, technology, engineering and math.” Batschelet admits that a drastic change in physical requirements for recruits may be hard for some to swallow. “That’s going to be an institutional, cultural change for us to be able to get our heads around that is kind of a different definition of quality, ” says Batschelet. “I would say it’s a modernizing, or defining in a more precise way, what is considered quality for soldiers.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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US Army May Relax Physical Requirements To Recruit Cyber Warriors

Jedi-ism Becomes a Serious Religion

An anonymous reader writes: 390, 127 Brits declared their religion as Jediism in their last census — many as a joke, but some are quite serious, the BBC reports. Cambridge University Divinity Faculty researcher Beth Singler estimates at least 2, 000 of them are “genuine, ” around the same number as the Church of Scientology. The U.K. Church of Jediism has 200, 000 members worldwide. Their belief system has expanded well beyond the Star Wars universe to include tenets from Taoism, Buddhism, Catholicism and Samurai. Former priest, psychotherapist and writer Mark Vernon finds real power in the Jedi story: “The reason it’s so powerful and universal is that we have to find ourselves. It’s by losing ourselves and identifying with something greater like the Jedi myth that we find a fuller life.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Jedi-ism Becomes a Serious Religion

Apple A8X IPad Air 2 Processor Packs Triple-Core CPU, Hefty Graphics Punch

MojoKid writes When Apple debuted its A8 SoC, it proved to be a modest tweak of the original A7. Despite packing double the transistors and an improved GPU, the heart of the A8 SoC is the same dual-core Apple “Cyclone” processor tweaked to run at higher clock speeds and with stronger total GPU performance. Given this, many expected that the Apple A8X would be cut from similar cloth — a higher clock speed, perhaps, and a larger GPU, but not much more than that. It appears those projections were wrong. The Apple A8X chip is a triple-core variant of the A8, with a higher clock speed (1.5GHz vs. 1.4GHz), a larger L2 cache (2MB, up from 1MB) and 2GB of external DDR3. It also uses an internal metal heatspreader, which the Apple A8 eschews. All of this points to slightly higher power consumption for the core, but also to dramatically increased performance. The new A8X is a significant power house in multiple types of workloads; in fact, its the top-performing mobile device on Geekbench by a wide margin. Gaming benchmarks are equally impressive. The iPad Air 2 nudges out Nvidia’s Shield in GFXBench’s Manhattan offscreen test, at 32.4fps to 31 fps. Onscreen favors the NV solution thanks to its lower-resolution screen, but the Nvidia device does take 3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited by a wide margin, clocking in at 30, 970 compared to 21, 659. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Apple A8X IPad Air 2 Processor Packs Triple-Core CPU, Hefty Graphics Punch

Ubuntu Turns 10

Scott James Remnant, now Technical Lead on ChromeOS, was a Debian developer before that. That’s how he became involved from the beginning (becoming Developer Manager, and then serving on the Technical Board) on the little derivative distribution that Mark Shuttleworth decided to make of Debian Unstable, and for which the name Ubuntu was eventually chosen. On this date in 2004, Ubuntu 4.10 — aka Warty Warthog, or just Warty — was released, and Remnant has shared a detailed, nostalgic look back at the early days of the project that has (whatever else you think of it ) become one of the most influential in the world of open source and Free software. I was excited that Canonical sent out disks that I could pass around to friends and family that looked acceptably polished to them in a way that Sharpie-marked Knoppix CD-ROMs didn’t, and that the polish extended to the installer, the desktop, and the included constellation of software, too. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Ubuntu Turns 10

Despite Patent Settlement, Apple Pulls Bose Merchandise From Its Stores

Apple has long sold Bose headphones and speakers in its retail stores, including in the time since it acquired Bose-competitor Beats Audio, and despite the lawsuit filed by Bose against Apple alleging patent violations on the part of Beats. That’s come to an end this week, though: Apple’s dropped Bose merchandise both in its retail locations and online, despite recent news that the two companies have settled the patent suit. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Despite Patent Settlement, Apple Pulls Bose Merchandise From Its Stores

Direct3D 9.0 Support On Track For Linux’s Gallium3D Drivers

An anonymous reader writes Twelve years after Microsoft debuted DirectX 9.0, open-source developers are getting ready to possibly land Direct3D 9.0 support within the open-source Linux Mesa/Gallium3D code-base. The “Gallium3D Nine” state tracker allows accelerating D3D9 natively by Gallium3D drivers and there’s patches for Wine so that Windows games can utilize this state tracker without having to go through Wine’s costly D3D-to-OGL translator. The Gallium3D D3D9 code has been in development since last year and is now reaching a point where it’s under review for mainline Mesa. The uses for this Direct3D 9 state tracker will likely be very limited outside of using it for Wine gaming. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Direct3D 9.0 Support On Track For Linux’s Gallium3D Drivers

New Music Discovered In Donkey Kong For Arcade

First time accepted submitter furrykef . writes Over 33 years have passed since Donkey Kong first hit arcades, but it still has new surprises. I was poking through the game in a debugger when I discovered that the game contains unused music and voice clips. One of the tunes would have been played when you rescued Pauline, and two others are suggestive of deleted cutscenes. In addition, Pauline was originally meant to speak. In one clip she says something unintelligible, but it may be “Hey!”, “Nice!”, or “Thanks!”. The other is clearly a cry for help. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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New Music Discovered In Donkey Kong For Arcade

Samsung Achieves Outdoor 5G Mobile Broadband Speed of 7.5Gbps

Mark.JUK writes: Samsung has become the first to successfully demonstrate a future 5G mobile network running at speeds of 7.5Gbps in a stationary outdoor environment. They also managed 1.2Gbps while using the same technology and driving around a 4.3km-long race track at speeds of up to 110kph. Crucially, the test was run using the 28GHz radio spectrum band, which ordinarily wouldn’t be much good for mobile networks where wide coverage and wall penetration is an important requirement. But Samsung claims it can mitigate at least some of that by harnessing the latest Hybrid Adaptive Array Technology (HAAT), which uses millimeter wave frequency bands to enable the use of higher frequencies over greater distances. Several companies are competing to develop the first 5G technologies, although consumers aren’t expected to see related services until 2020 at the earliest. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Samsung Achieves Outdoor 5G Mobile Broadband Speed of 7.5Gbps

Pentagon Reportedly Hushed Up Chemical Weapons Finds In Iraq

mr_mischief writes “Multiple sources report that the US found remnants of WMD programs, namely chemical weapons, in Iraq after all. Many US soldiers were injured by them, in fact. The Times reports: “From 2004 to 2011, American and American-trained Iraqi troops repeatedly encountered, and on at least six occasions were wounded by, chemical weapons remaining from years earlier in Saddam Hussein’s rule. In all, American troops secretly reported finding roughly 5, 000 chemical warheads, shells or aviation bombs, according to interviews with dozens of participants, Iraqi and American officials, and heavily redacted intelligence documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Pentagon Reportedly Hushed Up Chemical Weapons Finds In Iraq

Millions of Voiceprints Quietly Being Harvested

An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from The Guardian: Businesses and governments around the world increasingly are turning to voice biometrics, or voiceprints, to pay pensions, collect taxes, track criminals and replace passwords. “We sometimes call it the invisible biometric, ” said Mike Goldgof, an executive at Madrid-based AGNITiO, one of about 10 leading companies in the field. Those companies have helped enter more than 65M voiceprints into corporate and government databases, according to Associated Press interviews with dozens of industry representatives and records requests in the United States, Europe and elsewhere. … The single largest implementation identified by the AP is in Turkey, where the mobile phone company Turkcell has taken the voice biometric data of some 10 million customers using technology provided by market leader Nuance Communications Inc. But government agencies are catching up. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Millions of Voiceprints Quietly Being Harvested