science – Page 279

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.

Google is shutting down Picasa in favor of Photos

Google has been steadily migrating its resources towards the Photos ecosystem since the company first announced it at last year’s I/O developers conference. It’s already shut down Google+ photos in lieu of the newer service and linked Photos to your phone’s native camera app. Today Google announced that it will shut down Picasa . The move will occur over the next several months, beginning on May 1, 2016. Take note, however, that the Picasa desktop application won’t work after March 1st. Current Picasa users simply have to log into Photos — all of their content has already been moved over. Source: Google (Picasa Blog)

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Google is shutting down Picasa in favor of Photos

AT&T gets ready to test 5G technologies this 2016

AT&T has been working on possible 5G technologies, such as millimeter waves, for years. Now that it’s time to get serious, it’s teaming up with Ericsson and Intel to ramp up its development in the lab in the second quarter of the year. After that, it’s moving its 5G endeavors out of the lab and into the field, starting with outdoor tests over the summer. The carrier says 60 percent of its mobile traffic in 2015 came from video. It’s moving forward with its 5G plans, because emerging technologies like virtual reality, 4K video, robots, Internet of Things and self-driving cars will be even more demanding. As AT&T’s Chief Strategy Officer John Donovan notes, those technologies “will be immersive, pervasive and responsive to customers. 5G will help make them a reality.” 5G internet could be anywhere from 10 to 100 times faster than LTE, with users observing downloads going gigabits (yes, giga bits) per second. Imagine being able to finish downloading a TV show for less than three seconds. That’s nowhere near enough time to get up and microwave some popcorn. AT&T believes its 5G network will even be able to start streaming videos much, much faster — just 1 to 5 milliseconds from the moment you press play — than an LTE connection. If everything goes well, some parts of Austin, Texas will be able to test out Ma Bell’s 5G tech by the end of this year. The company says it’s conducting tests in a way that enables it to deploy the network commercially as soon as 5G standards are set. You’d have to wait a while for that to happen, though. 3GPP, the international consortium in charge of hashing out network standards, is working on it right now. However, phase one (of two) won’t be completed until the first half of 2018. By the way, AT&T isn’t the only US carrier gearing up to test its next-gen mobile network: Verizon will soon begin its 5G wireless service trials, as well. [Image credit: Mike Mozart/Flickr ] Source: AT&T

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AT&T gets ready to test 5G technologies this 2016

Time Inc buys…MySpace?

MySpace still exists . Crazy, right? The once monolithic social network had faded into irrelevancy until it was relaunched with a little help from Justin Timberlake back in 2013. The fresh coat of paint wasn’t enough to reinvigorate the platform, however, and it’s now being sold as part of its parent company Viant to Time Inc. Yep, that’s the same Time Inc that publishes Time, Fortune , Entertainment Weekly and a whole bunch of other magazines. The company described the acquisition as “game changing, ” most likely in reference to Viant’s broader ad-tech business. MySpace does, supposedly, still have a part to play in that offering, but it’s notable the site was barely mentioned in the footnote of today’s press release . Source: Time Inc. (Press Release)

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Time Inc buys…MySpace?

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

You can run over 1,000 Windows 3.1 programs in your browser

The Internet Archive has spent many years gathering and storing digital content from the past. It now hosts millions of web pages, texts, videos and audio snippets, but recently the site expanded its collection to include software, or more specifically, games . After making more than 2, 400 DOS titles available to play in the browser , the Internet Archive has embraced the GUI and done the same for Windows 3.1. It’s kicked things off by adding more than 1, 000 programs to its Windows 3.1 Software Library. The vast majority of them are games, including Taipei and Ski Free , but there’s plenty of browser-based shareware to get stuck into. There’s also a curated collection called the “Windows Showcase, ” which lists some of the best known programs and games from 20 years ago. It’s been made possible by Boris Gjenero’s EM-DOSbox emulator, which converts Windows runtimes into JavaScript code that can be interpreted by your browser. It’s what underpins the Archive’s DOS collection and testers have already used it to boot Windows 95 . That suggests we may only have to wait a short while to see more Windows programs added to the collection. Via: Internet Archive Blog Source: Windows 3.1 Software Library

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You can run over 1,000 Windows 3.1 programs in your browser

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.

Tinder bans users for sending pro-Bernie Sanders messages

Campaigning for Bernie Sanders, and presumably any other politician, can get you banned from Tinder. According to a report from Reuters , two users of the dating app learned that the hard way recently, after their accounts were locked for sending private messages about the 2016 presidential candidate . One woman, for example, told the publication she sent 60 messages per day to other people on Tinder, as she hoped to convince them to support Senator Sanders. Those read as “Do you feel the Bern?” and “Please text WORK to 82623 for me. Thanks, ” which would then prompt the recipients to get updates from the Sanders campaign . It also sent a link with a sign-up page for volunteering. Tinder has yet to issue an official statement, but we reached out to the service and will update the story if we hear back. It’s worth noting that Tinder’s Terms of Use are pretty clear. The document’s Section 9, which you can read in full here , states users “may not post, upload, display or otherwise make available Content that … involves the transmission of ‘junk mail, ‘ ‘chain letters, ‘ or unsolicited mass mailing or ‘spamming’ (or ‘spimming, ‘ ‘phishing, ‘ ‘trolling’ or similar activities).” If a user doesn’t follow the rules, Tinder says it has the right to “investigate, suspend and/or terminate” an account. Via: The Hill Source: Reuters

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Tinder bans users for sending pro-Bernie Sanders messages

Ken May

Tag: science