Pray silence…for the Queen’s first tweet. 88-year old Elizabeth II sent a message from the royal @BritishMonarchy account this morning to mark the grand opening of the Science Museum’s new Information Age Gallery. Bless. Read more…
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The Queen Just Sent Her First Tweet
An anonymous reader writes: The Atlantic has a nice profile of SpaceX’s rise to prominence — how a private startup managed to successfully compete with industry giants like Boeing in just a decade of existence. “Regardless of its inspirations, the company was forced to adopt a prosaic initial goal: Make a rocket at least 10 times cheaper than is possible today. Until it can do that, neither flowers nor people can go to Mars with any economy. With rocket technology, Musk has said, “you’re really left with one key parameter against which technology improvements must be judged, and that’s cost.” SpaceX currently charges $61.2 million per launch. Its cost-per-kilogram of cargo to low-earth orbit, $4, 653, is far less than the $14, 000 to $39, 000 offered by its chief American competitor, the United Launch Alliance. Other providers often charge $250 to $400 million per launch; NASA pays Russia $70 million per astronaut to hitch a ride on its three-person Soyuz spacecraft. SpaceX’s costs are still nowhere near low enough to change the economics of space as Musk and his investors envision, but they have a plan to do so (of which more later).” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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What It Took For SpaceX To Become a Serious Space Company
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
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
MTorrice writes: Many drugs that treat bacterial and fungal infections were found in microbes growing in the dirt. These organisms synthesize the compounds to fend off other bacteria and fungi around them. To find possible new drugs, chemists try to coax newly discovered microbial species to start making their arsenal of antimicrobial chemicals in the lab. But fungi can be stubborn, producing just a small set of already-known compounds. Now, one team of chemists has hit upon a curiously effective and consistent trick to prod the organisms to start synthesizing novel molecules: Cheerios inside bags. Scientists grew a soil fungus for four weeks in a bag full of Cheerios and discovered a new compound that can block biofilm formation by an infectious yeast. The chemists claim that Cheerios are by far the best in the cereal aisle at growing chemically productive fungi. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Chemists Grow Soil Fungus On Cheerios, Discover New Antifungal Compounds
MojoKid writes: For the past few years, Intel has promised that its various low-power Atom-based processors would usher in a wave of low-cost Android and Windows mobile products that could compete with ARM-based solutions. And for years, we’ve seen no more than a trickle of hardware, often with limited availability. Now, that’s finally beginning to change. Intel’s Bay Trail and Merrifield SoCs are starting to show up more in full-featured, sub-$200 devices from major brands. One of the most interesting questions for would-be x86 buyers in the Android tablet space is whether to go with a Merrifield or Bay Trail Atom-based device. Merrifield is a dual-core chip without Hyper-Threading. Bay Trail is a quad-core variant and a graphics engine derived from Intel’s Ivy Bridge Core series CPUs. That GPU is the other significant difference between the two SoCs. With Bay Trail, Intel is still employing their own graphics solution, while Merrifield pairs a dual-core CPU with a PowerVR G6400 graphics core. So, what’s the experience of using a tablet running Android on x86 like these days? Pretty much like using an ARM-based Android tablet currently, and surprisingly good for any tablet in the $199 or less bracket. In fact, some of the low cost Intel/Android solutions out there currently from the likes of Acer, Dell, Asus, and Lenovo, all compete performance-wise pretty well versus the current generation of mainstream ARM-based Android tablets. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Android On Intel x86 Tablet Performance Explored: Things Are Improving
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
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.
An anonymous reader writes Dropbox has denied that they have been hacked, and that the login credentials leaked by a unknown individual on Pastebin are those of Dropbox users. “Your stuff is safe. The usernames and passwords referenced in these articles were stolen from unrelated services, not Dropbox. Attackers then used these stolen credentials to try to log in to sites across the internet, including Dropbox, ” Anton Mityagin from the Dropbox security department noted in a post. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Dropbox Wasn’t Hacked, Says Leaked Credentials Are From Unrelated Services
dibdublin (981416) writes with a report from The Register: October is stacking up to be a bumper Patch Tuesday update with nine bulletins lined up for delivery — three rated critical. Cloud security firm Qualys estimates two of the lesser “important” bulletins are just as bad however, as they would also allow malicious code injection onto vulnerable systems. Top of the critical list is an update for Internet Explorer that affects all currently supported versions 6 to 11, on all operating system including Windows RT. Vulnerabilities discovered in most versions of Windows Server, Windows 7 and 8, and the .NET framework are covered in the other pair of critical bulletins. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Windows Users, Get Ready For a BIgger-Than-Usual Patch Tuesday