Summary: Slashdot
News for nerds, stuff that matters
First time accepted submitter Hotawa Hawk-eye writes "Tor Books
has announced that the release date for the final volume in the
Wheel of Time series of books, A Memory Of Light, will be January
8, 2013. [Barring a Mayan apocalypse, of course.] The fantasy
series, started by Robert Jordan and continued by Brandon Sanderson
after Jordan's death, will span 15 books and over 10,000 pages."
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Date Published: Feb 16, 2012 - 3:50 pm
ananyo writes with this snippet from Nature (for which this
earlier Nature article is also background): "'The courthouse in
L'Aquila, Italy, yesterday hosted a highly anticipated hearing in
the trial of six seismologists and one government official indicted
for manslaughter over their reassurances to the public ahead of a
deadly earthquake in 2009. .... During the hearing, the former head
of the Italian Department of Civil Protection turned from key
witness into defendant, and a seismologist from California
criticized Italy's top earthquake experts.' Lalliana Mualchin,
former chief seismologist for the Department of Transportation in
California, criticized the Italian analysis, which he says was
based on a poor model. If the court agrees with Mualchin, the
defendants could face up to 12 years in jail."
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Date Published: Feb 16, 2012 - 2:53 pm
Lucas123 writes "A new study by the University of California
and Microsoft shows that NAND flash memory experiences significant
performance degradation as die sizes shrink in size. Over the next
dozen years latency will double as the circuitry size shrinks from
25 nanometers today, to 6.5nm, the research showed. Speaking at the
Usenix Conference on File and Storage Technologies in San Jose this
week, Laura Grupp, a graduate student at the University of
California, said tests of 45 different types of NAND flash chips
from six vendors using 72nm to 25nm lithography techniques showed
performance degraded across the board and error rates increased as
die sizes shrunk. Triple-Level NAND performed the worst, followed
by Multi-Level Cell NAND and Single-Level Cell. The researchers
said MLC NAND-based SSDs won't be able to go beyond 4TB and
TLC-based SSDs won't be able to scale past 16TB because of the
performance degradation, so it appears the end of the road for SSDs
will be 2024."
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Date Published: Feb 16, 2012 - 2:10 pm
An anonymous reader writes "I am a long time Slashdotter and
currently find myself in the beginning of a divorce process. How
have you dealt with dispersing of shared data, accounts and things
online in such a situation? Domains, hosting, email, sensitive data
backups and social media are just a few examples."
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Date Published: Feb 16, 2012 - 1:27 pm
New submitter Garth Smith writes "Tim Schafer has a video
update for his crowdsourced project, Double Fine Adventure. Because
of the nearly $2 million in funding, the budget is now large enough
for language translations, voice acting, music, and more platforms.
The XBox and PS3 are absent. I wonder what would the chances of a
DRM-free release have been if funding had come from a traditional
publisher?"
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Date Published: Feb 16, 2012 - 12:43 pm
New submitter simula67 writes "Oracle wins back some karma from
the open source community by releasing MySQL cluster 7.2 with
ambitious claims of 70x performance gains. The new release is GPL
and claims to have processed over 1 billion queries per minute.
Readers may remember the story about Oracle adding commercial
extensions to MySQL."
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Date Published: Feb 16, 2012 - 12:01 pm
pigrabbitbear writes "To prevent hoarding of materials and
their potential for theft and illicit use, the Drug Enforcement
Agency sets quotas for the chemical precursors to drugs like
Adderall. The DEA projects the need for amphetamine salts, then
produces and distributes the materials to pharmaceutical companies
so that they can produce their drugs. But with the number of
prescriptions for Adderall jumping 13 percent in the past year,
pharmaceutical companies claim that the quotas are no longer
sufficient for supplying Americans with their Adderall. The DEA
contends that their quotas do, in fact, meet demands, and that any
shortages arise from pharmaceutical companies selectively producing
only certain, typically name-brand and more expensive versions of
ADHD medications."
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Date Published: Feb 16, 2012 - 11:18 am
An anonymous reader writes "The government of Bulgaria, which
had already signed ACTA, yesterday reversed itself, and announced
that it would not seek ratification of the treaty. This comes after
similar moves by Poland, Germany and the Netherlands, and a weekend
of massive protests against ACTA across the European continent."
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Date Published: Feb 16, 2012 - 10:58 am
First time accepted submitter brad-x writes "A new team of
developers have recently picked up development of WindowMaker, and
they've added many new features, including improved support for the
freedesktop standard menu layout and Mac OS X style application and
window switching from the keyboard, culminating in a new release,
0.95.2. A basic changelog is available on the newly redesigned
website."
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Date Published: Feb 16, 2012 - 10:35 am
Despite Apple's protestation that the iBooks Author EULA was
misinterpreted, the idea of a book publishing system that could be
used to grab copyright of the prepared text is annoying — like the
sort of EULAs that seem to give photo-sharing sites unlimited
re-use rights of hosted personal photos. New submitter rohangarg
points out a publishing system which shouldn't have such problems,
and is nicely cross-platform besides: "A new open-source digital
writing and publishing platform has been launched by non-profit
group Sourcefabric. Booktype allows for collaborative editing and
writing of books that can be easily outputted to on-demand print
services and eReaders such as the Amazon Kindle, Nook, iPad, and
more with a few simple clicks. Booktype source can be found here."
The online demo also leads to some downloadable examples (as PDFs).
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Date Published: Feb 16, 2012 - 9:36 am
Ralph Spoilsport writes "A coalition of 17 publishing companies
has shut down library.nu and ifile.it, charging them with pirating
ebooks. This comes less than a month after megaupload was shut
down, and SOPA was stopped. If the busting of cyberlockers
continues at this pace and online library sharing dismantled, this
under-reported story may well be the tip of a very big iceberg —
one quite beyond the P&L sheets of publishers and striking at
basic human rights as outlined in the contradictions of the UN
Charter. Is this a big deal — a grim coalition of corporate power?
Or just mopping up some scurvy old pirates? Or somewhere in
between?" Adds new submitter roaryk, "According to the complaint,
the sites offered users access to 400,000 e-books and made more
than $11 million in revenue in the process. The admins, Fidel Nunez
and Irina Ivanova, have been tracked down using their PayPal
donation account, which was not anonymous. Despite the claims of
the industry the site admins say they were barely able to cover the
server costs with the revenue."
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Date Published: Feb 16, 2012 - 8:54 am
An anonymous reader writes "While doctors routinely prescribe
antibiotics to treat sinus infections, researchers on Tuesday
revealed that amoxicillin, the most commonly prescribed medication
for nasal cavity inflammation and sinuses, was just as effective as
a dummy pill.Researchers from the Washington University School of
Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri, found that there was no
significant difference in symptoms between patients taking
amoxicillin to those who took the placebo three days after starting
the pills were administered."
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Date Published: Feb 16, 2012 - 8:30 am
asto21 writes with this excerpt from The Indian Express: "As
per amendments made to operators' licences, beginning May 31,
operators would have to provide the Department of
Telecommunications real-time details of users' locations in
latitudes and longitudes. Documents obtained by The Indian Express
show that details shall initially be provided for mobile numbers
specified by the government. Within three years, service providers
will have to provide information on locations of all users. The
information will have some margin of error at first. But by 2013,
at least 60 per cent of the calls in urban areas would have to be
accurately tracked when made 100 metres away from the nearest cell
tower. By 2014, the government will seek to increase the proportion
to 75 per cent in cities and 50 per cent in suburban and rural
areas."
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Date Published: Feb 16, 2012 - 8:11 am
adeelarshad82 writes "Earlier today Apple announced their next
OS, Mountain Lion. According to an early look, OS X 10.8 does more
to integrate social networking and file-synching into a personal
computer than any other OS. It tightly integrates with the whole
Apple ecosystem that includes iOS devices and the free iCloud
sharing service. Moreover Mountain Lion adds a powerful new line of
defense against future threats where a malware app is prevented
from running even if it is deliberately downloaded to a
computer.Even though Apple's clearly got a lot of fine-tuning to
do—and possibly a few features to add, but there's no doubt that
Mountain Lion already looks very fine." Update: 02/16 15:04 GMT by
T : New submitter StephenBrannen writes with some more details
culled from CNET. The newest OS X has now been released to
developers, with an official release date planned for this summer.
"Mountain Lion, as it is called, will further blur the lines
between iOS and its Mac OS. iOS features that are being ported
include: Messages (replacing iChat), Notification Center, Game
Center, Notes, and AirPlay mirroring. Also new to Mac OS is the
addition of Gatekeeper, which should help prevent malware attacks
on Apple products. Not announced is whether Siri will be ported to
the Mac."
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Date Published: Feb 16, 2012 - 7:30 am
kkleiner writes "Average life expectancy has nearly doubled in
developed countries over the 20th century. But a puzzling part to
the equation has emerged. While humans are in fact living longer
lives on average, the oldest age that the oldest people reach seems
to be stubbornly and oddly precisely cemented right at 114. What
will it take for humans to live beyond this limit?"
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Date Published: Feb 16, 2012 - 6:48 am
