Yunliang Yu, IT Senior Manager
 Open source is an investment in the future.
FDS Motto: we serve and empower the faculty.
- Contact Info:
- Office Hours:
- 12:01AM - 12:02AM every other day excluding today.
Not by appt:)
- Specialties:
-
Mathematics
- Recent Publications
- Y. Yu, test 123
(March, 2010).
[PNG, PDF]
- Famous Sayings:
- Your dream will come true,
if you eat your soup.
--- Angela Yu - Don't be a turkey; read a book.
--- Christina Yu
- To learn and practice what is learned from time to time is pleasure, is it not? To have friends from afar is happiness, is it not? To be unperturbed when not appreciated by others is a gentleman, is it not?
--- Kungfu Zi - Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.
--- Chinese Proverb 
mathprograms.org, academicjobsonline.org,
mathjobs.org,
ShortURLs, sharedworkingplace.org.
/. headline news :-)
- ESA Discovers Unexpected 'Haze' of Microwave Transmissions
2012-02-14T08:05:00+00:00
astroengine writes "The European space observatory Planck has discovered something peculiar about our galaxy: it's humming in microwaves and, for the moment, the source of the 'hard' radiation surrounding the galaxy's core is a complete mystery. Also, the Milky Way is home to previously unknown 'islands' of cold carbon monoxide gas, helping astronomers uncover the distribution of star-forming regions."Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
- Apple-Approved Fair Labor Inspections Begin At Foxconn
2012-02-14T05:03:00+00:00
redletterdave writes "Apple announced on Monday that the Fair Labor Association has begun inspecting Foxconn's Chinese factories, upon Apple's request. Apple said that Auret van Heerden, the president of the FLA, is leading a group of labor rights experts in the first round of inspections at the sprawling plant in Shenzhen, China, more informally known as
'Foxconn City.' The FLA's independent assessment — completely supplementary to Apple's own auditing practices — will involve interviewing thousands of Foxconn employees about the working and living conditions, including working hours, compensation, managerial issues, and health and safety conditions. Foxconn has 'pledged full cooperation with the FLA,' and will reportedly allow unrestricted access to all of their operations. The investigative team will report their findings in early March on the FLA's website. Apple's other suppliers, including Quanta and Pegatron, will be inspected later this spring. By the time summer rolls around, the FLA hopes to have covered 90 percent of facilities where Apple products are built and assembled."Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
- GNOME 3: Beauty To the Bone?
2012-02-14T03:12:00+00:00
someWebGeek writes "According to the GNOME design crew, as reported by Allan over at As Far as I Know, GNOME 3 will represent a new approach to GNOME application design. The design patterns being developed and employed may effect a new, prettier interface, but more importantly a new mindset about the entire project, a mindset intended to encourage greater deep beauty in the application layers below the user interface. Maybe...for now, I'm sticking to the sinking ship of KDE in the Ubuntu ocean."Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
- EU and US Approve Google-Motorola Deal
2012-02-14T01:10:00+00:00
angry tapir writes "European regulators have given Google the green light to take over Motorola Mobility. The U.S. $12.5 billion deal faced strong opposition from open source and consumer rights advocates, including Consumer Watchdog, but the European Commission announced on Monday that the acquisition could go ahead, without conditions."
Later in the day the DOJ announced an end to its investigation, greenlighting the acquisition in the U.S. as well.Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
- Ask Slashdot: Making a Tablet Run Only One Application?
2012-02-14T00:30:00+00:00
An anonymous reader asks "I'm working for a medical centre who want to make a tablet with various videos and webpages about smoking cessation available in their waiting room. The tablet can't access the Internet because of security policies. I'm planning to use a local server with copies of the (Creative Commons) videos and pages accessed through local webpages using the tablet's browser. How can I make only the browser be available to the tablet users? Ideas? Suggestions?"Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
- Cryptome Hit By Blackhole Exploit Kit
2012-02-13T23:48:00+00:00
wiredmikey writes with an excerpt from Security Week:"Whistleblower site has been hacked and infected by the Blackhole exploit kit. ... Cryptome co-founder John Young however told SecurityWeek that the Cryptome site is in the process of cleaning everything up, and that process should be finished by the end of the day. Founded in 1996, Cryptome publishes thousands of documents, including many related to national security, law enforcement and military. On Feb. 12, a reader advised the site that accessing a file had triggered a warning in their antivirus about the Blackhole exploit kit. ... Subsequent analysis found thousands of files on the site had been infected."
Cryptome has certainly seen worse.Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
- MIT's Online Education Prototype Opens For Enrollment
2012-02-13T23:26:00+00:00
OldHawk777 writes with news that MITx, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's online learning initiative, has opened free enrollment for its first course: 6.002x: Circuits and Electronics.
"Modeled after MIT’s 6.002 — an introductory course for undergraduate students in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) — 6.002x will introduce engineering in the context of the lumped circuit abstraction, helping students make the transition from physics to the fields of electrical engineering and computer science. ... 'We are very excited to begin MITx with this prototype class,' says MIT Provost L. Rafael Reif. 'We will use this prototype course to optimize the tools we have built by soliciting and acting on feedback from learners.' To access the course, registered students will log in at mitx.mit.edu, where they will find a course schedule, an e-textbook for the course, and a discussion board. Each week, students will watch video lectures and demonstrations, work with practice exercises, complete homework assignments, and participate in an online interactive lab specifically designed to replicate its real-world counterpart. Students will also take exams and be able to check their grades as they progress in the course. Overall, students can expect to spend approximately 10 hours each week on the course."Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
- How To Pull Location Data From Encrypted Google Maps Sessions
2012-02-13T23:07:00+00:00
Trailrunner7 writes "In the last couple of years, Google and some other Web giants have moved to make many of their services accessible over SSL, and in many cases, made HTTPS connections the default. That's designed to make eavesdropping on those connections more difficult, but as researchers have shown, it certainly doesn't make traffic analysis of those connections impossible. Vincent Berg of IOActive has written a tool that can monitor SSL connections and make some highly educated guesses about the contents of the requests going to Google Maps, specifically looking at what size the PNG files returned by Google Maps are. The tool then attempts to group those images in a specific location, based on the grid and tile system that Google uses to construct its maps."Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
- Europe's 'Right To Be Forgotten' Threatens Online Free Speech
2012-02-13T22:23:00+00:00
An anonymous reader writes "Jeffrey Rosen, Legal Affairs Editor for The New Republic, explains why the E.U.'s proposed data protection regulation known as the right to be forgotten is actually 'the biggest threat to free speech on the Internet in the coming decade.' In the Stanford Law Review Online (there's a shorter version in TNR), he writes: 'The right to be forgotten could make Facebook and Google, for example, liable for up to two percent of their global income if they fail to remove photos that people post about themselves and later regret, even if the photos have been widely distributed already. Unless the right is defined more precisely when it is promulgated over the next year or so, it could precipitate a dramatic clash between European and American conceptions of the proper balance between privacy and free speech, leading to a far less open Internet.' According to Rosen, the 'right' goes farther than previously thought, treating 'takedown requests for truthful information posted by others identically to takedown requests for photos I've posted myself that have then been copied by others: both are included in the definition of personal data as "any information relating" to me, regardless of its source.' Examples of previous attempts this might bolster include 'efforts by two Germans convicted of murdering a famous actor to remove their criminal history from the actor's Wikipedia page' and an 'Argentine pop star [who] had posed for racy pictures when she was young, but recently sued Google and Yahoo to take them down.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
- Despite Media Confusion, Raspberry Pi Boards Still On Schedule
2012-02-13T22:02:00+00:00
Last Friday, an article in Eurogamer about the Raspberry Pi's upcoming release threw a wrench in the mental gears of anyone hoping to soon order one of the long-awaited (and much anticipated) boards, which had been expected to be ready for orders sometime this month. The piece was based on an interview with David Braben — since picked up, and subsequently corrected, by others as well — and it gave the impression both that a sudden delay had cropped up in the schedule (so that the boards wouldn't be available for consumers until September), and that the price might rise as well. The Raspberry Pi site says that both of these were mistaken, and clarifies (with some bold print, even): "You will be able to buy a Raspberry Pi from the end of February, from this website. The 'consumer release' that Eurogamer is talking about is actually the educational release, which, as you’ll be aware if you’ve been hanging out on our forums, will come with a kid-targetted software stack, a heap of written support materials, and a standard case." That educational version sounds like it's got enough value added to justify a higher price and a longer wait, but you can unwrench those gears if you're just interested in the plain (unboxed) board instead.Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
- Ontario Teachers' Union Calls For Health-Related Classroom Wi-Fi Ban
2012-02-13T21:41:00+00:00
New submitter KJE writes "The CBC is reporting that an Ontario teachers' union is calling for an end to new Wi-Fi setups in the province's 1,400-plus Catholic schools. The Ontario English Catholic Teacher's Association (OECTA) says computers in all new schools should be hardwired instead of setting up wireless networks. The OECTA, in its paper (PDF), said the 'safety of this technology has not thoroughly been researched and therefore the precautionary principle and prudent avoidance of exposure should be practiced.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
- Twisted Metal Designer Rails Against Storytelling Games
2012-02-13T20:59:00+00:00
eldavojohn writes "Twisted Metal designer David Jaffe gave a DICE Summit presentation in which he argued against 'games that have been intentionally made from the ground up with the intent and purpose of telling a story or expressing a philosophy or giving a designer's narrative.' He went on to say essentially that it's a waste of time and resources when the focus should be on gameplay, not story. While some parts of his presentation are warmly welcomed by the gaming community (like his instructions for game execs to get a BS filter), this particular point has some unsurprising opponents. His argument against a 'cinematic narrative' was probably strongest with his comparison to the movie Saving Private Ryan, where Spielberg made the Normandy Beach invasion scene as close to a documentary as possible. The audience could sit back and appreciate that. But if you made a game where the player is in that position of the soldier then that historically accurate imagery and top shelf voice acting doesn't really matter, the only thing the player should be thinking is 'How the **** do I get to that rock? How do I get to the exit?' Is Jaffe right? Have game makers been 'seduced by the power and language of film' at the expense of gameplay?"Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
- Obama Budget Asks For 1% Boost In Research
2012-02-13T20:17:00+00:00
sciencehabit sends this excerpt from ScienceInsider:
"One of the big three research agencies appears to be lagging behind its doubling peers in the president's 2013 budget request released this morning. The $4.9 billion budget of the Department of Energy's Office of Science would rise by 2.4%, to $5 billion. In contrast, the National Science Foundation would receive a nearly 5% boost, to $7.37 billion, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology a hike of 13%, to $860 million. These three agencies were originally singled by President George W. Bush in 2006 for a 10-year budget doubling, a promise that President Barack Obama and Congress have repeatedly endorsed despite the current tough economic times. ... Obama is
asking for a 1% increase in overall federal spending on research, to $140 billion. Within that total, the White House seeks a similar 1% hike in the $30 billion devoted to basic research."Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
- New Horizons: One Billion Miles From Pluto
2012-02-13T19:56:00+00:00
astroengine writes "On Feb. 10, NASA's Pluto-bound New Horizons probe entered the homestretch of its mission. When you are sprinting across the solar system, 'homestretch' is the final 1 billion miles of your journey. That sounds like quite a long stretch! But the half-ton spacecraft has already logged 2 billion miles since its launch in early 2006. That's twice the distance between Earth and Saturn. Though the icy dwarf planet is still three years away from its close encounter, mission scientists call this the Late Cruise phase of the flight."Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
- Venture Capital in Detroit, Among Other Places (Video)
2012-02-13T19:35:00+00:00
If you have a startup idea kicking around in your head, you don't necessarily need to head for California, New York or Massachusetts to find venture capital. In today's video, Timothy Lord visits a venture capital firm called Detroit Venture Partners. (Yes, it's in Detroit.) This not an intimidating company, even though it has some big bucks and big names (including Magic Johnson) behind it. But this doesn't mean you need to rush to Detroit to fund your million-dollar idea. There are lots of local venture capital companies in the U.S. -- and chances are, wherever you are, there's one near you that's panting to invest in your can't-miss business opportunity.Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
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Mathematics Department