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+ - 150 JEDEC fiddles with DDR4 while LRDIMM burns->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "JEDEC hasn't finalized the upcoming DDR4 standard yet, but it seems they left out licensing some crucial IP for (the already finalized and shipping) LRDIMMs (for use on data center servers). As a result they are only produced by one source which is facing some hurdles justifying their copying of IP. Check out the article to understand how DDR4 is based on LRDIMMs and the future of memory."
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Microsoft

+ - 281 Why Visual Basic 6 Still Thrives

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes "Microsoft recently extended 'It Just Works' compatibility for Visual Basic 6 applications through the full lifetime of Windows 8, so VB6 apps will have at least 24 years of supported lifetime (VB6 shipped in '98). So why has VB6, "the un-killable cockroach" in the Windows ecosystem, managed to thrive? 'Cockroaches are successful because they're simple,' explains David S. Platt. 'They do what they need to do for their ecological niche and no more. Visual Basic 6 did what its creators intended for its market niche: enable very rapid development of limited programs by programmers of lesser experience.' But when Microsoft proudly trotted out VB.NET, the 'full-fledged language' designed to turn VB6 'bus drivers' into 'fighter pilots', they got a surprise. 'Almost all Visual Basic 6 programmers were content with what Visual Basic 6 did,' explains Platt. 'They were happy to be bus drivers: to leave the office at 5 p.m. (or 4:30 p.m. on a really nice day) instead of working until midnight; to play with their families on weekends instead of trudging back to the office; to sleep with their spouses instead of pulling another coding all-nighter and eating cold pizza for breakfast. They didn’t lament the lack of operator overloading or polymorphism in Visual Basic 6, so they didn’t say much.'"

+ - 261 Subject to a "stop and frisk"? There's an app for that.->

Submitted by lightbox32
lightbox32 writes "The New York Civil Liberties Union released a free smartphone application on Wednesday that allows people to record videos of and report police “stop and frisk” activity, a practice widely denounced by civil rights groups as mostly targeting minorities and almost never resulting in arrests.
The app was thoroughly criticized by the New York Police Department, which said that the tool might prove useful for criminals."
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Google

+ - 212 Google Earth to go FULLY 3D with Automated Image-Based Modeling Algorithms-> Screenshot-sm

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Google Earth has featured (some) textured 3D buildings and 3D terrain since 2006. New image-based modeling algorithms that process 45-degree Aerial Images automatically, however, will allow Google Earth to display entire 3D Cities with fully texture-mapped, accurately modeled 3 dimensional buildings, roads, trees and landscaping/terrain. This Youtube video released by Google shows how effective the technique is at capturing urban areas in 3D. The resulting 3D cities look almost like a high-altitude view of a fully modeled 3D city in games like Grand Theft Auto. If Google shares its new 3D cities data with outsiders, we could see games like Flight Simulator featuring cities where every single building, road, bridge, tree and hill that exists in the real world is represented in glorious and accurate 3D in the virtual world of the game."
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The Internet

+ - 147 Why Young Males Are No Longer the Most Important Tech Demographic->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "The Atlantic has an article discussing how 18- to 35-year-old males are losing their place as the most important demographic for tech adoption. 'Let me break out the categories where women are leading tech adoption: internet usage, mobile phone voice usage, mobile phone location-based services, text messaging, Skype, every social networking site aside from LinkedIn, all Internet-enabled devices, e-readers, health-care devices, and GPS. Also, because women still are the primary caretakers of children in many places, guess who controls which gadgets the young male and female members of the family get to purchase or even use?' The article points out that most of the tech industry hasn't figured this out yet — perhaps in part to a dearth of women running these companies."
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Cloud

+ - 140 Social Networks, Cloud, Mobility Flooding Businesses with Data: Report->

Submitted by
Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes "Mobility and the cloud have changed how employees work—and where they work, in the case of those who use smartphones and other devices to log into work systems from home or while on the road. But could mobility and the cloud, along with IT administrators’ increasing acceptance of technologies built for consumers as workplace tools, also complicate businesses’ ability to handle Big Data?"
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Patents

+ - 193 Judge Posner to Apple & Motorola, Go Home->

Submitted by reebmmm
reebmmm writes "Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Richard Posner, voluntarily sitting as a district court judge, in the patent infringement dispute between Apple and Motorola has, tentatively, dismissed the case on the eve of trial. In this hilariously short order, Judge Posner states, "I have tentatively decided that the case should be dismissed with prejudice because neither party can establish a right to relief."

Because it is "with prejudice" the parties cannot refile their case. The parties are likely to appeal the order (when it's finalized)."
Link to Original Source
Blackberry

+ - 176 Which carcass is worth more for Microsoft's vultures, RIM or Nokia?->

Submitted by colinneagle
colinneagle writes "Nokia and RIM, the two former leaders in the early smartphone market, are now basically at the end stage of their downward spirals. This is an opportunity for Microsoft, which wants to make some inroads in the smartphone market, assuming Microsoft it can play its cards right.

The question is which firm is worth more. Both have their values, especially in the patent areas. In terms of just smartphones, Microsoft would probably gain more from RIM, because it could integrate BlackBerry Enterprise Server into its own server products. Nokia, though, is a much older player and probably has a lot more of a patent portfolio.

The question then becomes which is an easier purchase. Nokia is a 150-year-old storied company. The Finns may not be too keen to let it go to an American firm.

There is the distinct possibility Microsoft acquires both firms and keeps the best of both worlds for hardware. But where does that leave OEM partners like LG, HTC and ZTE?"
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Communications

+ - 181 Apple To Unveil iOS 6 At WWDC 2012->

Submitted by
redletterdave
redletterdave writes "At next week's WWDC 2012 in San Francisco, Apple is expected to unveil new laptops, desktops, accessories, and software features for its Mac OS X platform. But on Friday afternoon, several pictures surfaced on Twitter showing banners released around Moscone West in San Francisco, showcasing "iOS 6: The world's most advanced mobile operating system.""
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Intel

+ - 186 Intel to Launch TV Service with Facial Recognition by End of the Year->

Submitted by
MojoKid
MojoKid writes "Despite television being a rather tough nut to crack, Intel is apparently hoping that its upcoming set-top box and subscription service will be its golden ticket to delivering more Intel processors to the living room. The service would be a sort of specialized virtual cable subscription that would combine a bundle of channels with on demand content. So what’s Intel’s killer feature that distinguishes it from the vast and powerful competition? Granular ratings that result in targeted ads. Intel is promising technology in a set-top box that can distinguish who is watching, potentially allowing Intel to target advertising. The technology could potentially identify if the viewer is an adult or a child, male or female, and so on, through interactive features and face recognition technology."
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Cloud

+ - 231 Researcher: Interdependencies could lead to cloud 'meltdowns' ->

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes "As the use of cloud computing becomes more and more mainstream, serious operational "meltdowns" could arise as end-users and vendors mix, match and bundle services for various means, a researcher argues in a new paper set for discussion next week at the USENIX HotCloud '12 conference in Boston. "As diverse, independently developed cloud services share ever more fluidly and aggressively multiplexed hardware resource pools, unpredictable interactions between load-balancing and other reactive mechanisms could lead to dynamic instabilities or 'meltdowns,'" Yale University researcher and assistant computer science professor Bryan Ford wrote in the paper. Ford compared this scenario to the intertwining, complex relationships and structures that helped contribute to the global financial crisis."
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Microsoft

+ - 142 Microsoft Relents On Metro-Only VS Express->

Submitted by
snydeq
snydeq writes "After hearing objections from developers, Microsoft will offer a version of its Visual Studio Express 2012 package for desktop application development after all. The company had previously announced that Express 2012 editions, which are free, platform-specific versions of the Visual Studio 2012 IDE, would be limited to Windows 8 Metro-style development as well as development for the Windows Azure cloud platform, Windows Phone, and Web applications. 'We heard from our community that developers want to have for Windows desktop development the same great experience and access to the latest Visual Studio 2012 features at the Express level. ... And it will enable developers working on open source applications to target existing and previous versions of Windows.'"
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Firefox

+ - 191 Adobe Releases Sandboxed Flash Player for Firefox->

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes "Adobe has released a new version of the Flash player that now gives Firefox users the additional security of a sandbox and also includes a background update mechanism for Mac users. Flash has run in a sandbox on Google Chrome and Internet Explorer for some time already.

The big security news in Flash player 11.3 is the addition of the protected mode sandbox for Firefox on Windows. That's a major change for Adobe, which has been adding sandbox to its main product lines for a couple of years now. Adobe Reader X has run in protected mode--which is what Adobe calls its sandbox--since its release, and the company also added a sandbox to Flash on Google Chrome. The sandbox is designed to prevent attackers from using vulnerabilities in Flash to break out of the application and move to other apps or the OS itself."
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Displays

+ - 278 Where are all the high-resolution desktop displays?->

Submitted by
MrSeb
MrSeb writes "Ever since the release of the iPhone 4 with its 326 pixels-per-inch (PPI) Retina display, people have wondered about the lack of high-PPI desktop displays. The fact is, high-resolution desktop displays do exist, but they're incredibly expensive and usually only used for medical applications. Here, ExtremeTech dives into the world of desktop displays and tries to work out why consumer-oriented desktop displays seem to be stuck at 1920x1080, and whether future technologies like IGZO and OLED might finally spur manufacturers to make reasonably-priced models with a PPI over 100."
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Piracy

+ - 147 Game of Thrones Crowned Most Pirated TV-Show of the Season->

Submitted by
TheGift73
TheGift73 writes "With nearly 4 million downloads per episode, the HBO hit series Game of Thrones is the most pirated TV-show of the season. Worldwide hype combined with restricted availability are the key ingredients for the staggering number of unauthorized downloads. How I Met Your Mother and The Big Bang Theory complete the top three, albeit with significantly fewer downloads than the chart topper.

As predicted, Game of Thrones has the honor of becoming the most downloaded TV-show of the spring season.

While there are many reasons for people to download TV-shows through BitTorrent, airing delays and HBO’s choice not to make it widely available online are two of the top reasons.

Game of Thrones is particularly popular in Australia, where people have to wait a week after the U.S. release comes out. Nevertheless, even in the U.S. hundreds and thousands are downloading the show for free, although many would love to pay for it if HBO offered a standalone HBO GO subscription."
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Entertainment

+ - 226 NPR's "Car Talk" Closing->

Submitted by stevegee58
stevegee58 writes "After 25 years on the air, Tom and Ray Magliozzi (aka Click and Clack, The Tappet Brothers) are calling it quits in September.
With their nerdy humor, explosive laughter and geek cred (both MIT alums) Tom and Ray will be sorely missed by the average NPR-listening Slashdotter."
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Earth

+ - 157 Sprint moves to eliminate "blood minerals" from cell phones->

Submitted by Velcroman1
Velcroman1 writes "So-called “blood diamonds” or conflict diamonds are the well-publicized face of the decades-long human rights challenge in Africa. But the mining and sale of a lesser-known but more widely used group of natural resources known as “blood minerals” has also fueled civil wars in Congo and Uganda — and they're in the latest smartphones, including the rumored iPhone 5 and many Android phones. Congress sought to address the issue through the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, which included a requirement for companies to disclose conflict minerals. In 2011 the SEC opened a public debate about this disclosure — but Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Washington is critical of the process. “They are afraid of being sued by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and the World Gold Council,” McDermott said. Ahead of the SEC ruling, Sprint has made baby steps to come to terms with the controversy, joining the Global e-Sustainability Initiative (GeSI) and the Public-Private Alliance for Responsible Minerals Trade (PPA), and said it is working to make device manufacturers aware of the issue. But are they doing enough?"
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Security

+ - 183 LinkedIn Password Leak: Salt Their Hide->

Submitted by
CowboyRobot
CowboyRobot writes "Following yesterday's post about Poul-Henning Kamp no longer supporting md5crypt, the author has a new column at the ACM where he details all the ways that LinkedIn failed, specifically realted to how they failed to 'salt' their passwords, making them that much easier to crack.
"On a system with many users, the chances that some of them have chosen the same password are pretty good. Humans are notoriously lousy at selecting good passwords. For the evil attacker, that means all users who have the same hashed password in the database have chosen the same password, so it is probably not a very good one, and the attacker can target that with a brute force attempt.""
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The Military

+ - 201 Drones, Computer Viruses and Blowback

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes "Michael Crowley writes that using drones rather than soldiers to kill bad guys is appealing for many reasons, including cost, relative precision and reduction of risk to American troops but there’s plenty of evidence that drones antagonize local populations and create more enemies over the long term than we kill in the short term. The failed 2010 Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad has said that about the U.S. drone campaign in Pakistan and the Washington Post has described how drone strikes may be breeding sympathy for al-Qaeda in Yemen. "It is the politically advantageous thing to do--low cost, no U.S. casualties, gives the appearance of toughness. It plays well domestically and it is unpopular only in other countries," says Dennis Blair, director of national intelligence until May of 2010. "Any damage it does to the national interest only shows up over the long term." Now there’s another component to the new warfare that threatens blowback: cyberwar. Like drones, cyberweapons are relatively cheap and do their work without putting American troops in harm’s way. The blowback comes when those viruses get loose and inflict unintended damage or provide templates to terrorists or enemy nations that some experts think could lead to disaster and argue that cyberweapons are like bioweapons, demanding international treaties to govern their use. "We may indeed be at a critical moment in history, when the planet's prospects could be markedly improved by an international treaty on cyberweapons, and the cultivation of an attendant norm against cyberwar," writes Richard Wright. "The ideal nation to lead the world toward this goal would be the most powerful nation on earth, especially if that nation had a pretty clean record on the cyberweapons front. A few years ago, America seemed to fit that description. But it doesn't now.""

+ - 285 Materials from Tough-as-Nails Crustacean Could Inspire Better Body Armor->

Submitted by
carmendrahl
carmendrahl writes "The peacock mantis shrimp, a crustacean which is neither a mantis nor a shrimp, has hammer-like clubs for smashing the shells of its prey, so strong that regular glass aquariums can’t hold them. But what’s interested researchers for some time is how the clubs stand up to all that stress. Now, a team’s figured out why- the mantis shrimp club's molecular structure is set up to resist fractures. That discovery could lead to stronger and lighter car frames or body armor."
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Hardware

+ - 222 Odd Laptop-Tablet Hybrids Show PC Makers' Panic->

Submitted by
jfruh
jfruh writes "Taipei's Computex trade show has seen array of strange devices on sale that are somewhere between PCs and tablets: laptops with screens you can twist in every direction, tablets with detachable keyboards, all-in-one PCs with detachable monitors. Some have Intel chips, some ARM chips; some run Windows 8, some Android. They all exist because of cheaper components now available, and because Windows 8 will make touch interfaces possible — but mostly they exist because PC makes are starting to freak out about being left behind by the tablet revolution."
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Open Source

+ - 139 AR.Drone published source and toolchain thanks to Jens, telnet, and the GPL->

Submitted by leorleor
leorleor writes "From their forums: As the AR.Drone runs a modified version of Linux kernel 2.6.27, we had to comply with GPL requirements. You can download here the diff between Linux kernel 2.6.27 and the AR.Drone kernel tag... Thanks for releasing the diff! But I am afraid that it might not be enough. Please take a look at http://gpl-violations.org/faq/sourcecode-faq.html . In response they published the source and toolchain: Now you can find all information in our Gpl page: toolchain, Linux base version and modifications, and other unpatched GPL-licensed userland software!"
Link to Original Source
Canada

+ - 184 Canadian IP Lobby Calls For ACTA, SOPA & Warrantless Search->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "The Canadian intellectual property's lead lobby group, the Canadian IP Council (which represent the music, movie, software and pharma industries) released a new policy document yesterday that identifies its legislative priorities for the coming years. Anyone hoping that the SOPA protests, the European backlash against ACTA, and the imminent passage of Canadian copyright reform might moderate the lobby group demands will be sorely disappointed. Michael Geist says it is the most extremist IP policy document ever released in Canada, calling for the implementation of ACTA, SOPA-style rules including website blocking and stopping search queries from resolving, liability for advertisers and payment companies, massive surveillance at the border and through delivery channels including searching through individual packages without court oversight, and spending hundreds of millions of tax dollars on private enforcement."
Link to Original Source
Censorship

+ - 212 UN to debate taxing internet data->

Submitted by Wowsers
Wowsers writes "In an effort to get ever more taxes for doing absolutely nothing, the United Nations are to consider a European proposal to tax the internet based on data that gets sent. The proposal is designed to get money from large bandwidth users like Google, Facebook, Apple, and Netflix. Smaller companies that have high bandwidth would be forced off the internet due to the taxes.

The proposed measure is also claimed to be an effective tool for censorship as companies will just block access to countries to limit the amount of taxes they pay for data."
Link to Original Source
Japan

+ - 260 OpenRelief project launches open drones to help save lives at LinuxCon Japan->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "We’ll never forget last year’s LinuxCon Japan conference, which took place shortly after the devastating Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in March. As the country still reeled from the disaster, LinuxCon presenters discussed how open source software could contribute to disaster relief.

One year later, a team of developers has returned to LinuxCon in Yokohama this week to announce OpenRelief, a new project aimed at building a low-cost, remote-controlled robotic plane to report damage in hard-to-reach, disaster stricken areas."
Link to Original Source
Apple

+ - 243 Apple fined $2.5 million for false advertising->

Submitted by
Whiney Mac Fanboy
Whiney Mac Fanboy writes "Apple has agreed to pay a $2.25 million (AUD) fine (along with 300k legal costs) to the Australian Competition & Consumer Commision for misleading advertising. Apple misrepresented their iPad product as being a '4G' device, when in fact they're only compatible with a very small percentage of 4G networks around the world. The Age online has the full story."
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% "Every morning, I get up and look through the 'Forbes' list of the richest people in America. If I'm not there, I go to work" -- Robert Orben

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