46776877
submission
kodiaktau writes
"Steve Wilhite, the inventor of GIF (Graphics Interchange Format), will be honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Webby Awards. The format was created in 1987 and is considered a mainstay of the internet. The format was originally designed to help convey images over CompuServe.
Mr. Wilhite reminds us that the 'g' is soft so the correct pronunciation is Jif, sending shivers up the spines of elocution teachers throughout the United States."Link to Original Source
46776875
submission
ysekand writes
"Google rolled out its latest algorithm update last night and based on the data we can see, it looks like they have got it wrong, yet again. We are seeing a huge number of exact match domains and domain crowding on UK search results.
Named Penguin 2.0, this update was announced by Matts Cutts a few days ago through his blog http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/what-to-expect-in-seo-in-the-coming-months/
It looks like Google is not fixing the most basic things, most of these basic issues cause significant obstacles for small and medium businesses. The big players who play the dirty tricks don't get affected that much.
Google keeps saying create "compelling content" but the question is does a small business say a locksmith need to create compelling content?"Link to Original Source
46776775
submission
Rambo Tribble writes
"As covered by the BBC, the GIF's inventor, Steve Wilhite has given his opinion that the acronym for the Graphics Interchange Format file should be pronounced "jif". This conflicts with the OED's take on the matter. Wilhite made his pronouncement whilst receiving an award for his work at the Webbys."Link to Original Source
46776673
submission
MTorrice writes
"Medical researchers think specially tailored RNA sequences could kill tumor cells or encourage wound healing by turning off genes in patients’ cells. Now researchers have developed a nanocoating for bandages or other medical materials that could deliver these fragile gene-silencing RNAs right where they’re needed. The team hopes to produce a bandage that shuts down genes standing in the way of healing in chronic wounds."Link to Original Source
46776445
submission
holy_calamity writes
"Digital currency Bitcoin is gaining acceptance with mainstream venture capitalists, reports Technology Review, but at the price of its famed anonymity and ability to operate without central authority. Technology investors have now ploughed millions of dollars into a handful of Bitcoin-based payments and financial companies that are careful to follow financial regulations and don't offer anonymity. That's causing tensions in the community of Bitcoin enthusiasts, some of whom feel their currency's success has involved abandoning its most important features."Link to Original Source
46776297
submission
Nerval's Lobster writes
"Twitter is now offering two-factor authentication, a feature that could help prevent embarrassing security breaches. Twitter users interested in activating two-factor authentication will need to head over to their account settings page and click the checkbox beside “Require a verification code when I sign in." Twitter will ask that the user add a phone number to their Twitter account; once this is done, it’s worth taking a few moments to access the “Mobile” tab on the account settings page (visible in the left-side bar) and adjust all the text-notification settings left on by default—that is, unless the user enjoys their phone buzzing at 2 AM with alerts of new followers. After activating “Require a verification code when I sign in,” Twitter will send the user a test message (“Twitter can send verification codes to this device!”). From that point forward, a six-digit code (sent to that phone via SMS) will be needed in order to sign in. Other social networks and online services such as Facebook and Google already have two-factor authentication in place. In the wake of some high-profile hacks, it seemed inevitable that Twitter would adopt the feature as well. Back in April, for example, hackers allegedly associated with the Syrian Electronic Army hacked into the Associated Press Twitter account and posted a false message about a White House bombing, which led to a brief plunge in the stock market; combined with some other high-profile victims, including The Onion, the pressure must have been intense for Twitter executives to do something to bolster security."Link to Original Source
46776193
submission
Trailrunner7 writes
"Responding to a wave of high-profile account takeovers in recent months, Twitter has implemented a phone-based two-factor authentication scheme that will require a numerical code along with a username and password when users log in to their accounts. The feature, known as login verification, is similar to one used by Google in its Gmail service.
The new security feature comes at a time when attackers are having a field day with account takeover attacks against prominent Twitter users. In the last few months, attackers have compromised the accounts of the Associated Press and The Onion, the satirical U.S. news site, among others. Twitter’s login verification is designed to help prevent these takeovers by requiring an extra piece of information when a user logs into her account on a new device or application."
46775829
submission
SMOKEING writes
"New Linux distributions nowadays do not necessarily make breaking news, yet the arrival of a Fedora remix for Raspberry Pi managed to attract unhealthy attention, and for all the wrong reasons (Pidora announcement on G+): for any Russian-speaking bloke the word "Pidora" stands linguistically just too closely to "bugger". It's arguably a serious brand blunder), which it's interesting how the Canadian team is (or is not) going to extricate itself from."Link to Original Source
46775793
submission
miller60 writes
"Servers may soon fill the aisles where shoppers once roamed. Sears Holdings is seeking to convert former Sears and Kmart stores into Internet data hubs. Some stand-alone stores and distribution centers may be repurposed as data centers, while mall-based stores can be converted into disaster recovery sites, the company says, offering access to stores and eateries for displaced workers who may be on site for weeks. Then there's the wireless tower opportunity. Seventy percent of the U.S. population lives within 10 miles of a Sears or Kmart store, and these rooftops can be leased to fill gaps in cell coverage. It's not the first effort to convert stores into IT infrastructure, as Rackspace is headquartered in an old mall, and companies have built data centers in malls in Indiana and Maryland. But Sears, which operates 25 million square feet of real estate, hopes to make this strategy work at scale."Link to Original Source
46775727
submission
An anonymous reader writes
"Google Android is the leading mobile OS and it powers Smartphone, Tablets, watches, Google Glass and other devices. However, manufacturers such as Samsung has tried building other OSs like Tizen. They might have different app stores. It can create the scenario competitive for Google."Link to Original Source
46775711
submission
itwbennett writes
"According to an announcement on a French government webside, police have stopped current searches for missing adults and will not accept new search requests. 'Such 'searches in the interests of the family' were conducted under an administrative procedure almost a century old, introduced to help families separated during the upheavals of World War I to find missing relatives,' according to the French Ministry of the Interior. In a letter to police chiefs announcing the changes, the Ministry advised them to instead 'direct people towards social networks on the Internet, which offer interesting possibilities.'"Link to Original Source
46775655
submission
An anonymous reader writes
"Hey, it looks like D-wave's "quantum computer" isn't quantum after all!
"A pair of recent articles concluded that the D-Wave One machine actually operates in the quantum regime, rather than performing some classical evolution. Here we give a classical model that leads to the same behaviors used in those works to infer quantum effects. Thus, the evidence presented does not demonstrate the presence of quantum effects.""Link to Original Source
46775451
submission
Zothecula writes
"IBM’s Watson supercomputer has been riding high for the past couple of years. It won a game of Jeopardy, went to university and did a stint at a cancer lab. But now it’s taking what might seem like a step down with a job in customer service. According to IBM, the current avalanche of information is provoking an oncoming crisis in customer service and the company sees Watson’s advanced learning and data crunching abilities as a solution."Link to Original Source
46775341
submission
Lucas123 writes
"Powermat Technologies has announced an agreement to merge with its European counterpart, PowerKiss, in a deal that will make what once was two disparate wireless power specifications come together under one. Among airports, coffee shops, malls and arenas, Powermat, owned by Duracell, claims it has more than 1,500 charging spots in the U.S. In Europe, PowerKiss said it has 1,000 charging spots in airports, hotels and cafes; it also recently announced wireless charging at some McDonald's restaurants. Powermat and PowerKiss are attempting to prevail against the competing Wireless Power Consortium (WPC), which supports the widely adopted Qi (pronounced "chee") standard used in Nokia, Samsung, and LG products. Like the Qi standard, the PMA's Power 2.0 specification is based on magnetic induction wireless power technology."Link to Original Source
46775017
submission
Vigile writes
"When NVIDIA released the GTX Titan in February it was the first consumer graphics card to use the GK110 GPU from NVIDIA that included 2,688 CUDA cores / shaders and an impressive 6GB of GDDR5 frame buffer. However, it also had a $1000 price tag that was the limiting specification for most gamers. With today's release of the GeForce GTX 780 they are hoping to utilize more of the GK110 silicon they are getting from TSMC while offering a lower cost version with performance within spitting range. The GTX 780 uses the same chip but disables a handful more compute units to bring the shader count down to 2,304 — still an impressive bump over the 1,536 of the GTX 680. The 384-bit memory bus remains though the frame buffer is cut in half to 3GB. Overall, the performance of the new card sits squarely between the GTX Titan ($1000) and AMD's Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition ($439), just like its price. The question is are PC gamers willing to shell out $220+ dollars MORE than the HD 7970 for somewhere in the range of 15-25% more performance?"
46774449
submission
c0d3g33k writes
"Google Project Hosting announced changes to the Download service on Wednesday, offering only "increasing misuse of the service and a desire to keep our community safe and secure" by way of explanation. Effective immediately, existing projects that offer no downloads and all new projects will no longer be able to create downloads. Existing projects which currently have downloads will lose the ability to create new downloads by January 2014, though existing downloads will remain available "for the foreseeable future". Google Drive is recommended as an alternative, but this will likely have to be done manually by project maintainers since the ability to create and manage downloads won't be part of the Project Hosting tools. This is a rather baffling move, since distributing project files via download is integral to FOSS culture."Link to Original Source
46774209
submission
stoolpigeon writes
"My review is below. I don't remember the exact fields from the review form and I can't figure out how to get to it here so here is what I have.
Title: The Human Division
Author: John Scalzi
Publisher: Tor Books
Pages: 432
ISBN: 978-0765333513
Rating: 9/10
How would humanity fare in a universe filled with other sentient races and the technology for all of them to interact? If human history is any indication there would be conflict. That conflict would be between many groups that saw themselves as people and the rest as monsters. What that universe and those interactions would look like is a key theme in John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War series. The latest offering, The Human Division continues to dig deeply into a wide range of questions about what makes someone a person and how people treat one another at their best and worst.
It’s been five years since the publication of the last book in John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War series, Zoe’s Tale. That entry saw Scalzi explore new ground with his first juvenile. The newest Old Man’s War book is another first for Scalzi. The Human Division was released on the web as a serial prior to being published in a complete volume in hardback and as an ebook. This was planned from the start and made for an interesting experience as those who chose to purchase chapters as they came out worked through the book together.
I have to admit I skipped out on reading the chapters as they were released. It seemed like a fun thing to do but I wanted to see what it would all cost in the end. Scalzi repeatedly said that the fully compiled story would cost the same as buying it in parts but I wanted to see how it would play out. So I avoided on-line discussion of the chapters as they were released and when it became available about a week ago I purchased the e-book version. The price was basically the same, though buying the complete book was a couple bucks cheaper and did include some extra content. I’d already read a big part of that extra content as it had been available earlier via Tor.com.
From what I’ve read on Scalzi’s blog, his experiment with serializing the book was a success from a busienss standpoint. And I got the impression that most readers enjoyed the process as they went along, though I did try to avoid most discussion as it was happening to avoid spoilers. Publishing stories in this manner has been around for a long time, but I think the results may encourage others to do the same and we may see more of this in the near future. Scalzi has already agreed to do season 2, or the next book, in the same fashion.
Reading it all at once, I could still appreciate that it was written this way. Each chapter is self contained to a large extent. There are glimpses into the lives of various characters, changes of setting, and some wonderful storytelling. It all fits together and is certainly a novel, not a collection of short stories, but much more episodic. I thought it allowed for a nice amount of flexibility in the flow of the story and I appreciated the end result even if I got it all in one package at the end.
Aside from interest in the method of delivery, I was very excited to read The Human Division for the story itself. I hadn’t enjoyed Scalzi’s last sci-fi outing, Redshirts and was really looking forward to his return to my favorite universe he has created. The Old Man’s War series, fitting into the military sci-fi genre, has of course brought many comparisons between Scalzi and Heinlein. I imagine part of the enjoyment I get from Scalzi’s books are that he does have some commonality with R.A.H. who is one of my favorite authors. But really Scalzi does have his own voice, style and message and this comes more and more to the fore as the series moves on. The Human Division has all of the excitement, action and wit that makes reading Scalzi so fun. I think his ability to put together strong dialogue is unparalleled. And it is still military sci-fi, with our main protagonist being a soldier. Yet the world is so much more complex and rich than a simple kill or be killed scenario that moves from one point of action to the next. And even what would be slow points in a book that used action to carry a lack of plot, are full of rewarding interaction. We get to know and care about characters, lose some all too quickly and feel a sense of real people engaging one another as opposed to cardboard cutouts.
I wouldn’t put the Old Man’s War books into the hard sci-fi category but they aren’t just fantasy dropped into space either. Scalzi obviously gives some thought to settings and technology and so I find it easy to overlook some of the issues that are skipped over for the sake of story. In the end it is entertainment and interesting questions about people and society that draw me to these books, more than a desire to learn more about physics or astronomy.
I did read follow on comments after the series was complete and noticed a few people who felt that there was a cliffhanger ending. While the book does end with some larger scale issues unresolved, I think that to call it a cliffhanger is not really accurate. I found the ending to be an appropriate point of closure, to step away from the characters. As I would tell me kids if they have to pause a movie, it was a “good place to stop.” If we followed everyone to the completion of all that was going on in their lives, the book would be immense. As it is, it is already a solid read. It might feel a bit abrupt to some as it does set up some questions that are left unanswered that normally would be in a more formulaic treatment, but I’m glad Scalzi left them rather than a hasty or awkward finish.
As I mentioned, there are two extra stories in the newly published compilation of all 13 chapters. They both involve characters from the book and I thought that they both were a lot of fun. One is
After the Coup which can be read on its own at Tor.com. The other, Hafte Sorvalh Eats a Churro and Speaks to the Youth of Today is shorter but very sweet and let me finish the book with a smile.
I’ve enjoyed every entry in the OMW series and I am very pleased to see it continue strongly. While reading the previous books is not necessary to enjoying this one, I can’t imagine not wanting to read the other four. If someone is unsure, feel free to start with The Human Division and if they enjoy it, jumping back and reading the others will still be very enjoyable. There will be some spoilers but I don’t think they’ll take much away from Scalzi’s real strengths in these stories, which are much more driven by character than plot. I think Scalzi will stand as a sci-fi great for some time to come and it is a lot of fun to get to watch it happen rather than just idolizing the masters of the past."Link to Original Source
46774161
submission
jfruh writes
"Microsoft revealed the Xbox One to the world yesterday, though it won't actually be available until sometime later this year. Despite all the information already shared, gamers are a curious lot, and there's a lot they'd like to know that they don't yet, such as: How often does the console need to connect to the Internet to phone home? What information does the mandatory Kinect sensor record, and what does it store? Will you need an Xbox Live Gold subscripiton to access some of the content laid out at Microsoft's show? About the biggest thing we do know: your old Xbox games and controllers won't work with the Xbox One."Link to Original Source
46773017
submission
zrbyte writes
"One-time pads are the holy grail of cryptography — they are impossible to crack, even in principle. However, the ability to copy electronic code makes one-time pads vulnerable to hackers. Now engineers at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, have found a way round this to create a system of cryptography that is invulnerable to electronic attack. Their solution is based on a special kind of one-time pad that generates a random key through the complexity of its physical structure, namely shining a light through a diffusive glass plate."Link to Original Source
46772631
submission
DavidGilbert99 writes
"The world of robotics, prosthetics and chips embedded in our brains is moving forward at an unprecedented pace. The problem is there is little or no regulation surrounding this issue and as the lines between man and machine blur, it is going to throw up some serious ethical and moral issues."Link to Original Source
