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Submission + - Firefox 29 is a Flop; UI Design Trends Getting Worse 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Firefox 29 marked the release of the UI overhaul codenamed "Australis" and the jury is back with a verdict: the vast majority of feedback on Firefox Input is negative and traffic to the Classic Theme Restorer add-on has aggressively spiked since Firefox 29 came out on April 29. Considering this is a year and a half after the backlash against the new Windows 8 user interface, it seems that even though the "dumbing down" trends in UI design are infuriating users, they continue to happen. Chrome will soon be hiding URLs, OS X has hidden scroll bars by default, iOS 7 flattened everything, and Windows 8 made scroll bars hard to see. If most users hate these changes, why are they so ubiquitous?

Submission + - Facebook retaliates; says 'Princeton may be in danger of disappearing entirely' (techienews.co.uk)

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: A recent report from two Princeton researchers claimed that Facebook is like an infectious disease currently experiencing a spike before its decline and will lose 80 percent of its user base by 2017, which caught attention of Facebook and in its reply the social networking giant claimed that ‘Princeton may be in danger of disappearing entirely’. Facebook data scientists Mike Develin, Lada Adamic, and Sean Taylor used some of the same techniques used by Princeton researchers to arrive at their conclusion. The trio used parameters such as Facebook Likes, Percentage of Princeton papers in journals, student enrolment, and Google Trends.

Submission + - CmdrTaco Launches Trove, a Curated News Startup (theverge.com)

Submitted by jigamo
jigamo writes: The Verge reports:

A long list of startups have put forth a Herculean effort to find the best way to suggest new things for people to read, and former Slashdot editor-in-chief Rob Malda, also known as CmdrTaco, just unveiled his: Trove, a people-powered app initially available on the web and for iPhone and iPad.

Trove basically lets users opt in to feeds of stories that align with their interests. Users are encouraged to curate "troves," collections of stories that relate to a particular theme. You could create a trove for "Ukrainian Politics," "Dog Heroes," or "Best of The Verge," for example, to which other Trove users can subscribe.

"The core of the product is that people have many interests and rather than just giving them information through pure algorithms and picking particular publications, we want to connect them with people who share those interests, who can pick the best content in those topical areas," says Vijay Ravindran, CEO of Trove.

Submission + - Supercomputer smashes simulation speed record 1

Submitted by Lank
Lank writes: A team of computer scientists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have managed to coordinate nearly 2 million cores to achieve a blistering 504 billion events per second, over 40 times faster than the previous record. This result was achieved on Sequoia, a 120-rack IBM Blue Gene/Q normally used to run classified nuclear simulations. Note: I am a co-author of the coming paper to appear in PADS 2013.
Google

Google Pledges Not To Sue Any Open Source Projects Using Their Patents 153

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the now-and-forever dept.
sfcrazy writes "Google has announced the Open Patent Non-Assertion (OPN) Pledge. In the pledge Google says that they will not sue any user, distributor, or developer of Open Source software on specified patents, unless first attacked. Under this pledge, Google is starting off with 10 patents relating to MapReduce, a computing model for processing large data sets first developed at Google. Google says that over time they intend to expand the set of Google's patents covered by the pledge to other technologies." This is in addition to the Open Invention Network, and their general work toward reforming the patent system. The patents covered in the OPN will be free to use in Free/Open Source software for the life of the patent, even if Google should transfer ownership to another party. Read the text of the pledge. It appears that interaction with non-copyleft licenses (MIT/BSD/Apache) is a bit weird: if you create a non-free fork it appears you are no longer covered under the pledge.
NASA

Low Quality Alloy Cause of Shuttle Main Tank Issue 118

Posted by Soulskill from the heisenberg-compensators-were-acting-up dept.
BJ_Covert_Action writes "NASA engineers have finally discovered the root cause of the cracks that have been found on space shuttle Discovery's main external tank. The main tank, one of the 'Super Lightweight Tank' models developed by Lockheed-Martin, employs an aluminum-lithium alloy developed by Lockheed-Martin specifically for this application. The new alloy is used in various structural stringers throughout the SLWT design. Unfortunately, the batch of this alloy used in the tank that is currently mated with the Discovery shuttle appears to be of low quality. The alloy used in the stringers has a 'mottled' appearance, compared to the nominal appearance typically used in the main tank stringers (see picture in article). This appearance is indicative of a fracture threshold that is significantly lower than typical. NASA has determined, through testing, that this low grade alloy has only 65% of the fracture strength of the nominal alloy typically used. NASA engineers have devised a potential fix to the problem that they are currently testing to ensure the repair will cause no unintended consequences. NASA plans to have the Discovery shuttle ready to launch again by February 24th, 2011."
XBox (Games)

Submission + - New Kinect Acheivement: Ring of Death (kitguru.net)

Submitted by otter42
otter42 writes: It seems that the XBox 360's Kinect will manage to scratch 100% of games. Okay, hyperbole aside, it really does seem that playing a kinect game becomes a question of when the disc will be fatally scratched, rather than if. The problem is that, in order to save $0.25/ea., Microsoft decided to forgo rubber bumpers that protect the spinning disc from vibration. As the Kinect virtually ensures there will be lots of humans jumping, bumping, hopping, and grinding, it's difficult to imagine when vibrations won't be present.
Education

Submission + - Should Colleges Ban Classroom Laptop Use? 1

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: If you were a college prof, think you could successfully compete for the attention of a lecture hall of Mac-packing students? CS student Carolyn blogs that a debate has sprung up on her campus about whether it is acceptable to use a laptop in class. And her school is hardly alone when it comes to struggling with appropriate in-classroom laptop use (vendor/corporate trainers would no doubt commiserate). The problem, she says, is that the OCD Facebookers aren't just devaluing their own education — there's a certain distraction factor to worry about. 'Students,' she suggests, 'should also communicate with each other more and tell their classmates when their computer use bothers them. I'll admit it, when I'm trying to pay attention to the lecture, even someone's screensaver in the row ahead of me can be a major distraction.' Try using an iPhone in a movie theater to get a taste of the quit-being-an-a**hole candor that's typically missing in the classroom.
Games

Submission + - Real-life Frogger Ends In Hospital Visit (yahoo.com) 1

Submitted by BigSes
BigSes writes: A 23-year old man has been hospitalized after police in South Carolina say he was hit by an SUV while playing a real-life version of the video game "Frogger." Authorities said the 23-year-old man was taken to a hospital in Anderson after he was struck Monday evening. Before he was hit, police say the man had been discussing the game with his friends. Chief Jimmy Dixon says the man yelled "go" and darted into oncoming traffic in the four-lane highway.

Has it come time to ban some of the classics before someone else goes out and breaks a few bricks with their heads after eating a large mushroom? Wait, I'm betting that has already happened.

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