Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Steve Jobs Dead At 56 1613

SoCalChris writes "Apple cofounder Steve Jobs was found dead in his Cupertino home this morning. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him — even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon."

Comment On Killing Seldom Used Features (Score 3, Funny) 862

Let's do a quick exercise in Microsoftian design: The week has 168 hours.

Shall we assume the typical adult male has 4x 15-minute sexual intercourses per week ? It's probably pushing a bit, but fine, let's exaggerate. That'll be 1 hour per week.

Shall we assume the typical adult male urinates 8 times per day (once every 2 hours while awake), and each event lasts 1 minute ? That'll be 8 minutes per day, 56 minutes per week. Let's round things up and call it 1 hour. We're exaggerating anyway.

166/168 = 0.9880. On our typical adult male, the penis is idle and unused 98.8% of the time. If the human body was designed by the Windows 8 design team, we would be dickless.

Comment Re:Thank god i don't buy Apple (Score 1) 148

Brazil provides huge tax breaks for products *assembled* in the country with local workforce, even if all the components are manufactred elsewhere. So the big manufacturers just import the component kits from China and assemble them here. This is true for Sony notebooks, the Xbox360 (recently started to be assembled here, and will start selling cheaper than the Wii for that alone), and the same goes for electronics such as phones, monitors, TVs, etc. Foxconn isn't starting up a facility out of nothing, the Sony vaio line is already assembled by them in Brazil.

Recently the legislation was changed to include tablets in the tax break law, and local assembly of ipads here will start soon. That is not a rumor and has been on the brazilian news for months, with official word from both the government and Foxconn. How much of the global market will be "served" from the brazilian output is the actual question. I wouldn't be surprised if the entire iPad 2 assembly transitioned to Brazil while the chinese sweatshops move to the iPad 3. With local economic treaties, it will be no surprise if the brazilian output of tablets starts serving the entire South America market right away.

Regarding the Argentinian coward's opinion on the quality of brazilian goods, there is no such perception of bad quality in the internal market, save for the automotive sector -- where the national industry is heavily protected and gets away with exorbitant profit margins on cars with considerably less features than cars from european and asian competitors.

Facebook

Winklevoss Twins Finally Give Up Fighting Facebook 160

An anonymous reader writes "Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's former Harvard classmates Cameron Winklevoss and Tyler Winklevoss, who accuse him of stealing their idea for the social network, have decided not to appeal to the Supreme Court. In a filing today with the federal court in San Francisco, the duo said that after 'careful consideration,' they decided not to seek Supreme Court review of the $65 million settlement."
Space

Project Icarus: the Gas Mines of Uranus 155

astroengine writes "When considering the fuel source for a fusion-powered interstellar probe, wouldn't it be a good idea to set up a colony on the moon and start pillaging the lunar surface for its helium-3 riches? Not so fast, says Adam Crowl of Project Icarus, there may be a far more viable source. What about the gas giants? Although Jupiter's gravity could pose a problem and Saturn's rings might get in the way (and forget Neptune, that place is one hell of a commute), perhaps the helium-3 in the Uranian atmosphere could be mined using atmospheric balloons?"
AI

Are 625 Pixels Enough To Identify Sex? 143

mikejuk writes "A Spanish research team have patented a video camera and algorithm that can tell the difference between males and females based on just a 25x25 pixel image. This means that there is enough information in such low resolution images to do the job! They also demonstrate that an old AI method, linear discriminant analysis, is as good and sometimes better than more trendy methods such as Support Vector Machines..."
Wikipedia

Editing Wikipedia Helps Professor Attain Tenure 139

Hugh Pickens writes "Lianna Davis writes in Watching the Watchers that Michel Aaij has won tenure in the Department of English and Philosophy at Auburn University Montgomery in Alabama in part because of the more than 60,000 edits ... he's written for Wikipedia. ... Aaij felt that his contributions to Wikipedia merited mention in his tenure portfolio and a few weeks before the portfolio was due two of his colleagues suggested, after they had heard him talk once or twice about the peer-review process for a Good Article, that he should include it under 'research' as well as 'service.'"
Handhelds

Mono Comes To Android 257

A reader writes "After releasing Monotouch for iPhone which allows c# development on iOS, Novell has announced the availability of Mono for Android. Will this give us the 'one language to rule them all' that Java failed to bring, or will the bad blood between the F/OSS groups and Microsoft make this a dead end?"
Firefox

Firefox 5 Details: Sharing, Home Tab, PDF Viewer 453

An anonymous reader writes "Firefox 4 may be still new, but Firefox 5 is already being prepared by Mozilla. At least the UI features have been laid out by the Mozilla team — there are nine new features in total. There are some features that are replicating Chrome functionality (tab multi-select or an integrated PDF viewer that will also extend to other file formats), but there are completely new features such as tab web apps, an identity manager a home tab that replaces the home button as well as a social sharing feature that is integrated in the URL bar and enables users to post directly to their Facebook and Twitter pages."
Crime

FBI Overwhelmed With 'Solutions' To Encrypted Note 137

An anonymous reader writes "Recently the FBI asked for the public's help in solving the encryption in a note linked to a man's murder. Well, they got so much 'help' it has overwhelmed the agency's phone and email systems. Dan Olson, chief of the FBI's Cryptanalysis and Racketeering Records Unit (CRRU), urged potential code-breakers to send their tips via mail rather than sending emails or flooding phone lines. 'We don't have the bandwidth to handle the emails we're getting,' Olson told FoxNews.com on Thursday. 'We're getting a bunch [of responses].' Suggested solutions range from a list of the dead man's medication schedule to instructions from a computer repair technician: 'He is speaking to a computer tech on how to fix his computer,' one message read."
Japan

A Handy Radiation Dose Chart From XKCD 392

An anonymous reader points out Randall Munroe's latest contribution to public health awareness, a "chart of how much ionizing radiation a person can absorb from various sources, compared visually. 1 Sievert will make you sick, many more will kill you, however, even small doses cumulatively increase cancer risk." It's a good way to think about the difference between Chernobyl and Fukushima.
Open Source

USB Autorun Attacks Against Linux 274

Orome1 writes "Many people think that Linux is immune to the type of Autorun attacks that have plagued Windows systems with malware over the years. However, there have been many advances in the usability of Linux as a desktop OS — including the addition of features that can allow Autorun attacks. This Shmoocon presentation by Jon Larimer from IBM X-Force starts off with a definition of autorun vulnerabilities and some examples from Windows, then jumps straight into the Linux side of things. Larimer explains how attackers can abuse these features to gain access to a live system by using a USB flash drive. He also shows how USB as an exploitation platform can allow for easy bypass of protection mechanisms like ASLR and how these attacks can provide a level of access that other physical attack methods do not." I've attached the video if you are curious. Skip the first 2 minutes if you don't care where the lost and found is.

Slashdot Top Deals

New York... when civilization falls apart, remember, we were way ahead of you. - David Letterman

Working...