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Bill Gates' Plan To Destroy Music, Note By Note 659

Posted by timothy from the too-insane-to-ignore-forever dept.
theodp writes "Remember Mr. Microphone? If you thought music couldn't get worse, think again. Perhaps with the help of R&D tax credits, Microsoft Research has spawned Songsmith, software that automatically creates a tinny, childish background track for your singing. And as bad as the pseudo-infomercial was, the use of the product in the wild is likely to be even scarier, as evidenced by these Songsmith'ed remakes of music by The Beatles, The Police, and The Notorious B.I.G.."

Comment The visual clutter... (Score 1) 848

by JickL (#26411741) Attached to: Windows 7 Beta Released To Public After Delay
After two years with OS X and some time with GNOME, Xfce and the like I just can't stand all the colours and fiddly little buttons that are EVERYWHERE. I'm in my early twenties; I can't imagine what it would be like for my 60 year old father. Luckily for him he's now enjoying Ubuntu, and he's commented more than once on how uncluttered it is compared to XP.
Image

Zoe's Tale Screenshot-sm 109

Posted by samzenpus from the read-all-about-it dept.
stoolpigeon writes "John Scalzi, the author of Hugo Award-nominated science fiction novel Old Man's War, has built what started as a story serialized in his blog into a series of full novels and short stories. The latest installment in the OMW universe, Zoe's Tale, is quite a departure from the previous three books. It is the first of Scalzi's sci-fi novels written intentionally as young adult fiction. In a move that I am sure will continue to fuel Scalzi/Heinlein comparisons, Zoe is a precocious young woman thrust into a world of adventure and danger. In just three years Scalzi has built an impressive resume as an author of fiction, and Zoe's Tale will be no small part of what looks to be an influential and outstanding career." Keep reading for the rest of JR's review.
Security

Lenovo Service Disables Laptops With a Text Message 257

Posted by kdawson from the say-the-magic-word dept.
narramissic writes "Lenovo plans to announce on Tuesday a service that allows users to remotely disable a PC by sending a text message. A user can send the command from a specified cell phone number — each ThinkPad can be paired with up to 10 cell phones — to kill a PC. The software will be available free from Lenovo's Web site. It will also be available on certain ThinkPad notebooks equipped with mobile broadband starting in the first half of 2009. 'You steal my PC and ... if I can deliver a signal to that PC that turns it off, hey, I'm good now,' said Stacy Cannady, product manager of security at Lenovo. 'The limitation here is that you have to have a WAN card in the PC and you must be paying a data plan for it,' Cannady added."
Supercomputing

Submission + - IBM to Build Cognitive Computer 1

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "IBM will lead a US government-funded collaboration to make a "cognitive computer" that can mimic the brain to be used for large-scale data analysis, decision making and image recognition. The project will have an ultimate goal of creating a system with the level of complexity of a cat's brain but "even a computer with the ability of a rat brain would be a success," says Dharmendra Modha, the IBM scientist who is heading the collaboration. The problem is not in the organization of existing neuron-like circuitry, but in the adaptability of the brain to tune synapses, the connections between the neurons. Synaptic connections form, break, and are strengthened or weakened depending on the signals that pass through them and making a nano-scale material that can fit that description is one of the major goals of the project. "The brain is much less a neural network than a synaptic network," Modha says. The fundamental shift toward putting the problem-solving before the problem makes the potential applications for such devices practically limitless. "We are attempting a 180 degree shift in perspective: seeking an algorithm first, problems second. We are investigating core micro- and macro-circuits of the brain that can be used for a wide variety of functionalities.""

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