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Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Best software for image organization? 1

Submitted by Wycliffe
Wycliffe writes: Like many people, I am starting to get a huge collection of digital photos from family vacations, etc... I am looking for some software that allows me to rate/tag my own photos in a quick way. I really don't want to spend the time tagging a bunch of photos and then be locked into a single piece of software so what is the best software to help organize and tag photos so that I can quickly find highlights without being locked into that software for life. I would prefer open source to prevent lock-in and also prefer linux but could do windows if necessary.

Submission + - American Intelligence Agencies Building New Superconducting Supercomputer (upi.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: UPI reports, "The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, a branch of the U.S. intelligence community, said in a press release that the agency has embarked on a multi-year research effort called the Cryogenic Computer Complexity program, or C3. Current supercomputing utilizes technology that relies on tens of megawatts and requires large amounts of physical space to house the infrastructure and power and cool the components. C3 hopes to use recent breakthroughs in supercomputing technologies ... to construct a superconducting supercomputer with "a simplified cooling infrastructure and a greatly reduced footprint." "The power, space, and cooling requirements for current supercomputers ... are becoming unmanageable," said Marc Manheimer, C3 program manager at IARPA. ... The international intelligence community has been competing to outpace each other and build the first computer to break the exaFLOP barrier for some time, but scaling out contemporary CMOS technologies to construct computers capable of exaFLOP calculations would require hundreds of megawatts to power, necessitating an energy source with an output equal to that of a single small nuclear reactor. ... Currently the record for single computer speed is China's Tianhe-2, ranked the world's fastest with a record of 33.86 petaFLOPS in June of 2013 ... In his 2008 book, The Shadow Factory, best-selling author and journalist James Bamford reported that the NSA told the Pentagon it would need an exaFLOP computer by 2018 ..." — More at Defense Systems.

Submission + - Top 5 Python GUI Frameworks (dice.com)

Submitted by Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: As a Python developer, sooner or later you’ll want to write an application with a graphical user interface. Fortunately, there are a lot of options on the tools front: The Python wiki on GUI programming lists over 30 cross-platform frameworks, as well as Pyjamas, a tool for cross-browser Web development based on a port of the Google Web Toolkit. How to choose between all these options for Python GUIs? Developer David Bolton started by narrowing it down to those that included all three platforms (Windows, Mac, and Linux) and, where possible, Python 3. After that filtering, he found four toolkits (Gtk, Qt, Tk, and wxWidgets) and five frameworks (Kivy, PyQt, gui2Py, libavg and wxPython). He provides an extensive breakdown on why he prefers these.

Submission + - Was Microsoft Forced to Pay $136M in Back Taxes in China? (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: China's state-controlled Xinhua News Agency said on Sunday that an unnamed international company was forced to pay 840 million yuan ($136 million) in back taxes, as part of a Chinese government crackdown on tax evasion. The Xinhua article simply referred to it as the "M company," describing it as a top 500 global firm headquartered in the U.S. that in 1995 set up a wholly owned foreign subsidiary in Beijing. The details match Microsoft's own background, and no other company obviously fits the bill. Xinhua added, that despite the company's strengths, its subsidiary in China had not been not making a profit, and posted a loss of over $2 billion during a six-year period.

Submission + - Elite: Dangerous Dumps Offline Singleplayer

Submitted by Robotron23
Robotron23 writes: The developers behind the sequel to legendary videogame Elite has, to the anger and dismay of fans, dropped the offline singleplayer mode it promised. The game is due for full release in under a month. With the title having raised about $1.5 million from Kickstarter, and millions more in subsequent campaigns that advertised the feature, gamers are livid. A complaints thread on the official Elite forums has swelled to 450+ pages in only three days, while refunds are being lodged in the thousands. It is down to the discretion of Frontier, the game's developer, whether to process refund requests of original backers.

Submission + - Apple and Samsung renew their partnership. (businessinsider.com)

Submitted by chasm22
chasm22 writes: Apple and Samsung have again joined hands to manufacture the chips that power many Apple products. It's considered a big win for Samsung, which has seen a remarkable drop in profits this year due in part to a drop in its chip production. There are few companies in the world that are capable of the producing the chips in the quantity and with the quality that Apple needs. Without a company being capable of producing the chips, Apples in-house designing would be an exercise in futility. And without the lift in chip production that this contract with Apple will provide, Samsung would see a large portion of its chip production capability lay idle.

Submission + - Robots Put To Work On E-Waste (unsw.edu.au)

Submitted by aesoteric
aesoteric writes: Australian researchers have programmed industrial robots to tackle the vast array of e-waste thrown out every year. The research shows robots can learn and memorise how various electronic products — such as LCD screens — are designed, enabling those products to be disassembled for recycling faster and faster. The end goal is less than five minutes to dismantle a product.

Submission + - NYC to replace most of its payphones with free gigabit WiFi in 2015

Submitted by mrspoonsi
mrspoonsi writes: NYC announced its plans: LinkNYC — a network of 10,000 gigabit WiFi hotspots that will line the streets of all five boroughs of New York City. The project will replace all but a small handful of historic payphones with "Links," small towers equipped with WiFi, an Android tablet with select city-service apps and, of course, the ability to make phone calls. What's missing? The word pay: it's all free.

Submission + - Electric shock study suggests we'd rather hurt ourselves than others (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: If you had the choice between hurting yourself or someone else in exchange for money, how altruistic do you think you’d be? In one infamous experiment, people were quite willing to deliver painful shocks to anonymous victims when asked by a scientist. But a new study that forced people into the dilemma of choosing between pain and profit finds that participants cared more about other people’s well-being than their own. It is hailed as the first hard evidence of altruism for the young field of behavioral economics.

Submission + - Ebola and the War of the Worlds (pbs.org)

Submitted by niftymitch
niftymitch writes: Compare and contrast todays news coverage on Ebola and the topic of the upcoming PBS special replay:
AMERICAN EXPERIENCE
War of the Worlds
Aired: 10/29/2013 52:10 Rating: NR
Shortly after 8 p.m. on the Halloween Eve, 1938, a panicked radio announcer broke in with a report that Martians had landed in the tiny town of Grovers Mill, New Jersey. Although most listeners understood that the program was a radio drama, the next day's headlines reported that thousands of others plunged into panic. It turned out to be H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds performed by Orson Welles.

Submission + - Apple Doesn't Design for Yesterday

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Erik Karjaluoto writes that he recently installed OS X Yosemite and his initial reaction was “This got hit by the ugly stick.” But Karjaluoto says that Apple’s decision to make a wholesale shift from Lucida to Helvetica defies his expectations and wondered why Apple would make a change that impedes legibility, requires more screen space, and makes the GUI appear fuzzy? The Answer: Tomorrow.

Microsoft’s approach with Windows, and backward compatibility in general, is commendable. "Users can install new versions of this OS on old machines, sometimes built on a mishmash of components, and still have it work well. This is a remarkable feat of engineering. It also comes with limitations—as it forces Microsoft to operate in the past." Bu Apple doesn't share this focus on interoperability or legacy. "They restrict hardware options, so they can build around a smaller number of specs. Old hardware is often left behind (turn on a first-generation iPad, and witness the sluggishness). Meanwhile, dying conventions are proactively euthanized," says Karjaluoto. "When Macs no longer shipped with floppy drives, many felt baffled. This same experience occurred when a disk (CD/DVD) reader no longer came standard." In spite of the grumblings of many, Karjaluoto doesn't recall many such changes that we didn’t later look upon as the right choice.

What about the change to Helvetica? It ties to the only significant point in yesterday’s iMac announcement: Retina displays. Just take a look at Helvetica on any high-fidelity screen, and you see a crisp, economical, and adaptable type system. "Sure, Helvetica looks crummy on your standard resolution screen," concludes Karjaluoto. "The people at Apple are OK with this temporary trade-off. You’re living in Apple’s past, and, in time, you’ll move forward. When you do, you’ll find a system that works as intended: because Apple skates to where the puck is going to be."

Submission + - Direct3D 9.0 Support On Track For Linux's Gallium3D Drivers (phoronix.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Twelve years after Microsoft debuted DirectX 9.0, open-source developers are getting ready to possibly land Direct3D 9.0 support within the open-source Linux Mesa/Gallium3D code-base. The "Gallium3D Nine" state tracker allows accelerating D3D9 natively by Gallium3D drivers and there's patches for Wine so that Windows games can utilize this state tracker without having to go through Wine's costly D3D-to-OGL translator. The Gallium3D D3D9 code has been in development since last year and is now reaching a point where it's under review for mainline Mesa. The uses for this Direct3D 9 state tracker will likely be very limited outside of using it for Wine gaming.

Submission + - India Successfully Launches navigation satellite 1

Submitted by vasanth
vasanth writes: India has successfully launched IRNSS-1C, the third satellite in the Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System (IRNSS), early on October 16. This is the 27th consecutively successful mission of the PSLV(Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle). The entire constellation of seven satellites is planned to be completed by 2015.

The satellite is designed to provide accurate position information service to users in the country as well as in the region extending up to 1,500 km from its boundary, which is its primary service area.

In Kargil war in 1999 the Indian military sought GPS data for the region from the US. The space-based navigation system maintained by the US government would have provided vital information, but the US denied it to India. A need for an indigenous satellite navigation system was felt earlier, but the Kargil experience made India realise its inevitability in building it's own navigation system. "Geopolitical needs teach you that some countries can deny you the service in times of conflict. It's also a way of arm twisting and a country should protect itself against that," said S Ramakrishnan, director of Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, Thiruvananthapuram

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