Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Submission + - New Whitehouse petition to limit copyrights to 56 (whitehouse.gov)

Submitted by
TheDawgLives
TheDawgLives writes: "Perhaps taking inspiration from two recent petitions a new petition has been created at the White House We The People site to limit copyright to 56 years. That may still be too long, but at least it's a start.
Did the RIAA and MPAA finally stir up a hornets' nest that they weren't ready for, or will the be able to bribe their way out of this one?"
Science

Submission + - Crowdsourced Map of Earthquake Damage in Annals of (tomnod.com)

Submitted by
Tomnod
Tomnod writes: "On February 22 2011, a 6.3-magnitude quake centered just 10km from downtown Christchurch caused widespread damage and resulted in the loss of 181 lives. In an effort to assess the damage done, we created the Tomnod Disaster Mapper. In case you haven’t tried it out, the site shows before/after imagery from Christchurch and asks users on the web to identify damaged areas. We worked with the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute and the World Bank to match this information to on-the-ground surveys and validate the crowd's work. It turns out that they’re pretty darn good!"
Google

Submission + - Google researchers propose TCP performance tweaks (infoworld.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Some portions of TCP could be tweaked to
improve web performance in today's world of relatively plentiful bandwidth and broadband connections, according to Google researchers studying web performance. In a blog post, a team member outlines four proposals for modifying TCP to reduce web latency. These proposals include increasing the initial congestion window from 3 to 10 segments (or 4.5KB to 15KB using the Ethernet MTU), and lowering the initial timeout from 3 seconds to 1 second.

Submission + - Netflix abandons plans to separate services (yahoo.com)

Submitted by s.d.
s.d. writes: Abandoning a break-up plan it announced last month, Netflix said Monday morning that it had decided to keep its DVD-by-mail and online streaming services together under one name and one Web site. "We underestimated the appeal of the single web site and a single service," Steve Swasey, a Netflix spokesman, said in a telephone interview. He quickly added: "We greatly underestimated it." Mr. Swasey said that the Netflix chief executive Reed Hastings declined an interview request. But in a statement, Mr. Hastings said, "Consumers value the simplicity Netflix has always offered and we respect that. There is a difference between moving quickly — which Netflix has done very well for years — and moving too fast, which is what we did in this case."
Facebook

Submission + - Google+ loses 60% of active users (theinquirer.net) 2

Submitted by tech4
tech4 writes: Despite users curiosity around Google+, it seems like most Google+ users just wanted to see the platform and then returned to Facebook. 'Google has lost over 60 per cent of its active users on its social network Google+, according to a report by Chitika Insights, raising questions about how well it is doing against its rival, Facebook. Despite the clear interest in an alternative to Facebook, it does not appear that the people joining are staying around and actively using the web site. Google's problem is not getting users in the first place, it seems, but rather keeping them after they have arrived. For now it appears that a lot of users are merely curious about Google+, but return to the tried and tested format of Facebook when the lustre fades. The problem is that Facebook is not going to rest on its laurels while Google attempts to get the advantage. Already it has added features inspired by Google+, particularly in terms of improving the transparency of its privacy options.'

Slashdot Top Deals

If all else fails, lower your standards.

Close