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Submission + - MagicJack Inventor Dan Borislow Dead at Age 52 (bloomberg.com)

Submitted by Nightwraith
Nightwraith writes: Dan Borislow, whose “MagicJack,” peddled in television infomercials, helped pioneer free phone calls through the Internet, has died. He was 52.

His death was confirmed by Brad Shewmake, a spokesman for MagicJack Vocaltec Ltd., the maker of the device. Borislow was the founder and former chief executive officer of the company, based in Netanya, Israel, and West Palm Beach, Florida.

He died yesterday of a heart attack after playing in a soccer game in West Palm Beach, according to an e-mail today from his friend, Douglas Kass, founder of Seabreeze Partners Management Inc. in Palm Beach, Florida.

“Dan was a true telecom pioneer whose vision, creativity, energy, passion and single-minded focus was the driving force behind the success of MagicJack,” the company’s CEO, Gerald Vento, said today in a statement. Vento replaced Borislow as the company’s chief executive on Jan. 1, 2013.

Submission + - 'Optical fibre' Made Out Of Thin Air 1

Submitted by Dave Knott
Dave Knott writes: Scientists from the University of Maryland say they have turned thin air into an "optical fibre" that can transmit and amplify light signals without the need for any cables. As described in the research, this was accomplished by generating a laser with its light split into a ring of multiple beams forming a pipe. Very short and powerful pulses from the laser are used to heat the air molecules along the beam extremely quickly. Such rapid heating produces sound waves that take about a microsecond to converge to the centre of the pipe, creating a high-density area surrounded by a low-density area left behind in the wake of the laser beams. The lower density region of air surrounding the centre of the air waveguide has a lower refractive index, keeping the light focused, and allowing the higher-density region (with its correspondingly higher index of refraction) to act like an optical fibre. The findings, reported in the journal Optica, have applications in long range laser communications, high-resolution topographic mapping, air pollution and climate change research, and could also be used by the military to make laser weapons.

Submission + - Motley Crüe's interesting take on photography copyright (petapixel.com) 1

Submitted by sandbagger
sandbagger writes: Concert photography sounds like a great job but like anything else, it's tough to make a dollar. The heavy metal band Motley Crüe's most recent photography licence appears to be making that harder. A leaked copy claims that "Licensor agrees that it shall not license any of the Materials (or shall not exploit any of the Materials) without the written consent of the Licensee which shall be withheld in Licensee’s sole discretion." Effectively, that professional photographers relinquish their copyright. This is followed by a secrecy clause that you can read more about on PetaPixel.

Submission + - Firefox 33 gets Cisco's OpenH264 (ghacks.net)

Submitted by NotInHere
NotInHere writes: As promised, version 33 of the Firefox browser will fetch the OpenH264 module from Cisco, which enables Firefox to decode and encode H.264 video, for both the <video> tag and WebRTC, which has a codec war on this matter. The module won't be a traditional NPAPI plugin, but a so-called Gecko Media Plugin (GMP), Mozilla's answer to the disliked Pepper API. Firefox had no cross-platform support for H.264 before.

Submission + - Microsoft reports a whopping $23.38 billion in revenue for FY14 Q4

Submitted by DroidJason1
DroidJason1 writes: Microsoft revealed today in an earnings call that quarterly profit declined 7.1% as the company absorbed a financial hit from acquiring Nokia's money-losing cellphone business. Microsoft also reported a whopping $23.38 billion in revenue for FY14 Q4, as well as an operating income of $6.48 billion. The company also reported $1.99 billion in phone revenue, stemming from its purchase of Nokia’s hardware assets for more than $7 billion. Microsoft also sold 5.8 million Windows Phone-based Lumia handsets in the period. That business cost the company $0.08 in earnings per share and lost it $692 million in the quarter. Had Microsoft not purchased the asset, it would have hit its profit mark. Azure and Office 365 grew more than 100 percent in just one year. Office 365 for consumers picked up another 1 million subscribers, ending the quarter with more than 5.6 million. Microsoft is clearly trying to sort out its profits and margins, especially since the company recently revealed that 18,000 employees were being laid off.

Submission + - Microsoft brings two open source tools to Azure (pcworld.com)

Submitted by mpicpp
mpicpp writes: Following through on promises from new CEO Satya Nadella, Microsoft continues to add support for non-Microsoft technologies, allowing them to run well on the company’s Azure cloud hosting platform.

The company has partnered with two organizations that offer popular open source programs for managing cloud resources—Packer and OpenNebula. Microsoft is releasing drivers that will make it easy to use the programs on Azure, as well as with Microsoft server software for in-house deployments.

Packer is increasingly being used by system administrators to create and then manage the operations of virtual machine images. Running from any OS, Packer assembles and configures the necessary components for a virtual machine and can create identical copies to run on different platforms, such as Linux and Windows.

Packer can also work with popular open source configuration tools such as Chef and Puppet to automate the procedures of rolling out many virtual machines at once.

“Packer has been so popular lately that we heard from people that they want it see it on Azure,” Mahugh said.

Microsoft is also adding support for the OpenNebula cloud management software. OpenNebula could be a key technology for companies interested in running hybrid clouds, a model in which some operations run on a public cloud like Azure and others run in-house, perhaps on a private cloud.

Comment Re:No Decent Solution (Score 3, Interesting) 83

> Nations must have borders or the nation ceases to exist.

I question that basic assumption: All that does is divide people into an "us vs them" mentality.

Why must there even BE _artificial_ human inventions such as borders?

The earth doesn't have borders, only men do.

I want a world where:

* People can freely live and work they may without another man giving them permission
* Personal Rights and Freedoms are respected and placed at a higher value then artificial government granted privileges,
* Governments to acknowledge that they are created BY the people to SERVE the people, not the other way around where people are brainwashed into believing they need artificial government granted privileges.
* Governments are Accountable for their actions
* Governments are Open about their actions

If people, and government which are an extension of people, would spend less time living in FEAR and profiting off making machines to kill other men we wouldn't even need borders.

Eventually a unified world government is more efficient but since that scares the hell out of a lot of people that will never happen until we remove money (corruption) from politics.

Submission + - Rupert Murdoch's quest to buy TimeWarner, not done yet

Submitted by Presto Vivace
Presto Vivace writes: It seems that Murdoch's desire to acquire TimeWarner predates his acquisition of Fox, and continues in spite of TimeWarner's recent refusal of his most recent offer.. The possible deal is important in and of itself, but it also bears upon the succession.

Murdoch’s skill is not just hiring the right people; he has been able to maintain control over them. They have his support as long as they produce results.

His executives are the hired help. There is never any threat to his control. When a Murdoch favourite begins to get more headlines than the chairman, the clock begins ticking for their departure.

But with the Time Warner bid, that balance may change. Chase Carey has put together a deal that, because of Murdoch’s history, is almost irresistible to him. But it’s a deal only Carey can put together.

If he succeeds, the $US160 billion company that will emerge will be an ungainly beast that will depend on Carey making the merger work. He’s indispensable.

Clearly we have not heard the last of this.

Comment Re:Binary prefixes: Use them (Score 1) 272

by UnknownSoldier (#47490583) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: How Many Employees Does Microsoft Really Need?

Preaching to the choir, brother !

What gets me about this whole KiB MiB bullshit is that it is revisionist history based on some pointless ideology. Years ago I recognized:

Any ideology taken to an extreme is usually never a good idea in the long run.

IF the terms had been invented back in the '70s, then fine, we _might_ of adopted it. But in 1998? Fuck off. If there really is _that_ much confusion then either put a 2 or 10 subscript below the K or M to distinguish the base.

i.e.
16 G2B = 16384 K2B = 16,777,216 bytes
299 M10m = 299.792458 Mm = 299,792,458 m.

We use B for Bytes, and b for bits. From context we can tell that base-2 is implied.

Submission + - Can the Multiverse be Tested Scientifically? (discovery.com)

Submitted by astroengine
astroengine writes: Physicists aren’t afraid of thinking big, but what happens when you think too big? This philosophical question overlaps with real physics when hypothesizing what lies beyond the boundary of our observable universe. The problem with trying to apply science to something that may or may not exist beyond our physical realm is that it gets a little foggy as to how we could scientifically test it. A leading hypothesis to come from cosmic inflation theory and advanced theoretical studies — centering around the superstring hypothesis — is that of the "multiverse," an idea that scientists have had a hard time in testing. But now, scientists at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, in Ontario, Canada, have, for the first time, created a computer model of colliding universes in the multiverse in an attempt to seek out observational evidence of its existence.

Submission + - Under The Sea: Rokudenashiko, Arrested For Sharing 3D Print Of Genitals (medicaldaily.com)

Submitted by FilmedInNoir
FilmedInNoir writes: 42-year-old Megumi Igarashi, who works under the pseudonym Rokudenashiko, has come under scrutiny after she shared 3D prints of her vulva to supporters of her vagina boat project. The 42-year-old was accused of a Japanese penal code dating back to 1907, where it is illegal to sell or distribute obscene objects.

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