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The Internet

Submission + - Best Website Strategy in a PR Meltdown?

theodp writes: When it came to protecting Tiger Woods' image in the print media, Tiger's PR folks displayed a lot of ingenuity. Attempts were also made to control the spin on tigerwoods.com, which was always a shrine to the golfer. But in the aftermath of the recent scandal, the comments section was left wide-open, allowing critics to bash Tiger on his own site. But the folks who manage tigerwoods.com have been scrambling — visitors are no longer allowed to leave comments, and embarrassing items have disappeared from the site (although you'll still find a Vegas showgirl or two). So, is there really any good strategy for dealing with a website in a PR meltdown? Or is simply making your problems disappear, a la IBM, usually the road best taken?

Comment Predictable? (Score 1) 181

Modelers claim wars are predictable

Up to a point yes they are, but as Helmuth Karl Bernhard Graf von Moltke so succulently said No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy. I can only imagine that if someone tries to predict a battle they are going to be left holding their graph at the end of the battle saying what the hell just happened?

Comment Fans (Score 3, Insightful) 160

The Italian government has proposed introducing new restrictions on the Internet after a Facebook fan page for the man who allegedly attacked Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi on Sunday drew almost 100,000 users in under 48 hours.

Well that is a rather knee jerk reaction, last I checked Facebook was not for just people from Italy. Besides people will become fans of anything on Facebook, from beer, to Jeffrey Dahmer.
BSD

Submission + - FreeNAS switching from FreeBSD to Debian Linux 1

dnaumov writes: FreeNAS, a popular free NAS solution is moving away from using FreeBSD as it's underlying core OS and switching to Debian Linux. Version 0.8 of FreeNAS as well as all further releases are going to be based on Linux, while the FreeBSD-based 0.7 branch of FreeNAS is going into maintenance-only mode, according to main developer Volker Theile. A discussion about the switch, including comments from the developers can be found on the FreeNAS SourceForge discussion forum. Some users applaud the change, which promises improved hardware compatibility, while others voice concerns regarding the future of their existing setups and lack of ZFS support in Linux.

Submission + - MIT/Harvard on Brain-Inspired A.I. Vision (tgdaily.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Researchers from Harvard and MIT have demonstrated a way to build better artificial visual systems [1] with the help of low-cost, high-performance gaming hardware like the PlayStation 3 and NVIDIA GPUs [2]. A great video describing their research is available [3].

From TGDaily: "Reverse engineering a biological visual system — a system with hundreds of millions of processing units — and building an artificial system that works the same way is a daunting task," says David Cox, Principal Investigator of the Visual Neuroscience Group at the Rowland Institute at Harvard [4]. "It is not enough to simply assemble together a huge amount of computing power. We have to figure out how to put all the parts together so that they can do what our brains can do." The team drew inspiration from screening techniques in molecular biology, where a multitude of candidate organisms or compounds are screened in parallel to find those that have a particular property of interest. Rather than building a single model and seeing how well it could recognize visual objects, the team constructed thousands of candidate models, and screened for those that performed best on an object recognition task. The resulting models outperformed a crop of state-of-the-art computer vision systems across a range of test sets, more accurately identifying a range of objects on random natural backgrounds with variation in position, scale, and rotation. Using ordinary CPUs, the effort would have required either years or millions of dollars of computing hardware. Instead, by harnessing modern graphics hardware, the analysis was done in just one week, and at a small fraction of the cost. "GPUs (graphics processor units) are a real game-changer for scientific computing. We made a powerful parallel computing system from cheap, readily available off-the-shelf components, delivering over hundred-fold speed-ups relative to conventional methods," says MIT researcher Nicolas Pinto [5]. "With this expanded computational power, we can discover new vision models that traditional methods miss."

[1] http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000579
[2] http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08%2F07%2F27%2F0721222
[3] http://vimeo.com/7945275
[4] http://www.rowland.org/rjf/cox/Projects/Computation/computation.html
[5] http://pinto.scripts.mit.edu/Research/Research

Games

Submission + - No "Aliens Vs. Predator" Video Game in Australia (gamasutra.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Australia refused to give Rebellion's new game "Aliens Vs. Predator" a rating, effectively banning it in the country. "Rebellion says it won't be submitting an edited version for another round of classifications, however. "We will not be releasing a sanitized or cut down version for territories where adults are not considered by their governments to be able to make their own entertainment choices," continues the statement."
Security

Submission + - Security Researchers: DRG offers $10,000 grant (team-cymru.org)

rivetkey writes: The Dragon Research Group (DRG) expects to award up to $10,000 (US) to the most innovative project in the area of information security. The DRG is seeking innovative projects that address a current and widespread information security challenge or present a novel, but practical solution that aids the Internet security community. Proposals may consist of software, hardware, training, facility or multimedia components. The grant is administered by the DRG ("an all volunteer research organization, dedicated to understanding online criminality and providing actionable intelligence for the benefit of the entire Internet community"). The grant is expected to be awarded, on a yearly basis, to the proposal with highest overall merit as rated by an independent DRG review committee.

Comment Freedom of information act (Score 1) 497

Felton has thrown down the gauntlet asking for a standardized data set from any telco that he can do statistical analysis on that will allow him to find any evidence of a single outlier ruining the experience for everyone else. Unlikely any telco will take him up on that offer but his point still stands."

It's too bad there isn't a freedom of information act for business, that could come in handy for this sort of thing. Although if there was I suppose that would make industrial espionage really easy.

Comment I can only hope (Score 1) 378

I can only hope that the movie industry reads the history books, for those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Although, I can see a new market opening up, sort of a YouTube for full length movies. I wonder if this is the end of the golden age for Hollywood, I can't see movie producers willing to pay actors millions to act in their movies if their profit margins are falling off the page. I wonder if Bollywood will step in to fill in the gap? I really don't like musicals.

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