bwintx - Slashdot User

Submission + - Apple board members look at new products 6-18 months before release (networkworld.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 21, 2013 @11:37AM

An anonymous reader writes: While speaking at Stanfords' Graduate School of Business yesterday, Apple board member Art Levinson spoke about his role as a board member and life at Apple post Steve Jobs.

It's been about 16 months since Jobs passed away, but the presence of Jobs is still felt at Apple, Levinson explained.

Of particular interest were Levinson's comments about Apple's creative process. While board members don't really have much input when it comes to creating a new product, they are presented with new products approximately 6 to 18 months prior to launch. What's more, if board members are presented with a product early on in the development process, and assuming that their background or expertise comes to bear, their opinions may very well be taken into account.

"The board is not there to define product specs," Levinson added. "It's there as a sounding board. It's there as a resource. And ultimately, the board is there to hire and fire the CEO."

Submission + - Sony Announces Playstation 4 (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by

_0x783czar

on Thursday February 21, 2013 @11:34AM

_0x783czar writes: "Sony has today announced their next generation console, the Playstation 4. It is slated to have an x86 based AMD chipset, which is why Sony is describing the new console as a "Super Charged PC". They also hope that the x86 architecture will make it easier for developers to create games, since they will be able to write the code for the same architecture as a PC. No pictures have yet been released to show what this new console will look like, aside from the the controller: which will have a touch-pad and & camera tracked light. This new console will also focus heavily on social interaction and aims to provide an easy way to pause and share video of your last few minutes of gameplay. In addition to this, it is reported to also have the ability to let your friends remotely control your character in game so as to help you get through a difficult spot; or even just to watch as spectators. Sony hopes to have this new console compete with the Wii U and the upcoming XBox 720 (name pending), but many people are still skeptical since no actual pictures of the console have been released. "Pics or it didn't happen.""

Submission + - NASA spots giant, fast-growing sunspot that could lead to big solar flares (networkworld.com)

Submitted by

coondoggie

on Thursday February 21, 2013 @11:21AM

coondoggie writes: "ASA's sun-watching telescope, the Solar Dynamics Observatory, this week spotted and watched a giant sunspot — over six Earth diameters across-- form in under 48 hours."

Submission + - Mouse Brain Activity Monitored on Video in Real Time (gizmag.com)

Submitted by Zothecula on Thursday February 21, 2013 @10:50AM

Zothecula writes: What’s that mouse thinking about? Scientists at California’s Stanford University can now tell you – to a limited extent. They recently had success in imaging the neural activity of mice, in real time. While the ability to “read a mouse’s mind” may not fire many peoples’ imaginations, the technology could prove very useful in researching diseases like Alzheimer's.

Submission + - Finnish anti-piracy group copies HTML, style sheet from Pirate Bay (afterdawn.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 13, 2013 @10:53AM

An anonymous reader writes: Finland's main anti-piracy group, TTVK, has put a fake Pirate Bay website online . All of the links direct the user to a Finnish anti-piracy message. If you check the source code of the fake BitTorrent website, you can find its largely copied outright from the Pirate Bay website, with the best example being a style sheet that starts with the comment "The main style sheet for the thepiratebay.se".

Submission + - Comcast buys out GE's remaining 49% stake in NBC (philly.com)

Submitted by

Bob the Super Hamste

on Wednesday February 13, 2013 @10:03AM

Bob the Super Hamste writes: "On Tuesday Comcast announced that it would accelerated its acquisition of NBCUniversal and purchase the remaining 49% owned by GE for $16.7 billion.Previously GE and Comcast were expected to operate NBCUniversal jointly until mid 2014 with Comcast having the option to extend that out until 2018. So far there are not details on when the deal with be completed but the article indicates that Comcast's complete acquisition of NBCUniversal will be completed years earlier that initially thought."

Submission + - PYPL: C# is Language of the Year (google.com)

Submitted by

wbates

on Thursday January 03, 2013 @10:48AM

wbates writes: "The site Popularity of Programming Languages (PYPL) declares C# is the "Language of the Year", disputing TIOBE's findings (http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html). PYPL takes a different approach on making this determination, which includes the analysis of the use of "tutorial" in programming language searches on Google. Consequently, they make the claim that because using the word "tutorial" in a search is an indication of intent to use the language, their index can be seen as a leading indicator. In contrast, they see TIOBE's index as a lagging indicator.

Also of interest are the 5-year trends of languages from the PYPL Index, which show a relatively steep incline for Python over that time and what appears to be an inverse trend for Perl. A similar, but less expected, inversion can be seen in the trends for Ruby and Basic.

Perhaps there is validity to this index and the claims which PYPL makes. Only time can tell."

Submission + - How a quarter of the cow genome came from snakes (nationalgeographic.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 03, 2013 @08:42AM

An anonymous reader writes: Genomes are often described as recipe books for living things. If that’s the case, many of them badly need an editor. For example, around half of the human genome is made up of bits of DNA that have copied themselves and jumped around, creating vast tracts of repetitive sequences. The same is true for the cow genome, where one particular piece of DNA, known as BovB, has run amok. It’s there in its thousands. Around a quarter of a cow’s DNA is made of BovB sequences or their descendants.

Submission + - What Happened To Google+?

Submitted by SquarePixel on Friday December 07, 2012 @02:13PM

SquarePixel writes: Google's own social network Google+ was supposed to the holy grail of social networking and Facebook replacement. It has however changed nothing in the social network game and has become "just-an-another-google-property". Why has Google+ failed to take off and are you using Facebook or Google?

Submission + - Your Own Private Google: The Quest for an Open Source Search Engine (wired.com)

Submitted by

concealment

on Friday December 07, 2012 @01:10PM

concealment writes: "The company guards its search platform like the crown jewels. It’s not about to release a paper describing how it all works, so producing an open source clone is more difficult. But there are options, and the push toward open source versions of the Google search engine has gathered some steam in recent months, with the arrival of a new company called ElasticSearch.

These projects aren’t trying to compete with Google’s public search engine — the one you use every day. They’re trying to compete with Google’s search appliance and other products that help enterprises — i.e., big businesses — find stuff inside their own private networks."

Submission + - Washington Post (& Warren Buffet-owned local newspapers) installing Paywalls (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by McGruber on Friday December 07, 2012 @11:12AM

McGruber writes: The Washington Post reports (http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/washington-post-reportedly-considering-adding-a-paywall-in-2013/2012/12/06/0630b2f4-3ff4-11e2-ae43-cf491b837f7b_story.html) that the Washington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com) and local newspapers owned by Warren Buffet, are all planning to follow the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com) and install metered paywalls.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: How to catch Photoshop plagiarism 4

Submitted by jemenake on Tuesday November 13, 2012 @11:05AM

jemenake writes: A friend of mine teaches electronic media (Photoshop, Premiere, etc.) at a local high-school. Right now, they're doing Photoshop, and each chapter in the book starts with an "end result" file which shows what they're going to construct in that chapter, and then, given the basic graphical assets (background textures, photos, etc.), the students need to duplicate the same look in the final-result file.

The problem, of course, is that some students just grab the final-result file and rename it and turn it in. Some are a little less brazen and they rename a few layers, maybe alter the colors on a few images, etc. So, it becomes time-consuming for her to open each file alongside the final-result file to see if it's "too perfect".

When I first discovered that she was doing this, my first reaction was that there's got to be some automated way of catching the cheaters. Of course, my first idea of just doing MD5 hashes of each file won't work, since most kids alter the file a little bit.

A second idea I had was to alter the final-result file in a way that isn't obvious, like removing someone's shoelace, mis-spelling a word in the background, or removing/adding some dust-specks. (I know map publishers and music transcribers use this trick to catch copiers). But this still requires that she look for the alteration in each file. I'd think that Photoshop, after all these years, would have some kind of scripting language which also supports some digital watermarking, but I've just never dabbled in that realm.

And, of course, I guess another solution would be for her to not provide the end-result file in Photoshop format, but to export it as a flat image. But I'm still intrigued by the notion of being able to "fuzzily" compare two photoshop files or images to find the ones which are too similar in certain aspects (color histograms, where the edges are, level of noise, whatever).

Anybody else have any clever ideas for this?

Submission + - Here come the humanoids. There go U.S. jobs (cnet.com) 1

Submitted by

concealment

on Tuesday November 13, 2012 @09:09AM

concealment writes: "Rethink Robotics founder Rodney Brooks took to the stage at the Techonomy conference here to talk about the wonders of his new robot, Baxter, which is designed to work on factory floors doing dull and necessary tasks. He costs just $25,000 and works for what amounts to $4 an hour.

Baxter is a step forward in robotics with mass potential. It has a face and sensors to tell it when people are near. It's about as close to a humanoid robot as we can get, and Brooks said it's just the beginning.

"Within 10 years, we're going to see humanoid robots," said Brooks, who was a co-founder of iRobot, maker of iRoomba, the vacuum cleaner robot."

Submission + - Mark Cuban: Facebook Is Driving Away Brands - Starting With Mine (readwrite.com)

Submitted by

concealment

on Tuesday November 13, 2012 @08:50AM

concealment writes: "Tech billionaire and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban says he is fed up with Facebook and will take his business elsewhere. He's sick of getting hit with huge fees to send messages to his team's fans and followers.

Two weeks ago Cuban tweeted out a screen grab of an offer he'd received from Facebook. The social network wanted to charge him $3,000 to reach 1 million people. Along with the screen grab, Cuban wrote, "FB is blowing it? This is the first step. The Mavs are considering moving to Tumblr or to new MySpace as primary site.""

Submission + - Windows Head Leaves Microsoft

Submitted by

Hugh Pickens writes

on Tuesday November 13, 2012 @05:52AM

Hugh Pickens writes writes: "The Guardian reports that in a shocking move move that comes just two weeks after the launch of Windows 8, Steven Sinofsky, the head of the Windows division at Microsoft is to leave the company. Sinofsky had been at the company for 23 years and had been seen by some as a future chief executive of the software giant but according to reports, there had been growing executive friction between Sinofsky and other top executives at the company. "This is shocking news. This is very surprising," says Brendan Barnicle, an analyst at Pacific Crest Securities. "Like a lot of people, I thought Sinofsky was in line to potentially be Ballmer's successor." Sinofsky's place will be taken by Julie Larson-Green, another Windows executive who has been at Microsoft nearly as long as Sinofsky – joining in 1993 – and will be in charge of hardware and software for Windows. "If this had happened before Windows 8 shipped, I would have worried about potential delays," says Al Hilwa, program director for application software at the research company IDC. "The strategy of folding PC, tablet, phone and set-top into a single platform and ecosystem is the right strategy, and likely will continue to be the strategy of record.""

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