Comment Hilarious (Score 2, Interesting) 133
I bought the app and said "Marijuana" in English, which promptly spit back out at me in Spanish, "illegales" . I'm pretty sure that translates back into English as , "Illegal".
Submission + - Telco sues city for plan to roll out own broadband (maximumpc.com)
Syngularity writes: MaximumPC is featuring an article about one broadband provider's decision to sue the city of Monticello, Minnesota after residents passed a referendum to roll out their own fiber optic system. TDS Telecommunications had earlier denied the city's request for the company to provide fiber optic service. During the ensuring legal battle, which prevented the citizens from following through with their plans, TDS Telecommunications took the opportunity to roll out a fiber system.
Submission + - Intergalactic Race Shows that Einstein Still Rules
Ponca City, We love you writes: "The NY Times reports that after a journey of 7.3 billion light-years, a race between gamma rays ranging from 31 billion electron volts to 10,000 electron volts, a factor of more than a million, in a burst from an exploding star have arrived within nine-tenths of a second of each other in a detector on NASA’s Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope confirming Einstein’s proclamation in his 1905 theory of relativity that the speed of light is constant and independent of its color, energy, direction or how you yourself are moving. Some theorists had suggested that space on very small scales has a granular structure that would speed some light waves faster than others — in short, that relativity could break down on the smallest scales. Until now such quantum gravity theories have been untestable because ordinarily you would have to see details as small as the so-called Planck length, which is vastly smaller than an atom — to test these theories in order to discern the bumpiness of space. The spread in travel time of 0.9 second, if attributed to quantum effects rather than the dynamics of the explosion itself, suggested that any quantum effects in which the slowing of light is proportional to its energy do not show up until you get down to sizes about eight-tenths of the Planck length. "This measurement eliminates any approach to a new theory of gravity that predicts a strong energy dependent change in the speed of light," says Peter Michelson of Stanford. “"To one part in 100 million billion, these two photons traveled at the same speed. Einstein still rules.""
Submission + - Speech-to-Speech Translator Developed for iPhone
Ponca City, We love you writes: "Dr. Dobbs reports that Alex Waibel, professor of computer science and language technologies at Carnegie Mellon University, has developed an iPhone application that turns the iPhone into a translator that converts English speech into Spanish, or vice versa. Users simply speak a sentence or two at a time into the iPhone and the iPhone will respond with an audible translation. "Jibbigo's software runs on the iPhone itself, so it doesn't need to be connected to the Web to access a distant server," says Waibel. Waibel is an leader in speech-to-speech translation and multimodal speech interfaces, creating the first real-time, speech-to-speech translator for English, German and Japanese. "Automated speech translation is an expensive proposition that has been supported primarily by large government grants," says Waibel. "But our sponsors are impatient to see this technology become more widely available and we, as researchers, are eager to find new revenues that will help us extend this technology to more of the 6,000 languages now spoken worldwide.""
Comment Re:slow data (Score 4, Interesting) 551
I was in San Francisco this past weekend, and my network services were severed sharply compared to the connection I get here in Austin TX. I was unable to get emails or use the internet and every other time I tried to make a phone call, I kept getting "Call Failed".
The problem was so bad that when I was in SFO, I tweeted something to the tune of "My POS iPhone never works when I need it to", to which an ATT Rep (apparently ATT has people scouring Twitter for angry ATT customers) responded with http://twitter.com/ATTJason/status/3676354487 .
When ATT loses its contract with Apple, I'm dropping their POS network for a more reliable carrier with a better network and more helpful customer support. (Ever had an ATT rep call you a horses ass on the phone? They did to me back in June, to which they ended up giving me 2 months of free service to apologize)
Comment Looks like the block was lifted (Score 4, Informative) 342
As of 1am CST, it looks like the block is beginning to be lifted :
http://encyclopediadramatica.com/AT%26T_Blocks_4chan#THIS_JUST_IN
I can confirm access to img.4chan.org open from the Austin/South Texas area now, whereas it wasn't about an hour ago.
Submission + - Chuck Norris sues, says his tears no cancer cure (reuters.com) 2
Google85 writes: Chuck Norris sued publisher Penguin on Friday over a book he claims unfairly exploits his famous name, based on a satirical Internet list of "mythical facts" about him.
The book capitalizes on "mythical facts" that have been circulating on the Internet since 2005 that poke fun at Norris' tough-guy image and super-human abilities, the suit said.
The book capitalizes on "mythical facts" that have been circulating on the Internet since 2005 that poke fun at Norris' tough-guy image and super-human abilities, the suit said.
Submission + - Ron Paul sets new online fundraising records
yamamushi writes: "Remember Remember the 5th of November indeed! In observance of Guy Fawkes Night, Thousands of Presidential Candidate/Congressman Ron Paul supporters donated just over $4.3 Million dollars to his campaign within 24 hours, topping the record for the most raised online in one day for any presidential candidate, ever. His staggering amount also shadowed the most raised in a single day by any of the other Republican candidates, to which Mitt Romney owned the title at $3.1 Million. With the media burying Ron Paul, and refusing to consider him a top-tier candidate, will Paul be able to leverage the internet community into proving otherwise at the polls?"
Submission + - Microsoft fires CIO (marketwatch.com) 5
An anonymous reader writes: SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — Microsoft's chief information officer has been fired for violating company policies, the company said Tuesday.
Submission + - Mandriva: An open letter to Steve Ballmer
An anonymous reader writes: An entry on the Mandriva Blog, written by Mandriva CEO François Bancilhon, is suggesting that the Nigerian government, after ordering thousands of Classmate PCs with Mandriva Linux installed, has suddenly decided that they will instead install Windows replacing the pre-loaded Mandriva Linux installation on the low-cost computing devices intended for children in the developing world. The blog suggests that this was not a decision that the Nigerian government made on its own. Is this just speculation, or is there something much bigger going on here?
Submission + - Vista not as ready for modern desktop as Linux? 1
Pr0xY writes: "Recently I purchased my new "gaming rig." So I decided to just go for and loaded up a new Dell XPS 720 with the works. Among other things, I got 4GB of RAM. To my (and many others according to google) surprise, x86 Vista only reports 3 and change GB of RAM.
I do some systems programming, so I had a clue as to what was going on, my first reaction was "PAE must not be enabled." Here's what's going on. With traditional paging, there is 4GB of physical address space available to a 32-bit x86 processor. This includes memory mapped devices, for example, your shiny new video card with 768 Megs of RAM takes up that much space of physical RAM your system can use. The solution is to use either PAE or PSE36, both provide up to 64GB of physical memory to a 32-bit x86 system. The limit of what you can map into memory at a time is still 4GB, but this allows motherboards to relocate the RAM that got displaced by hardware above the 4GB and still be usable.
However, it turns out that first of all, Vista automatically enables PAE if you want DEP since it is necessary for the NX bit. And in addition to that, Microsoft deliberately doesn't use RAM above the 4GB mark even with PAE for "compatibility reasons." The main issue being that DMA can't touch RAM higher than 4GB on x86. Microsoft could have easily had a special pool for this "high memory" in order to make some use of it when you know it's safe. This isn't impractical as the server editions of Windows are in fact able to use upwards of 4GB on 32-bit systems as well.
Linux has no issue using all 4GB of my RAM once I build my kernel with PAE support. Microsoft also claims that they support 4GB of RAM in their documentation. All in all, I find this whole thing to be a bit deceptive on Microsoft's part. Microsoft's solution: "Get Vista x86-64""
I do some systems programming, so I had a clue as to what was going on, my first reaction was "PAE must not be enabled." Here's what's going on. With traditional paging, there is 4GB of physical address space available to a 32-bit x86 processor. This includes memory mapped devices, for example, your shiny new video card with 768 Megs of RAM takes up that much space of physical RAM your system can use. The solution is to use either PAE or PSE36, both provide up to 64GB of physical memory to a 32-bit x86 system. The limit of what you can map into memory at a time is still 4GB, but this allows motherboards to relocate the RAM that got displaced by hardware above the 4GB and still be usable.
However, it turns out that first of all, Vista automatically enables PAE if you want DEP since it is necessary for the NX bit. And in addition to that, Microsoft deliberately doesn't use RAM above the 4GB mark even with PAE for "compatibility reasons." The main issue being that DMA can't touch RAM higher than 4GB on x86. Microsoft could have easily had a special pool for this "high memory" in order to make some use of it when you know it's safe. This isn't impractical as the server editions of Windows are in fact able to use upwards of 4GB on 32-bit systems as well.
Linux has no issue using all 4GB of my RAM once I build my kernel with PAE support. Microsoft also claims that they support 4GB of RAM in their documentation. All in all, I find this whole thing to be a bit deceptive on Microsoft's part. Microsoft's solution: "Get Vista x86-64""
Submission + - Students liable for School Insecurity?
yamamushi writes: "Within the past few weeks, students across Boerne ISD were being called into offices to discuss the use of proxies to circumvent the schools websense system. The problem is that some of these students are being punished so far as being suspended from school for up to (as far as anyone knows so far) 3 months at a time. Shouldn't the school district be liable for their own insecurity? Why are they punishing so many students for something that should be handled from the district's end? I know at the time I was going to school there, I was punished for using a linux livecd to login to their computers without using a password, even after I told the admins how to disable cdrom boots, they refused to update any of the computers and as such I was using the same tactic till the day I graduated."
Submission + - Make a viral video, lose your job
Raul654 writes: "Philip de Vellis, the author of the Hilary Clinton viral video was outed today on the Huffington Post. The company he works for, Blue State Digital, has now fired him as a result. Said Vellis: "I made the 'Vote Different' ad because I wanted to express my feelings about the Democratic primary, and because I wanted to show that an individual citizen can affect the process.""
