Comment Re:My mistake - 3 times :-) (Score 1) 17
It took a while, but here you go.
Journal Journal: /. Resurgent: On Stemming Audience Decline and Rebuilding that Good Ol' Brand 13
I'd like to talk about Slashdot. We all remember that old troll, Netcraft confirms it, only these days you don't need pagerank to see the decline in comments and community involvement. It's a problem. And facing that truth is the first step in finding solutions. But before I begin, a bit of meta about this journal entry:
Comment Re:My mistake - 3 times :-) (Score 1) 17
I have some ideas. I think it's time for a journal entry too.
Submission + - Maps Suggest Marco Polo May Have "Discovered" America 1
An anonymous reader writes: For a guy who claimed to spend 17 years in China as a confidant of Kublai Khan, Marco Polo left a surprisingly skimpy paper trail. No Asian sources mention the footloose Italian. The only record of his 13th-century odyssey through the Far East is the hot air of his own Travels, which was actually an “as told to” penned by a writer of romances. But a set of 14 parchments, now collected and exhaustively studied for the first time, give us a raft of new stories about Polo’s journeys and something notably missing from his own account: maps. If genuine, the maps would show that Polo recorded the shape of the Alaskan coast—and the strait separating it from Asia—four centuries before Vitus Bering, the Danish explorer long considered the first European to do so. Perhaps more important, they suggest Polo was aware of the New World two centuries before Columbus.
Comment Re:My mistake - 3 times :-) (Score 1) 17
There's a real dearth of quality submissions lately. Your work is being accepted because the editors need it. Badly. That's why Hugh Pickens keeps getting front paged too, even though he clearly engages in self-promotion. His choice of material is good and write ups concise.
Slashdot needs a new policy and system to foster community contribution. I don't think the site is dead. But I do think editors should consider how to rebuild audience share by transitioning focus away from link aggregation - a market they've lost to Reddit - to content creation. Too many submissions are easily found on Reddit hours before they go live here. That's a bad sign. Fresh content doesn't have that problem.
Submission + - Why the FCC will probably ignore the public on network neutrality (vox.com) 1
walterbyrd writes: The rulemaking process does not function like a popular democracy. In other words, you can't expect that the comment you submit opposing a particular regulation will function like a vote. Rulemaking is more akin to a court proceeding. Changes require systematic, reliable evidence, not emotional expressions . . .
In the wake of more than 3 million comments in the present open Internet proceeding-which at first blush appear overwhelmingly in favor of network neutrality-the current Commission is poised to make history in two ways: its decision on net neutrality, and its acknowledgment of public perspectives. It can continue to shrink the comments of ordinary Americans to a summary count and thank-you for their participation. Or, it can opt for a different path.
In the wake of more than 3 million comments in the present open Internet proceeding-which at first blush appear overwhelmingly in favor of network neutrality-the current Commission is poised to make history in two ways: its decision on net neutrality, and its acknowledgment of public perspectives. It can continue to shrink the comments of ordinary Americans to a summary count and thank-you for their participation. Or, it can opt for a different path.
Comment Two words... (Score 2) 126
Submission + - Is Apple throttling Nvidia GT750M on Macbook Pro ? (wordpress.com)
erodep writes: Nvidia blogs have claimed that the Macbook Pro makes a great CUDA development platform ( http://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2... ). However it appears that Apple is throttling the performance of the Nvidia GT 750M discrete card with regard to double precision floating point (DPFP) operations which is a basic requirement for CUDA based scientific computing returning a paltry 27 GFLOPS while the host Core i7 does much better at 120 GFLOPS. See http://bit.ly/1vDxUbZ for details. What do Slashdot readers recommend for a portable CUDA development platform for scientific computing ?
Submission + - An Appetite for Wonder: The Makings of a Scientist, by Richard Dawkins (newrepublic.com)
An anonymous reader writes: John Gray, emeritus professor of European thought at the London School of Economics, and a fellow atheist, reviews Richard Dawkins' memoir in the New Republic, writing: "There cannot be much doubt that Dawkins sees himself as a Darwin-like figure, propagating the revelation that came to the Victorian naturalist. ... Dawkins may not be Victorian, but the figure who emerges from An Appetite for Wonder is in many ways decidedly old-fashioned. ... Dawkins’s description of growing up in British colonial Africa, going on to boarding school and then to Oxford, has a similarly archaic flavor and could easily have been written before World War II. ... Born in 1941 in Nairobi, Kenya, and growing up in Nyasaland, now Malawi, Dawkins writes of life in the colonies in glowingly idyllic terms: “We always had a cook, a gardener and several other servants.... Tea was served on the lawn, with beautiful silver teapot and hot-water jug, and a milk jug under a dainty muslin cover ...” ... Exactly how Dawkins became the anti-religious missionary with whom we are familiar will probably never be known. From what he writes here, I doubt he knows himself. ... curiously his teenage passion for Elvis Presley reinforced his vestigial Christianity. Listening to Elvis sing “I Believe,” Dawkins was amazed to discover that the rock star was religious. “I worshipped Elvis,” he recalls, “and I was a strong believer in a non-denominational creator god.” ... We must await the second volume of his memoirs to discover how Dawkins envisions his future. But near the end of the present volume, an inadvertent remark hints at what he might want for himself. Darwin was “never Sir Charles,” he writes, “and what an amazing indictment of our honours system that is.” It is hard to resist the thought that the public recognition that in Britain is conferred by a knighthood is Dawkins’s secret dream. ... What could be more fitting for this tireless evangelist than to become the country’s officially appointed atheist, seated alongside the bishops in the House of Lords? "
Submission + - How Computer Vision Algorithms Cope With Detecting Human Figures In Cubist Art
KentuckyFC writes: The human visual system has evolved to recognise people in almost any pose under a vast range of lighting conditions. But abstract art pushes this ability to its limits by distorting the human form. In particular, Cubism seeks to represent three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional plane by juxtaposing snapshots from different angles. The result is that a Cubist picture contains many ‘fragments of perception’ of the same object. That's why it is often hard for people to recognise the human figures that these pictures contain. Now a group of computer scientists have tested how computer vision algorithms fare at the task of spotting human figures in Cubist art. They compared a variety of different algorithms against humans in trying to spot human figures in 218 Cubist paintings by Picasso. Humans easily outperform all the algorithms at this task. But some algorithms were much better than others. The most successful were based on so-called "deformable parts models" that recognise human figures by looking for body parts rather than the entire form. Interestingly, the team says this backs up various studies by neuroscientists suggesting that the human brain works in a similar way.
Comment Re:Skeptical of seamless images / Ars Project (Score 1) 56
drinkypoo - gee, I remember you. Nice to see some old timers 'round here.
I'm sure it will feature in Watch Dogs 2 or similar, but it's fairly irrelevant.
Way to let out a balloon. Comparing The Wire to Watch Dogs is like serving Chef Bloyardee and calling it Bolognese.
Comment Re:wait for a few more gens of Oculus Rift (Score 4, Interesting) 56
Carmack's keynote at the 2014 Oculus Connect conference said it would take several more generations before Samsung would have panels that could support seamless 120 fps. Apparently there's a problem with peripheral vision noticing 60fps with a significant number of people. Basically, Samsung is focused on developing panels for the phone market and Oculus piggypacks on that development line. They don't have the market penetration to drive display research.
The most interesting part of his discussion was proposing interlaced formats and variable refresh rates with G-sync to up the perceived refresh rate around peripheral vision.
The talk is about 90 minutes and - ironically - audio is not synced with video. Still, he doesn't talk much bullshit and it's an interesting listen.
Comment Skeptical of seamless images / Ars Project (Score 1) 56
I wonder how the group plans to stitch together multiple displays seamlessly. Removing the bezel is only part of the problem. There'd still be a noticeable seam between panels, never mind the problem of lining up pixels. I suppose one could argue that beyond a certain pixel density - +400dpi or something - lining up pixels exactly wouldn't be necessary. But then you'd have to offset by that difference, and the joined panel would have to test for and respond to that offset to compensate.
I think most would be rightly skeptical of this until seeing the tech work first hand.
On another subject, at the Techspot article there was a link to the Ars project. It's some kind of hot swappable modular phone in development.
http://www.techspot.com/news/5...
According to that, you can't swap out CPU or display live but just about everything else would be hot swappable. It's got a nifty photo showing parts to some kind of mock up or beta device.
All I could think of when looking at this was Stringer Bell from The Wire swapping out sim cards in his phone and what a boon that might be for criminals. Or at least crime drama on TV.
Submission + - Fortune.com: Blame Tech Diversity On Culture, not Pipeline (fortune.com)
FrnkMit writes: Challenging a previous Code.org story on tech diversity, a Forbes.com writer interviewed 716 women who left the technology field. Her conclusion: corporate culture, and the larger social structure, is the primary cause they shook the sand of the tech industry from their shoes, never looking back. Specific issues include a lack of maternity policies in small companies, low pay which barely covers day care, "jokes" from male coworkers, and always feeling like the "odd duck". In reality, there are probably many intertwined causes: peer pressure at the high-school and college level, female-unfriendly geek culture, low pay, a lack of accommodations for pregnant/nursing mothers, the myth of "having it all", stereotype threat, and repeated assertions that women aren't biologically suited to writing software and therefore there's no problem at all.
Comment bad link (Score 1) 54
in 2013 Edward Snowden's revelations proved what he'd said was true.
