192075
submission
Strudelkugel writes:
In the past few months, Jim Kraber became more than a little obsessed with CNBC's "Million Dollar Portfolio Challenge." At the peak, the 42-year-old was spending 12 hours a day on the contest, using three computers in his Greenwich Village apartment to trade 1,600 different portfolios, all in an effort to win the $1 million grand prize. He even dropped his studies for the chartered financial analyst (CFA) exam, given once a year, so he could have more time for the financial news channel's game. He made it into the group of 20 finalists, but in mid-May, as the last round of trading opened, he noticed an unusual pattern in the picks of other contestants. One trader had a stream of near-perfect picks, consistently placing huge bets on shares that soared in after-hours trading. Kraber suspected the trader and perhaps others were getting help from someone who was changing their picks after the stocks' increases — and he quickly notified CNBC. "I went back and looked at his trades and thought, 'This is pretty much statistically impossible,'" says Kraber, who holds master's degrees in business and statistics from New York University. Kraber says CNBC rebuffed him at the time, but now it looks like he may have been right. Several contest participants have told BusinessWeek that there was a flaw in the design of the CNBC game that allowed certain players an unfair advantage. As many as four of the top contestants in the million-dollar contest may have exploited the flaw, according to the participants interviewed by BusinessWeek.
184967
submission
Strudelkugel writes:
I decided to get a new laptop. I haven't looked new models for some time, but a friend was showing me his new one with many desirable features: Faster CPU, more RAM, faster disk, less weight. Just one problem: the LCD is the new "glossy" variety, which reflected the ceiling lights, the desk lamp, the wallpaper, etc. — essentially everything you would expect to see in a mirror. Obviously this degraded the display of the PC desktop. I thought it was a very annoying "feature", but I could always find a model with a decent anti-glare screen. Imagine my surprise when I went to the store and found every new model on display had glossy mirror screen! The people in the store said the new screens are supposed to offer a better image, but all agreed the reflectivity was something they didn't like. Where is the marketing PHB who foisted this idea upon the unsuspecting public? Is the glossy screen a wayward attempt to make laptops look more like shiny new toasters — something more oriented oriented to the general consumer?
167647
submission
Strudelkugel writes:
Business Wire reports Amazon.com will launch a digital music store later this year offering millions of songs in the DRM-free MP3 format from more than 12,000 record labels. EMI Music's digital catalog is the latest addition to the store. Every song and album in the Amazon.com digital music store will be available exclusively in the MP3 format without digital rights management (DRM) software. Amazon's DRM-free MP3s will free customers to play their music on virtually any of their personal devices — including PCs, Macs(TM), iPods(TM), Zunes(TM), Zens(TM) — and to burn songs to CDs for personal use.
161585
submission
Strudelkugel writes:
The BBC and New Scientist report a Californian company has created software that can layer relevant recorded sounds over locations in Google Earth Wild Sanctuary has over 3,500 hours of soundscapes from all over the world. Its director, Bernie Krause said: "A picture tells a thousand words, but a sound tells a thousand pictures." Dr Krause has spent the last 40 years collecting sounds, and his recordings include more than 15,000 animal noises, and sounds from a huge array of habitats, including cities, deserts, mountains and the marine environment. It is the largest library in existence of natural sound, he said. He said the idea would be to zoom-in on a particular area and then have the option to listen to the accompanying sound.
147973
submission
Strudelkugel writes:
The Daily Mail has an interview with a woman who is shielding herself from EM radiation: "Before knocking on Sarah Dacre's door, I take the precaution of checking my mobile phone. It's switched off, as she has requested." "Last time someone came to visit," she warns, "I started feeling awfully nauseous. It turned out he had a picture phone with him and had left it switched on. A picture phone!" She pauses, looking genuinely horrified. Apparently, this type of mobile automatically sends signals to a local base station every nine minutes — "No wonder I felt so sick." Also: "But beneath the coats of magnolia paint, she points out, the walls are lined with a special paper that contains a layer of tin-foil; and upstairs, the windows are hung with a fine, silvery gauze."
147167
submission
Strudelkugel writes:
TheStreet.com is reporting Microsoft sales of Vista and Office 2007 are going well: "Client software, which accounted for 37% of revenue in the quarter, surged 67% in the quarter, thanks to Vista sales. Business software, about one-third of total revenue, gained 34%. "There were some questions about how well Vista and Office 2007 would be received, and they've been very well received," said Tracy. "The client business was approximately $400 million higher than our guidance, and the business division was about $200 million higher." The Redmond, Wash., software giant also exceeded the Street's net profit estimates to a significant degree, reporting that net income grew $4.93 billion, or 50 cents a share, from $2.98 billion, or 29 cents a share, a year earlier." That's a nice chunk of change.
144193
submission
Strudelkugel writes:
CNN is reporting that the ex-CFO of Apple warned Steve Jobs about backdating options. FTA: "Apple's former finance chief Fred Anderson blamed Apple CEO Steve Jobs for a 2001 stock option grant that was backdated, according to a statement from Anderson's lawyer released Tuesday. The statement was released by Anderson's lawyer, Jerome Roth, after Anderson settled with the Securities and Exchange Commission related to Apple's stock option plan without admitting or denying any wrongdoing." This is serious business. It is quite possible that the SEC could someday require Jobs to resign from Apple. If that happens, is Apple only as good as Jobs' creative mind, or will the company continue successfully as it has since Jobs returned? Who is capable of replacing Jobs?
116371
submission
Strudelkugel writes:
The Mail reports "Scientists have created the world's first human-sheep chimera — which has the body of a sheep and half-human organs. The sheep have 15 per cent human cells and 85 per cent animal cells — and their evolution brings the prospect of animal organs being transplanted into humans one step closer. Professor Esmail Zanjani, of the University of Nevada, has spent seven years and £5million perfecting the technique, which involves injecting adult human cells into a sheep's foetus. He has already created a sheep liver which has a large proportion of human cells and eventually hopes to precisely match a sheep to a transplant patient, using their own stem cells to create their own flock of sheep." But there are risks: "But the development is likely to revive criticisms about scientists playing God, with the possibility of silent viruses, which are harmless in animals, being introduced into the human race." Plus the sheep might start gambling excessively for all we know.
24256
submission
Strudelkugel writes:
The MPAA and the Boyscouts have teamed to create a new merit badge! Arstechnica has all of the important details: "More than 50,000 kids in the Los Angeles area are enrolled in the Boy Scouts, where they earn merit badges in things like First Aid, Personal Management, and Citizenship in the World, and generally learn to "Be Prepared" (the Boy Scout motto). But what Boy Scout worth his moccasins could legitimately "be prepared" without knowing how to respect copyrights? Research peer to peer websites — describe to your troop what they are and how they are sometimes used to illegally trade copyrighted materials," suggests the official curriculum.
