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Microsoft

Submission + - Office 15 to have Facebook integration? (winbeta.org)

Submitted by
BogenDorpher
BogenDorpher writes: "Microsoft's Careers Web site today posted a job listing that describes an interesting new feature set to debut in Microsoft's next productivity suite, Office 15. Apparently, Office 15 will feature integration of instant messaging services and social networks such as Facebook."
Japan

Submission + - 'Suicide squad' struggles to cool reactors as rad (theseblogs.com) 1

Submitted by slashcuu
slashcuu writes: Japan yesterday deployed army helicopters and police water cannon manned by what the media are calling "suicide squads" in a frantic attempt to cool overheating fuel rods and prevent meltdown at a nuclear power plant ravaged by an earthquake and tsunami one week ago.

Submission + - Does College Make You Smarter (nytimes.com) 3

Submitted by Joe The Dragon
Joe The Dragon writes: "First there was the news that students in American universities study a lot less than they used to. Now we hear, in a recent book titled "Academically Adrift," that 45 percent of the nation's undergraduates learn very little in their first two years of college.

The study, by two sociologists, Richard Arum of New York University and Josipa Roksa of the University of Virginia, also found that half of the students surveyed did not take any classes requiring 20 pages of writing in their prior semester, and one-third did not take any courses requiring 40 pages of reading a week.

The research has come in for some criticism. But a larger question is: Have colleges, in their efforts to keep graduation rates high and students happy, dumbed down their curriculums? If they have, who is to blame? What should parents and federal taxpayers do"

Part of this has to do with pushing to many people in to College and the lack of good tech schools / apprenticeships. For people who are not cut out for the old fashioned collage system.

community is good for some of basic stuff but alot of stuff in years 1-2 should be at the high school level.

also there to many filler classes that some are just blow off classes.
News

Submission + - Murdoch Sued for Neopotism (smh.com.au) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: This is important to /. because it's likely that at least some of the stories that come through here are generated by News Corp

"AN American bank has confronted Rupert Murdoch with the most direct challenge yet to plans for one of his children to succeed him at the helm of News Corp, suing the media giant for ''rampant nepotism'' and running the media company as a 'wholly owned family candy store'."
Earth

Submission + - Japan Quake Raises Texas Aquifer 1 ft. (statesman.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Energy released from last week's massive earthquake in Japan affected the walls of the Edwards Aquifer, the sprawling underground rock formation that supplies drinking water for much of Central Texas, raising its water level by about one foot. The oscillations during high-energy earthquakes are common in artesian aquifers. "We saw Haiti, we saw Sumatra, Japan, a couple in Mexico and Alaska."

Submission + - U.S. military commissions sock puppet program (guardian.co.uk)

Submitted by chrb
chrb writes: The Guardian and The Telegraph are reporting that U.S. based Ntrepid Corporation has been awarded a $2.76 million contract to develop software aimed at manipulating social media. The project aims to enable military personnel to control multiple "sock puppets" located at a range of geographically diverse IP addresses, with the aim of spreading pro-U.S. propaganda. The project will not target English speaking web sites (yet) but will be limited to foreign languages, including Arabic, Farsi, Urdu and Pashto. The project will be funded as part of the $200 million Operation Earnest Voice (OEV) program run by U.S. Central Command.
Programming

Submission + - Punk Rock Programming Languages (pragprog.com)

Submitted by andrea.sartori
andrea.sartori writes: Chris Adamson posted a very interesting article on pragprog.com, defining C a "punk rock language". The musical analogy is developed and used to compare different types of programming languages. Pickup line: 'One of the defining traits of punk is the do-it-yourself (DIY) ethic, a rejection of the need to buy products or use existing systems, and instead to attend to your own needs. This attitude clearly suits C programming as well.' And: 'Any idiot with a Slashdot handle can talk crap about anything. It’s when you piss off the smart developers that you know you’re working with something interesting.'
Businesses

Submission + - How China is driving the IT agenda in Africa (techworld.com.au)

Submitted by
angry tapir
angry tapir writes: "The latest US cable released by Wikileaks scorns Chinese ICT companies doing business in Kenya as “re-colonising Africa” with “good and cheap” equipment, even if the after-sales service is described as s***. The US embassy cable, from Nairobi to Washington, says Chinese firms selling into Kenya's ICT sector are “throwing a lot of money around” and influence may be so great “that it is distorting important investment decisions in the country”, according to industry contacts."
Iphone

Submission + - China Unicom launches WoPhone Linux platform (engadget.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Another day, another Linux mobile platform launched. The latest flavor hails all the way from China Unicom — Apple's sole iPhone partner in China thanks to its WCDMA network — who's just announced the WoPhone platform to, ironically, "break up the foreign smartphone platform monopoly." Of course, this isn't the first time that a Chinese carrier has pushed out its own OS — TD-SCDMA operator China Mobile already has OPhone, though it's really just a bastardized Android; whereas China Unicom claims that WoPhone's an entirely new OS built around the Linux core. That said, some of WoPhone's UI elements do look awfully familiar.

While we don't expect to see this new OS trickling out to the rest of the world any time soon, a big handful of manufacturers — namely Motorola, Samsung, HTC, TCL, K-Touch, ZTE, Huawei, etc. — and cloud service partners were present at yesterday's launch event to show off the first batch of devices, including the K-Touch U2 pictured above. Head over to ifeng for more hands-on pics.

Submission + - Does Blade Runner need a sequel? (shadowlocked.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The news that 'Book Of Eli' production company Alcon is apparently securing the rights to movie, TV and multimedia prequels and sequels to Ridley Scott's classic SF noir 'Blade Runner' brings the long-mooted possibility of an extension of the 1982 movie a step nearer. But if '2001: A Space Oddysey' is sci-fi cinema's 'Citizen Kane', then 'Blade Runner' is surely its 'Casablanca'. The new deal does not grant any rights to remake the original, but sequels involving the original — and all very ephemeral — characters from the Philip K. Dick adaptation are quite possible — if not necessarily advisable.
Botnet

Submission + - SpyEye Botnet Activity Surges (net-security.org)

Submitted by Orome1
Orome1 writes: Activity of the SpyEye botnet is surging which signals a possible shift of criminal organizations around the world that had previously employed the Zeus botnet. Historically, Zeus developers have made efforts to avoid detection and analysis on their configuration files by prepending garbage (red herrings) before data structures. We’re likely to see similar ongoing activity by the SpyEye group, such as routine obfuscation of their data and command and control transmissions. SpyEye developers are also working to make their product more efficient in terms of management and automation, which is evidenced by the bot’s new Automatic Transfer System.

Submission + - LHC/CMS Narrows Search for Higgs Particle (discovery.com)

Submitted by
astroengine
astroengine writes: "On Wednesday, the CMS Collaboration announced its first science results. But no Higgs boson has been detected, yet. Physicists have instead narrowed the search down, and with a 95 percent certainty, the Higgs does not have a mass range of between 144 and 207 GeV/c2. In this quantum search for a proverbial needle in a haystack, it helps if the haystack shrinks a little."
Google

Submission + - Microsoft, Google Sue Troll Who Sued 397 Companies (blogspot.com)

Submitted by FlorianMueller
FlorianMueller writes: Microsoft and Google have teamed up against a company that holds a geotagging patent and sued 397 companies last year in Texas, most of them in mid December. The list, published on Scribd and Crocodoc, includes plenty of household names. Now the two tech giants have entered the fray together and want the patent declared invalid and seek an injunction to prevent further lawsuits over it. Since the patent holder has already filed for an initial public offering, this intervention may come at just the right time to prevent the worst. Google and Microsoft say that there was prior art when the patent on an 'Internet organizer for accessing geographically and topically based information' was applied for in 1996.

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