Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Open Source

Man Tries To Live an Open Source Life For a Year 332

Posted by samzenpus from the living-free dept.
jfruh writes "Sam Muirhead, a New Zealand filmmaker living Berlin, will, on the 1st of August, begin an experiment in living an open source life for a year. But this is going way beyond just trading in his Mac for a Linux machine and Final Cut Pro for Novacut. He's also going to live in a house based on an open source design, and he notes that trying to develop and use some form of open source toilet paper will be an "interesting and possibly painful process.""

Comment Creates barrier of entry for competitors (Score 2) 84

It seems to that the various privacy laws in place across Europe targeting Google Maps have little effect on Google, which has enough resources that they can easily apply technical fixes to tackle each states differing privacy requirement. The net effect though, is to provide a high barrier of entry for competitors. A young startup wishing to start a competing street level mapping service will not have army of lawyers to sort through each states differing laws. Nor may they have the technical expertise to accurately implement blurring algorithms to the satisfaction of the courts. In short, while these laws are intended to target Google, they end up benefiting it, by making it more difficult for competitors to enter the field.
Microsoft

Submission + - Is Microsoft's Kinect A Gaming Failure? (hothardware.com)

Submitted by
MojoKid
MojoKid writes: "E3 is well underway in Los Angeles, and Microsoft has already made a major splash with its "SmartGlass" technology, game demos, and its announcement that a Kinect-powered version of Internet Explorer will debut on the Xbox 360. This is a marked change from last year, when Kinect was the unquestioned centerpiece of Microsoft's display and the company's demos focused on how Kinect-powered games used your full body as a controller. Kinect is in the interesting position of having both sold extremely well while failing to move the bar forward in any of the ways Microsoft projected in the run up to it's launch. Scroll through the ratings on Kinect-required titles, and the percentages are abysmal. Kinect's biggest problem is rooted in ergonomics. Gamepads with buttons may be crude approximations of real life, but they're simple and intuitive. They're also flexible — a great many games have conditional scenarios that allow the same button to perform different functions depending on what's going on within the game. Pure Kinect games don't have a simple mechanism to incorporate these features, and there's no easy way around them. The motion-controller's most enduring features may ultimately be its capabilities outside the gaming sphere."
The Military

Submission + - Air Force believes anti-g suit is cause of F-22's oxygen problems (flightglobal.com) 2

Submitted by wired_parrot
wired_parrot writes: The USAF believes it may have identified the root cause of the F-22 Raptor's oxygen troubles: pilots are running into physiological limitations in attempting to breath oxygen while under high-g loads, leading to a condition know as acceleration atelectasis. This is being aggravated by the anti-g suit worn by pilots, which puts pressure in their chest. It may be that the F-22 has reached the edge of what a human pilot can handle
Graphics

Modeling People and Places With Internet Photo Collections 27

Posted by timothy from the deep-pixel-inspection dept.
CowboyRobot writes "Two researchers have created a system that aggregates thousands of photos from around the Web and integrates them into single images. One application is creating maps by taking the GPS coordinates of photos taken from a collection. Another is creating 3D models of historical buildings by automatically pasting together tourists' photos taken from different angles. 'The challenge is that online data sets are largely unstructured and thus require sophisticated algorithms that can organize and extract meaning from noisy data. In our case, this involves developing automated techniques that can find patterns across millions of images.'"
Businesses

Submission + - As Facebook prepares IPO, a wave of apps startups follows behind (siliconvalley.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Facebook, which is set to go public next week, has spawned a wave of startups based on its apps platform, particularly in the Bay Area. A University of Maryland study estimates that at the Facebook ecosystem supports at least 18 times as many jobs as the parent company itself. The Mercury News article contains a chart of the top 20 Facebook apps developers in the Bay Area, based on active users; Zynga is #1 by a large margin. Meanwhile, some social networking entrepreneurs are trying to avoid becoming dependent on Facebook's platform.

Submission + - The Rise of Chemophobia in the News (plos.org)

Submitted by eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: American news outlets like The New York Times seem to thrive on chemophobia — consumer fear of the ambiguous concept of 'chemicals.' As a result, Pulitzer-prize winning science writer Deborah Blum has decided to call out New York Times journalist Nicholas Kirstof for his secondary crusade (she notes he is an admirable journalist in other realms) against chemicals. She's quick to point out the absurdity of fearing chemicals like Hydrogen which could be a puzzler considering its integral role played in live-giving water as well as life-destroying hydrogen cyanide. Another example is O2 versus O3. Blum calls upon journalists to be more specific, to avoid the use of vague terms like 'toxin' let alone 'chemical' and instead inform the public with lengthy chemical names like perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) instead of omitting the actual culprit altogether. Kristof has, of course, resorted to calling makers of these specific compounds "Big Chem" and Blum chastises his poorly researched reporting along with chemophobic lingo. Chemists of Slashdot, have you found reporting on "chemicals" to be as poor as Blum alleges or is this no more erroneous than any scare tactic used to move newspapers and garner eyeballs?
Facebook

Submission + - NY Times: Microsoft Tried to Unload Bing on Facebook (nytimes.com)

Submitted by
benfrog
benfrog writes: "According to a blog posting on the New York Times site, Microsoft tried to sell the perpetual money-losing Bing to Facebook "over a year ago" (the article cites "several people with knowledge of the discussions who didn’t want to be identified talking about internal deliberations"). Steve Ballmer, apparently, was not involved or consulted. Facebook politely declined. Neither Microsoft or Facebook would comment on the rumors."
Math

Submission + - Statistical Analysis Raises Civil War Dead by 20%

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "For more than a century it has been accepted that about 620,000 Americans died in the the bloodiest, most devastating conflict in American history, but now BBC reports that historian J David Hacker has used sophisticated statistical software to determine the war's death toll and found that civil war dead may have been undercounted by as many as 130,000. "I have been waiting more than 25 years for an article like this one," writes historian James McPherson. Hacker began by taking digitized samples from the decennial census counts taken 1850-1880. Using statistical package SPSS, Hacker counted the number of native-born white men of military age in 1860 and determined how many of that group were still alive in 1870 and compared that survival rate with the survival rates of the men of the same ages from 1850-1860, and from 1870-1880 — the 10-year census periods before and after the Civil War. The calculations yielded the number of "excess" deaths of military-age men between 1860-1870 — the number who died in the war or in the five subsequent years from causes related to the war. Hacker's findings, published in the December 2011 issue of Civil War History, have been endorsed by some of the leading historians of the conflict but do the numbers, equivalent to about 7.5 million US deaths in proportion to America's current population, really matter? "The difference between the two estimates is large enough to change the way we look at the war," writes Hacker. "The war touched more lives and communities more deeply than we thought, and thus shaped the course of the ensuing decades of American history in ways we have not yet fully grasped. True, the war was terrible in either case. But just how terrible, and just how extensive its consequences, can only be known when we have a better count of the Civil War dead.""

Submission + - At what point has a Kickstarter project failed? 2

Submitted by skywiseguy
skywiseguy writes: I have only used Kickstarter to back a single project so far, but one of the backers of that project pointed us to a project promising video capable glasses which was once one of the top 10 highest funded projects in Kickstarter history. After reading through the comments, it is obvious that the project has not met its expected deadline of "Winter 2011" but the project team rarely gives any updates with concrete information, all emails sent to them by backers get a form letter in reply, they routinely delete negative comments from their Facebook page, and apparently very soon after the project was funded, they posted pictures of themselves on a tropical beach with the tagline "We are not on a beach in Thailand." Their early promotions were featured on Engadget and other tech sites but since the project was funded they've rarely, if ever, communicated in more than a form letter. So at what point can a project like this be considered to have failed? And if you had backed a project with this kind of lack of communication from the project team, what would you consider to be the best course of action? Disclaimer: I have not backed this project, but I am very interested in funding Kickstarter projects and I do not want to get caught sending money to a less than reputable project. According to the above project's backers, Kickstarter claims to have no mechanism for refunding money to backers of failed projects and no way to hold the project team accountable to their backers. This does not seem like a healthy environment for someone who is averse to giving their money to scam artists.

Submission + - Everything we know about cybercrime is wrong (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by isoloisti
isoloisti writes: Two interesting piece in the Register explode several cybercrime myths. Study of criminal demographics by a criminologist finds "cybercrime is far from the preserve of tech-savvy youths — nearly half (43 per cent) of cyber-crooks are over 35 years old, and less than a third (29 per cent) are under 25."
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/03/29/cybercrime_myths_exploded/

Study by Microsoft finds that "money mules, and not bank customers are the real victims when money is stolen" and that "passwords are not the bottleneck in the cybercrime pipeline." http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/03/30/ms_money_mule_victims/
Crime

Submission + - Visa and MasterCard warn of "Massive" Breach at Card Processor (majorgeeks.com) 1

Submitted by
concealment
concealment writes: "Visa and MasterCard are warning of what they call a “massive breach” that could involve as many as 10 million compromised credit card numbers.

The breach occurred between January 21, 2012 and February 25th 2012. They say that this information, known as full Track 1 and Track 2 data, could be used to counterfeit new cards."
Businesses

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: How Have You Handled Illegal Interview Topics (salary.com) 1

Submitted by kodiaktau
kodiaktau writes: Salary.com profiles 14 questions that interviewers may or may not ask during the interview process such as the standards of age, gender and sexual orientation. They also profile several lesser known illegal or border line questions like height/weight, military background, country of origin and family status.

With the recent flap over companies asking potential employees for passwords during the interview process it is important to know and review your legal rights before entering the interview.

Have you been confronted with borderline or illegal interview questions in the past? How have you responded to those questions?
Games

Submission + - Prince of Persia creator finds lost source code (geek.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Jordan Mechner may not be a name many of you know unless you are up-to-date with your video gaming history. He’s probably better known as the creator of Prince of Persia back in 1989.

Since that release 23 years ago on the Apple II, Mechner has gone on to develop the sequel, Prince of Persia 2: The Shadow and the Flame and then joined Ubisoft to reinvigorate the series for a new audience in 2001. Along the way, he managed to misplace the original source code for that first Prince of Persia game and has been searching for it ever since.

Yesterday he found it, and the discovery is all thanks to his father. The three packs of 3.5 Apple ProDOS disks had been safely stored away in a brown box along with a load of Amstrad copies of his 1984 game Karateka.
Ubuntu

Submission + - The world's slowest Linux PC (extremetech.com)

Submitted by
MrSeb
MrSeb writes: "Hackers are masochists. Almost by definition, hackers push hardware and software (and themselves) beyond breaking point to find out, once and for all, whether something is possible or not. In Dmitry Grinberg’s case, he decided to find out the lowest spec possible for a Linux PC. Barring exceptional circumstances, Linux generally requires a 32-bit processor with a modern memory management unit (MMU) and more than 1MB of RAM — Grinberg, obviously not a fan of excess bits, has successfully booted Ubuntu Linux (Jaunty) with an ATmega1284p, 8-bit RISC microcontroller clocked at 24MHz and equipped with no less than 16KB of SRAM and 128KB of flash storage. Of course, Ubuntu wouldn't boot on an 8-bit RISC chip, so Grinberg had to write an ARMv5 emulator. The effective speed of the computer, after emulation, is just 6.5KHz. It takes 2 hours to boot to command line, a further 4 hours to load Ubuntu, and if you want to open an actual window manager, Grinberg simply says 'starting X takes a lot longer.'"

Slashdot Top Deals

Doubt isn't the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith. - Paul Tillich, German theologian and historian

Close