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Businesses

Microsoft Demos Metro UI For Enterprise Apps 116

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the it-looks-pretty-but-does-it-work dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft has demoed a working prototype of Microsoft Dynamics GP (an ERP package) running on Windows 8, with a full Metro UI. This is the first example of an enterprise app for the Windows 8 metro 'wall.' The one hour keynote is available online behind a short registration form ... (demos start around 40 minutes in). Screenshots available at source."
Transportation

Submission + - Why Did It Take So Long to Invent the Wheel?

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Wheels are the archetype of a primitive, caveman-level technology and we tend to think that inventing the wheel was the number one item on man's to-do list after learning to walk upright, but LiveScience reports that it took until the bronze age (3500 BC), when humans were already casting metal alloys and constructing canals and sailboats, for someone to invent the wheel-and-axle, a task so challenging archeologists say it probably happened only once, in one place. The tricky thing about the wheel isn't a cylinder rolling on its edge but figuring out how to connect a stable, stationary platform to that cylinder. "The stroke of brilliance was the wheel-and-axle concept," says David Anthony, author of "The Horse, the Wheel, and Language." To make a fixed axle with revolving wheels, the ends of the axle have to be nearly perfectly smooth and round, as did the holes in the center of the wheels and the axles have to fit snugly inside the wheels' holes, but not too snug or there will be too much friction for the wheels to turn. Another issue is the size of the axle because while a thin one will reduce the amount of friction, it will be too weak to support a load. "They solved this problem by making the earliest wagons quite narrow, so they could have short axles, which made it possible to have an axle that wasn't very thick," says Anthony. But the real reason it took so long is that whoever invented the wheel would have needed metal tools to chisel fine-fitted holes and axles. "It was the carpentry that probably delayed the invention until 3500 BC or so, because it was only after about 4000 BC that cast copper chisels and gouges became common in the Near East.""

Comment Perspective (Score 5, Insightful) 438

by Effugas (#38969295) Attached to: The iPhone Is a Nightmare For Carriers
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2012/01/82-percent-of-atts-q4-2011-sales-are-smartphones-66-percent-are-iphones.ars

Yeah. 66% of AT&T's 4th quarter sales were iPhones. I was on Verizon for years, switched to AT&T only for their iPhone, and stuck with them only for their GSM capabilities worldwide. Sure, your margins are less when you offer a better service. Would you prefer no sales though?

Comment NES (Score 2) 348

by Effugas (#38962275) Attached to: Should Next-Gen Game Consoles Be Upgradeable?
The platform that most successfully upgraded itself was the NES. One of the degrees of freedom they had, because there were chips in each cartridge, was to deploy new memory management units inside the games themselves. Quite literally, the NES became more powerful for games released later in its dev cycle. SNES did this too, with the SuperFX chip inside of Starfox (the most popular DSP in the world, for its era) but it wasn't quite the "all games ship upgrading hardware".

I suspect if there was ever to be upgradable hardware, it'd have to work by yearly subscription, and it'd have to be no more than $50 a year for the part. However, with guaranteed sales in the millions of units (as games would hard-require it) the logistics of making some pretty crazy stuff fit into $50/yr wouldn't be unimaginable. Remember that XBox Live is already pulling, what, $60/yr?
Mars

Russian Official Implies Foul Play In Mars Probe Failure 451

Posted by Soulskill from the stop-launching-space-junk dept.
Back in November, Russia launched the Phobos-Grunt probe on a mission to return a soil sample from Mars' largest moon. Sadly, the probe malfunctioned, and never left orbit. It's due to crash into the Indian Ocean this weekend. An anonymous reader points out some interesting comments from a Russian official, Vladimir Popovkin, who obliquely suggested that interference from other countries was a possible cause of the failure. Quoting: "Mr. Popovkin’s remarks to the newspaper Izvestia were the first high-level suggestion of nefarious interference. A retired commander of Russia’s missile warning system had speculated in November that strong radar signals from installations in Alaska might have damaged the spacecraft. 'We don’t want to accuse anybody, but there are very powerful devices that can influence spacecraft now,' Mr. Popovkin said in the interview. 'The possibility they were used cannot be ruled out.' ... Mr. Popovkin did not directly implicate the United States in the interview. But he said 'the frequent failure of our space launches, which occur at a time when they are flying over the part of Earth not visible from Russia, where we do not see the spacecraft and do not receive telemetric information, are not clear to us,' an apparent reference to the Americas."
The Media

NYT Update Breaks iPad App, Annoys Subscribers 140

Posted by timothy from the hothouse-flower-in-the-walled-garden dept.
jbrodkin writes "The New York Times, which recently started charging iPad readers $20 a month, has a lot of angry digital subscribers after an update broke the NYTimes for iPad application. The update was designed to make it easier for readers to subscribe to the Times through iTunes (irony!) but instead left readers unable to access any articles. Worse, the Times didn't bother to fix the app over the long weekend or reply to users who complained on Twitter. It's not the first time developers have broken an iPad application with a poorly constructed update, but reader complaints noted that the size of the New York Times and the high price it charges make this gaffe particularly galling. Angry users have driven the app's rating down to less than two out of five stars."
The Media

How Journalists Data-Mined the Wikileaks Docs 59

Posted by samzenpus from the reading-between-a-million-lines dept.
meckdevil writes "Associated Press developer-journalist extraordinaire Jonathan Stray gives a brilliant explanation of the use of data-mining strategies to winnow and wring journalistic sense out of massive numbers of documents, using the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs released by Wikileaks as a case in point. The concepts for focusing on certain groups of documents and ignoring others are hardly new; they underlie the algorithms used by the major Web search engines. Their use in a journalistic context is on a cutting edge, though, and it raises a fascinating quandary: By choosing the parameters under which documents will be considered similar enough to pay attention to, journalist-programmers actually choose the frame in which a story will be told. This type of data mining holds great potential for investigative revelation — and great potential for journalistic abuse."
Google

Google Lobbies Nevada To Allow Self-Driving Cars 275

Posted by samzenpus from the to-drive-or-not-to-drive dept.
b0bby writes "The NY Times reports that Google is quietly lobbying for legislation that would make Nevada the first state in which self-driving cars could be legally operated on public roads. 'The two bills, which have received little attention outside Nevada's capitol, are being introduced less than a year after the giant search engine company acknowledged that it was developing cars that could be safely driven without human intervention.'"
United States

Why Does the US Cling To Imperial Measurements? 2288

Posted by samzenpus from the my-car-gets-40-rods-to-the-hogshead dept.
PhunkySchtuff writes "As one of only three countries on Earth that hasn't converted to a metric system of units and measurements, there is a huge amount of resistance within the US to change the status quo. Whilst the cost of switching would be huge, there is also a massive hidden cost in not switching when dealing with the rest of the world (except for Liberia & Burma, the only other two countries that don't use the metric system) With one of the largest organisations in the US, the military, using metric units extensively, why does the general public in the US still cling to their customary system of units?"
Japan

Robots Enter Fukushima Reactor Building 244

Posted by samzenpus from the our-radioactive-overlords dept.
swandives writes "For the first time, a pair of remote controlled robots have entered a reactor building at the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Plant operator Tokyo Electric Power hopes the iRobot Packbots will be able to provide data on the current condition inside the buildings, although the company hasn't yet released any information on what they found inside."

Comment Title is wrong (Score 1) 2

by mreed911 (#35703588) Attached to: 18000 x norm radiation in San Francisco tap wate
Title says tap water... article says rain water. The synopsis is also wrong. The synopsis says that "3 Liters of rainwater collected contained 134 Becquerels of Iodine for an average of 20.1 Becquerel per liter", but this isn't the case (and in any case the average given those numbers would be 44.67 (134 / 3 = 44.67)). That data shows that 20.1 Bq/L of Iodine 131 were found (in three liters, meaning a total of 60.3 becquerel) and the parenthetical number (134) is "the number of liters of water that one would need to consume to equal the radiation exposure of a single round trip flight from San Francisco to Washington D.C. (0.05 mSv)."
EU

Submission + - Europe Plans to Ban Cars From Cities By 2050 (motorauthority.com) 4

Submitted by thecarchik
thecarchik writes: Can you imagine a future--thirty-nine years from now--where there are no engines humming, no exhaust smells, no car sounds of any kind in the city except the presumably Jetsons-like beeping of EVs? The European Commission, the governing body of the European Union, can, and it has a transportation proposal aiming to do just that by 2050.

Paris was the first city to suggest a ban on gas guzzlers in their city core, but this ban takes it to whole different level by planning to ban all cars completely from the city streets. While Paris was motivated by reduced pollution, the EU is focused on wider scope of reduced foreign oil dependence, reduced greenhouse gas emissions, increased jobs within the EU, and improved infrastructure for future economic growth.
IT

Submission + - IT Should Favor Stewardship Over Control (infoworld.com)

Submitted by
snydeq
snydeq writes: "InfoWorld's Bob Lewis argues in favor of a seismic shift in IT strategy, one that favors 'stewardship' of applications and devices rather than control. 'When IT lost control of information technology as PCs empowered individual users, the U.S. economy expanded; when we regained control, the economy contracted. The same thing happened when someone who almost always wasn't in IT put just about every company in the country on the Web, along with lots of new companies that kept their Web development teams carefully separate from IT — and when IT regained control of Web development,' Lewis writes. 'Correlation doesn't, of course, prove causation, but the lack of linkage between IT keeping tight control and economic success isn't the best news for those in our profession who spend most of their time locking down plans and details.'"

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