53429175
submission
johnslater writes:
The Chicago Transit Authority's new "Ventra" stored-value fare card system has another big problem. It had a difficult birth, with troubles earlier this fall when legitimate cards failed to allow passage, or sometimes double-billed the holders. Last week a server failure disabled a large portion of the system at rush hour. Now it is reported that some federal government employee ID cards allow free rides on the system. The system is being implemented by Cubic Transportation Systems for the bargain price of $454 million.
53346367
submission
ausekilis writes:
Toms Hardware has a story (original paywalled at WSJ) about Ballmer's decision to retire early. It wasn't due to his office running out of chairs, rather it was he realized he wasn't as quick to adapt or as adept at the emerging markets (mobile, wearables, etc...). He then decided that for Microsoft to succeed, it would need someone else at the helm. While this is something Slashdotters have been talking about for years, the usual rationale was his missing the boat or just plain inept to the world around him. From the article, it wasn't until he talked to another CEO, who saved Ford Motor Company, that he realized he could change the culture at MS a bit to be more adaptive. Ballmer insituted some changes in how the company was run, and once finished, he realized that he was no longer the right guy for the job. Instead of being captain of the sinking ship, he decided it's time for a new captain.
53174711
submission
An anonymous reader writes:
Mozilla today released its annual financial report for 2012, and while revenue is up quite substantially, the organization's reliance on Google continues to grow. In 2011, 85 percent of Mozilla’s revenue came from Google. In 2011, the figure increased to 90 percent.
53082149
submission
McGruber writes:
An update on the tragic Gunman Opens Fire At LAX (http://news.slashdot.org/story/13/11/01/2014210/gunman-opens-fire-at-lax) story: FoxNews reports (www.foxnews.com/us/2013/11/15/lax-security-officer-bled-for-33-minutes-as-help-stood-by) that shot Transportation Security Administration Officer Gerardo Hernandez laid helplessly bleeding after a gunman opened fire at Los Angeles International Airport while paramedics waited 150 yards away because police had not declared the terminal safe to enter.
33 minutes passed before wounded Transportation Security Administration Officer Gerardo Hernandez, who was about 20 feet from an exit, was wheeled out by police to an ambulance. For all but five of those minutes, there was no threat from the suspected gunman — he had been shot and was in custody.
Formal conclusions may take months to reach, but what is already known raises the possibility that a lack of coordination between police and fire officials prevented speedy treatment for Hernandez and other victims. Victor Payes, President of the Union Local for TSA Workers at LAX explained: "I basically think there's a lack of coordination between entities at this airport. That lack of coordination may have led to something that shouldn't have happened. We may be talking about Officer Hernandez as a survivor."
53082151
submission
SonicSpike writes:
The Department of Justice said Bitcoins can be “legal means of exchange” at a U.S. Senate committee hearing, boosting prospects for wider acceptance of the virtual currency. “We all recognize that virtual currencies, in and of themselves, are not illegal,” Mythili Raman, acting assistant attorney general at the Justice Department’s criminal division, said at the hearing.
The Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, which solicited comments in an Aug. 12 letter, scheduled the hearing “to explore potential promises and risks related to virtual currency for the federal government and society at large” after the Silk Road Hidden Website was shut down in October. The closing of the marketplace, is helping fuel a rally in the virtual currency as speculators bet that the digital money will gain more mainstream acceptance.
“The FBI’s approach to virtual currencies is guided by a recognition that online payment systems, both centralized and decentralized, offer legitimate financial services,” Peter Kadzik, principal deputy assistant attorney general, wrote in a letter dated Oct. 23. “Like any financial service, virtual currency systems of either type can be exploited by malicious actors, but centralized and decentralized online payment systems can vary significantly in the types and degrees of illicit financial risk they pose.”
Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, is also weighing in on the hearing, saying that it has no plans to regulate the currency. “Although the Federal Reserve generally monitors developments in virtual currencies and other payments system innovations, it does not necessarily have authority to directly supervise or regulate these innovations or the entities that provide them to the market,” Bernanke wrote in a letter to the committee ahead of the meeting. Quartz's Zachary Seward called it a "cautious blessing," with Bernanke acknowledging the Fed doesn't have the authority to supervise virtual currencies, but that they "may hold long-term promise, particularly if the innovations promote a faster, more secure and more efficient payment system.”
The hearings will bolster the view that Bitcoins are an acceptable alternate means of conducting transactions, and that their use will grow, said Jerry Brito senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University who is also testifying in front of the committee today. “These hearings means Bitcoin is finally coming into its own; it’s a real thing and it’s not going anywhere and these hearings highlight that."
52949887
submission
DW100 writes:
Yahoo has found some rather wonderful old domains it forgot it owned and now doesn't have any need for as it goes about putting its house in order. Sandwich.com, webservers.com and av.com are just some of the domains now up for grabs and they are all worth a small fortune. In fact the firm could make a quick $4m from selling these dusty old domains and help some up-and-coming firm land a plumb piece of interest real estate.
52863733
submission
MojoKid writes:
At APU13 today, AMD announced a full suite of new products and development tools as part of its push to improve HSA development. One of the most significant announcements to come out the sessions today-- albeit in a tacit, indirect fashion, is that Kaveri is going to pack a full 512 GPU cores. There's not much new to see on the CPU side of things — like Richland/Trinity, Steamroller is a pair of CPU modules with two cores per module. AMD also isn't talking about clock speeds yet, but the estimated 862 GFLOPS that the company is claiming for Kaveri points to GPU clock speeds between 700 — 800MHz. With 512 cores, Kaveri picks up a 33% boost over its predecessors, but memory bandwidth will be essential for the GPU to reach peak performance. For performance, AMD showed Kaveri up against the Intel 4770K running a low-end GeForce GT 630. In the intro scene to BF4's single-player campaign (1920x1080, Medium Details), the AMD Kaveri system (with no discrete GPU) consistently pushed frame rates in the 28-40 FPS range. The Intel system, in contrast, couldn't manage 15 FPS. Performance on that system was solidly in the 12-14 FPS range — meaning AMD is pulling 2x the frame rate, if not more.
52768381
submission
enigma32 writes:
As detailed on Gigaom: Facebook has open sourced Presto, the interactive SQL-on-Hadoop engine the company first discussed in June. Presto is Facebook’s take on Cloudera’s Impala or Google’s Dremel, and it already has some big-name fans in Dropbox and Airbnb.
52766899
submission
ClockEndGooner writes:
Local solar panel farms in your area might be able to take music requests in the near future, as researchers at Queen Mary University of London and Imperial College London found that playing loud pop and rock music improves the performance of solar cells. According to the researchers, "The high frequencies and pitch found in pop and rock music cause vibrations that enhanced energy generation in solar cells containing a cluster of 'nanorods', leading to a 40 per cent increase in efficiency of the solar cells."
52743637
submission
bkerensa writes:
A member of Canonical's Legal Team recently sent a email to a critic of Ubuntu privacy to insist he stop using the Ubuntu Trademark dispute his use being fair use.
52556443
submission
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes:
Allison Schrager writes in the Atlantic that losing another hour of evening daylight isn't just annoying. It's an economically harmful policy with minimal energy savings. "The actual energy savings are minimal, if they exist at all. Frequent and uncoordinated time changes cause confusion, undermining economic efficiency. There’s evidence that regularly changing sleep cycles, associated with daylight saving, lowers productivity and increases heart attacks." So here's Schrager's proposal. This year, Americans on Eastern Standard Time should set their clocks back one hour (like normal), Americans on Central and Rocky Mountain time do nothing, and Americans on Pacific time should set their clocks forward one hour. This will result in just two time zones for the continental United States and the east and west coasts will only be one hour apart. "America already functions on fewer than four time zones," says Schrager. "I spent the last three years commuting between New York and Austin, living on both Eastern and Central time. I found that in Austin, everyone did things at the same times they do them in New York, despite the difference in time zone. People got to work at 8 am instead of 9 am, restaurants were packed at 6 pm instead of 7 pm, and even the TV schedule was an hour earlier. " Research based on time use surveys found American’s schedules are already determined more by television than daylight suggesting, in effect, that Americans already live on two time zones. Schrager says that this strategy has already been proven to work in other parts of the world. China has been on one time zone since 1949, despite naturally spanning five time zones and in 1983, Alaska, which naturally spans four time zones, moved most of the state to a single time zone. "It sounds radical, but it really isn’t. The purpose of uniform time measures is coordination. How we measure time has always evolved with the needs of commerce.," concludes Schrager. "Time is already arbitrary, why not make it work in our favor?"
52546111
submission
SanDogWeps writes:
Periodically viewed as copyright infringement by the media, the Department of Defense's "Early Bird" has been delivering applicable headlines to the Armed Forces since 1948. It stopped updating on October 1st, along with a number of other government products, but when the lights turned back on, The Early Bird remained dark. A number of reasons have been floated, including applicability in the internet age, cost, and a lack of interest. Others claim The Early Bird was nothing more than a propaganda machine, by culling articles that painted DoD in a favorable light.
52458791
submission
NewtonsLaw writes:
Google have started rolling out their plan to force all non-passive YouTube users to join their GooglePlus service.
As of last night I noticed that I can no longer access the comments on my videos via their dedicated comments page and attempts to respond to comments posted by others simply by clicking on the "to reply, click here" link in the advisory email fail to show the comment concerned. This forces me to go to the actual video page each time and manually locate the comment within the hundreds that may be there.
For weeks, Google has been in nag-mode, constantly trying to coerce YouTube account holders link their channels to a G+ identity and now that this strategy has failed, they're basically saying that unless you do as they say, no more easy access to the comments on your videos. In fact they say this quite literally in a big red banner at the top of the screen when you log on which proclaims " Connect to Google+ to maintain access to new comments".
As an early adopter of YouTube and many other Google services I now find myself with a real mess on my hands. Most of my Google service accounts have different email addresses, therefore are different identities. To comply with Google's diktat, I will have to create several G+ accounts, meaning more logins, more passwords, more complexity!
I am not alone in this — users all over the Net (and on YouTube) are really annoyed that the "do no evil" company is forcing them to sign up to services they do not want and breaking stuff in the process.
The reason for YouTube's success is that it's relatively simple to use and focused. YouTube makes it easy to post videos and comment on them — full stop! If they start messing with that formula by adding the complexity and "features" of G+ then I fear they will pay a price.
In the past, one of the biggest benfits of Google was that it wasn't Facebook. It seems that is no longer the case (especially in light of their recent "we'll use your face and comments to promote products" initiative).
It would appear that Google is about to turn a silk purse into a sow's ear.
Aaaaarrgggh!
52311619
submission
ananyo writes:
Allen Nicklasson has had a temporary reprieve. Scheduled to be executed by lethal injection in Missouri on 23 October, the convicted killer was given a stay of execution by the state’s governor, Jay Nixon, on 11 October — but not because his guilt was in doubt. Nicklasson will live a while longer because one of the drugs that was supposed to be used in his execution — a widely used anaesthetic called propofol — is at the centre of an international controversy that threatens millions of US patients, and affects the way that US states execute inmates.
Propofol, used up to 50 million times a year in US surgical procedures, has never been used in an execution. If the execution had gone ahead, US hospitals could have lost access to the drug because 90% of the US supply is made and exported by a German company subject to European Union (EU) regulations that restrict the export of medicines and devices that could be used for capital punishment or torture.
This is not the first time that the EU’s anti-death-penalty stance has affected the US supply of anaesthetics. Since 2011, a popular sedative called sodium thiopental has been unavailable in the United States.
“The European Union is serious,” says David Lubarsky, head of the anaesthesiology department at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine in Florida. “They’ve already shown that with thiopental. If we go down this road with propofol, a lot of good people who need anaesthesia are going to be harmed.”
