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An anonymous reader writes: A majority of the community is revolting against the Slashdot beta http://beta.slashdot.org/ and the men and women behind the scenes are ignoring the community. Let's see what that brings with it...
rueger writes: A fair question that is on many people's minds. Given that the beta site is proving incredibly unpopular, what Slash-replacements are out there?
who_stole_my_kidneys writes: Slashdot started redirecting users in February to its newly revamped webpage and received a huge backlash from users. The majority of comments dislike the new site while some do offer solutions to make it better. The question is will Slashdot force the unwanted change on its users that clearly do not want change?
somenickname writes: As a long time Slashdot reader, I'm wondering what website to transition to once the beta goes live. The new beta interface seems very well suited to tablets/phones but, it ignores the fact that the user base is, as one would expect, nerds sitting in front of very large LCD monitors and wasting their employers time. It's entirely possible that the browser ID information gathered by the site has indicated that they get far more hits on mobile devices where the new interface is reasonable but, I feel that no one has analyzed the browser ID (and screen resolution) against comments modded +5. I think you will find that most +5 comments are coming from devices (real fucking computers) that the new interface does not support well. Without an interface that invites the kind of users that post +5 comments, Slashdot is just a ho-hum news aggregation site that allows comments. So, my question is, once the beta is the default, where should Slashdot users go to?
An anonymous reader writes: Maybe some of the slashdot team should start listening to its users, most of which hate the new user interface. Thanks for ruining something that wasn't broken.
astroengine writes: On Tuesday at precisely 12:55 p.m. EST (17:55 UTC), Mars rover Curiosity successfully breached the crest of the dune in “Dingo Gap.” The 1 meter-high dune stands between the rover and a smoother route to the mission’s next science target. The timestamps on the raw imagery suggests the short drive up the sandy slope took around 25 minutes, where it appears to have paused at the dune's apex.
jackb_guppy writes: SLASHDOT today started to push users from the old interface to the ugly, slow, new interface. Any guess on the number of users that will be leaving SLASHDOT. So much for market share.
Jeremiah Cornelius writes: Upon revelation of the extent of US foreign intelligence surveillance, through efforts by Edward Snowden and LavaBit founder Ladar Levison, an increasing number of nation's have expressed official dismay and concern over the US dominance in managing the infrastructure for request and transit of information on the Internet. In the past, ICANN challenges have been secondary to efforts in the UN ITU — until now. Yesterday at a summit in Uruguay, every major Internet governing body pledged to free themselves of the influence of the US government. "The directors of ICANN, the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Internet Architecture Board, the World Wide Web Consortium, the Internet Society and all five of the regional Internet address registries have vowed to break their associations with the US government. The group called for "accelerating the globalization of ICANN and IANA functions, towards an environment in which all stakeholders, including all governments, participate on an equal footing". Any doubt about the reason or timing of this statement is dispelled with the inclusion: "the group 'expressed strong concern over the undermining of the trust and confidence of Internet users globally due to recent revelations of pervasive monitoring and surveillance'."
The US argument for maintaining governance has been the need to maintain "a free and open Internet" versus interests of authoritarian societies. Has recent understanding of the wholesale surveillance of telecommunications by the NSA completely ruined the US reputation as the just custodian of that mission?
An anonymous reader writes: Since the United States landed on the Moon on July 20th 1969, there has been an American flag standing on its surface. While 5 out of the 6 flags still stand (Neil Armstrong reported that Apollo 11s flag was knocked over by engine thrust), the colors of Old Glory have faded due to the Suns harsh radiation.
anontoworld writes: Washington Post: Cole said the programs are legal and overseen by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. He also said the programs “achieved the right balance” between protecting Americans’ safety and their privacy.
“Both programs are conducted under laws passed by Congress,” Cole said.
The 11 judges on the secret FISA court that approves surveillance “are far from rubber stamps,” he said. “They don’t sign off until they are satisfied that we have met all statutory and constitutional requirements.”
But some lawmakers were not swayed by Cole’s explanation.
LFSim writes: It's not the Turing test just yet, but in one more domain, AI is becoming increasingly competitive with humans. This time around, it's in interplanetary trajectory optimization.
From the European Space Agency comes the news that researchers from its Advanced Concepts Team have recently won the Gold "Humies" award for their use of Evolutionary Algorithms to design a spacecraft’s trajectory for exploring the Galilean moons of Jupiter (Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto).
The problem addressed in the awarded article was put forward by NASA/JPL in the latest edition of the Global Trajectory Optimization Competition. The team from ESA was able to automatically evolve a solution that outperforms all the entries submitted to the competition by human experts from across the world.
dryriver writes: Dear Slashdotters. I am an intermediate level programmer who works mostly in C# NET. I have a couple of image/video processing algorithms that are highly parallelizable — running them on a GPU instead of a CPU should result in a considerable speedup (anywhere from 10x times to perhaps 30x or 40x times speedup, depending on the quality of the implementation). Now here is my question: What, currently, is the most painless way to start playing with GPU programming? Do I have to learn CUDA/OpenCL — which seems a daunting task to me — or is there a simpler way? Perhaps a Visual Programming Language or "VPL" that lets you connect boxes/nodes and access the GPU very simply? I should mention that I am on Windows, and that the GPU computing prototypes I want to build should be able to run on Windows. Surely there must a be a "relatively painless" way out there, with which one can begin to learn how to harness the GPU?
