Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Comment Define: 'My Media' (Score 1) 187

by Mr. Sketch (#45727773) Attached to: How much of your media do you store locally?

If I have Netflix streaming, I can watch thousands of movies and TV shows that are not stored locally, so are those 'mine'?

If so, then I have about 0.0000000000001% of my media stored locally since the vast majority of it is accessed on the cloud.

In terms of media that I watch, I stream about 1000 shows or movies for every 1 that might watch from a local collection (if ever).
Crime

TSA Union Calls For Armed Guards At Every Checkpoint 603

Posted by timothy from the more-effective-than-at-the-post-office dept.
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Brian Tumulty writes at USA Today that the union representing airport screeners for the Transportation Security Administration says Friday's fatal shooting of an agent at Los Angeles International Airport highlights the need for armed security officers at every airport checkpoint. The screeners, who earn up to $30,000 annually, have not requested to carry guns themselves, but they do want an armed security officer present at every checkpoint says J. David Cox Sr., president of the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents the screeners. "Every local airport has its own security arrangement with local police to some type of contract security force," says Cox. "There is no standardization throughout the country. Every airport operates differently. Obviously at L.A. there were a fair number of local police officers there." Congress may investigate the issue but Sen. Tom Carper, the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, says that "there will be an appropriate time — after all the facts have been gathered and thoughtfully analyzed —to review existing policy and procedure to see what, if anything, can be learned from this unfortunate incident to help prevent future tragedies." TSA officials say that they don't anticipate a change in the agency security posture at the moment, but "passengers may see an increased presence of local law enforcement officers throughout the country.""
Mozilla

Cisco Releases Open Source "Binary Module" For H.264 In WebRTC 95

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the bait-and-switch dept.
SD-Arcadia writes "Mozilla Blog: 'Cisco has announced today that they are going to release a gratis, high quality, open source H.264 implementation — along with gratis binary modules compiled from that source and hosted by Cisco for download. This move enables any open source project to incorporate Cisco's H.264 module without paying MEPG LA license fees. Of course, this is not a not a complete solution. In a perfect world, codecs, like other basic Internet technologies such as TCP/IP, HTTP, and HTML, would be fully open and free for anyone to modify, recompile, and redistribute without license agreements or fees. Mozilla is fully committed to working towards that better future. To that end, we are developing Daala, a fully open next generation codec. Daala is still under development, but our goal is to leapfrog H.265 and VP9, building a codec that will be both higher-quality and free of encumbrances.'"

Comment I/O Bandwidth (Score 3, Interesting) 84

by Mr. Sketch (#45018233) Attached to: Software Rendering Engine GPU-Accelerated By WebCL

Many 3D engines are carefully tuned to the limited bandwidth to the GPU cards that provides them just enough bandwidth per frame to transfer the necessary geometry/textures/etc for that frame. The results, of course, stay on the GPU card and are just outputted to the frame buffer. Now, in addition to that existing overhead, the engine writer would now have to transfer back the results/frame buffer back to the CPU to process, generate an image, that is then passed back to the GPU to be displayed as an image? Or am I missing something?

While I'm sure it would allow customized algorithms, they would have to be rather unique to not be handled by the current state of geometry/vertex/fragment shaders. Are they thinking some of non-triangular geometry?

Maybe there is a way to send the result of the maths directly to the frame buffer while it's on the GPU?

Comment Re:How Blackberry could remain relevant (Score 1) 278

by Mr. Sketch (#44998821) Attached to: How BlackBerry Blew It

Samsung did this already. It's called Knox. As most Android vendors have discovered, competing with Samsung is a losing proposition.

True, but if anyone could compete with Samsung in the mindshare of the enterprise, it would be Blackberry. Samsung is pouring tons of money into building their mindshare and awareness in the enterprise space, something that Blackberry already has.

If that could easily be done, they would have done it for BB 10. And honestly, can you name one BlackBerry app worth having that doesn't exist on Android already? Ironically, BB did build Android compatibility into BB 10... but it apparently hasn't made the platform any more popular.

Yes, I was thinking later that this was more optional and extraneous. It would depend on how many enterprise apps were already custom made for Blackberry, not for games or other novelties that are Blackberry-only.

Comment How Blackberry could remain relevant (Score 3, Interesting) 278

by Mr. Sketch (#44996481) Attached to: How BlackBerry Blew It

Blackberry could succeed on their name, if they tweaked their brand a little and adopt a more 'Samsung' approach. Their name is already synonymous with enterprise level email, service and solutions, so capitalize on that, just with a different platform.

  • 1. Create an enterprise hardened version of Android
  • 2. Integrate with their existing Blackberry Enterprise Server (and of course other email providers, but provide a good business case for using their services like uptime, security, no NSA snooping, etc
  • 3. Provide a compatibility layer/VM for existing Blackberry apps on their devices

This would provide end users with a standard Android platform just with more security features (maybe fingerprint, retina scan, whatever, and market it for security conscious individuals), and it would provide enterprises with a trusted platform.

Individuals will still get an Android platform with all those apps, and Businesses will get a platform that plugin into a standard Android ecosystem.

Anyways, those are my thoughts about how they could still make it work

BTW, Blackberry, if you're looking for a new CEO or VP-level manager to implement this solution, I'm available.
Security

WeChat IM Application Could Disclose Your Password To Attackers 49

Posted by Soulskill from the conveniently-facilitates-account-sharing dept.
New submitter soulflyz writes "Security researchers found some security issues in WeChat, a popular instant messaging application developed by the Chinese company Tencet. By exploiting these vulnerabilities, any other application installed on the user's phone can force WeChat to send the user's password hash (in plain MD5 format) to an external web server, controlled by the attacker. Android versions of WeChat up to 4.5.1 are confirmed to be vulnerable, but similar issues could interest also other versions of the application. According to recent statistics, WeChat should have about 300 million registered users."
Biotech

Video Backyard Brains Shows You How to Remote Control a Cockroach (Video) 62

Posted by Roblimo from the we're-happy-scientists-not-mad-scientists dept.
This is our second video starring Backyard Brains (Motto: "Neuroscience for Everyone!"). The first one was pretty lab-oriented, with a twitching roach leg here and there. This one has more roaches, with most of them crawling on command. Will the DoD see this and decide to make cockroach soldiers? Or roboroach bomb detectors and defusers? Or cockroach drone pilots? Anything's possible these days. But meanwhile, relax and enjoy learning about roboroaches and watching how, with little circuit boards on their little backs, they scurry hither and yon under control of their human masters. WARNING: Excessively squeamish people should not watch this video, but should stick to the transcript.
Earth

Cometary Impacts May Have Provided Key Elements of Life 85

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the interstellar-snowball-fight dept.
trendspotter writes with news of research indicating that impact events might be responsible for seeding the Earth with reactive forms of the precursors to amino acids. From the article: "Early Earth was not very hospitable when it came to jump starting life. In fact, new research shows that life on Earth may have come from out of this world. Lawrence Livermore scientist Nir Goldman and University of Ontario Institute of Technology colleague Isaac Tamblyn (a former LLNL postdoc) found that icy comets that crashed into Earth millions of years ago could have produced life building organic compounds, including the building blocks of proteins and nucleobases pairs of DNA and RNA. Comets contain a variety of simple molecules, such as water, ammonia, methanol and carbon dioxide, and an impact event with a planetary surface would provide an abundant supply of energy to drive chemical reactions." The paper (PDF).
Communications

Ask Slashdot: Best Way To Archive and Access Ancient Emails? 282

Posted by timothy from the learn-them-like-the-ancient-memory-singers dept.
An anonymous reader writes "I started using email in the early 90s and have lost most of that first decade due to ignorance, botched backups, and so on. But since about 2000, I've got most — if not all — of my email in some form or other. I run Linux, so this has mainly been in a mix of various programs: Kmail, Evolution, Thunderbird. The past 2-3 years are still on the IMAP servers. My problem is that I only rarely NEED to look back to email of 5 years ago. But sometimes it's nice. Or I just want to reminisce about something...or find an old attachment that I was sent. But I do not want to be clogging my current email client of choice with vast backups and even more, I don't know if it will even easily convert. The file structures are different, some are mbox, others maildir, etc., and I would ideally like a way to 1) store and archive these emails, 2) access them, and 3) search by Sender, Subject, Date, Attachments. Is there anything I can do or do I just have to keep legacy applications on hand for this? Should I keep trying to upgrade and pull old files into the new applications? Any help or suggestions about what YOU do would be great."
Science

Ask Slashdot: How Many Time Standards Are There? 214

Posted by timothy from the didn't-suffer-slept-right-through-it dept.
jjoelc writes "Being one of those 'suffering' through the time change last night, the optimist in me reminded me that it could be much worse. That's when I started wondering how many different time/date standards there really are. Wikipedia is a good starting point, but is sorely lacking in the various formats used by e.g. Unix, Windows, TRS-80, etc. And that is without even getting into the various calendars that have been in and out of use throughout the ages. So how about it? How many different time/date 'standards' can we come up with? I'm betting there are more than a few horror stories of having to translate between them..."
Science

Scientists Have Re-Cloned Mice To the 25th Generation 134

Posted by Soulskill from the time-to-locate-jango-fett dept.
derekmead writes "Dolly's mere existence was profound. It was also unusually short, at just six years. But scientists in Japan announced yesterday they have succeeded in cloning mice using the same technique that created Dolly with more or less perfect results: The mice are healthy, they live just as long as regular mice, and they've been flawlessly cloned and recloned from the same source to the 25th generation. Researchers claim it's the first example of seamless, repeat cloning using the Dolly method—known as "somatic cell nuclear transfer" (SCNT)—in which the nucleus from an adult source animal is transferred to an egg with its nucleus removed. Until recently, the process was fraught with failures and mutations. But the team led by Teruhiko Wakayama, whose results were published today in the journal Cell Stem Cell, was able to create 581 clones from the same original mouse. Scientists, including Dolly's creator, have long felt the process was still too unstable—and too wasteful of precious eggs, given the failure rate—to be used on humans any time soon. But perhaps it's not so far off, after all."

Slashdot Top Deals

It is easier to write an incorrect program than understand a correct one.

Close