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Submission + - GlowBowl Lighting Makes Your Tinkle Twinkle At Night (hothardware.com) 1

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: It's definitely not as creepy as Tony The Toilet Buddy from Better Call Saul, this latest Kickstarter project is definitely puts the "whiz" in gee-whiz. GlowBowl is an LED-light for your toilet that is seems to be aimed at males, because females probably won't have a use for such a product (and probably think it's too childish to boot), that bathes your toilet water in seven selectable colors. The GlowBowl simply attaches to your toilet bowl like any garden variety toilet fresher and serves as a night light so you don't have to sear your retinas with the fancy pants LED lighting in your overhead bathroom fixtures during late night pee runs. And if you simply can't settle on one single color for your last night "exit stream," there is a carousel mode that will cycle through all seven colors every four seconds.

Submission + - Netflix Is Experimenting with Advertising (vice.com)

Submitted by derekmead
derekmead writes: Netflix is experimenting with advertisements that run both before and after users watch a video. It's unclear whether or not the company will eventually push ads to everyone.

For now, the company is primarily experimenting with the HBO model of pitching its own original programming to viewers. The company is only showing trailers for shows like Orange Is the New Black and House of Cards—it has not attempted to sell third party ads, and the company told me that, for the moment, only specific users in specific markets are seeing ads.

Submission + - Tiny Fantastic Voyage-inspired robots are starting to get reasonably mature

Submitted by szotz
szotz writes: No shrinking machine in an underground military lab (as far as we know). And no Raquel Welch. Still there is a growing microrobotics movement underway, looking at ways that tiny, untethered robots might be used to perform medical interventions in the human body. There have been piecemeal reports for years now of various designs, such as microscallops that can swim through the eye and bots that can be pushed around by bacteria flagella. This article in IEEE Spectrum gives a round-up of recent progress and looks at some of the difficulties that arise when you try to make things tiny and still have them retain a modicum (or give them more than a modicum) of function.

Submission + - New Wind Turbine Has No Blades

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: The Guardian reports that Vortex Bladeless has developed a new bladeless wind turbine that promises to be more efficient, less visually intrusive, and safer for birdlife than conventional turbines. Using the principle of natural frequency and vorticity, the turbine oscillates in swirling air caused by the wind bypassing the mast, and then builds exponentially as it reaches the structure’s natural resonance. It’s a powerful effect that famously caused the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in 1940, footage of which inspired David Yáñez to try to build a structure to harness this energy rather than prevent it. The turbine “floats” on magnets, which as well as significantly amplifying the oscillation, also eliminates any friction and the need for expensive lubricating oils or mechanical parts. “Wind turbines now are too noisy for people’s backyard,” says David Suriol. “We want to bring wind power generation to people’s houses like solar power.”

On the minus side the oscillating turbine design will sweep a smaller area and have a lower conversion efficiency. “The best wind turbine will collect around 50% of energy from the wind,” says Suriol. “We are close to 40% with bladeless turbines in our wind tunnel laboratory.” To offset this disadvantage, "you can put four, five or six 4kW turbines in the space of one conventional turbine, which need 5 meter diameter space around them,” he says. In fact, wind tunnel tests have shown they perform even better placed closer together as they benefit from the vortices each of them creates.

Submission + - What do you wish you'd known when starting your first 'real' job? (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: ITworld's Josh Fruhlinger asked seasoned (and some not-so-seasoned) tech professionals what they wished they knew back when they were newly minted graduates entering the workforce. Perhaps not surprisingly, some of the best advice has more to do with soft skills than with tech skills. To wit: 'When [managers] say they are suggesting you do something, it's not really a suggestion — it is an order disguised as a suggestion. Plain-speaking is a lost art at big companies and corporate double talk is the name of the game.' What's your best piece of advice for the newest among you?

Submission + - The Artificial Pancreas for Diabetics Is Nearly Here (ieee.org)

Submitted by the_newsbeagle
the_newsbeagle writes: It's the tech that type 1 diabetics have long been waiting for: An implanted "closed-loop" system that monitors a person's blood-sugar level and adjusts injections from an insulin pump. Such a system would liberate diabetics from constant self-monitoring and give parents of diabetic children peace of mind. Thanks to improvements in glucose sensors and control algorithms, the first artificial pancreas systems are now in clinical trials.

Submission + - Intel Buys Altera for $16.7 Billion (bloomberg.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Today Intel purchased chipmaker Altera for $16.7 billion. This follows another huge purchase in the semiconductor industry last week, when Avago snapped up Broadcom for $37 billion. This has been a record year for consolidation within the industry, as growth slows and stock prices begin to stagnate. Altera had already rejected an offer from Intel, but shareholders pressured them to reconsider. "Acquiring Altera may help Intel defend and extend its most profitable business: supplying server chips used in data centers. While sales of semiconductors for PCs are declining as more consumers rely on tablets and smartphones to get online, the data centers needed to churn out information and services for those mobile devices are driving orders for higher-end Intel processors and shoring up profitability."

Submission + - Cool Tool: The Nuclear Fuel Cycle Cost Calculator (thebulletin.org)

Submitted by Lasrick
Lasrick writes: The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has launched a very cool new tool that will thrill energy wonks and anyone interested in understanding the per kilowatt cost of nuclear energy. Developed over the last two years in a partnership between the Bulletin and the University of Chicago, the Nuclear Fuel Cycle Cost Calculator estimates the cost of electricity produced by three configurations of the nuclear fuel cycle:

1. The once-through fuel cycle used in most US nuclear power plants, in which uranium fuel is used once and then stored for later disposal.; 2. A limited-recycle mode in which a mix of uranium and plutonium (that is, mixed oxide, or MOX) is used to fuel a light water reactor; 3. A full-recycle system, which uses a fast neutron spectrum reactor that can be configured to “breed” plutonium that can subsequently be used as either nuclear fuel or weapons material.

This online tool lets users test how sensitive the price of electricity is to a full range of components—more than 60 parameters that can be adjusted for the three configurations of the nuclear fuel cycle considered. The results provide nuanced cost assessments for the reprocessing of nuclear fuel and can serve as the basis for discussions among government officials, industry leaders, and public interest groups.

Submission + - Indicted ex-FIFA executive cites Onion article in rant slamming US (time.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Former FIFA vice president Jack Warner renewed his criticism of the United States, where he faces corruption charges, on Sunday by releasing a pair of videorecorded comments — one of them based on a story by satirical website The Onion.

"This past week has been a most trying one for me, a most difficult one," Warner said.

Even Sunday wasn't easy, when Warner needed two attempts to get his message across by telling followers that the latest accusations against him stem largely from the U.S. being upset that it did not win the rights to host the 2022 World Cup — which went to Qatar.

In an eight-minute Facebook video, which was quickly deleted after numerous news reports picked up on the gaffe, Warner held up a printout of a fictitious story from The Onion bearing the headline: "FIFA Frantically Announces 2015 Summer World Cup In United States."

The fake story was published on Wednesday, hours after Warner was indicted in the U.S. and arrested and briefly jailed in Trinidad. Warner asked why the story was "two days before the FIFA election" when Sepp Blatter was re-elected as president.

Submission + - Carnegie Mellon Reeling After Uber Poaches Top Robotics Researchers (wsj.com)

Submitted by ideonexus
ideonexus writes: In February, Carnegie Mellon and Uber announced a partnership to develop driverless-car technology. After raising $5 billion from investors, Uber used the money to poach 40 of the university's researchers and scientists, offering them bonuses of hundreds of thousands of dollars and doubling their salaries. This has left the world's top robotics research institution in a crisis.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Overcoming Low-cost Competition In Web Design

Submitted by Patchw0rk F0g
Patchw0rk F0g writes: As a web developer and designer, I've been waging a small-scale war on two fronts: disingenuous design companies with low rates, and students with no infrastructure (or experience), and therefore low fees.

We've all seen them: the web design companies that offer web pages for $99.00 or less, only to provide the client with a static web page that does nothing to further their web presence needs. The client then needs to pony up further funds for a website that reflects the reality of their online needs. We've also seen the student ads on various forums, offering ridiculously low costs for web pages that fail to live up to expectations, much less the minimum requirements that are necessary in today's Google-expected RWD (responsive web design) world.

I've been developing web pages for over ten years now, and have both the requisite experience and client base to make a reasonable salary. I can't, however, develop a suitable web page for a client for a mere pittance. What suggestions would Slashdot readers have, either in the marketing forum or on the production side, to combat these substandard practitioners that beset web designers?

Submission + - Windows 10 will be available on July 29th (windows10update.com)

Submitted by Ammalgam
Ammalgam writes: Windows 10 will be available starting on July 29th.

This date comes from an early morning announcement from Microsoft. Starting on July 29, you can get Windows 10 for PCs and tablets by taking advantage of the free upgrade offer, or on a new Windows 10 PC from your retailer.

Submission + - Infrared detector to free up Internet of tomorrow

Submitted by jan_jes
jan_jes writes: US technology company Cisco Systems says that worldwide Internet traffic increased more than five-fold between 2008 and 2013, and is set to rise by another factor of three by 2018.

Physicists in Canada and the UK have invented a new kind of silicon photodetector that converts the pulses of light sent down a fibre-optic cable into electrical signals that serve as input to computer processors – that is designed to meet that demand by increasing the range of wavelengths that can be used to send data.
The device, which could be built using existing chip-fabrication techniques, would ease the pressure on the Web's data centres by opening up a new frequency range in optical communications. This work is published in Nature Photonics.

Submission + - Malware Evolution Calls for Actor Attribution: Robmertik Actor Located 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: "What makes one novel strain of malicious software more dangerous or noteworthy than another? Is it the sheer capability and feature set of the new malware, or are these qualities meaningless without also considering the skills, intentions and ingenuity of the person wielding it? Most experts probably would say it’s important to consider attribution insofar as it is knowable, but it’s remarkable how seldom companies that regularly publish reports on the latest criminal innovations go the extra mile to add context about the crooks apparently involved in deploying those tools."

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