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Businesses

Submission + - Petroleum companies using "speed interviewing&

Submitted by antifoidulus
antifoidulus writes: Yahoo Finance is reporting that petroleum companies are using speed interviewing to try to find lots of engineering talent in a short period of time. Inspired by the "speed dating" trend managers are now inviting people in for quick 10-15 minute initial interviews with a large pool of candidates. The companies doing this say they have thousands of openings that traditional recruiting, such as job fairs, has failed to fill. Managers say that giving such short interviews gives them face time with more applicants than was previously possible. Furthermore they say it can give them insight into how candidates will respond under pressure. However, according to the article, "Those who make good impressions will eventually have more traditional interviews with the four companies involved." Will this catch on in the software world?
Microsoft

Submission + - Windows Live and Privacy

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Today as we were biking around our neighborhood in a small city we saw a strange vehicle slowly driving around. It appeared to be an SUV, bristling with cameras mounted on the roof, and pointing just about every possible direction. The first time we saw it, all we could see was that it had a sign on the side, something about Windows. The second time we saw it, we stared at it so hard that the driver stopped and we had a chance to ask him what it was all about. He said he was driving around, filming streets, and that there were people doing this all over the world, and getting data from the air too. It was going to be available on the Web. I asked him if this was Microsoft's answer to Google Earth, and he indicated that it was. There seems to be very little about this on the Web, and I found no mention of Microsoft's collection of this sort of detailed street level data. The Windows site appears to be http://preview.local.live.com/, although since I use a Mac it didn't work properly.

I'm not sure I want my neighborhood viewable on the Web from ground level. And are they going to edit all the people out? I don't see how they could.
Communications

Submission + - ASUS integrates VOIP and PSTN into motherboards

Submitted by
yahyamf
yahyamf writes: "ASUS recently announced that their ASUS TeleSky(TM) telecom adaptor will now be included in some of their motherboards. The TeleSky telecom adaptor converts ordinary house phones into multi-functional Skype phones. With one jack connected to the house phone and the other linked to the ground telephone line, the TeleSky can switch the house phone connection between PSTN and VoIP networks. While it sounds interesting, how would this compare to the dedicated VOIP adapters available from SIPURA and others?"
Editorial

Submission + - Greatest task of Web 2.x: Meta-Validation

Submitted by
CexpTretical
CexpTretical writes: "An article in MIT's Technology Review about Web 2.0 problems fails to mention the 800 pound gorilla in the room when it comes to fulfilling the dreams of the Semantic Web, i.e. assumptions about the validity of metadata or tagging schemes. We can add all of the metadata and/or tags we want to web resources but that does not mean that the "data about the data" honestly or accurately describes the resource or is "about the data" at all. This is why Google does not place much importance on the metadata already contained in html document headers in terms of search ranking etc. because it cannot be trusted and to validate it would require more effort than to search and index that data from scratch. Ensuring or verifying the validity of metadata would be a task equal to that of actually creating it but would have to be repeated continually. Hence all of the talk about "trusted networks" which then requires trusting the gatekeepers of those networks. Talk about "semantics"."
Encryption

Submission + - how secure will cyphers be in the future?

Submitted by
GillBates
GillBates writes: "Lets say we have a cypher that takes e.g. 3*10^6 years to break. What can be said about the same cypher in 10 or 20 years, when new cryptoanalysis methods are found and Moore's law applies? How long would it take to brake that cypher? How much does the different method's ladder play role in the future (in the future we have many more analysis methods to apply to a cyper)? Thanks for Your attention. Hope to receive an answer."
The Media

Our Love/Hate Relationship With Wikipedia 244

Posted by kdawson from the who-you-callin'-non-notable? dept.
netbuzz points us to a somewhat snarky Washington Post article about the Wikipedians' work in upholding a minimum standard of "notability" for the collaborative encyclopedia. Here's his take on the Post's bemusement from a NetworkWorld blog: "The Washington Post this morning gets its snickers at the Wikipedians who do the best they can to apply the minimum 'notability' standards needed to keep the online encyclopedia's 1.5 million English entries relatively free of worthless junk. 'It's also safe to assume these are people with a lot of time on their hands,' the Post writer notes... These are people doing a truly thankless job... and they deserve a few thank-yous."
Privacy

Submission + - Tool to circumvent internet censorship

Submitted by prelelat
prelelat writes: Researchers at University of Toronto decided to make a tool that will allow people in countries like China, that have restrictions on internet access get access to censored sites. The tool is to be released at the universities Protect The Net conference. The goal seems to be to allow access to sites like wikipedia.
PlayStation (Games)

Submission + - PS3 only worth it on 1080p?

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes: "I just purchased a new Samsung 46" DLP HDTV. It only does 1080i, but I figured, that's enough, right? Well I've read a few reviews saying that the PS3 will throw everything into 720p if you don't have a TV that supports 1080p. Am I gonna be missing out on the power of the PS3 because of this?"
Operating Systems

Submission + - NetBSD 4.0 re-branched

Submitted by jschauma
jschauma writes: The NetBSD Release Engineering team has announced that the process of releasing NetBSD 4.0 has been re-started. "Re-started?", you ask? Well, the process was originally started back in August 2006, with a goal of releasing by December. Due to a big number of improvements on the NetBSD-current branch during several hackathons, it was decided to re-branch NetBSD 4.0 instead of identifying and pulling all those changes into the existing branch (see this mail for details). Now, as of 2006-12-03, NetBSD 4.0 has been re-branched as "netbsd-4", and details on the release schedule as well as details on where to get binaries and sources of the NetBSD 4.0_BETA2 release and how you can help are available here.
Displays

Computer Monitor In Eyeglasses 109

Posted by kdawson from the move-over-mister-gibson dept.
ozancakmakci writes "We have all seen science fiction ideals of computer displays concealed in eyeglasses. One of the earlier spectacle-based designs was created by David Bettinger and disclosed in US Patent 4,806,011. Advances in fabrication technologies are now allowing complicated surface profiles to be manufactured. Exploitation of a complicated surface profile leads to low element count designs. Researchers at the University of Central Florida, CREOL/College of Optics & Photonics have designed and fabricated a computer monitor in eyeglasses that uses sophisticated surface profiles to achieve a compact design. The current specifications include an 8mm exit pupil, 20-degree field of view, 15mm eye clearance, and a resolution of 1.5 arcminutes. Follow the link for two pictures of this latest prototype." Read on for some of the challenges in designing a workable eyeglasses-based display.
GNU is Not Unix

Submission + - Bill to ban commercial software in Philippines?

Submitted by thingthingfish
thingthingfish writes: A Philippine congressman has proposed a bill to mandate the use of Open Source Software in government. A local columnist responds by denouncing Free Software as "a costly and disastrous technological trap". This coming from a country with an average wage of US$200.

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