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

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Microsoft

Silverlight 5 Released 107

New submitter CaptSlaq sends word that Silverlight 5 has been released. Microsoft has not revealed whether it will be the last version. "New features in Silverlight 5 include Hardware Decode of H.264 media, which provides a significant performance improvement with decoding of unprotected content using the GPU; Postscript Vector Printing to improve output quality and file size; and an improved graphics stack with 3D support that uses the XNA API on the Windows platform to gain low-level access to the GPU for drawing vertex shaders and low-level 3D primitives. In addition, Silverlight 5 extends the ‘Trusted Application’ model to the browser for the first time. These features, when enabled via a group policy registry key and an application certificate, mean users won’t need to leave the browser to perform complex tasks such as multiple window support, full trust support in browser including COM and file system access, in browser HTML hosting within Silverlight, and P/Invoke support for existing native code to be run directly from Silverlight."
Android

Apple Loses Tablet Battle In Australia 159

New submitter harmic writes "The Australian Federal High Court has denied Apple's appeal against the earlier decision that overturned the ban on sales of the Galaxy Tab. The Samsung Android based tablets should be in the shops in a matter of days. Apple had attempted to appeal an earlier court ruling overturning the ban."
It's funny.  Laugh.

Occupy Flash? 507

mcgrew writes "CNN is reporting another Occupy movementOccupy Flash. Their aim: get rid of Flash completely. They explain: 'Why does it matter when HTML5 has clearly won the fight for the future of our web browsing? Well, as we've seen with other outdated web technologies (most notably the much-lamented Internet Explorer 6), as long as software is installed on machines, there will be a contingent of decision makers who mandate its use, and there will be a requirement of continued support, the plugin will live on, and folks will continue to develop for it.' In response, a group of Flash developers have started Occupy HTML in Flash's defense. Popcorn, anyone?"
Science

The Weight of an e-Book 243

whoever57 writes "According to Prof Kubiatowicz from Berkeley, each time an additional book is downloaded to an e-reader, the mass of the e-reader increases. The effect doesn't really make the devices more difficult to carry: the professor calculates that 4GB of books would increase its weight by a billionth of a billionth of a gram— about the mass of a single virus or DNA molecule."
Firefox

Meet Firefox's Built-In PDF Reader 257

An anonymous reader writes "Not long ago, Mozilla coders announced that they were starting to build PDF.js, a way to display Acrobat documents in the browser using pure web code. No longer will you have to fight with an external PDF plug-in in Firefox. Development on PDF.js has progressed to the point now where you can take an early peek at it. Huzzah!"

Submission + - John McCarthy, Pioneer of AI, Dies 1

Genrou writes: It is a sad month for computer sciences in the world. After Jobs and Ritchie, yesterday, October 23rd, John McCarthy died. He was a pioneer in the field of Artificial Intelligence and creator of the LISP language.
Apple

Submission + - Apple's Siri is as revolutionary as the Mac (hbr.org)

hype7 writes: "The Harvard Business Review is running an article on Siri, the speech recognition technology inside the new iPhone. They make the case that Siri's use of artificial intelligence and speech recognition is going to change the way we interact with machines. From the article: "the desktop metaphor — that the Mac introduced all those years ago — has long been stretched past breaking point. Novice users often don't know where to begin. The touch paradigm introduced in the iPhone began to change that: it removed the intermediary of the mouse and the cursor. But even still, unnecessary complexity remains...

Siri is going to be the first step in fixing it.""

Steve Jobs Dead At 56 1613

SoCalChris writes "Apple cofounder Steve Jobs was found dead in his Cupertino home this morning. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him — even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon."

Comment On Killing Seldom Used Features (Score 3, Funny) 862

Let's do a quick exercise in Microsoftian design: The week has 168 hours.

Shall we assume the typical adult male has 4x 15-minute sexual intercourses per week ? It's probably pushing a bit, but fine, let's exaggerate. That'll be 1 hour per week.

Shall we assume the typical adult male urinates 8 times per day (once every 2 hours while awake), and each event lasts 1 minute ? That'll be 8 minutes per day, 56 minutes per week. Let's round things up and call it 1 hour. We're exaggerating anyway.

166/168 = 0.9880. On our typical adult male, the penis is idle and unused 98.8% of the time. If the human body was designed by the Windows 8 design team, we would be dickless.

Comment Re:Thank god i don't buy Apple (Score 1) 148

Brazil provides huge tax breaks for products *assembled* in the country with local workforce, even if all the components are manufactred elsewhere. So the big manufacturers just import the component kits from China and assemble them here. This is true for Sony notebooks, the Xbox360 (recently started to be assembled here, and will start selling cheaper than the Wii for that alone), and the same goes for electronics such as phones, monitors, TVs, etc. Foxconn isn't starting up a facility out of nothing, the Sony vaio line is already assembled by them in Brazil.

Recently the legislation was changed to include tablets in the tax break law, and local assembly of ipads here will start soon. That is not a rumor and has been on the brazilian news for months, with official word from both the government and Foxconn. How much of the global market will be "served" from the brazilian output is the actual question. I wouldn't be surprised if the entire iPad 2 assembly transitioned to Brazil while the chinese sweatshops move to the iPad 3. With local economic treaties, it will be no surprise if the brazilian output of tablets starts serving the entire South America market right away.

Regarding the Argentinian coward's opinion on the quality of brazilian goods, there is no such perception of bad quality in the internal market, save for the automotive sector -- where the national industry is heavily protected and gets away with exorbitant profit margins on cars with considerably less features than cars from european and asian competitors.

Facebook

Winklevoss Twins Finally Give Up Fighting Facebook 160

An anonymous reader writes "Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's former Harvard classmates Cameron Winklevoss and Tyler Winklevoss, who accuse him of stealing their idea for the social network, have decided not to appeal to the Supreme Court. In a filing today with the federal court in San Francisco, the duo said that after 'careful consideration,' they decided not to seek Supreme Court review of the $65 million settlement."
Space

Project Icarus: the Gas Mines of Uranus 155

astroengine writes "When considering the fuel source for a fusion-powered interstellar probe, wouldn't it be a good idea to set up a colony on the moon and start pillaging the lunar surface for its helium-3 riches? Not so fast, says Adam Crowl of Project Icarus, there may be a far more viable source. What about the gas giants? Although Jupiter's gravity could pose a problem and Saturn's rings might get in the way (and forget Neptune, that place is one hell of a commute), perhaps the helium-3 in the Uranian atmosphere could be mined using atmospheric balloons?"
AI

Are 625 Pixels Enough To Identify Sex? 143

mikejuk writes "A Spanish research team have patented a video camera and algorithm that can tell the difference between males and females based on just a 25x25 pixel image. This means that there is enough information in such low resolution images to do the job! They also demonstrate that an old AI method, linear discriminant analysis, is as good and sometimes better than more trendy methods such as Support Vector Machines..."

Slashdot Top Deals

The last thing one knows in constructing a work is what to put first. -- Blaise Pascal

Working...