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Facebook's 'Like This' Button Is Tracking You 273

Posted by CmdrTaco from the of-course-they-are dept.
Stoobalou submitted a story about some of the most obvious research I've seen in a while ... "A researcher from a Dutch university is warning that Facebook's 'Like This' button is watching your every move. Arnold Roosendaal, who is a doctoral candidate at the Tilburg University for Law, Technology and Society, warns that Facebook is tracking and tracing everyone, whether they use the social networking site or not. Roosendaal says that Facebook's tentacles reach way beyond the confines of its own web sites and subscriber base because more and more third party sites are using the 'Like This' button and Facebook Connect."
First Person Shooters (Games)

Video Games Found To Enhance Visual Attention 79

Posted by Soulskill from the told-you-mom dept.
donniebaseball23 writes "Reporting on new research from WIREs Cognitive Science, IndustryGamers writes: 'Action games like Call of Duty and Halo can enhance visual attention, the ability that helps us focus on relevant visual information. The mental mechanism allows people to select pertinent visual information and ignore irrelevant information. It suggests that action titles can be used to augment military training, educational tools, and correct visual deficits.' Shawn Green, co-author of the study, commented, 'At the core of these action video game-induced improvements appears to be a remarkable enhancement in the ability to flexibly and precisely control attention, a finding that could have a variety of real-world applications. For example, those in professions that demand "super-normal" visual attention, such as fighter pilots, would benefit enormously from enhanced visual attention, as their performance and lives depend on their ability to react quickly and accurately to primarily visual information."
Operating Systems

Can Windows, OS X and Fedora All Work Together? 375

Posted by timothy from the like-to-buy-the-world-a-coke dept.
greymond writes "In my ever growing job responsibilities, I've recently been tasked with documenting our organization's IT infrastructure, primarily focusing on cost analysis of our hardware leases and software purchases. This is something that has never been done in our organization before and while it's moving along slowly, I'm already seeing some places where we could make improvements. Once completed, I see this as an opportunity to bring up the topic of migrating the majority of our office from Windows 7 to Linux and from Exchange to Gmail. However, this would result in three departments each running a different system: Windows, OS X, and most likely Fedora. Has anyone worked in or tried to set up an environment like this? What roadblocks did you run into? Is this really feasible or should I just continue to focus on the cutbacks that don't require OS changes? (The requirement for having three different systems is that the vast majority of our administration, who rely solely on an install of Microsoft Windows, Word and Excel, are savvy enough that if they came in and saw Gnome running on Fedora with Open Office they'd pick it up fast. However, our marketing department is composed entirely of Apple systems, and the latest Adobe Creative Suite doesn't seem to all work under Wine. The biggest issue is with the Sales department though, as they rely on a proprietary sales platform that is Windows only — and generally, sales personal give the biggest push back when it comes to organizational changes.)"
Science

CERN LHC Reaches Its Goals For 2010 90

Posted by CmdrTaco from the christmas-break-woohoo dept.
Anonymous Dupaeur writes "The goals for the first run of the most powerful particle collider (and the most energetic storage ring since ISR) were recently surpassing the 10^32 level of luminosity, with a destructive 15 MJ energy per-beam. This is a significant milestone, opening the way to collect more and more data. The current plan is to stop the proton collisions soon, and provide an ion (Pb) beam and conclude this year with a X-mass break. The next year is expected to bring at least one inverse femtobarn of data, which is achievable with such beam power. After that, the entire accelerator complex will be shut down for a year, due to budget costs for science in Europe."

Comment Re:Does anyone know (Score 1) 332

by Fulg (#33665370) Attached to: Introducing the Invulnerable Evercookie

XP Mode or Hyper-V, without the VT switch on, it will just laugh at you.

Actually there was an update early this year that removed the limitation, presumably because plenty of cheapo Dell PCs (for example) don't even expose the VT switch in their BIOSes (even though the CPU supports it).

I haven't noticed any speed difference in XP Mode or VirtualBox with or without VT.

Comment Re:Response to rampant speculation (Score 1) 370

by Fulg (#33653476) Attached to: DX11 Coming To Linux (But Not XP)

Oh, I certainly agree, WINE is quite an achievement. My point was that it's much too soon to celebrate an open-source DX11 implementation because they haven't started doing the hard part yet; look at how long it took WINE to get accelerated DX9 to a "mostly working (with limitations)" state...

Comment Re:Response to rampant speculation (Score 4, Insightful) 370

by Fulg (#33653232) Attached to: DX11 Coming To Linux (But Not XP)

Yes. It seems very likely to me that an open-source implementation of a Microsoft API, and implementation "in its infancy", will soon surpass Microsoft's own offering.

I was about to post the same thing. The summary is amazingly hasty in its conclusion... I mean, WINE has been at it for what, 10 years? They still don't have it working as well as the original. Not dissing WINE, but I mean, implementing the entry points of a published API is easy. Making it do the correct things under the hood is the hard part...

That being said, I can certainly applaud the effort, but this should be news once it's working otherwise it's meaningless.

Comment Re:Comment your code (Score 1) 590

by Fulg (#33492678) Attached to: Programming Things I Wish I Knew Earlier

Amen. The best practice I ever adopted was adding comments like "As per bug #1351", so that a year later I can remember why I picked took a seemingly screwy approach

I agree with the sentiment, but I prefer to be a bit more verbose than "bug #1351". Bug trackers change, projects change, access levels too. When bug #1351 in project ABC refers to a bug database that is no longer available, you'll still know what it refers to. No need for being excessively verbose, but just a simple explanation can help tremendously.. e.g. "bug #1351 - state ptr can be NULL when reloading". In my case we frequently re-use code from other projects, but seldom have access to their bug databases (and often they no longer exist).

Same thing for checkin comments - just telling me the bug number won't help me if I wasn't on your team.
Image

Snoop Dogg Joins the War On Cybercrime Screenshot-sm 164

Posted by samzenpus from the scanning-fo-shizzle dept.
wiredmikey writes "Think you can bust out some silly fresh rhymes on the subjects of hacking, identity theft and computer viruses? In a somewhat untraditional partnership, Snoop Dogg and Symantec's Norton want you to show off your their lyrical skills on the subject of cybercrime and enter the 'Hack is Wack' cybercrime rap contest. If you have the skills and bust out the phattest rap, you'll receive round trip airfare for two to Los Angeles along with two days and two nights' hotel stay to meet with Snoop's management, learn more about his business. You'll also get two tickets to a Snoop Dogg concert and a new laptop pimped out with Norton Internet Security 2011."
Image

Study Shows Monkeys Like Watching TV Screenshot-sm 103

Posted by samzenpus from the jungle-news-network dept.
According to a Japanese study, monkeys are not immune to the siren call of the idiot box. It seems rhesus monkeys enjoy watching videos of circus animals. From the article: "The study found that when the monkey was witnessing the acrobatic performances of circus animals on a television screen, the frontal lobe area of its brain became vigorously active. The activity in such an area was significant in reflecting the monkey's pleasure, as the human equivalent is a neurological area associated with triggering delight in a baby when it sees the smile of its mother."

Comment Re:nice...mostly (Score 1) 277

by Fulg (#32577888) Attached to: Microsoft Unveils Smaller Xbox 360 Model, Kinect Details

[...] I'm pretty sure you can just transfer your profile, saved games, arcade games to a regular old USB flash drive and then transfer all that stuff to a new console.

It's gonna take a while doing it manually.... More importantly, some content and some saved games cannot be moved to another storage device. If you use the transfer cable, everything is moved to the new hard drive in a single operation, including stuff that you cannot move manually.

It's too bad you can't replace your Xbox hard drive with a USB external drive (well you can, but you're limited to 16GB!), that would have been amazingly convenient.

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