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Windows

British Royal Navy Submarines Now Run Windows 725

Posted by samzenpus from the deep-blue-screen dept.
meist3r writes "On his Government blog, Microsoft's Ian McKenzie announced today that the Royal Navy was ahead of schedule for switching their nuclear submarines to a customized Microsoft Windows solution dubbed 'Submarine Command System Next Generation (SMCS NG)' which apparently consists of Windows 2000 network servers and XP workstations. In the article, it is claimed that this decision will save UK taxpayers £22m over the next ten years. The installation of the new system apparently took just 18 days on the HMS Vigilant. According to the BAE Systems press release from 2005, the overall cost of the rollout was £24.5m for all eleven nuclear submarines of the Vanguard, Trafalgar and Swiftsure classes. Talk about staying with the sinking ship."
The Internet

Wikipedia's New Definition of Truth 428

Posted by kdawson from the beware-the-man-with-the-lantern dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Simson Garfinkel has an interesting essay on MIT Technology Review in which he examines the way that Wikipedia has redefined the commonly accepted use of the word 'truth.' While many academic experts have argued that Wikipedia's articles can't be trusted because they are written and edited by volunteers who have never been vetted, studies have found that the articles are remarkably accurate. 'But wikitruth isn't based on principles such as consistency or observability. It's not even based on common sense or firsthand experience,' says Garfinkel. What makes a fact or statement fit for inclusion is verifiability — that it appeared in some other publication, but there is a problem with appealing to the authority of other people's written words: many publications don't do any fact checking at all, and many of those that do simply call up the subject of the article and ask if the writer got the facts wrong or right. Wikipedia's policy of 'No Original Research' also leads to situations like Jaron Lanier's frustrated attempts to correct his own Wikipedia entry based on firsthand knowledge of his own career. So what is Wikipedia's truth? 'Since Wikipedia is the most widely read online reference on the planet, it's the standard of truth that most people are implicitly using when they type a search term into Google or Yahoo. On Wikipedia, truth is received truth: the consensus view of a subject.'"

Comment Re:projection (Score 2, Interesting) 596

by gaijin99 (#25439761) Attached to: How Much Storage Will You Use 10 Years From Now?

You can store around one year of moderate quality video/audio, (by which, I guess, I mean fairly low quality by today's standards) and GPS location, in just ten terabytes. Trigger high quality only for stuff you're really interested in, and a few very high quality still shots and you can probably still squeeze in a year of recording in only a bit more than that. Call it eleven terabytes.

Add a video search and you'd never be asking "now where did I leave my keys?" Or, rather, you'd be asking, and your AI assistant would do a quick video search of the past few hours, and tell you "you left them locked in the car. Again." (my AI assistant would be snide, sarcastic, and treat me with a combination of difference and thinly veiled contempt; because I think it'd be fun, that's why. Ideally I'd license Jeremy Irons' voice for my AI assistant.)

Of course there's a whole raft of legal/moral/ethical/privacy problems associated with that, but assuming Moore's law holds steady we ought to be seeing 10TB of portable storage costing only around $10 or so by 2018. Our lives will be recorded, the only real question is: by us, or by a panopticon state? Again, I argue that David Brin's "Transparent Society" is well worth the read.

Storing all sensory input would be interesting, and likely take a lot more storage. But I doubt we'll be seeing that available (at least to the general public) in ten years.
Politics

Internet Co-inventor Vint Cerf Endorses Obama 713

Posted by CmdrTaco from the time-to-play-that-game dept.
SEAActionFund writes "Vint Cerf, Google's Chief Internet Evangelist who also happens to be credited with co-founding the Internet, submitted a video to our AVoteforScience YouTube challenge. In it he discusses the importance of net neutrality and endorses Barack Obama specifically because he supports net neutrality (John McCain does not.) The AVoteForScience challenge calls upon scientists to upload videos to YouTube explaining who they are voting for and why. The first two videos were by Cerf and the 2008 Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry Marty Chalfie. Any Slashdotters game for explaining who they are voting for and why?" Still waiting for one of the campaigns to ask for my endorsement, which is totally available to whichever campaign offers me the better cabinet seat.
Politics

Journal Journal: Interesting strategy from FoxNews

Journal by gaijin99

Here we see an interesting new strategy: the carefully timed retraction. FoxNews has recently began posting stories containing false information about John Kerry. The first was the story containing made up quotes intended to make Kerry look effeminant [1]. The second was a story in which they quoted the anti-Kerry group "Communists For Kerry" as if they were a genuine pro-Kerry group. When they quoted Billionares for Bush they made it quite clear that they were an anti-Bush group.

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