fysdt - Slashdot User

Submission + - Study: Internet Explorer Users Have Lower IQ (socialbarrel.com)

Submitted by

fysdt

on Saturday July 30, 2011 @10:08AM

fysdt writes: "Users of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer web browser have lower IQ than their counterparts who use other browsers, a study from a web consulting firm reveals.

According to a large study conducted by Vancouver, Canada-based AptiQuant, those who use the Internet Explorer web browser scored lower in an IQ test they conducted.

The large study which involved 100,000 participants says Internet Explorer users scored lower than average in the IQ test."

Submission + - Mind Control: Brain Waves Control Car (go.com)

Submitted by

fysdt

on Friday July 29, 2011 @12:17PM

fysdt writes: "It's the future. You're racing down the highway when, all of a sudden, the driver ahead of you slows down. You know you need to hit the brakes to avoid an accident, but your foot can't move as fast as your brain. You're about to rear-end the guy, except. ... ... except that your car has read your mind. It picks up your brain waves and automatically slows down. Accident averted."

Submission + - Apple holding more cash than USA (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by

fysdt

on Friday July 29, 2011 @11:22AM

fysdt writes: "Apple now has more cash to spend than the United States government.

Latest figures from the US Treasury Department show that the country has an operating cash balance of $73.7bn (£45.3bn).

Apple's most recent financial results put its reserves at $76.4bn (£46.9bn).

The US House of Representatives is due to vote on a bill to raise the country's debt ceiling, allowing it to borrow more money to cover spending commitments.

If it fails to extend the current limit of $14.3 trillion (£8.7tn) dollars, the federal government could find itself struggling to make payments, and risks the loss of its AAA credit rating."

Submission + - It's official - computerised agents do it better! (soton.ac.uk)

Submitted by

fysdt

on Friday July 29, 2011 @11:20AM

fysdt writes: "Robot trading agents, which already dominate the foreign exchange markets, have now been definitively shown to beat human traders at the same game.

Results presented at a conference last Friday (22 July) showed beyond doubt that computerized trading agents, using the Adaptive Aggressiveness (AA) strategy developed at the University of Southampton in 2008, can beat both human traders and robot traders using any other strategy.

The new results were obtained after a re-run of the well-known IBM experiment (2001) where human traders competed against state-of-the-art computerised trading agents — and lost.

Ten years on, experiments carried out by Marco De Lucas and Professor Dave Cliff of the University of Bristol have shown that AA is now the leading strategy, able to beat both robot traders and humans."

Submission + - Apple wins global smartphone crown, Nokia now 3rd (cnet.com)

Submitted by

fysdt

on Friday July 29, 2011 @11:15AM

fysdt writes: "Apple, followed closely by Samsung Electronics, overtook Nokia in global smartphone market share during the second quarter.

Apple controlled nearly a fifth of the smartphone market, or a share of 18.5%, as it shipped more than 20 million iPhones, according to market research firm Strategy Analytics. Samsung Electronics wasn't far behind, with 17.5% of the market share and 19.2 million smartphones shipped. Nokia fell to third, with its market share plunging by more than half to 15.2% from 38.1% a year ago."

Submission + - iOS Pulling Developer Interest From Android (pcmag.com)

Submitted by

fysdt

on Sunday July 17, 2011 @02:13PM

fysdt writes: "The iOS platform has generated more support from developers between the first and second quarters of 2011. But new numbers from analytics platform Flurry don't necessarily mean that Android developers are unsatisfied with the platform. Rather, the launch of Apple's iPhone on Verizon and the launch of the iPad 2 itself have been large factors in the developer pendulum swinging over to iOS over the past quarter."

Submission + - Why opposing HTML5 and Flash is a non-sense (forbes.com)

Submitted by

fysdt

on Sunday July 17, 2011 @02:11PM

fysdt writes: "HTML5 is a hot topic, which is a good thing. The problem is that 99% of the writings has been about HTML5 replacing Flash. Why is it a problem? Because not only it is irrelevant, but also it prevent you from getting the big picture about interoperability."

Submission + - Google Plus Runs Out Of Disk Space; Spams Users (digitizor.com)

Submitted by dkd903 on Sunday July 10, 2011 @10:15AM

dkd903 writes: Yesterday, many users of Google+ noticed Google spamming their inbox with multiple email notifications in very quick succession. Earlier today, Vic Gundotra, Head of Social at Google, explained what was causing it – Google ran out of disk space on the server that keeps track of notifications.

Submission + - IMF Chief Calls on US to Raise Borrowing Limit (go.com)

Submitted by

fysdt

on Sunday July 10, 2011 @10:01AM

fysdt writes: "The International Monetary Fund's new chief foresees "real nasty consequences" for the U.S. and global economies if the U.S. fails to raise its borrowing limit.

Christine Lagarde, the first woman to head the lending institution, said in an interview broadcast Sunday that it would cause interest rates to rise and stock markets to fall. That would threaten an important IMF goal, which is preserving stability in the world economy, she said.

The U.S. borrowing limit is $14.3 trillion. Obama administration officials say the U.S. would begin to default without an agreement by Aug. 2.

Lagarde, who took over as managing director July 5, also addressed the fallout stemming from the sexual assault charges filed against her predecessor, Dominique Strauss-Kahn."

Comment Abstraction layer (Score 1) 509

by fysdt on Saturday July 09, 2011 @10:37AM (#36704276) Attached to: Facebook Trapped In MySQL a 'Fate Worse Than Death'

They would probably need to build an abstraction layer on top of MySQL. Something like "FBSQL" :) . This would create the ability to move to whatever database system they want.

Submission + - Who Wants to Live Forever?

Submitted by

Hugh Pickens writes

on Friday July 08, 2011 @12:47PM

Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Reuters reports that if biomedical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey's predictions are right, the first person who will live to see their 150th birthday has already been born and the first person who will live to 1,000 is likely to be born less than 20 years after the first person to reach 150. De Grey, chief scientist of the non-profit California-based "Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence" Foundation sees a time when people will go to their doctors for regular "maintenance," which by then will include gene therapies, stem cell therapies, immune stimulation and a range of other advanced medical techniques to keep them in good shape. "I'd say we have a 50/50 chance of bringing aging under what I'd call a decisive level of medical control within the next 25 years or so," says de Grey. De Grey's ideas may seem far-fetched, but in 2005 MIT Technology Review journal offered $20,000 to any molecular biologist who showed that de Grey's SENS theory was "so wrong that it was unworthy of learned debate" — a prize that has never been won. But for some, a world composed of healthy, powerful, composed, careful people in their seventies, eighties, nineties, or hundreds, or the prospect of living for hundreds of years is not particularly attractive, as it conjures up an image of generations of sick, weak old people and societies increasingly less able to cope. "This is absolutely not a matter of keeping people alive in a bad state of health," says de Grey. "This is about preventing people from getting sick as a result of old age. The particular therapies that we are working on will only deliver long life as a side effect of delivering better health.""

Submission + - German parliament backs nuclear exit by 2022 (physorg.com)

Submitted by

fysdt

on Friday July 08, 2011 @10:28AM

fysdt writes: "The German parliament sealed plans Friday to phase out nuclear energy by 2022, making the country the first major industrial power to take the step in the wake of the disaster at Japan's Fukushima plant.

The nuclear exit scheme cleared its final hurdle in the Bundesrat upper house, which represents the 16 regional states, after the legislation passed the Bundestag lower house with an overwhelming majority last week.

Germany's seven oldest reactors were already switched off after Japan's massive March 11 earthquake and tsunami knocked out cooling systems at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, causing reactors to overheat and radiation to leak.

A further reactor has been shut for years because of technical problems."

Submission + - Gene study offers clues on memory puzzle (medicalxpress.com)

Submitted by

fysdt

on Friday July 08, 2011 @10:26AM

fysdt writes: "Scientists have shed light on why it is easier to learn about things related to what we already know than it is to learn about unfamiliar things, according to a new study.

The team says this is a paradox, as very different things are arguably more novel, yet adding to what we already know is so much easier.

Researchers at the Universities of Edinburgh and Tokyo have found that building on existing knowledge activates a key set of genes in the brain.

These 'plasticity' genes do not respond so well to subjects about which we know very little, making it harder for us to form new memories about unfamiliar topics.

The team says this could help us understand how professionals acquire their knowledge gradually over time and may inform new educational strategies to boost learning."

Submission + - A-Team publishes list of alleged LulzSec members (latimes.com)

Submitted by

fysdt

on Monday June 27, 2011 @02:51PM

fysdt writes: "An Internet hacker group calling itself the A-Team has published a document it claims reveals the identities of at least some members of the recently retired hacker network LulzSec, including phone numbers, addresses, Facebook URLs and even the identities of some of their relatives and associates.

The A-Team exposed the names of seven individuals, the first name of two others, information on a 10th and implied that there was another member of LulzSec who they were unable to find out about.

The A-Team, which said it has been following some members of LulzSec since a large online attack on the media network Gawker in December, said the group claimed to only be causing havoc for entertainment because they would only expose random information they could find."

Submission + - Google Boots Transdroid From Android Market (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by

fysdt

on Sunday June 26, 2011 @04:37PM

fysdt writes: "Google has pulled one of the most popular torrent download managers from the Android Market because of policy violations. Before Google booted the application, Transdroid had been available for two years and amassed 400,000 users during that time. Thus far Google hasn’t specified what the exact nature of Transdoid’s violations are, but it’s not unlikely that they relate to copyright infringement.

For many Android users Transdroid is the perfect remote access app for managing their BitTorrent clients on the go. The app allows users to start and stop torrents, search torrent files and even use the barcode scanner to find matching torrent files.

Transdroid offered both a free and a paid version of the app, and judging from the 400,000 downloads people seemed to appreciate it. However, as of this week, Google decided that Transdroid is no longer eligible to be placed in the Android Market."

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