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Comment Re:Required "malware" (Score 1) 120

by Jimme Blue (#41506217) Attached to: PlaceRaider Builds a Model of Your World With Smartphone Photos

What's the alternative? A sound of some kind can be very useful when taking a picture - making it unique is also useful, and it doesn't really matter if kids these days don't know the etymology. Ditto saving - it's pretty much an entirely abstract concept these days, but it still needs an icon.

I've noticed a disturbing sharp turn to anachronism in the tech field lately.

There's been no "turn" - there's just nowhere else to go.

Slashdot discussed this issue earlier in the year, for those interested:
http://ask.slashdot.org/story/04/03/17/1454213/modernizing-the-save-icon
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/05/13/0310219/icons-that-dont-make-sense-anymore

Comment Re:Another nail for XP (Score 1) 296

by Jimme Blue (#41343945) Attached to: Google Kills Apps Support For Internet Explorer 8

The summary leaves out the interesting part: IE8 is the latest version available for Windows XP. And there's no place that XP exists more than business, education, and government. This is Google's way to get sysadmins comfortable with Chrome in the workplace.

Having read the FA (hanging my head in shame (which is stressing my youvh yypinh dkilld) ), it looks like this is only touching upon the web-access apps.

Does anyone know if there are Google Appliance apps, similar to Google Search appliances? I know that I've run across Google search appliances on small & large scales (various gov-controlled, closed networks), but I've not seen (or recognized) any implementations of their apps on these aforementioned appliances.

It seems to me that affecting _those_ networks would really be turning the screws on XP.
Math

Submission + - The Chaos Within Sudoku - A Richter Scale Of Difficulty (i-programmer.info) 2

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: A pair of computer scientists from the Babes-Bolyai University (Romania) and the University of Notre Dame (USA) have made some remarkable connections between Sudoku, the classic k-SAT problem, and the even more classic non-linear continuous dynamics. But before we go into the detail let's look at what this means for Sudoku enthusiasts. Maria Ercsey-Ravasz and Zoltan Toroczkai have devised a scale that provides an accurate determination of a Sudoku puzzle's hardness. So when you encounter a puzzle labelled hard and you find it easy all you need to do is to compute its , a co-efficient that measures the hardness of the problem. An easy puzzle should fall in the range 0 3 with the hardest puzzle, the notorious Platinum Blond being top of the scale with = 3.6. We will have to wait to see if newspapers and websites start to use this measure of difficulty. The difficulty is measured by the time it takes the classical dynamics corresponding to the problem to settle in the ground state and this depends on the degree of chaos in the search for a solution. The Chaos Within Sudoku (pdf)

Comment Re:Nonsense... it is 100% effective (Score 5, Informative) 490

by Jimme Blue (#40837349) Attached to: US Navy Admiral Questions Expensive Stealth Platforms

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/07/f-22-germans/

"...individual German Typhoons flew against single F-22s in basic fighter maneuvers meant to simulate a close-range dogfight.

The results were a surprise to the Germans and presumably the Americans, too. “We were evenly matched,” Maj. Marc Gruene told Combat Aircraft’s Jamie Hunter. The key, Gruene said, is to get as close as possible to the F-22 and stay there. “They didn’t expect us to turn so aggressively.”"

I don't doubt this report. However, my understanding is that the point of F-22 is to conduct its engagements at long-range and avoid these close-range knife fights. If the threat gets to dog-fighting range, the F-22s have screwed up and lost their greatest advantages.

Submission + - American-Made Fighter, Flown By Brit, Found in Egyptian Desert By Pole. (cnn.com)

Submitted by Jimme Blue
Jimme Blue writes: In the latest instance of long-lost WWII aircraft arising from the mists of .... erm, in this case the desert (previously http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/11/world/british-wwii-plane/index.html?hpt=hp_c1) a P-40 Kittyhawk has been found in remarkably good condition. A shiny nickel goes to the first person that can tell us where to find it on Google Earth!

Comment Re:Baloney (Score 2) 467

by Jimme Blue (#39683083) Attached to: Magical Thinking Is Good For You

But even for those few of us who claim to be complete skeptics, belief quietly sneaks in.

Nope. Not a bit of it. In my experience, only believers believe that everyone else must secretly be a believer. The rest of us live a fact-based life.

I agree with you 100%.

I'm a rationalist, I've convinced myself that organized religions are man-made for the enrichment of their power-brokers, I know that there is no evidence for an interventionist god in the modern world, and I'm am certain beyond a shadow of a doubt that astrology, crystology, pyramidism, and their ilk are without basis in fact.

Having said that, I will move heaven (ha!) and earth to ensure that I wear my lucky jockstrap when i suit up for the game on Sunday mornings.
Hardware

Submission + - Enterprise Grade Vending Machine Monitored by Enterprise Grade OpenNMS (openvnd.org)

Submitted by mjhuot
mjhuot writes: The folks at OpenNMS decided for a twist on April Fools and did some actual work that looks like a joke. They set up a vending machine to demonstrate that OpenNMS can track anything as long as it is network reachable. Using a drink vending machine with a UCS/DEX inventory interface connected to a Linux PC they can now look at data collection, thresholds, and some beautiful reports on their drink consumption.
Networking

Submission + - How to subnet IPv6 ? (anuragbhatia.com)

Submitted by suraj.sun
suraj.sun writes: Subnetting IPv6 sounds very complex but all you need to do is how an address is formed and how to efficiently use CIDR notation. An IPv6 address has 8 sections seprated by coloums and each sections has carries 4 hexadecimal digits(http://anuragbhatia.com/networking/how-to-subnet-ipv6/). So an IPv6 address is something like: xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx – Each x can have a hexa decimal value i.e from 0 to 9 and a to f. This turns out to be 16 + 16 + 16 + 16 + 16 + 16 + 16 + 16 bits = 128bit, which means total possible addresses in IPv6 space is 2^128.

In most of cases RIRs like ARIN/APNIC allocate a /32 IPv6 block. This means first 2 sections 16+16 bits are reserved and rest 6 sections i.e 128-32 = 96 bits are available for use. Let’s pick example of Google’s block, 2404:6800::/32 from APNIC in Asia. Since only first 32 bits are reserved, block 2404:6800::/32 goes from 2404:6800:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000 to 2404:6800:FFFF:FFFF:FFFF:FFFF:FFFF:FFFF
The Courts

Submission + - Federal Judge Rules P2P users aren't in a Conspiracy (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by
Fluffeh
Fluffeh writes: "Judge Holderman ruled against copyright holders who were trying to paint a rather distorted picture. They sue just one Internet user, but use that lawsuit as a pretext to subpoena other defendants who had participated in the same BitTorrent swarm. The plaintiffs in these lawsuits claim that the other users had participated in a "conspiracy" to assist one another in distributing particular copyrighted works. Because the copyright holder's threat is based on the cost of litigation (and risk of public embarrassment — as this is a tactic used increasingly by the pron industry) more so than the damages a defendant would face in the event of a loss, innocent defendants have virtually as much incentive to settle as guilty ones do. That's not how things are supposed to work, and more and more judges are refusing to play along. Coupled with recent rulings in Florida, the copyright holders seem to be finding less and less favour with judges."
Space

Submission + - Mike Smith (Bubbles) leading the Race for Space

Submitted by reovirus1
reovirus1 writes: Mike Smith, the character Bubbles on the Canadian TV show Trailer Park Boys is leading the
  Race for Space
  contest that will send one lucky reader into space. Throughout the series, Bubbles often talks about his love for space and his lifelong desire to become a spaceman someday, but his poor eyesight has always prevented him from even owning a drivers license. Its a fictional show obviously, but Bubbles desire to go to space on the show was actually born out of my love of space and rocketry. It has been a hobby of mine since I was 5 years old. If I win this chance to go to space, I intend to shoot a documentary of the entire process leading up to the flight, in hopes of inspiring a new generation of young people to become involved in space exploration.
Privacy

Submission + - ACLU Obtains Cell Phone Tracking Training Materials

Submitted by guttentag
guttentag writes: The New York Times has published a large collection of law enforcement training documents obtained by the ACLU. The documents describe in detail what kind of information can be obtained from cell phones and cell phone carriers, and how to obtain it. The 189-page PDF also contains dozens of invoices from the major carriers for their services to law enforcement that describe the fees for those services.
Australia

Submission + - Australian WiFi inventors win US legal battle (yahoo.com)

Submitted by Kangburra
Kangburra writes: Australian government science body CSIRO said Sunday it had won a multi-million-dollar legal settlement in the United States to license its patented technology that underpins the WiFi platform worldwide.
AMD

Submission + - Google NativeClient CPU Whitelist Maintained By Ex-Intel Director (google.com)

Submitted by HuvahCraftah
HuvahCraftah writes: Apparently, anti-competitive habits die hard. After leaving his Director position at Intel, Brad Chen became the gatekeeper at Google for which processors you are allowed to run NativeClient apps on. When confronted, he initially cites "incorrect x86 implementations" as the main concern and then bizarrely turns that upside-down and says that only processors with documented incorrect x86 implementations are allowed to run NativeClient applications.
Space

Submission + - Pulsars For Spacecraft Navigation (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by Jimme Blue
Jimme Blue writes: The use of pulsars as a GPS analogue holds the promise of fixing a spacecraft's location to within 5 km, anywhere in the galaxy. While not ready for immediate use, it may be ready for use within the Solar System in the next 10-15 years.

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