AmyVernon - Slashdot User

Submission + - IT Guy Wanted -- Must Have Own Tools (infoworld.com) 2

Submitted by

snydeq

on Monday February 06, 2012 @02:20PM

snydeq writes: "If you work in IT, you not only put your heart and soul into your job, you often sacrifice your own hardware to the cause, writes Deep End's Paul Venezia. 'Often, small-but-critical parts slip from personal stores into the corporate maw. Sometimes I feel like a teacher who has spent his own money on school supplies — and I'm certain I'm not alone. Who knows how many IT folks have used their own gear to get projects completed on time or to save the day while troubleshooting, only to leave those parts behind because they've become indispensible?'"

Submission + - NFL Issues False DMCA Take Down of Chrysler Ad? (jalopnik.com)

Submitted by fostytou on Monday February 06, 2012 @01:22PM

fostytou writes: The NFL issued a DMCA takedown of a Chrysler ad from last night's superbowl. This caused an incredible amount of lost viewership as well as losing ranking on most-viewed lists which can often offer millions of future advertising at no cost to the advertiser. The potential cost to Chrysler is significant.

The obvious parallel to SOPA / ACTA is exactly why these types of bills must be considered very carefully.

Submission + - Nascent Graphene Institute Makes Steps Towards Transistors (techweekeurope.co.uk)

Submitted by

judgecorp

on Monday February 06, 2012 @12:32PM

judgecorp writes: "A research team at Manchester has taken a big step towards building transistors with graphene. So far graphene's marvelous conductiviity has actually proved a drawback, but the team has sandwiched a layer of molybdenum disulfide between layers of graphene to provide a high on/off ratio. Also, the British Government is finding £50 million to fund Manchester as a centre for graphene study and development, led by two professors there, Sir Kostya Novoselov and Sir Andre Geim, who shared the 2010 Nobel prize for Physics for their work on graphene."

Submission + - Complicated Schizophrenia Treatment: There's An App For That? (vice.com)

Submitted by

pigrabbitbear

on Monday February 06, 2012 @12:09PM

pigrabbitbear writes: "Welcome to the age of mobile mind medicine. A research team in Norway, led by Professor Kenneth Hugdahl of the University of Bergen, is in the early stages of developing a mobile app for schizophrenic patients. The app is designed to help schizophrenics train their brain to ignore the ultra-realistic, often unsettling inner voices characteristic of severe cases of the disease."

Submission + - BlackBerry Pins Hopes on Masked Superheroes (ibtimes.co.uk)

Submitted by AlistairCharlton on Tuesday January 31, 2012 @12:28PM

AlistairCharlton writes: After the slow-motion plane crash that was 2011, Research in Motion feels that 2012 is the year to turn its BlackBerry brand around, and a team of cartoon superheroes is — apparently — the answer.

Submission + - AMD's New Radeon HD 7950 Tested (hothardware.com)

Submitted by

MojoKid

on Tuesday January 31, 2012 @12:28PM

MojoKid writes: "When AMD announced the high-end Radeon HD 7970, a lower cost Radeon HD 7950 based on the same GPU was planned to arrive a few weeks later. The GPU, which is based on AMD's new architecture dubbed Graphics Core Next, is manufactured using TSMC’s 28nm process and features a whopping 4.31 billion transistors. In its full configuration, found on the Radeon HD 7970, the Tahiti GPU sports 2,048 stream processors with 128 texture units and 32 ROPs. On the Radeon HD 7950, however, a few segments of the GPU have been disabled, resulting in a total of 1,792 active stream processors, with 112 texture units and 32 ROPs. The Radeon HD 7950 is also clocked somewhat lower at 800MHz, although AMD has claimed the cards are highly overclockable. Performance-wise, though the card isn't AMD's fastest, pricing is more palatable and the new card actually beats NVIDIA's high-end GeForce GTX 580 by just a hair."

Submission + - New software makes building your own custom Androi (lunduke.com)

Submitted by TroysBucket on Tuesday January 31, 2012 @12:24PM

TroysBucket writes: A new tool that sprang out of the XDA Developer community, called Easy Development Suite, is aimed at automating the process of building your own custom Android Rom's — and making it accessible for people new to the process.

Submission + - Google "Does No Evil"... (reuters.com)

Submitted by

alreaud

on Tuesday January 31, 2012 @12:17PM

alreaud writes: "Looking at Google's concept of "Do No Evil", one has to ask: "How does skipping the most popular question on YouTube to President Obama serve the concept of Do No Evil?" Monday, the POTUS had a Google+ hangout, and the most voted upon question on YouTube was: "Mr. President, my name is Stephen Downing, and I'm a retired deputy chief of police from the Los Angeles Police Department. From my decades of law enforcement experience I have come to see our country's drug policies as a failure and a complete waste of criminal justice resources. According to the Gallup Poll, the number of Americans who support legalizing and regulating marijuana now outnumber those who support continuing prohibition. What do you say to this growing voter constituency that wants more changes to drug policy than you have delivered in your first term?""

Submission + - NASA launches Android phones into space as cheap s (treehugger.com) 1

Submitted by AmyVernon on Thursday January 19, 2012 @12:13PM

AmyVernon writes: It's the NexusOne PhoneSat project:
"Its goal is to determine if low-cost mobile phone components can withstand space travel. Not only must they reach orbit without shaking apart but they have to function within a vacuum and operate at both extremely high and low temperatures. And, of course, they'll have to travel a lot higher than 28,000 feet. The group is comprised of NASA Ames students, Google employees and two NASA contractors. "

Submission + - Internet Access IS A Human Right (techi.com)

Submitted by AmyVernon on Thursday January 05, 2012 @01:03PM

AmyVernon writes: In response to Vinton Cerf's assertion that it is not (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/05/opinion/internet-access-is-not-a-human-right.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all), the writer posits that access to the Internet is, indeed, a human right today.

To wit:
"The question really comes down to delivery of rights. Rather than trying to play around with semantics, we should be looking at the results of the last couple of years and make the determination based upon three questions:

1) Is it possible in the near future to create an infrastructure that would make internet access available to nearly everyone in the world?
2) Would making internet access available worldwide to the vast majority of people foster positive changes in every culture and every society?
3) Are those without internet access less able to prosper?"

In answering those three questions, it's pretty easy to see this access is vital to human rights today, and therefore is a basic human right.

Submission + - Anonymous launches Nazi-leaks.net, targeting Germa (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by H3xx on Thursday January 05, 2012 @01:02PM

H3xx writes: Following the start of Operation Blitzkrieg, a campaign against neo-nazi and other far-right sites, Nazi-leaks.net [currently down], a Wikileaks-style site was launched today.

"We hereby call to you to identify sites where the nazis gather... collect the data and co-ordinate attacks," Anonymous' announcement from May 2011 said.

The site includes some National Democratic Party (NPD) emails, customer lists from far-right stores, as well as contact information from a weekly paper, and a list of individuals the hacker group alleges are donors to the NPD, who are reportedly considering legal action against the site.

Submission + - An interactive guide to who is for and against SOP (sopaopera.org)

Submitted by

zokuga

on Thursday January 05, 2012 @12:57PM

zokuga writes: "When I started reading up about SOPA, I was frustrated with how hard it was to find even a simple list of who has come out for or against SOPA/PROTECT-IP. So I put this site together as a way to easily see the tally and compare the lawmakers."

Submission + - Top TV production company drops FCP for Avid (edibleapple.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 05, 2012 @12:55PM

An anonymous reader writes: Despite a wave of optimism preceding its release, Apple created a storm of controversy when it released a revamped version of Final Cut Pro, dubbed Final Cut Pro X, this past Summer. Professional video editors, by and large, were incensed at what they categorized as ‘dumbing down’ of the product by which they earned their living.

A few months later, Bunim/Murray Productions, the company behind such popular reality Television shows like The Real World and Keeping up with the Kardashians, looked at the video editing landscape and decided to drop FCP in favor of a solution from Avid.

Submission + - The Internet Is Not a Human Right (nytimes.com) 1

Submitted by JDRucker on Thursday January 05, 2012 @12:44PM

JDRucker writes: Vinton G. Cerf, one of the "fathers of the internet" argues that the United Nations is going too far with their claims that the internet access should be a human right. Cerf believes it's a means to an end, not the end itself. I disagree.

Submission + - Study: Parasitic Fly Could Explain Bee Die-Off (npr.org)

Submitted by

walterbyrd

on Thursday January 05, 2012 @12:36PM

walterbyrd writes: "Northern California scientists say they have found a possible explanation for the honey bee die-off: a parasitic fly that hijacks the bees' bodies and causes them to abandon hives. . . The symptoms mirror colony collapse disorder, in which all the adult honey bees in a colony suddenly disappear. The disorder continues to decimate hives in the U.S. and overseas."

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