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The Internet

PR Firm Unwisely Tangles With Penny Arcade 419

Posted by Soulskill from the internet-lynch-mob-engaged dept.
New submitter FSWKU writes "Courtesy of Penny-Arcade, Paul Christoforo of Ocean Marketing provides a perfect example of what not to do when interacting with customers, especially if you are doing so on behalf of another company. There's name dropping, an ego trip worthy of Charlie Sheen, and even what appears to be a promise to commit libel. Other outlets are already picking up the story and running with it, and an examination of Ocean Marketing's website has generated accusations of plagiarism."
GNOME

Ask Slashdot: Assembling a Linux Desktop Environment From Parts? 357

Posted by timothy from the gnome-panel-and-thunar dept.
paxcoder writes "Gnome Shell ... is different. Very much so. The fallback was inadequate. I suspect that many people, like me, turned to the alternatives. My choice was LXDE, which worked ok, until (lx-)panel broke in the unstable branch of the distro that I use. Tired of using the terminal to run stuff, I replaced the standard panel with the one from Xfce. That made me realize that we really don't need a packaged desktop environment, there are pieces ready for assembly. If you customize your graphical environment, what elements do you use? Which window manager, file manager, panel(etc.) would you recommend? Do you have a panel with a hardware usage monitors, how do you switch between workspaces? Anything cool we might not know about?"

Comment Re:Why not use it as a bargaining chip? (Score 1) 735

by endikos (#37639028) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Does Being 'Loyal' Pay As a Developer?

Yup. Give them an opportunity to make up the difference if you're more inclined to stay if the pay were right. If that doesnt work or if you'd rather leave anyway, give generous notice (I gave my last employer 4 weeks instead of the customary 2), and even offer to be available on a consultancy basis a few hours a week to help them through the transition. That'll also give you a bit of a further bonus in your pocketbook if they choose to do that.
Cloud

Cloud-Powered Facial Recognition Is Terrifying 286

Posted by Soulskill from the you-are-who-google-says-you-are dept.
oker sends this quote from The Atlantic: "With Carnegie Mellon's cloud-centric new mobile app, the process of matching a casual snapshot with a person's online identity takes less than a minute. Tools like PittPatt and other cloud-based facial recognition services rely on finding publicly available pictures of you online, whether it's a profile image for social networks like Facebook and Google Plus or from something more official from a company website or a college athletic portrait. In their most recent round of facial recognition studies, researchers at Carnegie Mellon were able to not only match unidentified profile photos from a dating website (where the vast majority of users operate pseudonymously) with positively identified Facebook photos, but also match pedestrians on a North American college campus with their online identities. ... '[C]onceptually, the goal of Experiment 3 was to show that it is possible to start from an anonymous face in the street, and end up with very sensitive information about that person, in a process of data "accretion." In the context of our experiment, it is this blending of online and offline data — made possible by the convergence of face recognition, social networks, data mining, and cloud computing — that we refer to as augmented reality.'
Idle

A Few Million Virtual Monkeys Randomly Recreate Shakespeare Screenshot-sm 312

Posted by samzenpus from the simpsons-did-it dept.
First time accepted submitter eljefe6a writes "On September 23 at 2:30 PST the A Million Amazonian Monkeys project successfully recreated A Lover's Complaint. This is the first time a work of Shakespeare has actually been randomly reproduced. It is one small step for a monkey, one giant leap for virtual primates everywhere. From the article: 'For this project, I used Hadoop, Amazon EC2, and Ubuntu Linux. Since I don’t have real monkeys, I have to create fake Amazonian Map Monkeys. The Map Monkeys create random data in ASCII between a and z. It uses Sean Luke’s Mersenne Twister to make sure I have fast, random, well behaved monkeys. Once the monkey’s output is mapped, it is passed to the reducer which runs the characters through a Bloom Field membership test. If the monkey output passes the membership test, the Shakespearean works are checked using a string comparison. If that passes, a genius monkey has written 9 characters of Shakespeare. The source material is all of Shakespeare’s works as taken from Project Gutenberg.'"
Handhelds

Fusion Garage Going After Lower-Price Tablet Market 196

Posted by Soulskill from the wising-up dept.
nk497 writes "Fusion Garage has dropped the price of its follow-up to the JooJoo tablet, cutting the Grid10's price by $200 to $299 in the US and £259 in the UK. Outspoken CEO Chandrasekar Rathakrishnan has clearly been following the HP TouchPad fire sale, and noticed the importance of price when it comes to taking on Apple's iPad. He said there's no point in buying 'a poor carbon copy' of the Apple tablet for the same price. 'At $499, why would you buy — it's like going to China and buying a [fake] Louis Vuitton bag, at the same price as the real Louis Vuitton bags. It doesn't make sense, when you know it's a rip-off product,' he said."
Censorship

Online Parody Cartoon Targeted For Prosecution 327

Posted by timothy from the what-renton-might-need-is-some-attention dept.
SeattleGameboy writes "It seems that the Renton (suburb of Seattle) police need a remedial course on the U.S. Constitution," linking to a story at Seattle TV station KIRO which says "The Renton City Prosecutor wants to send a cartoonist to jail for mocking the police department in a series of animated Internet videos. The 'South-Park'-style animations parody everything from officers having sex on duty to certain personnel getting promoted without necessary qualifications. While the city wants to criminalize the cartoons, First Amendment rights advocates say the move is an 'extreme abuse of power.'"

Comment Best of Both Worlds (Score 1) 341

by endikos (#36873008) Attached to: Why IT Won't Like Mac OS X Lion Server

Honestly, It seems to me that the things that are best done in a windowed environment (user management, policy management, etc) have been kept in a nice GUI, whereas the things that have been traditionally configured in text files or via the command line on *nix servers have been kept that way. Quit moaning about having to actually learn how to administer a server. I don't see how IT guys in a enterprise are really going to see this as a bad thing. If they already know how to administer a *nix box, they can administer a OSX box. I can see this affecting shops that are solely OSX Server environments, but those are the exception, not the rule.
Biotech

Scientists Breeding Super Bees 248

Posted by samzenpus from the what-could-go-wrong dept.
Elliot Chang writes "Over the last five years the world's honey bee population has been steadily dwindling, with many beekeepers citing 2010 as the worst year yet. In order to save these extremely important insects, scientists are working on breeding a new super honey bee that they hope will be resistant to cold, disease, mites and pesticides. If all goes well, the new and improved insect will continue to pollinate our crops for years to come."
Displays

Computer De-Evolution: Awesome Features We've Lost 662

Posted by samzenpus from the way-of-the-dodo dept.
jfruhlinger writes "If you listened to tech marketing departments, you'd believe that advances in computers have been a nonstop march upwards. But is that really true? What about all the great features early hackers had in the '70s and '80s that are now hard to find or lost forever, like clicky keyboards and customizable screen height? This article looks at much beloved features that lost the evolutionary war."

Comment Re:a gun (Score 1) 825

by endikos (#33204384) Attached to: Where To Start With DIY Home Security?

Perhaps material possessions aren't worth risking your life, but protecting your family is. Besides, this seems backwards somehow. Someone that breaks into my home needs to assess whether it's worth risking their life and well-being in order to attempt to steal my possessions and put myself and my family at risk.

Submission + - Da Vinci Chess Mystery (educationalchess.com)

Submitted by Anaid9
Anaid9 writes: Who was Da Vinci? A scientist, an inventor, an artist, and possibly...a chess master? A recent discovery of a chess journal by Luca Paccioli who was a friend and a collaborator of Da Vinci's point to the fact that some of the chess puzzles in the journal may have been drawn by Da Vinci. In fact, some of the references in Da Vinci's own manuscripts had chess references. Should that surprise us?

Comment Re:Wrong tag (Score 2, Insightful) 288

by endikos (#32538676) Attached to: Mass SQL Injection Attack Hits Sites Running IIS

Not saying it is a problem with SQL. Some SQL statements are being injected into a script, which is then happily executing them. The problem is with the script, but SQL is being injected into it... which is why its known as SQL injection. The term does not imply that the root of the problem is with SQL itself. It's a variant of Code Injection, but with SQL instead...

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