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Submission + - Gates, Zuckerberg Promising Same Jobs to US Kids and Foreign H-1B Workers? 1

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Over at the Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg-bankrolled Code.org, they're using the number of open computing jobs in each state to convince parents of the need to expand K-12 CS offerings so their kids can fill those jobs. Sounds good, right? But at the same time, the Gates and Zuckerberg-bankrolled FWD.org PAC has taken to Twitter, using the number of open "STEM" jobs in each state to convince politicians of the need to expand the number of H-1B visas so foreign workers can fill those jobs. While the goal of Microsoft's 'two-pronged' National Talent Strategy is to kill two birds [K-12 CS education and H-1B visas] with one crisis, is it cool for organizations backed by many of the same wealthy individuals to essentially promise the same jobs to U.S. kids and foreign H-1B workers?

Comment Only when I say 'Buy" first! (Score 1) 35

by leftover (#49707405) Attached to: Report: Google To Add 'Buy' Buttons To Mobile Search Results

Sometimes when I do a search my intent is to consider buying something but that is fewer than 3% of my searches. I am continually annoyed by the barrage of sales-oriented items and pre-emptive ads when I really wanted a spec sheet.

I would cheerfully say "buy" as one of the keywords if that is my intent. That should be a more valuable click-through to boot.

Submission + - A Wind Turbine without Blades

Submitted by rtoz
rtoz writes: Vortex Bladeless is a Spanish tech start-up. It wants to completely change the way we get energy from the wind. Think wind stick instead of a massive tower with blades that capture blowing winds.

The Vortex is a new kind of Wind Turbine being developed without any blades.
The conical shape harnesses the oscillating motion caused by the wind and converts that to kinetic energy.

When wind hits a structure and flows over its surfaces the flow changes and generates a cyclical pattern of vortices at the tail end of the flow. This is known as the vortex shedding effect which creates something known as vorticity and that is what Vortex Bladeless uses to generate energy.

Vorticity has long been considered the enemy of architects and engineers, who actively try to design their way around these whirlpools of wind.

Where designers see danger, Vortex Bladeless’s founders sees opportunity. The team started Vortex Bladeless in 2010 as a way to turn this vibrating energy into something productive.

This is not your usual wind turbine. It consists of a fixed mast, a power generator that has no moving parts which come into contact with each other and a semi-rigid fiberglass cylinder. The power generator is a system of magnetic coupling devices which means there are no gears needing lubrication and an overall system needing less maintenance.

The Vortex team says there are some clear advantages to their model It’s less expensive to manufacture, totally silent, and safer for birds since there are no blades to fly into.

According to conservative estimates: Vortex saves 53% in manufacturing costs and 51% in operating costs compared to conventional wind turbines.

Vortex is much smaller than traditional wind turbines, allowing you to use your space more efficiently.

Initially, the co-founders were looking at large generating devices. That remains a longer-term goal but a much shorter range goal is a device of 4kW Vortex that would be about 13 meters tall. The company sees this generator being used in conjunction with solar generation for homes that are either off the grid or want to be off the grid.

This spanish company has already raised $1 million from private capital and government funding in Spain.

In February of this year, Vortex Bladeless relocated to Boston. There it is working with Harvard University, SunEdison, and is working with venture capitalists for its next round of Series A funding. Due to public interest in investing in the company, they will launch a crowdfunding campaign on June 1.

Submission + - Banks Conspire 2

Submitted by Jim Sadler
Jim Sadler writes: I'll keep it short. Why do banks, charge cards and others have such lousy password software? My bank allows twenty letters or numbers but not all combinations of letters and numbers. Then on top of that one can not use symbols or ASCI symbols in ones password. Needless to say pass phrases are also banned. For example "JackandJillwentupthehilltofetch1394pounds of worms." would be very hard to crack and very easy to recall.
              I can't imagine why such passwords would be so hard to handle for financial institutions and they have everything in the world to lose from sloppy security. So just why, considering that these institutions complain of mega money being lost, do they not have a better password system? Do they somehow gain when money goes missing?

Submission + - In-Database R Coming to SQL Server 2016

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Wondering what kind of things Microsoft might do with its purchase of Revolution Analytics? Over at the Revolutions blog, David Smith announces that in-database R coming to SQL Server 2016. "With this update," Smith writes, "data scientists will no longer need to extract data from SQL server via ODBC to analyze it with R. Instead, you will be able to take your R code to the data, where it will be run inside a sandbox process within SQL Server itself. This eliminates the time and storage required to move the data, and gives you all the power of R and CRAN packages to apply to your database." It'll no doubt intrigue Data Scientist types, but the devil's in the final details, which Microsoft was still cagey about when it talked-the-not-exactly-glitch-free-talk (starts @57:00) earlier this month at Ignite. So, brush up your R, kids, and you can see how Microsoft walks-the-in-database-walk when SQL Server 2016 public preview rolls out this summer.

Submission + - Oculus Rift Hardware Requirements Revealed, Linux Development Halted (oculus.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Oculus has selected the baseline hardware requirements for running their Rift virtual reality headset. To no one's surprise, they're fairly steep: NVIDIA GTX 970 / AMD 290 equivalent or greater, Intel i5-4590 equivalent or greater, and 8GB+ RAM. It will also require at least two USB 3.0 ports and "HDMI 1.3 video output supporting a 297MHz clock via a direct output architecture." Oculus chief architect Atman Binstock explains: "On the raw rendering costs: a traditional 1080p game at 60Hz requires 124 million shaded pixels per second. In contrast, the Rift runs at 2160×1200 at 90Hz split over dual displays, consuming 233 million pixels per second. At the default eye-target scale, the Rift’s rendering requirements go much higher: around 400 million shaded pixels per second. This means that by raw rendering costs alone, a VR game will require approximately 3x the GPU power of 1080p rendering." He also points out that PC graphics can afford a fluctuating frame rate — it doesn't matter to much if it bounces between 30-60fps. The Rift has no such luxury, however.

The last requirement is more onerous: WIndows 7 SP1 or newer. Binstock says their development for OS X and Linux has been "paused" so they can focus on delivering content for Windows. They have no timeline for going back to the less popular platforms.

Submission + - College Board Puts Billionaire-Backed Code.org in Charge of AP CS Program

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: "The College Board," reports GeekWire, "is endorsing Code.org as a coursework and teacher training provider for its upcoming AP Computer Science Principles course and will help Code.org fund the teacher training work required to establish new computer science classes." So what's the catch? "Schools that commit to using the [new] PSAT [8/9 assessment] to identify middle school students who have potential for success in computer science will be eligible to receive curriculum, training, and funding for programming classes." Hey, with Bill "Common Core" Gates involved, would you have expected anything less? Bankrolled by some of tech's wealthiest leaders and their corporations, Code.org's seven-person Board includes Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith, Google Director of Education Maggie Johnson, Amazon Sr. VP Jeff Wilke, and Vandana Sikka, the spouse of Vishal Sikka, CEO of offshore outsourcing giant Infosys. Smith, the next-door neighbor of Code.org CEO Hadi Partovi, proposed the idea of 'producing a crisis' to advance Microsoft's 'two-pronged' National Talent Strategy to increase K-12 CS education and the number of H-1B visas. Just months thereafter, nonprofit organizations Code.org and Mark Zuckerberg's FWD.us, which is lobbying for H-1B reform, were born. Code.org and FWD.us share many supporters.

Submission + - Our attention span is now less than that of a goldfish (independent.co.uk) 1

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Microsoft surveyed 2,000 people and used electroencephalograms (EEGs) to monitor the brain activity of another 112 in the study, which sought to determine the impact that pocket-sized devices and the increased availability of digital media and information have had on our daily lives.

Submission + - Japanese smartphone gets iris-scanning for mobile payments (engadget.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: The common objection to using your phone for purchases is that any sufficiently-motivated criminal could lop off your thumb and go on a spending spree. That's one of the reasons why Japanese carrier NTT DoCoMo and Fujitsu have teamed up to unveil the Arrows NX F-04G. The pair say that it's the world's first smartphone with iris recognition technology that can be used to both unlock a device and certify mobile wallet payments.

Submission + - The Infrastructure for Your Augmented Reality Does Not Exist (theplatform.net)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: According to Chris Rossbach, a Microsoft Research veteran who has been working on virtual and augmented reality systems for years (including on the early team that developed the Kinect), the “devil is in the details” when it comes to widespread adoption of augmented reality. Now with VMware Research, he and his team are exploring just how deep the chasm is between real use of the technology set for augmented reality and actual implemented reality.

Submission + - Californians Gets Past the Yuck Factor With 'Toilet to Tap' Water Recycling 1

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: From a marketing point of view, using treated sewage to create drinking water is a proposition that has proved difficult to sell to customers. Now John Schwartz writes in the NYT that as California scrambles for ways to cope with its crippling drought and the mandatory water restrictions imposed last month by Gov. Jerry Brown, enticing people to drink recycled water is requiring California residents to get past what experts call the “yuck” factor. Efforts in the 1990s to develop water reuse in San Diego and Los Angeles were beaten back by activists who denounced what they called, devastatingly, “toilet to tap.” Orange County swung people to the idea of drinking recycled water with a special purification plant which has been operating since 2008 avoiding a backlash with a massive public relations campaign that involved more than 2,000 community presentations. The county does not run its purified water directly into drinking water treatment plants; instead, it sends the water underground to replenish the area’s aquifers and to be diluted by the natural water supply. This environmental buffer seems to provide an emotional buffer for consumers as well.

In 2000, Los Angeles actually completed a sewage reclamation plant capable of providing water to 120,000 homes — the Donald C. Tillman Water Reclamation Plant in Van Nuys.The plan was abandoned after public outrage. Angelenos, it seemed, were too good to drink perfectly safe recycled water — dismissed as “toilet to tap.” But Los Angeles is ready to try again, with plans to provide a quarter of the city’s needs by 2024 with recycled water and captured storm water routed through aquifers. ”The difference between this and 2000 is everyone wants this to happen,” says Marty Adams. The inevitable squeamishness over drinking water that was once waste ignores a fundamental fact, says George Tchobanoglous: “When it comes down to it, water is water. Everyone who lives downstream on a river is drinking recycled water.”

Submission + - Coast Guard spots 100+ year old shipwrecks from the air

Submitted by tomhath
tomhath writes: "Earlier this month, a helicopter from the Coast Guard's Air Station in Traverse City, Michigan, was out on a routine patrol over the lake, looking for boats in distress or anything out of the ordinary. It was a calm day; the ice that covered the lake had recently melted, and the water was still very cold, just 38 degrees Fahrenheit (3.3 degrees Celsius) — a perfect combination for good visibility.

When Petty Officer Mitch Brown looked out the window of the helicopter, he could spot several century-old shipwrecks in the crystal-blue waters."

Submission + - Shape of the Universe determined to be really, really flat 1

Submitted by StartsWithABang
StartsWithABang writes: You might imagine all sorts of possibilities for how the Universe could have been shaped: positively curved like a higher-dimensional sphere, negatively curved like a higher-dimensional saddle, folded back on itself like a donut/torus, or spatially flat on the largest scales, like a giant Cartesian grid. Yet only one of these possibilities matches up with our observations, something we can probe simply by using our knowledge of how light travels in both flat and curved space, and measuring the CMB, the source of the most distant light in the Universe. The result? A Universe that’s so incredibly flat, it’s indistinguishable from perfection.

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So you think that money is the root of all evil. Have you ever asked what is the root of money? -- Ayn Rand

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