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Submission + - askslashdot: is it worth upgrading an old GPU to a newer one for OpenCL support?

Submitted by genik76
genik76 writes: I currently have a Radeon HD 3870. For research purposes, I downloaded and tested oclHashcat-plus, only to notice that my GPU doesn't support it (no OpenCL support). I considered upgrading my GPU to something supporting OpenCL, but it is not worth it just to use one program.

Is there any advantage in having a GPU supporting OpenCL in normal home computing usage? Besides browsing and word processing I do some occassional image processing, programming (Eclipse) and video processing.
The Media

Submission + - The Fate of Newspapers: Farm it, Milk it, or Feed it

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Alan D. Mutter writes that with a 50% drop in newspaper advertising since 2005, the old ways of running a newspaper can no longer succeed so most publishers are faced with choosing the best possible strategy going-forward for their mature but declining businesses: farm it, feed it, or milk it. Warren Buffett is farming it and recently bucked the widespread pessimism about the future of newspapers by buying 63 titles from Media General and is concentrating on small and medium papers in defensible markets, while steering clear of metro markets, where costs are high and competition is fierce. “I do not have any secret sauce,” says Buffett. “There are still 1,400 daily papers in the United States. The nice thing about it is that somebody can think about the best answer and we can copy him. Two or three years from now, you’ll see a much better-defined pattern of operations online and in print by papers.” Advance Publications is milking it by cutting staff and reducing print publication to three days a week at the New Orleans Times-Picayune, thus making the Crescent City the largest American metropolis to be deprived of a daily dose of wood fiber in its news diet. Once dismantled, the local reporting infrastructure in communities like New Orleans will almost certainly never be rebuilt. "By cutting staff to a bare minimum and printing only on the days it is profitable to do so, publishers can milk considerable sums from their franchises until the day these once-indomitable cash cows go dry." Rupert Murdoch is feeding it as he spins his newspapers out of News Corp. and into a separate company empowered to innovate the traditional publishing businesses into the future. In various interviews after announcing the planned spinoff, Murdoch promised to launch the new company with no debt and ample cash to aggressively pursue digital publishing opportunities across a variety of platforms. "If the spinoff materializes in anywhere near the way Murdoch is spinning it, however, it could turn out to be a model for iterating the way forward for newspapers.""
Android

Submission + - Google applies for mobile patents (cbsnews.com)

Submitted by bizwriter
bizwriter writes: Newly public patent applications show that in addition to buying blocks of patents, Google is trying to expand its collection of mobile-related technology patents into the user interface area that Apple has dominated. That would increase the chances of Google having intellectual property that competitors might infringe, providing important additional bargaining chips in legal battles that seem only too certain to continue for it and its hardware vendors.
Games

Submission + - Microsoft Research Presents - Sword Fight With Phones! (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: What will Microsoft Research think of next? After giving us the Kinect it has now invented a way to allow us to play sword fighting with nothing more than standard mobile phones. You start the game and each player thrusts a mobile phone as if it was a sword. If you get close enough to you opponents phone while pressing the screen then it's a hit.

How do the phones know that they are close? The basic method is simple enough the phones beep at each other and time how long it takes the pulse to arrive. They then swap data and both compute the distance that they are apart. The difficulties in getting it accurate and fast enough make this a big signal processing problem.
However they seem to have solved it well enough to get a 2cm accurate position 12 times a second — which is enough to play SwordFighting or ChaseCat (don't ask).
Is this a good idea?
It only needs standard phones and no extras and Microsoft Research think that it could be the basis of a whole new genre of games — Motion Mobile Games (MMGs). They don't seem to have learned the lesson of the flying WII controller however and is seems reasonable to predict lots of broken phones due to advanced sword play...

Submission + - How the inventors of Dragon speech recogniton technology lost everything. (nytimes.com) 5

Submitted by cjsm
cjsm writes: James and Janet Baker were the inventors of Dragon Systems speech recogintion software, and after years of work, they created a multimillion dollar company. At the height of the tech boom, with investment offers rolling in, they turned to Goldman Sachs for financial advice. For a five million dollar fee, Goldman hooked them up with Lernout & Hauspie, the Belgium speech recognition company. After consultations with Goldman Sachs, the Bakers traded their company for $580 million in Lernout & Hauspie stock. But it turned out Lernout & Hauspie was involved in cooking their books and went bankrupt. Dragon was sold in a bankruptcy auction to Scansoft, and the Bakers lost everything. Goldman and Sachs itself had decided against investing in Lernout & Hauspie two years previous to this because they were lying about their Asian sales. The Bakers are suing for one billions dollars.
Government

Submission + - In Vast Effort, F.D.A. Spied on E-Mails of Its Own Scientists (nytimes.com)

Submitted by jvillain
jvillain writes: The FDA went on a spying expedition against some of it's it's own scientists. Predictably disaster ensues. Emails sent to congress, lawyers third parties etc were collected and read. Wistle blowers are intimidated. Of course it only comes out in the when the contractor hired to do the spying posts the messages on a public web site.

While outrage ensues in Congress and the White house, down the hall they are both making plans to make more of this possible.
EU

Submission + - Niinistö Predicts: ECB Will Print More Money 2

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: Finnish President Sauli Niinistö says in all likelihood the current European financial crisis will be solved by the European Central Bank printing more money. This is one of the methods that the Federal Reserve System also used in the US. 'It will supposedly lead to inflation at some point, but it starts to look like the only path to take', Niinistö said to HS.fi. Commenting on the President’s forecast, the former Managing Director of the Research Institute of the Finnish Economy (ETLA), Sixten Korkman says printing money is only part of the solution and in itself not a magic trick.
News

Submission + - Chicago Tribune Stops the Journatic Presses

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: In April, the Chicago Tribune touted its investment in and use of news outsourcer Journatic. "We're excited to partner with Journatic, both as an investor and as a customer," said Dan Kazan, the Trib's Sr. VP of Investments. "Journatic will expand Tribune's ability to deliver relevant hyperlocal content to our readers, and we believe that many other publishers and advertisers will benefit from its services as well." That was then. In a Friday-the-13th letter to readers, the Tribune announced a plagiarized and fabricated story has prompted the paper to suspend its relationship with Journatic. The move comes two weeks after Journatic's standards and practices were called into question by This American Life, which noted several Journatic-produced stories had appeared this year on TribLocal online with false bylines. Explaining why he went public about his experience at Journatic, reporter Ryan Smith said he felt 'people should know how their local newspapers are being hollowed out.'
Patents

Submission + - RIM Facing $147.2 Million Patent verdict (reuters.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Reuters reports that beleaguered wireless device maker Research In Motion is on the losing end of a patent suit that will cost them $147.2 million. The jury arrived at that number by assigning an $8 royalty for every BlackBerry connected to RIM's enterprise server software. Unsurprisingly, RIM intends to appeal the decision. 'Mformation sued RIM in 2008, bringing claims on a patent for a process that remotely manages a wireless device over a wireless network, a court filing says. According to its web site, Mformation helps corporations manage their smart phone inventory. The company also says it helps telecoms operators, such as AT&T and Sprint, with remote fixes and upgrades for users' gadgets. RIM argued that Mformation's patent claims are invalid because the processes were already being used when Mformation filed its patent application.'
Science

Submission + - Biodegradable, biocompatible "Shrilk" is a potenti (gizmag.com)

Submitted by cylonlover
cylonlover writes: Arthropods — that's spiders, insects and crustaceans, have provided inspiration for a new material that is cheap to produce, biodegradable, and biocompatible. Its creators say the material, dubbed "Shrilk," has the potential to replace plastics in consumer products and could also be used safely in a variety of medical applications, such as suturing wounds or serving as scaffolding for tissue regeneration.

Comment Price Social Networking (Score 2) 291

by tylerv86 (#38364502) Attached to: 24-Year-Old Asks Facebook For His Data, Gets 1,200 PDFs
If so many people are concerned with their privacy, yet still want a Social Network; why not create your own website. Using HTML5 or whatever other fad code of today, creating your own fully linked website with interactive media is almost as easy as creating a facebook profile. With the searching power of google finding all your friends is just as easy. Chatting, use irc. facebook as brought nothing new to the area of personal web presence, except it's almost idiot-proof, and, oh yeah. FREE! Now that the dust has settled on this fashionable form of web presence, it's not so amazing to those who don't want everyone in the world with a PC or smartphone to have a direct portal to their info. Kids are killing themselves over this info, crimes are being committed. People, it's time to take responsibility for your own actions and get a clue. If you don't know how the internet works, GET OFF-LINE! Anyone can do anything with a computer. Until there is some kind of world internet police, it's free game. This is what makes it so special. Stop whining and get informed. Don't tell others what to do with their companies, your not paying for anything. On the web, all you have to do and compete. Make something better. Then watch as the users tell you what to do.Best part is, you can ignore them too. You have the power to control your "on-line avatar", whatever, but you cant sit on your hands and let others do it. Get coding!
Security

Submission + - How To Deny DDoS Attacks (infoworld.com)

Submitted by
snydeq
snydeq writes: "Security Advisor's Roger Grimes provides insights on how to stop today's increasingly sophisticated DDoS attacks. 'The most difficult challenge has been DDoS attackers' increasing sophistication as they've moved from targeting Layers 3 and 4 (routing and transport) to Layer 7 (the application layer). They've learned, for example, how to determine which elements comprise a victim's most popular Web page, honing in on which ones take the most time to load and have the least amount of redundancy,' Grimes writes. 'The most sophisticated DDoS hackers have attacked with many vectors, one at a time, thus increasing the pain. A growing number of DDoS victims have found that attackers are using these types of multipronged, multiday assaults as ruses to draw attention from more damaging attacks elsewhere on the network. '"

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