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Comment Ummm (Score 1) 108

by Iconoc (#45082323) Attached to: Kickstarter For Open Source GPU
This is so ridiculous I don't even know where to start. Whoever is promoting this has no idea what is involved.

If you want to learn, buy a Xilinx demo board with a VGA or HDMI connector. You can learn something from it, and begin to see what a huge amount of work something like this requires.

Leave your high-minded ideas for open source (or free money from Kickstarter) and get a vague of idea of what you are proposing. The costs to fab anything are enormous. A $35 PCI-Express video card with no fan is a much better bargain.

Comment Really? (Score 1) 1191

by Iconoc (#45008087) Attached to: Come Try Out Slashdot's New Design (In Beta)
Please don't "improve" slashdot. I quit scanning CNBC because the website is similar to this "new" look. I like a dense page with information and could care less what picture a bored mod selected to go with an article.

This look is not an improvement.

There is an early Bloom County cartoon about how the UI should hurt the user. It was funny. Leave it alone.
The Internet

ICANN's Trademark Clearinghouse Launching Today 49

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the no-domain-for-you dept.
itwbennett writes "If you want to protect your brand before ICANN rolls out the new gTLDs (generic top-level domains), here's your chance. The clearinghouse will allow trademark owners to register their marks for an annual fee of between $95 and $150. The clearinghouse 'doesn't necessarily prevent trademark infringement or cybersquatting, but it does help trademark owners and brand owners somewhat in mitigating the damage that might occur,' said Keith Kupferschmid, general counsel and vice president of IP policy and enforcement for the Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA). 'We've been telling brand owners it's not that expensive to protect themselves and they ought to do it.'" All of the new TLD registrars will be required to check the trademark clearinghouse before issuing domains, preemptively squashing trademark disputes.
Science

New Research Sheds Light On the Evolution of Dogs 374

Posted by samzenpus from the a-caveboy-and-his-dog dept.
Hugh Pickens writes writes "The first dogs descended from wolves about 14,000 years ago but according to Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods humans didn't domesticate dogs — dogs sought out humans and domesticated us. Humans have a long history of eradicating wolves, rather than trying to adopt them which raises the question: How was the wolf tolerated by humans long enough to evolve into the domestic dog? 'The short version is that we often think of evolution as being the survival of the fittest, where the strong and the dominant survive and the soft and weak perish. But essentially, far from the survival of the leanest and meanest, the success of dogs comes down to survival of the friendliest.' Most likely, it was wolves that approached us, not the other way around, probably while they were scavenging around garbage dumps on the edge of human settlements. The wolves that were bold but aggressive would have been killed by humans, and so only the ones that were bold and friendly would have been tolerated. In a few generations, these friendly wolves became distinctive from their more aggressive relatives with splotchy coats, floppy ears, wagging tails. But the changes did not just affect their looks but their psychology. Protodogs evolved the ability to read human gestures. 'As dog owners, we take for granted that we can point to a ball or toy and our dog will bound off to get it,' write Hare and Woods. 'But the ability of dogs to read human gestures is remarkable. Even our closest relatives — chimpanzees and bonobos — can't read our gestures as readily as dogs can. 'With this new ability, these protodogs were worth knowing. People who had dogs during a hunt would likely have had an advantage over those who didn't. Finally when times were tough, dogs could have served as an emergency food supply and once humans realized the usefulness of keeping dogs as emergency food, it was not a huge jump to realize plants could be used in a similar way.' This is the secret to the genius of dogs: It's when dogs join forces with us that they become special," conclude Hare and Woods. 'Dogs may even have been the catalyst for our civilization.'"

Submission + - CERN's LHC to Shut Down for 2 Years for Repair & Upgrades (paritynews.com)

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: CERN has revealed that the world's largest and most powerful atom smasher – the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is going into hibernation and will be shut down for a period of two years for upgrade purposes. To be operated for a couple of more months this year, the LHC will go through a maintenance and upgrade phase starting March that will bring the atom smasher up to speed with its maximum energy levels, which will enable scientists to carry out more discoveries even greater than the current ones like the Higgs Boson.

Going Off the Fiscal Cliff Could Mean Missing the Next Hurricane Sandy 296

Posted by timothy from the it's-all-so-simple dept.
Lasrick writes "Alex Knapp has an excellent article pointing out that NOAA satellites enabled NOAA to predict the 'left hook' of Hurricane Sandy into the Eastern Seaboard, which in turn enabled local governments to prepare. Those satellites are at risk and there will be a gap of about a year between 2017 and 2018, when the old ones fail and the new ones are scheduled to launch. There's no alternative to getting that data, and the so-called 'fiscal cliff' will drive an 8% cut to NOAA's satellite program, so that those replacement satellites may go up even later than 2018."

Submission + - I don't Read Code Anymore - Linus Torvalds

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: There is a excellent interview over at the H with Linus Torvalds. Glyn Moody's second interview with Linus since 1998 is both informative and revealing. Linus response to his role as the kernel maintainer has this interesting tidbit: "Well, the big thing is I don't read code any more... when it comes to the major subsystem maintainers, I trust them because I've been working with them for 5, 10, 15 years, so I don't even look at the code." The interview goes on to talk about Amazon, Google, phones tablets and the cloud. Further on the topic of coding, the interview ends with Linus stating: "When I was twenty I liked doing device drivers. If I never have to do a single device driver in my life again, I will be happy. Some kind of headaches I can do without." Like all of us, Linus is getting older and taking a less hands on approach to the development of the kernel. Of course this is understandable. Even the great Git himself is a slave to the passage of time, but thankfully for us, his creation is not.

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