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Linux

Submission + - FFmpeg 1.0 MultiMedia Library Released (phoronix.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The free software FFmpeg multi-media library that's used by VLC, MPlayer, Chrome, and many other software projects has reached version 1.0 since being in development since 2000. The 1.0 release incorporates new filters/decoders and other A/V enhancements. The code is available from FFmpeg.org.
KDE

Submission + - Digia Completes Acquisition of Qt (digia.com)

Submitted by ArrayIndexOutOfBound
ArrayIndexOutOfBound writes: On September 18, Digia has completed the acquisition of the Qt Framework. The venerable open source C++ framework underpinning KDE and countless other projects, now has a brighter future than was likely under Nokia's ownership. "Digia now becomes responsible for Qt activities including product development and commercial and open source licensing, the acquisition paves the way for Qt to become the world’s leading cross-platform application development framework across desktop, embedded and mobile platforms." They seem to have some mess to sort out first.
Facebook

Submission + - NYSE will use Twitter and Facebook if email fails (computerworlduk.com)

Submitted by
DerekduPreez
DerekduPreez writes: "The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) has said that it plans to use Twitter and Facebook for finding buyers and sellers to close daily trading, following a technical glitch that saw its usual method of email fail.

At the end of trading last week an email notification was meant to alert investors to a stock with an outsize number of unfilled buy orders. However, this email was delayed by seven minutes.

uch delays at close could have caused the stock to leap higher or drop lower than its final trading level. This led to NYSE sending traders a notification on Thursday, which said that if email alerts fail again it will use social media distribution channels to help address buy and sell imbalances."
Software

Submission + - Cornell team figures out how to simulate cloth sounds using physics (geek.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In a lot of cases a sound is recorded and matched to an animation after it is created in a process done by hand, but it would be much faster if a computer could simulate the required audio. A team of researchers at Cornell University is tackling one such simulation. They have developed a process that manages to realistically simulate the sound of moving cloth.

So how do you simulate cloth sounds? Physics. The team used the friction and crumpling movement of cloth to approximate what sounds are required through a sequence of actions. That data is then broken down into “microsecond chunks” in order to have sound snippets matched to it more precisely. he sounds are produced by hand, first by recording cloth being crumpled, then by spinning a piece of cloth off of a cloth roller. Those sounds are also broken down into chunks allowing them to be matched to the appropriate physics gathered from the animation data using best approximation.

The end result is pretty realistic cloth sound simulation.
Blackberry

Submission + - The BlackBerry typo that landed a man in jail (pcpro.co.uk)

Submitted by
Barence
Barence writes: "A British man was jailed for 18 months for accidentally sending an explicit text message to his entire address book.

24-year-old swimming coach, Craig Evans, intended to send a text message to his girlfriend asking her for sex. Instead, the message was accidentally sent to his entire BlackBerry address book, including two girls, aged 13 and 14, from his swimming class.

He was subsequently arrested and charged with “causing or inciting a child to engage in sexual activity”, and – incredibly – jailed for 18 months at Birmingham Crown Court in July. Yesterday, an appeal's court freed Evans, although he wasn't cleared — the sentence was merely reduced to a nine-month suspended jail term."
Education

Submission + - Microsoft calls for $5B investment in U.S. education (computerworld.com)

Submitted by Dupple
Dupple writes: Congress should invest $5 billion in the country's education system — particularly in math, science and technology education — over the next 10 years and pay for it with increased fees on high-skill immigration, a Microsoft executive said.

The U.S. needs to push more resources into science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education because technology companies are running into huge shortages of workers, said Brad Smith, Microsoft's general counsel and executive vice president. With most U.S. industries relying heavily on IT systems, other companies will soon start to see those worker shortages as well, unless the country focuses more on STEM education, he said during a speech at the Brookings Institution Thursday.

"We need to do something new," he said. "We need to try something different."
Government

Submission + - Electronic Surveillance by US Law Enforcement Agencies Rising Steeply (paritynews.com)

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: According to data obtained by American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), surveillance of emails and other forms of Internet communications without warrants has increased substantially over the last two years. Documents, obtained by ACLU after months of litigation, reveal that there has been a whopping 361 per cent increase in “pen register” and “trap-and-trace” orders between 2009 and 2011. ACLU has appealed to US congress to bring in more judicial oversight of pen register and trap-and-trace orders as agencies don’t require a warrant to obtain such orders.
Your Rights Online

Submission + - Assange Declared 'Enemy of State' (smh.com.au)

Submitted by lightbox32
lightbox32 writes: According to documents obtained by the Sydney Morning Herald the US military has designated Julian Assange and WikiLeaks as enemies of the United States — the same legal category as the al-Qaeda terrorist network and the Taliban insurgency.
The documents, some originally classified "Secret/NoForn" — not releasable to non-US nationals — record a probe by the air force's Office of Special Investigations into a cyber systems analyst based in Britain who allegedly expressed support for WikiLeaks and attended pro-Assange demonstrations in London.
Meanwhile Assange remains holed up in Ecuador's embassy in London. He was granted diplomatic asylum on the grounds that if extradited to Sweden to be questioned about sexual assault allegations, he would be at risk of further extradition to the US to face espionage or conspiracy charges arising from the leaking of hundreds of thousands of secret US military and diplomatic reports.
Bitcoin

Submission + - Bitcoin exchange BitFloor (computerworld.com.au)

Submitted by
angry tapir
angry tapir writes: "Bitcoin exchanges generally don't seem to recover that easily after security breaches. However, BitFloor, which was hacked and had 24,000 Bitcoins stolen in early September, is coming back online, refunding account holders whose coins were stolen and implementing new security measures, including cold storage for private keys."
Science

Submission + - Smartphones Have Banished Boredom (and Why That's Bad) 1

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Doug Gross writes that thanks to technology, there's been a recent sea change in how people today kill time. "Those dog-eared magazines in your doctor's office are going unread. Your fellow customers in line at the deli counter are being ignored. And simply gazing around at one's surroundings? Forget about it." With their games, music, videos, social media and texting, smartphones "superstimulate," a desire humans have to play when things get dull, says anthropologist Christopher Lynn and he believes that modern society may be making that desire even stronger. "When you're habituated to constant stimulation, when you lack it, you sort of don't know what to do with yourself ...," says Lynn. "When we aren't used to having down time, it results in anxiety. 'Oh my god, I should be doing something.' And we reach for the smartphone. It's our omnipresent relief from that." Researchers say this all makes sense. Fiddling with our phones, they say, addresses a basic human need to cure boredom by any means necessary. But they also fear that by filling almost every second of down time by peering at our phones we are missing out on the creative and potentially rewarding ways we've dealt with boredom in days past. "Informational overload from all quarters means that there can often be very little time for personal thought, reflection, or even just 'zoning out,'" researchers write. "With a mobile (phone) that is constantly switched on and a plethora of entertainments available to distract the naked eye, it is understandable that some people find it difficult to actually get bored in that particular fidgety, introspective kind of way.""
Software

Submission + - French government to use PostgreSQL & LibreOffice in free software adoption (computerworlduk.com)

Submitted by concertina226
concertina226 writes: French government agencies could become more active participants in free software projects, under an action plan sent by Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault in a letter to ministers, while software giants Microsoft and Oracle might lose out as the government pushes free software such as LibreOffice or PostgreSQL in some areas.
Beer

Submission + - U.S. Beer Is Cheaper Than Anywhere Else in the World 1

Submitted by derekmead
derekmead writes: It’s frustrating to drop $7 on a pint of beer in New York City, as it turns out, Americans have the cheapest beer on Earth. International bank UBS gathered data about the median wages and average retail prices of a 500mL (pint) beer in 150 countries. Those data were compiled to figure out how many minutes of work it takes the average worker of a country to earn enough money to buy a beer.

It’s funny that UBS analysts are spending time looking at beer, but considering that beer is beloved and nigh essential everywhere, it offers an interesting comparison between commodities and wages. For example, India tops the least, with the median worker having to work nearly an hour to afford a pint thanks to extremely low wages. In the U.S. however, where wages are relatively high and the cost of the average beer is quite low (thanks to those super-massive macrobreweries out there), it takes the median worker about five minutes of labor to afford a retail (store-, not bar-bought) pint. That’s the shortest amount of time in the world, which means that, relatively speaking, beer is cheaper here than anywhere else.

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