Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Submission + - Microsoft to re-brand Windows Azure to Microsoft Azure effective April 3rd 1

Submitted by DroidJason1
DroidJason1 writes: Microsoft recently changed the name of its SkyDrive cloud storage solution to OneDrive, and now it looks like the rebranding at Microsoft will continue with Windows Azure. The company apparently plans to change the name to Microsoft Azure, in an effort to lend more of a cross-platform feel to the service. Azure has become more cross-platform compatible, so this is likely a good move for the company, and this time it has not been forced to do the renaming, unlike OneDrive.

Comment Re:Treatment (Score 1) 112

by turning in circles (#46558245) Attached to: Electric 'Thinking Cap' Controls Learning Speed
Your comment about how to shed chronic fatigue by using the body "properly" is arrogant and misguided at best. Chronic fatigue can be caused by a chemical imbalance, or other medical condition, and all the yoga and body alignment and core work will not cure it. Not that I'm advocating a jolt of electric current through the brain will.

There is much we don't know, but I don't think we have to start wearing our Aluminum foil hats 24/7 just yet.

Comment Re:Science, I think not (Score 1) 99

I'm not sure that posting in prominent journals is quite the panacea you believe it is: there are still far more articles posted each year in Nature and Science than could be tested and verified by competent researchers. And surely you do not suggest we discount all science published in "obscure" areas? The science is not obscure to the ones who study it.

Comment Re:Science, I think not (Score 1) 99

The Economist published an article last fall: Unreliable Research: Trouble at the Lab discussing that scientists may be looking at the wrong questions, and that well respected work may not be reproducible. I work at a university and to some extent, the new grad students reproduce the results that the senior grad students found en route to learning how to use the equipment, but it's not always that way.

Comment Re:Biology varies more than expected. Unsurprised. (Score 1) 64

by turning in circles (#46482747) Attached to: Google Flu Trends Gets It Wrong Three Years Running
It is really a flawed experimental design. If I have the flu, I go to the doctor or I go to bed, I don't go to Google. If I have a bad cold, and can't decide whether it's the flu or not, I google the symptoms. The sicker you are, the less need to Google. The model might be predictive for really bad colds in cities, or really mild cases of flu.

Comment Re:Slippery slope (Score 1) 187

Point of fact, when I run the browser with Adblock on it, I don't see any of the new Google ads, I just see some white space. I have a different browser without Adblock that I use to watch network TV online, so I know where the ads would be. No argument with me, Google is evil, but now it seems easier to block ads on Google than it used to be.

Submission + - White House urges 'geeks' to get healthcare coverage, launch start-ups (computerworld.com) 1

Submitted by dcblogs
dcblogs writes: The White House is urging tech workers, or "geeks," to sign up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, and said having the coverage will give them the "freedom and security" to start their own businesses. "There is strong evidence that when affordable healthcare isn't exclusively tied to employment, in more instances people choose to start their own companies," wrote White House CTO Todd Park in a post to launch its #GeeksGetCovered campaign.Bruce Bachenheimer, a professor of management at Pace University and director of its Entrepreneurship Lab, said the effort is part of a broader appeal by the White House to get younger and healthier people to sign-up for Obamacare, and is in the same vein as President Obama's recent appearance on Between Two Ferns,

Submission + - Neil Young's 'Righteous' Pono Music Startup Raises $1 Million with Kickstarter

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Jose Pagliery reports at CNN that the 68-year-old rock star unveiled his startup, Pono, at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas raising $1.4 million in a single day. Young has developed a portable music player that stores high-resolution recordings and promises to deliver all the delicate details that get chopped out of modern-day formats, like MP3s and CDs. "Pono" is Hawaiian for righteous. "What righteous means to our founder Neil Young is honoring the artist’s intention, and the soul of music. That’s why he’s been on a quest, for a few years now, to revive the magic that has been squeezed out of digital music." With 128 GB of space, the PonoPlayer can carry about 3,200 tracks of high-resolution recordings while an MP3 player of the same size can hold maybe 10 times that many songs. Young says the MP3 files we're all listening to actually are pretty poor from an audio-quality standpoint and only contains about five percent of the audio from an original recording. But isn't FLAC already lossless? What makes Pono better?

Comment Re:Please stop linking paywalled papers. (Score 2) 74

PNAS has an option where the researcher uses $1,350 or $1,000 funds to make the research Open Access. The money to do this can be written into grants. Alternatively, the researchers can publish in another journal that is open access (again for a fee). So, blame the researcher, not the journal.

Submission + - Stamp of Approval For New Living Cell Printing Technique (gizmag.com) 1

Submitted by Zothecula
Zothecula writes: Researchers in Houston have developed a cost effective method for printing living cells, claiming almost a 100 percent survival rate. The method, which is akin to a modern version of ancient Chinese wood block printing, allow cells to be printed on any surface and in virtually any two dimensional shape. And while current inkjet printers adapted to print living cells can cost upwards of US$10,000 with a cell survival rate of around 50 percent, this simple new technique could see the cell stamps produced for around $1.

Submission + - Google Wants to Develop $50 Modular Smartphones For Next Year (gizmorati.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Google‘s Motorola announced the Project Ara in October last year as company’s open hardware platform for creating highly modular smartphones. How much will a modular smartphone set you back? To start, if Google gets its way, about $50. The key phrase there is “to start,” however, as this smartphone with swappable components could get a lot pricier, very quickly.

Submission + - First Outdoor Flocks of Autonomous Flying Robots

Submitted by KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: Aerial flocking has been a long standing goal for roboticists but the technical demands for autonomous outdoor flocking has always been too great. Now a European team has successfully demonstrated autonomous outdoor flocking for the first time with up to 10 flyers in the air simultaneously for up to 20 minutes. The flyer of choice is the MK Basicset L4-ME made by the German company MikroKopter. They modified this by attaching an extension board carrying a variety of navigational devices such as a gyroscope, accelerometer, GPS receiver and so on as well as a wireless communications unit and a minicomputer to calculate trajectories. To simplify these calculations, all the quadcopters fly at the same altitude to make the flocking problem two-dimensional. The team say the quadcopters can fly autonomously in lines and circles and even demonstrate self-organising behaviour when confined to specific volumes of space. Crucially, the flock does not rely on any centralised control for its behaviour.The potential applications are numerous. The researchers imagine using them for large-scale, redundant observations over wide areas, perhaps for farming, traffic monitoring and, of course, military purposes. They might even put on aerial displays for entertainment purposes.

Comment Re:The home of 1984? Really? (Score 1) 137

by turning in circles (#46361505) Attached to: GCHQ Intercepted Webcam Images of Millions of Yahoo Users
You write: "Short of actually bringing down the government and replacing the system, hopefully in a non-violent way, this seems unlikely to change any time soon." Looks to me like the Arab/Ukraine/Etc Spring has shown that _bringing down a government_ is almost a guarantee that what replaces it will be nondemocratic.

Slashdot Top Deals

I tell them to turn to the study of mathematics, for it is only there that they might escape the lusts of the flesh. -- Thomas Mann, "The Magic Mountain"

Close