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Microsoft

Windows 8 Release Preview Now Available To Download 363

Posted by timothy from the air-conditioning-for-me dept.
MrSeb writes "Microsoft has announced the immediate availability of Windows 8 Release Preview. Unfortunately there isn't a Consumer Preview > Release Preview upgrade path — you'll have to format and perform a clean installation. After downloading the ISO, simply burn Windows 8 RP onto a USB stick or DVD, reboot, and follow the (exceedingly quick and easy) installer. Alternatively, if you don't want to format a partition, ExtremeTech has a guide on virtualizing Windows 8 with VirtualBox. After a lot of fluster on the Building Windows 8 blog, the Release Preview is actually surprisingly similar to the Consumer Preview. Despite being promised a new, flat, Desktop/Explorer UI, Aero is still the default theme in Windows 8 RP. The tutorial that will introduce new users to the brave new Start buttonless Windows 8 world is also missing. Major features that did make the cut are improved multi-monitor support — it's now easier to hit the hot corners on a multi-monitor setup, and Metro apps can be moved between displays — and the Metro version of IE10 now has a built-in Flash plug-in. There will be no further pre-releases of Windows 8: the next build will be the RTM."
Businesses

Tech Site Sues Ex-Employee, Claiming Rights To His Twitter Account 267

Posted by timothy from the depends-what-the-meaning-of-his-is dept.
nonprofiteer writes "Noah Kravitz worked as a mobile phone reviewer for a tech website called Phonedog for four and a half years. While there, he started a Twitter account (of his own volition) with the handle @PhoneDog_Noah to tweet his stories and videos for the site as well as personal stuff about sports, food, music, etc. When he left Phonedog, he had approximately 17,000 followers and changed his Twitter handle to @noahkravitz. This summer, Phonedog started barking that it wanted the Twitter account back, and sued Kravitz, valuing the account at $340,000 (!), or $2.50 per follower per month. Kravitz claims the Twitter account was his own property. A California judge ruled that the case can proceed and theoretically go to trial. Meanwhile, Kravitz continues to tweet."
The Courts

Samsung Lawyer Fails To Differentiate iPad and Galaxy Tab In Court 495

Posted by Soulskill from the shouldn't-you-know-these-things dept.
Several readers sent in a story that's sure to be embarrassing for Samsung. The company has been involved in a drawn-out patent dispute with Apple over similarities between the Galaxy Tab and the iPad. Today, during a court session, U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh held up both objects and asked one of Samsung's attorneys whether she could identify which was which. The attorney replied, "Not at this distance, your honor." The distance was roughly 10 feet. The judge then quizzed the rest of Samsung's lawyers. After a brief hesitation, one of them was able to correctly identify the Galaxy Tab.
Businesses

Solar Company Folds After $0.5B In Subsidies 694

Posted by timothy from the all-these-lovely-broken-windows dept.
First time accepted submitter dusanv writes "Solyndra, a Silicon Valley solar energy firm, subsidized to the tune of $500 million and held as a 'gleaming example of green technology,' announced bankruptcy yesterday. 1,100 employees fired."

Comment What constitutes a "real" name? (Score 2) 283

by robbyjo (#37056490) Attached to: Fake Names On Social Networks, a Fake Problem

What constitutes a "real" name? Take a look at Sun Yat-Sen, for example. Which one do you think is THE real name? The original name? Baby name? Genealogy name? Courtesy name? School name? Eventually, Sun Yat-Sen was famed in China because of the pseudoname he used in Japan. And Yat-Sen itself is a school name.
Apple

Amazon, Google Cave To Apple, Drop In-App Buttons 307

Posted by timothy from the you-wanna-play-in-our-hothouse dept.
CWmike writes "Amazon bowed on Monday to Apple's newest App Store rules, and removed a link in its iPhone and iPad Kindle apps that took customers directly to its online store. The move was required to comply with new rules designed to block developers from evading the 30% cut that Apple takes from in-app purchases. In February, Apple CEO Steve Jobs laid down the law. 'Our philosophy is simple — when Apple brings a new subscriber to the app, Apple earns a 30% share,' said Jobs in a statement released Feb. 15. 'When the publisher brings an existing or new subscriber to the app, the publisher keeps 100% and Apple earns nothing.' Rhapsody updated its iPhone app last week to, among other things, remove the in-app subscribing link. Also on Monday, Google complied with Apple's new rules when it re-released Google Books — which had been yanked from the App Store — minus an in-app purchasing button."

Comment GUIMiner is most likely optimized for AMD cards (Score 1) 403

by robbyjo (#36756034) Attached to: Bitcoin Mining Tests On 16 NVIDIA and AMD GPUs

The performance of GPU-based codes is highly dependent on the video cards. I highly doubt the dismal performance of NVIDIA cards. I think the authors most likely optimized the kernel code to AMD cards. This is evident when you look at the CL kernel code and you see that there are so many hardwired constants and fixed arrays (aligned to 128 ints or longs). Moreover, the authors GUIMiner don't seem to take advantage of NVIDIA's more local workthreads (compared to AMD's).

I'd say that declaring AMD a victor is premature.
Security

Comcast Offering Home Security Bundle 102

Posted by samzenpus from the we'll-protect-your-home-sometime-between-8am-and-noon dept.
vaporland writes "Bloomberg reports that media giant Comcast has begun offering home security bundles with cable or phone service in selected markets. From the article: 'The Philadelphia-based company is starting Xfinity Home Security in seven markets for $39.95 a month. It lets users remotely adjust lights and thermostats, watch cameras, and get e-mail or text alerts when doors and windows are opened and closed. Customers can watch live video of their homes on an Xfinity website or with an Apple Inc. iPad application.'"
The Military

US Navy Creates MMO To Fight Somali Pirates 318

Posted by Soulskill from the your-tax-dollars-at-play dept.
dotarray writes "Ever wanted to fight Somali pirates without leaving the safety of your computer? Well, believe it or not, the United States Navy could use your help. MMOWGLI is a new video game project (that's Massive Multiplayer Online WarGame Leveraging the Internet, by the way) that is being used to crowdsource ideas on how to fight off maritime terrorists and hopefully secure the Horn of Africa."

Comment Re:Not going to happen (Score 1) 104

by robbyjo (#35979610) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: How To Encourage Better Research Software?

Does "agile" software development allow scrapping 100% of the code and radically change the spec (and thereby everything else) every about 6 months just because of new scientific publication? It may sound extreme, but this often happen in research. If we take time to "structure" our code, before we know it, we have to redo it all over again. We do use libraries like GSL, BLAS, ATLAS, etc. to make our lives easier. These won't change, but whatever we build on top of these often get scrapped at regular basis. So, we really don't have incentives to "beautify" the code.

Comment Not going to happen (Score 5, Insightful) 104

by robbyjo (#35978292) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: How To Encourage Better Research Software?

Not only that most researchers are not proficient in programming language, they shape their codes more like prototypes so that they can modify the codes easily as the science progress. Conventional programmers will be frustrated with this approach since they want every single spec set in stone, which will never happen in research setting since research progresses very rapidly and specs can change dramatically in most cases. If you can set the spec in stone, it is usually a sign that the field has matured and is getting transitioned to engineering-type problems. Once the transition happens, it's no longer research, it's engineering. Then you can "make the code better".
Medicine

Is Sugar Toxic? 1017

Posted by Soulskill from the toxic-is-delicious dept.
a_hanso tips an article by Gary Taubes in the NYTimes Magazine that evaluates claims from Dr. Robert Lustig's virally popular lecture on the negative effects of sugar on peoples' health. (YouTube video of the lecture.) Taubes discusses the science behind the claims and the odd willingness of people to accept Lustig's arguments without further inspection. Quoting: "When I set out to interview public health authorities and researchers for this article, they would often initiate the interview with some variation of the comment 'surely you’ve spoken to Robert Lustig,' not because Lustig has done any of the key research on sugar himself, which he hasn’t, but because he’s willing to insist publicly and unambiguously, when most researchers are not, that sugar is a toxic substance that people abuse. In Lustig’s view, sugar should be thought of, like cigarettes and alcohol, as something that’s killing us. This brings us to the salient question: Can sugar possibly be as bad as Lustig says it is?"
The Internet

Submission + - FTP is 40 years old (bit-tech.net)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: FTP celebrates its 40th birthday tomorrow. Originally launched as the RFC 114 specification, which was published on 16 April 1971, FTP is arguably even more important today than when it was born. Frank Kenney, vice president of global strategy for US managed file transfer company Ipswitch, said that the protocol we know as FTP today is ‘a far cry from when Abhay Bushan, a student at MIT, wrote the original specifications for FTP.’

According to Kenney, the standard has grown from ‘a simple protocol to copy files over a TCP-based network [to] a sophisticated, integrated model that provides control, visibility, compliance and security in a variety of environments, including the cloud.’

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