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Submission + - What Can Tony Fadell Actually Do For Google Glass? (dice.com)

Submitted by Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: Google Glass is no longer a part of the Google X research lab that birthed the project, according to The Wall Street Journal; instead, it’s now part of a standalone unit overseen by Tony Fadell, the CEO of Google subsidiary Nest. Given Fadell’s rising profile in the technology world, it seems unlikely that he’d inherit the Glass project just to kill it, which would make him look bad; it seems more likely that he’ll try to revamp the technology, much in the same way that he overhauled smoke detectors into sleek, Web-connected devices with aesthetic appeal. But what can Fadell actually do to "save" Glass? He could slash the absurdly high price of $1,500 for starters, and perhaps give it a design revamp, but what other actions can he take beyond that?

Submission + - Holder Severely limits Civil Forfeiture (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by gurps_npc
gurps_npc writes: As most people know, the US has for quite some time let police steal pretty much anything they wanted to, forcing you to (expensively) go to court to get back your stuff. Most of the problems came about because the Federal government let the local cops keep most of what they took.
Eric Holder, the US Attorney General, has changed the rules of that program, making it more difficult for the police to do it under the federal program. They can still use local state programs, but that accounts for only about 57% of the cash taken. Note he did not end the program entirely, he left in some excepts that amounted to about 1% of the current federal program. Still with this action he will have struck a serious blow to a despicable practice that serious newspapers and comedy TV shows decried as nothing more than legalized theft.

Submission + - Hacked news companies tweet Chinese fired on U.S. warship (cnn.com)

Submitted by mpicpp
mpicpp writes: The Twitter accounts of the New York Post and United Press International were hacked Friday. Both companies tweeted that a war had broken out between the United States and China.

At 1 p.m. ET, the Twitter accounts of both companies reported that the Chinese military had fired a missile on a U.S. warship, sparking a full-blown battle. They also claimed the U.S. Federal Reserve was to make an emergency announcement about interest rates.

The stock markets were unmoved by the fake news reports.

"Give the hackers this much credit, the George Washington is our permanent Pacific based carrier," tweeted John Noonan, spokesman for House Armed Services committee. "They at least did their homework."

Submission + - What Went Wrong With the SpaceX Landing Attempt (businessinsider.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Last week, SpaceX attempted to land a Falcon 9 rocket on an autonomous ocean platform after successfully launching supplies to the ISS. It didn't work, but Elon Musk said they were close. Now, a few frames were recovered from an onboard camera, and they show just how close it was. You can see the rocket hitting the platform while descending at an angle, falling sideways, and exploding. Musk said a few days ago that not only do they know what the problem was, but they've already solved it. The rocket's guiding fins require hydraulic fluid to operate. They had enough fluid to operate for 4 minutes, but ran out just prior to landing. Their next launch already carries 50% more hydraulic fluid, so it shouldn't be an issue next time.

Comment Why is this not surprising? (Score 1) 329

by azav (#48830711) Attached to: Steam For Linux Bug Wipes Out All of a User's Files

When TF2 has critical bugs that are still in it after 7 years and issues like the Strange PDA Engie Upgrade Bug that has been in the product for over a year, it amazes me that these guys are still going.

It just looks like they are running by the skin of their teeth since there are FREQUENT issues that are dangerous as hell or that stay in the product for ages.

Every new release of TF2 seems to add new bugs and they spend more time putting in new hats than fixing outstanding issues. This reeks of shitty software development.

Submission + - What Africa really needs to fight Ebola (thebulletin.org)

Submitted by Lasrick
Lasrick writes: Laura Kahn, a physician on the research staff of Princeton University's Program on Science and Global Security, writes that the high tech solutions being promoted to help fight Ebola in Africa will make no difference. What Africa really needs is anti-corruption efforts, now. 'A case in point is Liberia, which has received billions of dollars in international aid for over a decade, with little to show for it. The country ranks near the bottom of the United Nation’s Human Development Index and near the bottom of Transparency International’s Global Corruption Barometer. And while international aid groups and non-governmental organizations such as Doctors Without Borders and the International Medical Corps provide important humanitarian assistance and medical care, they also inadvertently absolve African political leaders from developing medical and public health infrastructures.'

Comment Re:If you don't want to upgrade your box (Score 1) 100

That's actually why I decided to use it. Faster compile times.

OS X hits the disk so often, that I moved my user environment on to the RAM drive.

Even with 1066 MHz RAM, I would get instant build times as the swap files were now in RAM.

That when compared to 30 second build times are a trade off I'm willing to make.

And losing my contents? That's what rsync is for. And that's what back up batteries are for. My RAM drive is rsynched to an SSD partition. Happens in the background every 5 mins. I never see the impact.

So, yeah. Swap files on the RAM Disk. Insane speed as a result. Disk backed up to an SSD. Battery backup (laptops have batteries too, don't they?) Never a problem.

Comment Re:If you don't want to upgrade your box (Score 3, Interesting) 100

Well, shame on me. I've been doing it for 3 years on a daily basis.

I have my RAM drive rsynched to an SSD partition that is the same-ish size.

And here's one area where you're incorrect. Safari loads web pages. Each page loads javascript. Many of these leak over time or simply never purge their contents. I often end up with 8 GB used in Safari. Safari alone is a citizen that doesn't play by these rules because each page that loads is a prisoner of the javascript that loads and often doesn't handle memory freeing properly.

When I use my RAM as a drive, I get near INSTANT builds on OS X.

This matters to me more than your claims of "all modern operating systems taking full advantage of the RAM". If the operating system takes full advantage of the RAM, it may not be to my best benefit.

For example, Apple apps now by default do not quit when you close the last document. They merely stay in memory, hide the UI and then need to be relaunched to enable the UI again. Why does this matter? For TextEdit, if I want to open a document form the open menu if I close the last document and click elsewhere, this forces me to reopen the app because the OS fake closes the app (really only hiding the UI) while the rest of the app stays memory resident.

So, I have to relaunch the app. This takes more time and ONLY just renables the UI. How much memory does this save on my 32 GB machine? 1 MB. Now, that's certainly not taking full advantage of the RAM. It's a case of the OS designers thinking that "he wanted to quit the app, so we'll do it for him". But I didn't want to quit the app. The computer is not taking full advantage of the RAM in this case. That's not what I wanted it to do.

Maybe I have apps in the background that are doing stuff, but I want them to pause completely if another app is running in the foreground. Maybe I want ALL Safari pages to suspend their javascript when in the background, but the app still can still process downloads as if it's running at normal priority.

See, there are many cases where the computer's OS will not take proper advantage of the RAM and the processing power since it can not mirror the user's intentions. Even in cases where it tries to, it often gets them wrong. And in some cases where it does (Safari javascript), the computer ends up eating processing power and RAM for tasks that the user doesn't want it to be placing priority on. And in some of these cases, it can't allocate RAM and processing power properly, because it can't if it relies on other programmers writing their javascript competently and acting as good citizens.

I can cordon off a small chunk of my computer's RAM (since I have way more than enough) and direct it to do pretty damn much just want I want it to do.

That's why I bought it. I don't want the OS to prioritize things the way it wants to. I want to tell (parts of) the OS to prioritize things the way I want it to.

Cheers.

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