Comment Huh... (Score 1) 137
Saw the title of this article and wondered "how will Las Vegas casinos make the move to have all of my gaming chips put onto a server."
Comment Re:Academics (Score 1) 186
Oh, the humor of this comment - yes, lets appoint Elizabeth Warren - you know, the Harvard law professor and noted academic. While Liz Warren has some great ideas, most professors (and particularly law professors) will tell you that it is not a good policy to appoint fellow academics to policy-making roles.
Comment Lesson learned by the Dallas Morning News (Score 1) 217
The NY Times print folks need to learn from the same lessons the leadership of the Dallas Morning News learned a year or two back - namely that news consumers do not consider the print and electronic versions of the paper equal or interchangeable substitutes. That is, there is far less crossover in each of the customer bases than the newspaper execs or the conventional wisdom might suggest. Unfortunately, if the print folks win out, they will learn this lesson the hard way.
Comment Hmmm...listen closely... (Score 1) 403
I hear insurance scammers quietly whispering about new schemes throughout the US about how to use this to their benefit.
Submission + - A sneak preview of new OpenOffice 3.2 (linuxcrunch.com)
omlx writes: The last developer milestone ( DEV300m60) of OpenOffice.org has been released. The next version of OpenOffice.org 3.2 has more than 42 features and 167 enhancements . The final version is expected to be available at the end of November 2009.
Many companies have contributed to this version like RedHat , RedFlag and IBM, making OpenOffice more stable and useful. I couldn't stop myself from seeing new features and enjoying them. So I downloaded DEV300m60 version. After playing with it for many days I could say that OpenOffice developers have done very good work in it. Well done !
A sneak preview of new OpenOffice 3.2 : more secure , faster , easier and more international.
Many companies have contributed to this version like RedHat , RedFlag and IBM, making OpenOffice more stable and useful. I couldn't stop myself from seeing new features and enjoying them. So I downloaded DEV300m60 version. After playing with it for many days I could say that OpenOffice developers have done very good work in it. Well done !
A sneak preview of new OpenOffice 3.2 : more secure , faster , easier and more international.
Comment Seems natural... (Score 1) 140
Not surprising really. The old media print newspapers have the staff and research people to go out and do real reporting/news gathering in the real world. Online sources pick up this basis of real news reporting and become a distribution and commentary outlet for the work done by the traditional reporters.
Comment Re:Yeah... (Score 3, Informative) 77
AT&T needs to specifically provision the visual voicemail on your plan. I don't know, but I don't think it is tied specifically to the iPhone data plan.
When I switched to the iPhone, the initial rep failed to provision the visual voicemail service to my plan. It took a separate call for them to provision it properly.
Submission + - Big Brother Wants Radio-control of your thermostat (nytimes.com) 3
Malachi Constant writes: "Californian bureaucrats appear likely to approve a proposal to allow utility companies to control your thermostat's temperature via radio during those nasty rolling blackout periods.
The FM radio transmissions used to control temperature are described as "encrypted and encoded." I, for one, am hoping that the algorithm that protects them is another A5/1 or CSS."
Submission + - Web Services Without Pain: gSOAP Writes Your XML (technocrat.net)
Bruce Perens writes: "The downside to web services is that they look as if they were designed by Bertrand Russell and Donald Knuth, from first principles as if they were a theorem in Principia Mathematica. Their rampant anal-retentiveness enables machine analysis and machine generation, at the cost of making any human who writes them work like a machine. But now we are freed from this toil: there's Open Source software that will write them for us."
Submission + - Don't invent; evolve (economist.com) 1
mlimber writes: The Economist is running a story on evolutionary programming, which takes its starting point from evolutionary biology in trying random mutations on a design to generate a better version of that design. It takes a lot of computing power to use these techniques effectively because the mutations cause so many bad mutations that have to be weeded out, but as the price of supercomputing has come down, the usefulness of this technique has risen. The article describes several innovations brought about by evolutionary means, such as changing the pattern of air holes in an optical fibre: "Normally, these holes are arranged in a hexagonal pattern, but the algorithm generated a bizarre flower-like pattern of holes that no human would have thought of trying. It doubled the fibre's bandwidth."
Microsoft Agrees to Release Work Group Protocols 143
UnknowingFool writes "Groklaw is reporting that the Protocol Freedom Information Foundation (PFIF) has signed an agreement with Microsoft to release their protocols relating to Windows Work Group Server. The Foundation agrees to pay MS $10,000, and the agreement does not cover patents. This agreement apparently was made to somewhat satisfy the EU Commission complaints. With PFIF's objective to aid open source, this agreement means that the Samba Team may finally get the information they need to fully interoperate with Windows AD servers."
Submission + - Google returns bad results in top 10 (blogspot.com)
Aravind Ranganathan writes: "Google consistently returns bad results in the top 10 if the search keywords happen to be in the text of a blog post even though the blog (or that post) is on a totally irrelevant topic. I found this first hand when someone Googled "flight from cincinnati to mumbai" and was directed to one of my blog posts on the problems I once had during my travel from Mumbai to Cincinnati. Google returned my post as the 2nd in its search results!! The question is, is this a flaw in the page ranking algorithm? Or is Google just giving more importance to Blogger pages than necessary?"
Submission + - Predicting drug side effects
Roland Piquepaille writes: "It would certainly be nice for the pharmaceutical industry to identify potential side effects of a drug before it starts to be tested on humans. Now, a research team at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) might have found a solution. They have developed a new computational technique to predict drug side effects. Besides identifying adverse effects of a new drug before human clinical trials, this method can also be used to explain the known side effects of drugs already on the market. But read more for additional references and pictures showing how drugs can bind to several proteins."
Submission + - Wikipedia COO was Convicted Felon (theregister.co.uk) 4
An anonymous reader writes: From the Register:
"For more than six months, beginning in January of this year, Wikipedia's million-dollar check book was balanced by a convicted felon. When Carolyn Bothwell Doran was hired as the Chief Operating Officer (COO) of the Florida-based Wikimedia Foundation, she had a criminal record in three other states — Virginia, Maryland, and Texas — and she was still on parole for a DUI (driving under the influence of alcohol) hit and run that resulted in a fatality. Her record also included convictions for passing bad checks, theft, petty larceny, additional DUIs, and unlawfully wounding her boyfriend with a gun shot to the chest."
"For more than six months, beginning in January of this year, Wikipedia's million-dollar check book was balanced by a convicted felon. When Carolyn Bothwell Doran was hired as the Chief Operating Officer (COO) of the Florida-based Wikimedia Foundation, she had a criminal record in three other states — Virginia, Maryland, and Texas — and she was still on parole for a DUI (driving under the influence of alcohol) hit and run that resulted in a fatality. Her record also included convictions for passing bad checks, theft, petty larceny, additional DUIs, and unlawfully wounding her boyfriend with a gun shot to the chest."
Submission + - Why are some HD shows S T R E T C H E D? (newteevee.com) 1
Chris Albrecht writes: "There's some science behind some TV networks distorting their shows to fit a widescreen format. TBS uses an algorithm to determine where the action is taking place. It keeps that ratio normal and stretches the rest of the image to fit the screen. Research also says people prefer the stretched image to the original. What do you think?"
