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.
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?"
Submission + - Time Warner Cable Wins State-Wide Cable Franchise (state.oh.us) 1
An anonymous reader writes: Time Warner Cable has received the second state-wide franchise agreement, covering 260 communities, in 60 of Ohio's 88 counties, for 10 years. AT&T was the first to earn a state-wide franchise contract, after a law was passed in September that allowed operators to negotiate a single state-wide agreement.
Normally operators negotiate franchise agreements at the local level.
Submission + - The Epic Battle between Microsoft and Google 1
Hugh Pickens writes: "There is a long article in the NYTimes well worth reading called "Google Gets Ready to Rumble With Microsoft" about the business strategies both companies are pursuing and about the future of applications and where they will reside — on the web or on the desktop. Google President Eric Schmidt thinks that 90 percent of computing will eventually reside in the Web-based cloud and about 2,000 companies are signing up every day for Google Apps, simpler versions of the pricey programs that make up Microsoft's lucrative Office business. Microsoft faces a business quandary as they to try to link the Web to its desktop business — "software plus Internet services," in its formulation. Microsoft will embrace the Web, while striving to maintain the revenue and profits from its desktop software businesses, the corporate gold mine, a smart strategy for now that may not be sustainable. Google faces competition from Microsoft and from other Web-based productivity software being offered by start-ups but it is "unclear at this point whether Google will be able to capitalize on the trends that it's accelerating." David B. Yoffie, a professor at the Harvard Business School, says the Google model is to try to change all the rules. If Google succeeds, "a lot of the value that Microsoft provides today is potentially obsolete.""
Submission + - The Twitter/T-Mobile Battle (bibleboy.org)
bblboy54 writes: "Starting Sunday December 9th, many T-Mobile customers began having issues sending SMS messages to the Twitter service. Initially this was thought to be a bug but customers began investigating and received very strong e-mail responses from T-Mobile's President's office. On Thursday, AlternaGeek reported the speculation. It was then later confirmed by the emails customers were receiving from T-Mobile and TechCrunch picked up the story. After a huge outcry from the Twitter community, it was just reported by a representative of Twitter that the problem was found to be technical and not political but this is not only after the direct emails from T-Mobile but also Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, announced T-Mobile was blocking Twitter. The motives and actions of what happened are up for debate but, at the very least, T-Mobile owes their customers and explanation for the way they were treated."
Submission + - Broadband over Power Lines under pressure (mybroadband.co.za)
slash-sa writes: "Power Line Telecommunication (PLT) is the official terminology for what elsewhere
in the world is referred to as PLC and BPL. Its proponents claim it to be the
answer to provide cheap broadband to the masses. But will it ever materialize?
Can we liken it to a cheap alternative drug which has huge side effects that makes
its use undesirable? Is it not a question of too little too late?"
Submission + - Japanese phone technology coming to North America
An anonymous reader writes: Canada's Globe and Mail newspaper brings us an article on a hot Japanese technology poised to break into the US and Canadian cell phone market.
QR codes look like a cross between a Magic Eye picture and a poorly-played game of Tetris, but they are actually scannable bits of information that function much like traditional bar codes. QR codes can appear in printed matter, such as newspaper or magazine ads, or on business cards or letterhead, or on actual objects. For example, McDonald's restaurants in Japan have been using QR codes for more than a year on their food wrappers, providing a link that sends customers to a website displaying nutritional information.
When a cellphone user snaps a picture of a QR code, it automatically triggers a response in the phone that can open a link to a website, dial a phone number or download an application. A Canadian company, Luna Development, is finally bringing this technology to the US and Canada.
QR codes look like a cross between a Magic Eye picture and a poorly-played game of Tetris, but they are actually scannable bits of information that function much like traditional bar codes. QR codes can appear in printed matter, such as newspaper or magazine ads, or on business cards or letterhead, or on actual objects. For example, McDonald's restaurants in Japan have been using QR codes for more than a year on their food wrappers, providing a link that sends customers to a website displaying nutritional information.
When a cellphone user snaps a picture of a QR code, it automatically triggers a response in the phone that can open a link to a website, dial a phone number or download an application. A Canadian company, Luna Development, is finally bringing this technology to the US and Canada.
