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Businesses

Google 'Wasting' $16 Billion On Projects Headed Nowhere 408

Posted by timothy from the preemptive-sour-grapes dept.
hapworth writes "Google's engineering culture is 'wasting profits,' according to a new report published today that refers to $16 billion worth of Google projects that are going nowhere. According to the analysis, it's not that the ideas — such as the Kansas City Fiber Project, driverless cars, and other engineering efforts — are bad. Rather, it's Google's poor execution that is killing the company and adding billions of dollars worth of projects to its 'trash pile.'" On the obvious other hand, Google's done a lot of interesting things over the years that they've managed to make work well, and that strayed from their initial single-text-field search bar.
Chrome

Pinkie Pie Earns $60K At Pwn2Own With Three Chromium 0-Day Exploits 148

Posted by timothy from the omg-pwnies! dept.
Tackhead writes "Hot on the hooves of Sergey Glazunov's hack 5-minutes into Pwn2Own, an image of an axe-wielding pink pony was the mark of success for a hacker with the handle of Pinkie Pie. Pinkie Pie subtly tweaked Chromium's sandbox design by chaining together three zero-day vulnerabilities, thereby widening his appeal to $60K in prize money, another shot at a job opportunity at the Googleplex, and instantly making Google's $1M Pwnium contest about 20% cooler. (Let the record show that Slashdot was six years ahead of this particular curve, and that April Fool's Day is less than a month away.)"

Comment The Trouble with Touchscreens (Score 2, Insightful) 279

by wintermute1974 (#39116403) Attached to: I prefer my input devices to be as _______ as possible.

Touchscreens could just become the single biggest public safety hazard of the 21st century. The user instructions on all the ones I have read (including popular ones such as the iPad) expressly forbid cleaning them with any sort of liquid other than water.

People have dirty hands. Sometimes very dirty hands. I rather doubt that a little water on a lint-free rag is going to remove the huge smudgy colonies of bacteria and other things that collect on them.

Comment Re:I prefer mine to be insanely great trackballs (Score 4, Informative) 279

by wintermute1974 (#39116351) Attached to: I prefer my input devices to be as _______ as possible.

There are all sorts of nice trackballs out there now. This wiki page from my favorite input device website might be of some interest: http://geekhack.org/showwiki.php?title=Island:10242

The CST LaserTRAC Trackball looks especially promising. You could replace the provided ball will a pool ball or a perfect sphere of any material, so long as it was the same size. This means you could try out heavier trackballs.

Comment Augmented Reality HUD? (Score 1) 279

by wintermute1974 (#39115957) Attached to: I prefer my input devices to be as _______ as possible.

Every six months or so, I trawl the Internet looking for any new heads-up displays which add their signal to the one your eyes are already receiving instead of blocking out the world altogether and replacing it with some sort of display.

Are there any augmented reality HUDs out there? I've yet to see any good ones that you could walk around outside with while managing not to be mugged or hit by a bus.
The Internet

Bufferbloat: Dark Buffers In the Internet 124

Posted by timothy from the perfect-for-dark-fiber dept.
Expanding on earlier work from Jim Gettys of Bell Labs with a new article in the ACM Queue, CowboyRobot writes that Gettys "makes the case that the Internet is in danger of collapse due to 'bufferbloat,' 'the existence of excessively large and frequently full buffers inside the network.' Part of the blame is due to overbuffering; in an effort to protect ourselves we make things worse. But the problem runs deeper than that. Gettys' solution is AQM (active queue management) which is not deployed as widely as it should be. 'We are flying on an Internet airplane in which we are constantly swapping the wings, the engines, and the fuselage, with most of the cockpit instruments removed but only a few new instruments reinstalled. It crashed before; will it crash again?'"
Data Storage

Ask Slashdot: Best Way To Destroy Hard Drives? 1016

Posted by samzenpus from the burn-it-with-fire dept.
First time accepted submitter THE_WELL_HUNG_OYSTER writes "I have 10-15 old hard drives I want to trash, some IDE and some SATA. Even if I still had IDE hardware, I don't want to wait several weeks to run DBAN on all of them. I could use a degausser, but they are prohibitively expensive. I could send them to a data destruction firm, but can they be trusted? What's the fastest, cheapest DIY solution?"
Movies

Space Invaders: The Movie 244

Posted by timothy from the they-want-our-unobtanium dept.
rainmouse writes "Hollywood, clearly after witnessing the staggering success and endless critical acclaim of other computer game adaptations with their typically engrossing story line and deep, believable character development, have now apparently picked up the rights to make a film based upon Space Invaders. 'The classic 1980s arcade game from Taito and Midway, which is ranked as the top arcade game of all time by Guinness World Records, is heading to the big screen courtesy of producers Lorenzo di Bonaventura and Odd Lot Entertainment's Gigi Pritzker.'" Please help out by providing appropriate plot-lines and character sketches below.
Google

Google Launches Search By Image 109

Posted by CmdrTaco from the i-see-what-you-did-there dept.
kai_hiwatari writes "At the Inside Search event being held at San Francisco, Google has announced a new addition to its search features — Search by Image. The Search by Image feature is something like Google's image search application for mobile devices — Google Goggles — but for the desktop."

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