Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Comment Panama has already minted $1 USD coins (Score 1) 943

by mhocker (#42154711) Attached to: Is It Time For the US To Ditch the Dollar Bill?

A little background first: Panama uses the US Dollar but calls it the "Balboa". 1 Balboa = 1 Dollar and they look exactly the same because they are actually US dollar bills. Doing this has given Panama an economic stability unheard of in Latin America and contributes to the consistent annual 9% economic growth that the country enjoys, all while keeping inflation low.

A couple of years ago, Panama started to mint their own $1 coins. See here: http://www.thepanamanews.com/pn/v_17/issue_02/economy_12.html. Now granted, they can't be used outside Panama and were actually minted in Canada, but the "Martinellis" as the Panamanians call the coins, named after the president, have some significant advantages over dollar bills:

- In a country where dollar bills do not get replaced frequently and are usually filthy, Martinellis are clean and durable.
- $1 in Panama can get a lot done for you: groceries bagged and carried to your car, a parking space from a "bien cuidado", and two of them will get you a taxi ride in the city. So dropping one or two coins is a convenient way to pay.
- Martinellis represent money that stays inside Panama and can only be used to pay for goods in Panama, thus reducing capital outflow (but of course, not by much as there aren't that many in circulation)

However, this money is minted independently of the US, so it actually represents Panama's own currency. I'm not sure if this is good or bad though.
Space

Submission + - In Space, Cambridge Will See If Someone Can Hear You Scream (screaminspace.com)

Submitted by mhocker
mhocker writes: Science is all about testing theories to validate them and students at Cambridge University are doing exactly that with a long-held theory that "In Space, No One Can Hear You Scream" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_(film). The team from the Cambridge University Spaceflight (CUSF) society are launching a smartphone into orbit that will play videos of members of the public screaming in a variety of ways. As the videos are played, the team hope to find the answer to the question of whether or not anyone can hear you scream in space. More here: http://www.screaminspace.com./
Programming

The Struggles of Developing StarCraft 135

Posted by Soulskill from the requires-more-vespene-gas dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Patrick Wyatt led production efforts for several of Blizzard Entertainment's early games, including Warcraft 1 & 2 and StarCraft. Wyatt has just published an in-depth look at the development of StarCraft, highlighting many of the problems the team encountered, and several of the hacks they came to later regret. Quoting: 'Given all the issues working against the team, you might think it was hard to identify a single large source of bugs, but based on my experiences the biggest problems in StarCraft related to the use of doubly-linked linked lists. Linked lists were used extensively in the engine to track units with shared behavior. With twice the number of units of its predecessor — StarCraft had a maximum of 1600, up from 800 in Warcraft 2 — it became essential to optimize the search for units of specific types by keeping them linked together in lists. ... All of these lists were doubly-linked to make it possible to add and remove elements from the list in constant time — O(1) — without the necessity to traverse the list looking for the element to remove — O(N). Unfortunately, each list was 'hand-maintained' — there were no shared functions to link and unlink elements from these lists; programmers just manually inlined the link and unlink behavior anywhere it was required. And hand-rolled code is far more error-prone than simply using a routine that's already been debugged. ... So the game would blow up all the time. All the time.'" Wyatt also has a couple interesting posts about the making of Warcraft 1.

Comment Re:RIM, you're not paying attention (Score 1) 299

by mhocker (#40617509) Attached to: RIM CEO On What Went Wrong

There is a company that already does exactly this - Good Technology. I investigated using it for our company and it seems to offer exactly what we would need to replace Blackberries with iPhones. But there are some problems that are preventing us from switching:

1. PIN to PIN messages. Unbelievably, these insecure messages are very popular with some users. No other platform supports them because they are the native protocol of the Blackberry.
2. BBM. WhatsApp is a good alternative but you have to convinced all your contacts to get it.
3. No integration of Good with the rest of iOS. So no Siri, calendar integration, etc. It lives in its own little box. Really not ideal.

So between the network effect (1,2) and lack of integration (3) some customers are not yet switching.
Businesses

Top Google Executives Approved Illegal Drug Ads 287

Posted by timothy from the regulations-trump-free-choice dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "PC Magazine reports that the U.S. government used convicted con artist David Whitaker, owner of an online business selling steroids and human growth hormone to U.S. consumers, to help federal agents in a sting operation against Google when he began advertising with Google with advertisements that included the statement 'no prescription needed,' clearly violating U.S. laws. Google's settlement with the U.S. government for $500 million blamed AdWords sales by Canadian pharmacies, who allegedly were selling drugs to U.S. consumers. 'We banned the advertising of prescription drugs in the U.S. by Canadian pharmacies some time ago,' Google said then. 'However, it's obvious with hindsight that we shouldn't have allowed these ads on Google in the first place.' Peter Neronha, the U.S. attorney for Rhode Island who led the multiagency federal task force that conducted the sting, claims that chief executive Larry Page had personal knowledge of the operation, as did Sheryl Sandberg, a Google executive who now is the chief operating officer for Facebook. In 2009 Google started requiring online pharmacy advertisers to be certified by the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy's Verified Internet Pharmacy Practices Sites program and hired an outside company to detect pharmacy advertisers exploiting flaws in the Google's screening systems."
IBM

IBM's Five Predictions For the Next Five Years 219

Posted by timothy from the ok-but-let's-revisit-in-5-years dept.
PolygamousRanchKid writes "In each of the past five years, IBM has come up with a list of five innovations it believes will become popular within five years. In this, the sixth year, IBM has come up with the following technologies it thinks will gain traction: (1) People power will come to life. Advances in technology will allow us to trap the kinetic energy generated (and wasted) from walking, jogging, bicycling, and even from water flowing through pipes. (2) You will never need a password again. Biometrics will finally replace the password and thus redefine the word 'hack.' (3) Mind reading is no longer science fiction. Scientists are working on headsets with sensors that can read brain activity and recognize facial expressions, excitement, and more without needing any physical inputs from the wearer. (4) The digital divide will cease to exist. Mobile phones will make it easy for even the poorest of poor to get connected. (5) Junk mail will become priority mail. "In five years, unsolicited advertisements may feel so personalized and relevant it may seem that spam is dead."
Piracy

Sony, Universal and Fox Caught Pirating Through BitTorrent 284

Posted by Soulskill from the hand-in-cookie-jar dept.
New submitter Bad_Feeling sends in a followup to the story we discussed on Monday about a new site that scanned a few popular torrent trackers and linked torrents to IP addresses. The folks at TorrentFreak decided to check IP addresses belonging to major companies in the entertainment industry and published lists of pirated files from several, including Fox, Sony, and NBC Universal. Of course, they used the information to make a slightly different point than the industry usually does: "By highlighting the above our intention is not to get anyone into trouble, and for that reason we masked out the end of the IP addresses to avoid a witch hunt. An IP address is not a person, IP addresses can be shared among many people, and anyone can be behind a keyboard at any given time."
Space

Pristine Big Bang Gas Found 220

Posted by Soulskill from the drill-baby-drill dept.
New submitter cekerr sends this quote from Discovery News: "U.S. scientists have found two interstellar clouds of original gas, which contain only original elements created moments after the universe's birth (abstract). Unlike everything else in the universe, the gas clouds have never mingled with elements forged later in stars. The existence of pristine gas that formed minutes after the Big Bang explosion, some 13.7 billion years ago, had been predicted, but never before observed."
Security

Precursor To the Next Stuxnet? 49

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the us-government-denies-involvement dept.
An anonymous reader writes "On Oct. 14, 2011 Symantec was alerted to a malware sample from some recovered computers that demonstrated code similar to Stuxnet. This code however appears to serve a different purpose, apparently laying the groundwork for a future Stuxnet type of attack." Quoting Symantec: "The threat was written by the same authors (or those that have access to the Stuxnet source code) and appears to have been created since the last Stuxnet file was recovered. Duqu's purpose is to gather intelligence data and assets from entities, such as industrial control system manufacturers, in order to more easily conduct a future attack against another third party. The attackers are looking for information such as design documents that could help them mount a future attack on an industrial control facility."
Java

Oracle's Ambitious Plan For Client-Side Java 292

Posted by timothy from the larry-pulls-a-shot dept.
snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister suggests that the real news out of this year's JavaOne is Oracle's ambitious plan to revitalize Java on the desktop, the Web, and mobile devices. 'It's been tempting to assume that Oracle, with its strong enterprise focus, would ignore the client in favor of data center technologies such as Java EE. This week, we learned that's not the case. In fact, the real news from this year's JavaOne conference in San Francisco may not be Oracle's plans for Java 8 and 9, but the revelation that Oracle is gearing up for a new, sustained push behind Java for the desktop, the Web, and mobile devices. If it can succeed in its ambitious plans, the age of client-side Java could be just beginning.'"
Earth

New Skeleton Finds May Revamp History of Human Evolution 131

Posted by timothy from the history-is-written-by-the-known-survivors dept.
brindafella links to a series of articles published yesterday in the journal Science "on Australopithecus sediba, explaining that skeletons found in the Malapa cave in the World Heritage listed 'Cradle of Civilisation' push back to 1.97 million years the oldest known tool-using, ape-like pre-humans." As is typical, the full Science articles are paywalled, but the abstracts are interesting. (If you're a university student — or, in some cases, an alumni club member — you may have full journal access and not even realize it.) NPR has a nice article on the find as well.

Slashdot Top Deals

"And remember: Evil will always prevail, because Good is dumb." -- Spaceballs

Close