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Submission + - Disney pulls a reverse Santa, takes back Christmas shows from Amazon customers

Submitted by Sockatume
Sockatume writes: Since 2011, Amazon Instant Video has sold a series of Christmas shorts from Disney called "Prep and Landing". Unfortunately this holiday season, Disney has had a change of heart and has decided to make the shorts exclusive to its own channels. Showing an abundance of Christmas cheer, the Mickey Mouse company went so far as to retroactively withdrawn the shows from Amazon, so that customers who have already paid for them no longer have access. Apparently this reverse-Santa facility is a feature Amazon provides all publishers, and customers have little recourse but to go cap-in-hand to a Disney outlet and pay for the shows again.

Submission + - Exponential Algorithm in Windows Update Slowing XP Machines (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: An interesting bug regarding update dependency calculation has been found in Windows XP. By design, machines using Windows Update retrieve patch information from Microsoft's update servers (or possibly WSUS in a company setting). That patch information contains information about each patch: what software it applies to and, critically, what historic patch or patches the current patch supersedes. Unfortunately, the Windows Update client components used an algorithm with exponential scaling when processing these lists. Each additional superseded patch would double the time taken to process the list. With the operating system now very old, those lists have grown long, sometimes to 40 or more items. On a new machine, that processing appeared to be almost instantaneous. It is now very slow. After starting the system, svchost.exe is chewing up the entire processor, sometimes for an hour or more at a time. Wait long enough after booting and the machine will eventually return to normalcy. Microsoft thought that it had this problem fixed in November's Patch Tuesday update after it culled the supersedence lists. That update didn't appear to fix the problem. The company thought that its December update would also provide a solution, with even more aggressive culling. That didn't seem to help either. For one reason or another, Microsoft's test scenarios for the patches didn't reflect the experience of real Windows XP machines.

Comment What could possibly go wrong? (Score 0) 257

by I'm not god any more (#44010209) Attached to: Prosecutors Push For Anti-Phone-Theft Kill Switches
I just can't imagine how this could possibly go wrong for all those apple lovers.
This might be the killer feature that will transition OSX to iOS, so those computer users can also benefit from this marvelous technology.
It's just a matter of time before the government will be replacing Social Security numbers with Apple IDs and retirement benefits will move over to iTunes gift cards.
The realization of Corporate America is almost here.
Science

Submission + - Why Men Prefer "Dumb-Looking" and Sleepy Women for Flings but Not Marriage (medicaldaily.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Men have evolved to prefer dumb, sleepy or drunk women over those with charm and intelligence when they're on the hunt for a one-night-stand, according to a new study.

New findings, published in journal Evolution and Human Behavior, researchers explored the so-called "sexual exploitability hypothesis," an assumption that men are genetically programmed to look for 'easy' and short-term sexual relationships.
Idle

Submission + - GSA emails recount inside story of exploding toilets (muckrock.com)

Submitted by
v3rgEz
v3rgEz writes: "Six months ago, the toilets of the General Services Administration started exploding, injuring two employees and beginning the agency's spiral down the drain of bad press (this is the same GSA now under fire for pricey Vegas conference flings). E-mails just released under FOIA now show the culprit: Compressed air + ancient plumbing + leaving it all unattended.

Full documents are available as well."

Comment Re:Lets fix things since 1994... (Score 0) 406

by I'm not god any more (#38742030) Attached to: PS4: What Sony Should and Shouldn't Do
How about allowing the PS4 to play region free NTSC and PAL DVDs?

How about not needing to have to put the freaking disc in each and every time I want to play the freaking game?

How about not having the internet required to play single player games?

How about an easier way to move all my stuff/games from my old PS3 to my PS4? Certainly make it easier than moving my stuff from a fat PS3 to a slim PS3 - yes, I agree it was nice that it had the feature - but fuck me, that was a magic dance to get it to actually work. Having non encrypted DMR free hard disks would make this easier.

Oh, and make it work with my freaking iPhone and iPad goddammit

Support all the legacy input devices, and add some sort of Kinect (or equivalent) support.

Comment Re:$.99 Textbooks? Doubtful but... (Score 0) 396

by I'm not god any more (#38741874) Attached to: Apple Intends To 'Digitally Destroy' Textbook Publishing
I think $14.95 is quite reasonable: http://www.blueleaf-book-scanning.com/index.html

If you're in a class of 30 then that's only 50 cents each. If you're talking a whole year of 6th graders, it could be as little as a dime each per book. Everyone's got a computer or iPad - right?

If your 10 year old kid is lugging 10 Kg of books to/from school each day, then it's a no brainer to get the soft copy. Heck - it makes the book searchable too.

Is this ethical or legal? If I've got the hard copy of a book - have I the right to use the soft copy? The small print at the start of the book would certainly like you to believe that you have no rights to do anything.

Comment Re:Well, they're a good indicator of intelligence (Score 0) 672

by I'm not god any more (#38617858) Attached to: Are Brain Teasers Good Hiring Criteria?

you sometimes encounter like "How many pigeons are there is Manhattan" is that they are a very good way to judge someone's unstructured problem solving ability.

You should re-read that. I'm sure you didn't mean "there is Manhattan".

I'd fail the interview:
a) I'll annoy you with grammar corrections
b) point out that Passenger Pigeons have been extinct for quite some time.
c) African or European?
d) ask if we could change the question to something more warm and fuzzy, like estimating the number of squirrels in Los Angeles

Comment Re:iPad books cost less? (Score 0) 396

by I'm not god any more (#38364750) Attached to: Goodbye Textbooks, Hello iPad
AFAIK you can load up an iPad with apps and then sell the iPad with all of its DRM'd content. So, there might be a market for used iPads loaded with the right textbooks. This will create a new cap on how high the publishers can charge for text books.

Apple's model of free app upgrades could be circumvented by the text book publishers by renaming the text book revisions in such a way that they show up as completely separate apps. So, the publisher's can still play the multiple revision game.

Seems to me that a professor could publish a PDF each year and eliminate the text book guys from the equation completely if they wanted to. That would also empower their students to pick their own reading platform.

--
Cloud

Submission + - Beware of the iCloud (networkworld.com)

Submitted by mvar
mvar writes: Network World has an article about Apple's iCloud service claiming that, as experts say, it could be an IT security professional's nightmare.

  iCloud's functionality will be very tightly integrated with both Apple devices and third-party applications. For example, app developers could use the iCloud to store data such as high scores and in-game credits, without having to set up their own Web services. Users would be automatically signed in the minute they opened the app — no need to create new user accounts for each game or application.

Then there's this scenario. You're at your office Mac, working on a sensitive company document. Now, there's a copy of the document automatically pushed to your iPad, which a family member borrowed and took to Starbucks. There's a copy on your home Macbook, which your teenager is using. Oh, and there's a copy on your iPhone, which you just left in a cab. ICloud raises serious questions in terms of what Apple plans to do to deliver a secure experience, and what enterprises need to do to protect sensitive corporate data.
Robotics

Submission + - Latest combat drone makes wheels up test flight (suasnews.com)

Submitted by
garymortimer
garymortimer writes: "The U.S. Navy/Northrop Grumman Corporation X-47B Unmanned Combat Air System Demonstration aircraft reached a major milestone Sept. 30 when it retracted its landing gear and flew in its cruise configuration for the first time.

The flight, conducted at Edwards Air Force Base, also helped validate precision navigation hardware and software that will allow the X-47B to land with precision on the moving deck of an aircraft carrier.

“Last week’s flight gave us our first clean look at the aerodynamic cruise performance of the X-47B air systemand it is proving out all of our predictions,” said Janis Pamiljans, vice president and Navy UCAS program manager for Northrop Grumman’s Aerospace Systems sector. “Reaching this critical test point demonstrates the growing maturity of the air system, and its readiness to move to the next phase of flight testing.”"
User Journal

Journal Journal: Supernovae 1a Data

Journal by mburns

I studied the published graphs of supernovae Ia brightness versus redshift. So I came to accept that the comparison curve on what is expected in an empty universe is correct. This certainly makes interpretation on the deviations easier. (In Wikipedia the dimming due to redshift is stated incorrectly, so my doubts were not unfounded.) See http://www.pha.jhu.edu/~bfalck/SeminarPres.html#adeptsim

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