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Comment Re:He's right (Score 1) 186

by mrderm (#30423718) Attached to: Are Sat-Nav Systems Becoming Information Overload?

Which satnav system doesnt support an optional 2D map?

The problem with a 3D display is that perspective means that proportionally more pixels are used for the features next to you, and behind you. The features on the road ahead are shrunken. That's the opposite of how I would want the pixels used.

Submission + - Google demonstrates quantum computer image search (newscientist.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Google's web services may be considered cutting edge, but they run in warehouses filled with conventional computers. Now the search giant has revealed it is investigating the use of quantum computers to run its next generation of faster applications.

Writing on Google's research blog this week, Hartmut Neven, head of its image recognition team, reveals that the Californian firm has for three years been quietly developing a quantum computer that can identify particular objects in a database of stills or video.

Google has been doing this, Neven says, with D-Wave, a Canadian firm that has developed an on-chip array of quantum bits – or qubits – encoded in magnetically coupled superconducting loops.

Submission + - 3 Years Prison in CA For Covering Laptop (ca.gov) 7

Submitted by mrcaseyj
mrcaseyj writes: California penal code section 537e makes it a felony punishable by up to 3 years in prison to be in possession of an integrated computer panel where the serial number or any other distinguishing number or identification mark has been covered. It's also a crime punishable by 6 months or a year to cover or obliterate the serial number or identification mark of just about any other personal property, from tools to CDs and much more. While a district attorney might have a hard time prosecuting you for such a crime, it appears a police officer could still take you to jail without having to worry about getting in trouble, because covering is apparently illegal by the letter of the law.
Music

Submission + - Logitech Announces Touchscreen Net Music Player (logitech.com)

Submitted by
FredFredrickson
FredFredrickson writes: "Logitech just announced this morning two new products to their network audio player line-up: The Squeezebox Touch, a touchscreen music player, and the Squeezebox Radio, a player with a speaker built-in. The touch is highly anticipated, with 24/96 support, digital and analog outputs, local music library capabilities, and internet audio options such as Rhapsody, Last.FM, Pandora, and others. I was a beta tester, and I've been loving these new additions to the lineup. Feel free to ask questions."

Comment In classic games (Score 1) 346

by mrderm (#28994485) Attached to: Finding New and Unintended Ways of Playing Games

A donkey kong clone on - if I remember right - the zx81, allowed you to climb up the stack of ramps then jump over the damsel in distress that was supposed to be your target. Jump onto donkey kong's arm, over his head onto the other arm, then make an adrenaline-filled slow-motion fall down the full height of the screen back to where you started.

Well, you had to be there.
Security

Submission + - Scientists Discover How to Recover Lost Wallets

Submitted by
The Narrative Fallacy
The Narrative Fallacy writes: "The Times reports that researchers left 240 wallets on the streets of Edinburgh last year to see how many were returned to their owners. The wallets were planted at random about a quarter of a mile apart and snapshots were inserted into a clear plastic window inside the wallets, none of which contained money. However, some of the wallets contained photographs of a baby, a cute puppy, a family or a portrait of an elderly couple while others contained a card suggesting the owner had recently made a charity donation. A control batch was also left containing no additional items. Those containing the picture of the infant were most likely to trigger an honest reaction from the finder, with 88 per cent being returned, followed by those containing pictures of the puppy at 53 per cent. Wallets containing the charity cards and the control sample were least likely to be returned, with rates of 20 and 15 per cent respectively. "The baby kicked off a caring feeling in people, which is not surprising from an evolutionary perspective," said Richard Wiseman, a psychologist who supervised the experiment. "We were amazed by the high percentage of wallets that came back.""

Submission + - What is the best algorithm for HAND sorting? 2

Submitted by
EricHsu
EricHsu writes: "I'm a teacher and I've often had to sort stacks of 20-100 papers by last name. For I while I did what I suppose most hand sorters do: I made a new stack and added new papers in order. I believe this is basically insertion sort, right?

After a while, this felt inefficient, particular since it's relatively slow to flip through the papers. So I tried a kind of bucket sort where I first sorted papers into four piles of lead letter ranges, like [A-F][G-M][N-S][T-Z], and then did an insertion sort on the piles. This seemed to go faster, but it was a bit confusing to remember which letters bounded each pile.

It seemed to me that someone must have thought about this harder that I have and that such a geek could be found on Slashdot. In particular, it seems to me that one could do a somewhat detailed study of hand-sorting algorithms by modifying analyses of computer sorting algorithms, which usually take into account number of comparisons and memory usage etc, taking into account human parameters like difficulty of flipping papers, difficulty of remembering the algorithm, how many papers one can hold easily in a single hand, difficulty of accessing piles as the number grows.

So, any careful analyses out there? Or failing that, any great hand sorting algorithms?"
Hardware Hacking

Submission + - Developer creates DIY 8-bit CPU (wired.com) 1

Submitted by MaizeMan
MaizeMan writes: Not for the easily distracted. A Belmot software developer's hand built CPU was featured in wired recently. Starting with a $50 wire wrap board Chamberlin built his CPU with 1253 pieces of wire, each wire wrapped by hand at both ends. Salvaging parts from 70's and 80's era computers, the final result is an 8-bit processor with keyboard input, a USB connection and VGA graphical output. More details on the developer's blog

Comment Re:all this data yet so much gets missed (Score 1) 139

by mrderm (#26249849) Attached to: Managing Last.FM's "Mountain of Data"

.... also exitahead has a rss feed of music on ebay matching a lastfm profile so it has new music as well as older, hard to find, releases.

I think it is a healthy sign that lastfm have such a broad community of third party developers, but some of these add-ons really should be core features of their service by now. They seem to have been focused on trying to be social networking, neglecting their users that just want to find music.
Censorship

Submission + - UK ISPs censor Wikipedia page, serve fake 404 1

Submitted by
McDutchie
McDutchie writes: "Suddenly, access to Wikipedia from most major UK ISPs has become painfully slow. The reason: all your connections to Wikipedia are being transparently proxied through a single IP address, and the article about the 1970s Scorpion album, Virgin Killer, is blocked, presumably because of the cover image. The proxy serves fake 404 Not Found error page, so you wouldn't know about the block unless you were familiar with Wikimedia's regular 404 page. Wikinews has more on this."

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