Comment Separating Fact From Fantasy (Score 0, Offtopic) 111
Surely they're not trying to suggest that my l33tness *doesn't* make me more attractive to women?
Comment Usable by humans (Score 4, Interesting) 243
New tech is all good, but if this is now (supposedly) even more higher res than the human eye compared to Retina, is there any point?
Can you tell the difference?
Meet NELL, the Computer That Learns From the Net 272
bossanovalithium writes "Carnegie Mellon University has taught a computer how to read and learn from the internet.
According to Dennis Baron at the Oxford University press blog, the computer is called NELL and it is reading the internet and learning from it in much the same way that humans learn language and acquire knowledge. Basically by soaking it all up and figuring it out.
NELL is short for Never Ending Language Learner and apparently it is getting brainier every day."
Comment "That's the great thing about evercookie" (Score 3, Insightful) 332
From TFA:
That's the great thing about evercookie
I disagree. Strongly.
I guess it's good that this is out in the open so we know about it, and hopefully the major browsers can all do something to help prevent it. But still: don't like, don't like at all.
Introducing the Invulnerable Evercookie 332
An anonymous reader writes "Using eight different techniques and locations, a 'security' guy has developed a cookie that is very, very hard to delete. If just one copy of the cookie remains, the other locations are rebuilt. My favorite storage location is in 'RGB values of auto-generated, force-cached PNGs using HTML5 Canvas tag to read pixels (cookies) back out' — awesome."
Comment Units (Score 4, Funny) 255
How much is that in terms of the size of a more standard unit of measurement ?
Adding Some Spice To *nix Shell Scripts 411
An anonymous reader writes "Developing GUI script-based applications is time-consuming and expensive. Most Unix-based scripts run in a CLI mode or over a secure ssh session. The Unix shells are quite sophisticated programming languages in their own right: they are easy to design and quick to build, but they are not user-friendly in the same way the Unix commands aren't (see the Unix haters books). Both Unix and bash provide features for writing user friendly scripts using various tools to build powerful, interactive, user-friendly scripts that run under the bash shell on Linux or Unix. What tools do you use that spice up your scripts on the Linux or Unix platforms?"
Volcanic Ash Heading Towards North America 338
chocomilko writes "St. John's International Airport, the easternmost airport in Canada, has begun canceling flights due to worries of ash from Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull volcano, leaving travelers stranded after the weekend's Juno awards festival. Early reports stated that there was a 30% chance ash would reach the island by early Monday; Air Canada has issued an all-day travel advisory. A thick blanket of fog currently covering the city isn't helping matters, either."
Comment Why not all electronic? No really, why not? (Score 2, Interesting) 494
I mean this as a genuine question: why is the US so far behind Europe in this?
I haven't seen a cheque in years. Is it too expensive to move everyone over to electronic transfers (surely it's cheaper to get rid of cheque processing)? Too difficult to change the habits of a large population quickly? Concerns about fraud? Plain unwillingness to change? It can't be the recent banking crisis because we had that too...
Deposit Checks To Your Bank By Taking a Photo 494
Pickens writes "The Mercury News reports that consumers will soon be able to deposit a check by snapping a photo of it with a cell phone and transmitting an encrypted copy to their bank. Although some critics contend paperless deposits are an attempt by the banking industry to eliminate 'float,' the standard one- or two-day waiting period between the time someone writes a check and the time the money is actually taken out of their account, actually remote-deposit capture started out as a way for big companies and financial institutions to process huge numbers of checks without having to ship them around the country. 'Our customers are becoming more and more tech-savvy,' said an SVP for mobile banking at Citibank. 'We're trying to support those people on the go.' Although the process adds a new wrinkle to concerns about fraud and the privacy of financial data, banks and the technology companies helping them say they have largely overcome these concerns. Another bank SVP said, 'For many institutions struggling to raise deposits and differentiate, this is an outstanding offering they can roll out inexpensively [note: interstitial]. It's a sticky product.'"
Comment BBC BASIC (Score 4, Interesting) 548
I cut my teeth on BBC BASIC back in the 80's. It was simple, powerful, let you do pretty much anything and best of all came with a built in assembler. Now that was really neat.And it just worked. It was easy to optimise individual subroutines in assembler. This was age 10. At my simple state school with a couple of BBC Model Bs in the corner, I wasn't the only one doing that either.
I make a living writing C++ now and seem to do fairly well at it. The kids coming out of university that I interview these days haven't touched BASIC, or C++ for that matter. We want them to write good C++ when they come and work for us. The intelligent ones adapt easily to working with pointers etc. The less able ones that have somehow made it through the interview process struggle.
BBC To Make Deep Cuts In Internet Services 246
Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that the BBC has yielded to critics of its aggressive expansion, and is planning to make sweeping cuts in spending on its Web site and other digital operations. Members of the Conservative Party, which is expected to make electoral gains at the expense of the governing Labor Party, have called for the BBC to be reined in and last year James Murdoch criticized the BBC for providing 'free news' on the internet, making it 'incredibly hard for private news organizations to ask people to pay for their news.' Mark Thompson, director-general of the BBC, said 'After years of expansion of our services in the UK, we are proposing some reductions.' The BBC is proposing a 25 percent reduction in its spending on the Web, as well as the closure of several digital radio stations and a reduction in outlays on US television shows. The Broadcasting Entertainment Cinematograph and Theatre Union, which represents thousands of workers at the BBC, says that instead of appeasing critics, the proposed cuts could backfire. 'The BBC will not secure the politicians' favor with these proposals and nor will the corporation appease the commercial sector, which will see what the BBC is prepared to sacrifice and will pile on the pressure for more cuts,' says Gerry Morrissey, general secretary of the union."
Comment Already gone? (Score 5, Informative) 241
Looks like DNS has already gone...
Searching for cryptome.org. A record at G.ROOT-SERVERS.NET. [192.112.36.4]
...took 31 ms
Searching for cryptome.org. A record at D0.ORG.AFILIAS-NST.org. [199.19.57.1]...took 9 ms Nameserver D0.ORG.AFILIAS-NST.org. reports: No such host cryptome.org
Comment Slashdot attempts to backpedal on bad summary (Score 1) 207
nothing to see here, move along
Comment Re:Another pointless plugin? (Score 1) 200
If you want something that works everywhere now, you're out of luck. JOGL probably works in the most places, but I've not seen many things use it. WebGL has a lot of potential. When I visited Google a couple of weeks ago, one of the guys there showed me a port of Quake 2 to WebGL. It was pretty impressive; the game is quite old now, but it was running in Chrome on a Mac without needing any extra plugins. All of the resources were loaded on demand, which produced some interesting effects (the walls were flat shaded when you started the level and only became textured a few seconds later, as the server provided the textures), but you can fix that with precaching.
