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Comment So just forget about home users? (Score 4, Interesting) 107

by alexwcovington (#33671648) Attached to: FCC Set To Finalize Rules For Next-Gen Wireless

Allowing these devices to power up through a 50 mile radius basically speaks to the market the manufacturers are working toward.

These "white space devices" are going to be industrial-scale. They will cost tens of thousands of dollars and will have to be set upon a pretty tall tower or building to even be safe from an EMR standpoint.

It's not home networking. It's not even local area networking. This is a business model for Wireless ISPs that doesn't include an FCC licencing and application process.

That's it. Big Whoop.
Space

Submission + - The Best Near-term Future of Space Exploration? (space.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Much fanfare has been made about manned missions to moons and planets but little has been done about travel to the asteroids, that is until now. NASA has announced a trip to the asteroids by 2025. This type of mission has great potential for positive economic return based on the fact that no effort has to be spent on getting in and out of a planet's gravity well. Yes, we should go to the planets, but we should master mining the asteroid belt for resources first because it is easiest. What do you think?
Hardware

Submission + - Hacker creates 1/10th scale Cray-1 supercomputer (geek.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Chris Fenton, an electrical engineer living in New York, always wanted his very own supercomputer, but did not have the space or money to acquire one. So he took a different approach and decided to build his own supercomputer from the 70s in scaled-down form based on the Cray-1.

The end result of his hacking produced a homebrew Cray-1A, which is 1/10th the size of the original. Unfortunately, getting software for the machine proved almost impossible. Fenton searched everywhere and eventually found out that SGI destroyed all the old software archives. Not even former Cray employees could help him.

Submission + - Wikileaks to Move to Nuclear-Proof Facilities (www.idg.se)

Submitted by Buzzy_Bot
Buzzy_Bot writes: Wikileaks to Move to Nuclear-Proof Facilities

30 meters below ground, in a facility built to withstand anything but a direct hit from a nuclear warhead, that is where the servers of Wikileaks will be hosted from now on. Bahnhof, the Swedish ISP, has kept security in mind when choosing the new location of their server park. ”This rock shelter was supposed to be the heart of the defense against the Soviet Union” says Jon Karlung, CEO of Bahnhof. ”However, the most important aspects [for the clients] are the legal matters as well as the integrity”.

Submission + - IE worldwide marketshare drops below 50% (statcounter.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: For the second weekend in a row the combined marketshare of all Internet Explorer versions around the world dropped below 50%

Submission + - Jet Packs Finally On Sale: Buy Your Rocket Belt (popularmechanics.com)

Submitted by Bad_CRC1945
Bad_CRC1945 writes: The good news: Not one, but two companies are selling jet packs. The bad news: The tech has a long way to go. In the past, potential buyers have been stymied by two problems: Rocket belts aren't for sale, and even prototypes run on modern-day fuel (as opposed to whatever the Jetsons use) which means rocket belts can weigh upwards of 100 pounds, with only enough fuel to stay aloft for under a minute. Now, a pair of companies have solved one of these problems: rocket belts are for sale.
Businesses

Submission + - Tech's Dark Secret: It’s All About Age 2

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Universities really should tell engineering students what to expect in the long term and how to manage their technical careers. But since they're not, Vivek Wadwha uses his TechCrunch bully pulpit to give students a heads-up about the road ahead. Citing ex-Microsoft CTO David Vaskevitch's belief that younger workers have more energy and are sometimes more creative, Wadwha warns that reports of ageism's death have been greatly exaggerated. While encouraging managers to consider the value of the experience older techies bring, Wadwha also offers some get-real advice to those whose hair is beginning to grey: 1) Move up the ladder into management, architecture, or design; switch to sales or product management; jump ship and become an entrepreneur. 2) If you're going to stay in programming, realize that the deck is stacked against you, so be prepared to earn less as you gain experience. 3) Keep your skills current — to be coding for a living when you're 50, you'll need to be able to out-code the new kids on the block. Wadwha's piece strikes a chord with 50-something Dave Winer, who calls the rampant ageism 'really f***ed up,' adding that, 'It's probably the reason why we keep going around in the same loops over and over, because we chuck our experience, wholesale, every ten years or so.' Well, Microsoft did struggle with problems that IBM solved in the '60s.
Wikipedia

Submission + - Prosecutor Loses Case for Citing Wikipedia (inquirer.net) 1

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "The Phillipine Daily Inquirer reports on a recent case where the Office of the Solicitor General (OSG) lost an appeal after seeking to impeach the testimony of a defendant's expert witness by citing an article from Wikipedia. In her brief, the defendant said "the authority, alluded to by oppositor-appellant, the 'Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Health Disorders DSM-IV-TR,' was taken from an Internet website commonly known as Wikipedia" and argued that Wikipedia itself contains a disclaimer saying that it "makes no guarantee of validity." The court in finding for the defendant said in its decision that it found "incredible ... if not a haphazard attempt, on the part of the (OSG) to impeach an expert witness, with, as pointed out by (the defendant) unreliable information. This is certainly unacceptable evidence, nothing short of a mere allegation totally unsupported by authority.""
Education

Submission + - Bill Gates Enrolls His Kids in Khan Academy 1

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: At some schools, a teaching load of five courses every academic year is considered excessive. But Sal Khan, as an earlier Slashdot post noted, manages to deliver his mini-lectures an average of 70,000 times a day. BusinessWeek reports that Khan Academy has a new fan in Bill Gates, who's been singing and tweeting the praises of the free-as-in-beer website. 'This guy is amazing,' Gates wrote. 'It is awesome how much he has done with very little in the way of resources.' Gates and his 11-year-old son have been soaking up videos, from algebra to biology. And at the Aspen Ideas Festival in front of 2,000 people, Gates gave Khan a shout-out, touting the 'unbelievable' Khan Academy tutorials that 'I've been using with my kids.' Gates, whose foundation spends $700MM a year on U.S. education, plans to talk to Khan soon.
Television

Submission + - I need a webcam optimized for the living room.

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: So — I have a windows machine hooked up to my 46" samsung LCD in the living room. Makes for a good social browsing experience. I started using it for video chat, and found it to be great except for the lack of optical zoom on my webcam (which is a pretty good one — the logitech quickcam pro 9000. When I sit on the couch about 9 feet away, I appear too small, the microphone has more trouble picking me up, and the digital zoom is of course useless at improving things. So I sit on my coffee table about 4 feet away from this huge LCD so the other person can actually see the expression on my face, defeating that 10-foot experience.

I thought to myself — "self, this should be pretty easy. Go grab a webcam with a bit of optical zoom, and maybe get a wireless headset to improve the sound quality on the mic." The wireless headset was pretty easy to find — lots of bluetooth solutions out there. as well as a stereo wireless headset by logitech called the clearchat, which I just got. But nowhere is there a tv-top-mount web cam with optical zoom with windows drivers. I'm a bit astounded... I tried just moving my wired webcam closer to me, setting it down on the coffee table and pointing it up at me, but then the experience is quite odd — I'm looking at the tv screen to see my skype-buddy, but it looks to them that I'm looking far into the distance, because the angles are all wrong, which is disconcerting for them, because that's the same way I like when I'm ignoring someone :)

Anyway — here's what I did find — the sony eye USB device (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_Eye), which has a manual optical zoom, but that's optimized for PS3 only, and has no windows drivers — in other words, no skype or other windows video chat. I also found some webcams seemingly optimized for the 10-foot experience (http://shop.skype.com/intl/en-ca/skype-for-tv/), and they're USB devices as well (sounds good) , but.... you need a skype-enabled TV for these. WHAAAA?? Again no windows drivers. Also found this guy: (http://www.everythingusb.com/net_cowboy_dc-ncp130.html) with a mondo 7x optical zoom , but... it isn't really tv-mountable, and thus would suffer from the "faraway stare" problem if place, say, on the shelf next to the tv. People might also think I'm the creepy neighbor next door with a 7x optical zoom webcam.

So. I'm looking for better options. Anyone?
Intel

Submission + - First Intel Sandy Bridge CPU Benchmarks Out!! (anandtech.com)

Submitted by siliconbits
siliconbits writes: Anand from Anandtech has managed to get his hands on an early Sandy Bridge processor and has tested it extensively. Benchmark figures are excellent and may well give AMD (and Fusion) some food for thoughts (and some nightmares).
Businesses

Submission + - A Threat to Google's Future from Intent Generation (techcrunch.com)

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "Alex Rampell, the CEO of TrialPay, has an interesting article in TechCrunch analyzing the future of the money-making parts of Google and how Google will be threatened by "Intent Generation" and "Vertical Search." Everyone knows that Google makes almost all it's money from contextual ads that appear with Google's search results, but while the battle for search is over for now — Google won — Rampell writes that the battle for the underlying revenue is just heating up. "The holy grail is the ability to show the perfect advertisement at the perfect time (precognition, like in Minority Report), something Facebook has a better chance of doing than anyone," writes Rampell. "Intent Generation catches people further up the funnel, before they search, and delivers them what they want, and gets them to purchase, before they start searching." Payment companies are another threat because by knowing how much you spend and where, they have a tremendous opportunity to change future behavior, generating and catalyzing intent. "For Google's enemies, the best way of hurting the search goliath is not to build a better search engine, but rather to give people a reason to stop searching for a wide class of goods and services by preempting search on Google.""

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It's a naive, domestic operating system without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption.

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