ubermiester - Slashdot User

Submission + - DVR Helps Some TV Shows Become Hits (nytimes.com)

Submitted by ubermiester on Monday November 02, 2009 @12:39PM

ubermiester writes: After years of panicked lawsuits against TiVo and DVR technology in general, the the NYTimes is reporting on yet another lesson for content providers to learn and then immediately forget:

"Against almost every expectation, nearly half of all people watching delayed shows are still slouching on their couches watching messages about movies, cars and beer. According to Nielsen, 46 percent of viewers 18 to 49 years old for all four networks taken together are watching the commercials during playback, up slightly from last year." The article offers one very plausible explanation for why viewers do not take advantage of the fastforward button on their DVR while watching their favorite shows: "It's still a passive activity".

Long live the couch potato!

Submission + - Ethical Killing Machines (nytimes.com)

Submitted by

ubermiester

on Tuesday November 25, 2008 @11:57AM

ubermiester writes: "The New York Times reports on research to develop autonomous battlefield robots that would "behave more ethically in the battlefield than humans..." The researchers claim that these real life terminators "can be designed without an instinct for self-preservation and, as a result, no tendency to lash out in fear. They can be built without anger or recklessness..., and they can be made invulnerable to the ... 'scenario fulfillment,' which causes people to absorb new information more easily if it agrees with their pre-existing ideas." Based on a recent report stating that "fewer than half of soldiers and marines serving in Iraq said that noncombatants should be treated with dignity and respect, and 17 percent said all civilians should be treated as insurgents", this might not be all that dumb an idea. Besides, what could possibly go wrong..?"

Submission + - Broken Satellite to be Shot Down by US Missile (nytimes.com)

Submitted by

ubermiester

on Thursday February 14, 2008 @02:29PM

ubermiester writes: "NYTimes.com reports that the US is planning to shoot down the doomed satellite, thought by some to be the radar satillite US193, with a modified missile launched from a Navy Destroyer. 'Shooting down a satellite is particularly sensitive because of the controversy surrounding China's anti-satellite test last year, when Beijing shot down one of its defunct weather satellites, drawing immediate criticism from the U.S. and other countries.'"

Submission + - $199 "Google PC" coming to Walmart (pcworld.com)

Submitted by

ubermiester

on Wednesday October 31, 2007 @08:04PM

ubermiester writes: "PC World reports that "PC maker Everex rolls out a budget desktop PC Thursday that costs $200 and combines the Ubuntu Linux kernel with Google applications and open source software. The secret sauce is a software suite that begins with what the company calls its "gOS," which turns out to be a customized Ubuntu Linux kernel. The software bundle includes open source desktop applications highlighted by OpenOffice, GIMP photo software, the Xing DVD and video player, and Rhythmbox music management software.""

Submission + - NASA Global Warming Data Shown to be Flawed (dailytech.com)

Submitted by

ubermiester

on Friday August 10, 2007 @11:26AM

ubermiester writes: "The Daily Tech science blog reports on a recent correction made by NASA to it's global climate data. Apparently the algorithm NASA was using the crunch raw climate data suffered from a Y2K bug that skewed the numbers. The operators of climateaudit.org were forced to reverse engineer the algorithm after NASA's James Hansen (best known for his claims of White House censorship) refused to share it. NASA has since admitted to the error and republished the numbers. The changes result in a 1-2% downward correction in overall warming trends. 1934 also surpasses 1998 as the warmest year on record and 5 of the top 10 warmest years in the 20th century occur before WWII."

Submission + - AT&T Deal with eMusic Excludes iPhones

Submitted by

ubermiester

on Tuesday July 31, 2007 @04:00PM

ubermiester writes: "ArsTechnica reports that AT&T has inked a deal with eMusic, a direct competitor to Apple's iTunes music store. eMusic specializes in independent artists and offers DRM-less content for direct download. For a monthly fee (the number of tracks one can download per month depends on the package) the site's catalog will be available to AT&T customers using Samsung and Nokia handsets, but NOT the iPhone. Does this mean there will be no alternative sources of content for the iPhone?"

Submission + - Apple Releasing Safari for Windows (com.com)

Submitted by

ubermiester

on Monday June 11, 2007 @04:56PM

ubermiester writes: "CNET reports that Apple will soon release a Windows version of it's Safari web-browser. There is a beta-version available for testing now, with the final release date yet to be announced. A graph on the download page claims that when it comes to HTML rendering, JavaScript execution and application startup, Safari is "the fastest web browser on any platform". Is this a threat to Firefox?"

Submission + - Amazon to Launch DRM-Free MP3 Store

Submitted by

ubermiester

on Wednesday May 16, 2007 @11:00AM

ubermiester writes: "TheStreet.com is reporting that Amazon will soon launch an online MP3 store that will not utilize any kind of DRM. Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com CEO, says "Our MP3-only strategy means all the music that customers buy on Amazon is always DRM-free and plays on any device". The store will apparently carry songs from "more that 12,000 labels", but no word yet on which labels are included or how much the songs will cost."

Submission + - Astronomers Report Largest Ever Stellar Explosion

Submitted by

ubermiester

on Monday May 07, 2007 @11:17PM

ubermiester writes: "The NY Times reports that astronomers located in Berkeley and at the University of Texas have submitted a paper to the The Astrophysical Journal claiming to have observed what is "quite possibly the most massive star that has ever been seen to explode".

A "freakishly massive" star at least 150 times the mass of the Sun exploded in a galaxy 250 million light years away in the constellation Perseus, and was spotted by a grad student using a small robotic telescope in Texas. Such super-massive objects are thought to be similar to the first generation stars formed when the universe was much younger. FTA: "The star bears an eerie resemblance to Eta Carinae, a star in our own galaxy that has been burbling and bubbling in the last few centuries as if getting ready for its own outburst. The observations suggest that the troubled and enigmatic Eta Carinae, thought to weigh in at about 120 solar masses, could blow up sooner than theorists have thought." When and if this happens, the explosion will not cause any ill effects on Earth, but would be visible in the daytime and would be bright enough to read by at night."

Submission + - Astronomers Find Earth 2.0 (Alpha)

Submitted by

ubermiester

on Tuesday April 24, 2007 @08:29PM

ubermiester writes: "The Science Times reports that a team of astronomers from the Astronomical Observatory of the University of Geneva may have discovered "the smallest and potentially most Earth-like extra-solar planet yet." FTA: "Fives times as massive as Earth, it orbits a relatively cool star at a distance that would provide earthly temperatures as well, signaling the possibility of liquid water. The separation between the planet and its star is just right for having liquid water at its surface. That's why we are a bit excited.""

Submission + - Silicon Valley Works to Find Missing Colleague

Submitted by

ubermiester

on Saturday February 03, 2007 @05:14PM

ubermiester writes: "The NY Times is reporting on the massive effort among Silicon Valley's "best and brightest" to aid in the search for missing MS researcher James Gray, who went missing on Sunday while sailing the Pacific on his private boat, "Tenacious". The Coast Guard suspended its search of more than 100,000 square miles of ocean on Thursday, but "dozens of Dr. Gray's colleagues, friends and former students [continued the search] with the tool they know best: computer technology... A veritable Who's Who of computer scientists from Google, Amazon, Microsoft, NASA and universities across the country spent sleepless nights writing ad hoc software, creating a blog and reconfiguring satellite images so that dozens of volunteers could pore over them, searching for a speck of red hull and white deck among a sea of gray pixels." One Coast Guard official noted, "This is the largest strictly civilian, privately sponsored search effort I have ever seen". Go geeks go!"

Submission + - Vista to be Downloadable (Legally)

Submitted by

ubermiester

on Thursday January 18, 2007 @01:15PM

ubermiester writes: "According to various sources, Windows Vista will be available for legal download as of January 30th — the same day it will be available in retail stores. MS-NBC Online notes that, "a relatively low number of computer users are likely to get Vista by downloading it from the Internet, but the mere availability indicates that Microsoft is fiddling with distribution methods for the extremely profitable franchise at the core of its business." It will be available via the MS Marketplace site in conjunction with a Circuit City offering. And for users who eventually realize that the version of Vista they purchased is just not doing the job, they can simply activate the features they want by unlocking them via online activation."

Slashdot Top Deals