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The Almighty Buck

Microsoft Trademarks "Windows 365" 191

Posted by samzenpus from the one-easy-payment dept.
jones_supa writes The talks about a subscription-based Windows have begun again. With Windows 10 those ideas did not materialize in the way that many had speculated. Even though Microsoft has not fully detailed its Windows 10 pricing strategy, it is not believed that Microsoft is targeting an annual subscription charge for Windows at this time. However, it turns out that Microsoft has recently filed for a trademark for Windows 365, which adds a bit of fuel to the subscription based version of Windows. As of right now, Microsoft has only claimed this branding right, but as for what they will do with it, only time will tell. Deep inside the company, the idea is clearly still bubbling there.
Privacy

Samsung SmartTV Customers Warned Personal Conversations May Be Recorded 309

Posted by samzenpus from the not-in-front-of-the-television dept.
An anonymous reader writes Samsung's privacy policy includes details that its Smart TV voice recognition feature may pick up on personal conversations and transmit private communications to third parties. Buried in the privacy policy related to the smart television, Samsung advises users to be aware that any snippets of conversation might be captured by the software which allows them to control their television sets with a series of commands. Questions have been raised about who these third parties could be, what the information is used for, and how the data is being transmitted – with potentially unencrypted voice clips left exposed to hackers.
The Almighty Buck

Hobbyists Selling Tesla Coil Kits To Fund Drone Flight Over North Korea 175

Posted by samzenpus from the beats-lightbulbs dept.
An anonymous reader writes Imagine for a moment having at your fingertips the ability to send a small robotic messenger — a minion if you will — virtually anywhere in the world and back. Sure, you've seen those fun little drone toys at the mall and perhaps you have had a friend that likes to tinker around with model airplanes, but what you are about to see unfold here is genuinely an unprecedented work of good 'ol fashioned American ingenuity. Apparently a group of hackers has started a kickstarter to build and fly a small drone over North Korea and back and is selling mini tesla coils to do this. "All of the money from this project will be used to extend the distance our drone can fly, so the more backers we have, the farther it will be able to go," they say.

RMS Objects To Support For LLVM's Debugger In GNU Emacs's Gud.el 551

Posted by timothy from the purity-in-body-mind-and-spirit dept.
An anonymous reader writes with the news that Richard Stallman is upset over the prospect of GNU Emacs's Grand Unified Debugger (Gud.el) supporting LLVM's LLDB debugger. Stallman says it looks like there is a systematic effort to attack GNU packages and calls for the GNU Project to respond strategically. He wrote his concerns to the mailing list after a patch emerged that would optionally support LLDB alongside GDB as an alternative debugger for Emacs. Other Emacs developers discounted RMS' claims by saying Emacs supports Windows and OS X, so why not support a BSD-licensed compiler/debugger? The Emacs maintainer has called the statements irrelevant and won't affect their decision to merge the LLDB support.
Programming

Ask Slashdot: Is There a Web Development Linux Distro? 136

Posted by timothy from the best-of-brood dept.
Qbertino writes I've been a linux user for more than 15 years now and in the last ten I've done basically all my non-trivial web development on Linux. SuSE in the early days, after that either Debian or, more recently, Ubuntu, if I want something to click on. What really bugs me is, that every time I make a new setup, either as a virtual machine, on concrete hardware or a remote host, I go through 1-2 hours of getting the basics of a web-centric system up and running. That includes setting PHP config options to usable things, setting up vhosts on Apache (always an adventure), configging mod_rewrite, installing extra CLI stuff like Emacs (yeah, I'm from that camp) walking through the basic 10-15 steps of setting up MySQL or some other DB, etc. ... You get the picture.

What has me wondering is this: Since Linux is deeply entrenched in the field of server-side web, with LAMP being it's powerhouse, I was wondering if there aren't any distros that cover exactly this sort of thing. You know, automatic allocation of memory in the runtime settings, ready-made Apache http/https/sftp/ftp setup, PHP all ready to go, etc. What are your experiences and is there something that covers this? Would you think there's a need for this sort of thing and would you base it of Debian or something else? If you do web-dev, how do you do it? Prepareted scripts for setup? Anything else? ... Ideas, unkown LAMP distros and opinions please."

Comment Re:Hardware doesnt really matter (Score 2) 177

by uvajed_ekil (#49008887) Attached to: The First Ubuntu Phone Is Here, With Underwhelming Hardware

As long as software is written well and it wont lag (doubt it).

Name one phone with good software and crappy hardware that I'd consider using. There isn't one. Good software doesn't make the weak screen or camera good. Processor speed may be over rated, but adequate RAM is certainly not, especially with a low-end processor.

Comment Re:Look at the specs (Score 1) 177

by uvajed_ekil (#49008869) Attached to: The First Ubuntu Phone Is Here, With Underwhelming Hardware

Size - 4.0 inches (~61.3% screen-to-body ratio)
Resolution - 480 x 800 pixels (~233 ppi pixel density)
OS - Android OS, v4.2.2 (Jelly Bean)
Chipset - Mediatek MT6572
Internal - 4 GB ROM, 512 MB RAM
CAMERA -2 MP, 1600 x 1200 pixels
BATTERY - Li-Ion 1300 mAh battery
Stand-by - Up to 432 h (2G) / Up to 384 h (3G)
The price? Less than $60.00

In what way the new Ubuntu phone can match it?

Eww, yuck.
Pros: cheap, has FM radio
Cons: every other single thing about it.
Verdict: no thanks. I don't care what you compare it to, it still stinks. This is like comparing dog shit to wolf shit.
The Internet

The Man Squatting On Millions of Dollars Worth of Domain Names 175

Posted by timothy from the your-name-here dept.
Jason Koebler writes For the last 21 years, Gary Millin and his colleagues at World Accelerator have been slowly accumulating a veritable treasure trove of seemingly premium generic domain names. For instance, Millin owns, has sold, or has bartered away world.com, usa.com, doctor.com, lawyer.com, comic.com, email.com, cyberservices.com, and more than 1,000 other domain names that can be yours (including yours.com, which he owns), as long as you've got the startup idea to back it up. Millin doesn't sell domain names anymore, instead, he trades them to startups in exchange for a stake in the company.
Social Networks

NYPD Creates Fake Social Media Profiles To Track Loud Parties, Underage Drinking 135

Posted by timothy from the kid-vs-the-state dept.
v3rgEz writes Is that Facebook friend request from the cute girl in third period, or an undercover officer looking to bust up the next high shool kegger? That's the question more students in New York City might be asking, as newly released documents from the NYPD disclose its process for agents creating undercover social media aliases with the aims of uprooting terrorist plots, tracking "political activity," and other nefarious crimes like underage drinking or pre-meditated loud partying. Fake profiles must be approved by bureau brass, unless it would "seriously impair" an investigation or risk life or property damage.
Biotech

Woman Suffers Significant Weight Gain After Fecal Transplant 378

Posted by timothy from the watch-the-upstream dept.
Beeftopia (1846720) writes In a case reported in the journal Open Forum Infectious Diseases, a woman suffering from a drug-resistant intestinal infection gained 36 pounds after receiving a fecal transplant from her overweight daughter. Previous mouse studies have shown thin mice gain weight after ingesting fecal bacteria from obese mice. The woman previously was not overweight. After the procedure, despite a medically supervised liquid protein diet and exercise regimen, the woman remained obese. Her doctor said, "She came back about a year later and complained of tremendous weight gain... She felt like a switch flipped in her body, to this day she continues to have problems... as a result I'm very careful with all our donors don't use obese people."

Comment Re:Here's why people start getting sick of "scienc (Score 2) 212

by uvajed_ekil (#49003731) Attached to: The Search For Neutrons That Leak Into Our World From Other Universes
If you aren't interested in the nature of our universe, or the possible existence of other universes that might be able to interact with ours, that's fine, but lots of us don't feel the same way. Numerous important scientific advances have come from what initially looked like useless findings, so just because you don't know right now how this might be applied to future technologies that doesn't mean it is a dead end.

Comment Re:You'd need a universe where... (Score 2) 212

They set up the same experiment, but do NOT put the shield in place, so as to facilitate the discovery in our brane.

A universe where they are, through altruism, trying to help us out with no expectation of reward.

What a nice brane! Thanks guys!

The proposed experiment does not require an other-dimensional intelligence conducting an identical experiment, jut another universe. The neutrons would leak out of our universe and then back in, untouched.

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