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Submission + - IBM to share technology with China in strategy shift (reuters.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: IBM Corp will share technology with Chinese firms and will actively help build China's industry, CEO Virginia Rometty said in Beijing as she set out a strategy for one of the foreign firms hardest hit by China's shifting technology policies.

IBM must help China build its IT industry rather than viewing the country solely as a sales destination or manufacturing base, Rometty said at the China Development Forum, an annual Chinese government-sponsored conference bringing together business executives and China's ruling elite.

"If you're a country, as China is, of 1.3 billion people you would want an IT industry as well," the chief executive said on Monday. "I think some firms find that perhaps frightening. We, though, at IBM ... find that to be a great opportunity."

Submission + - Facebook Engineering Tool Mimics Dodgy Network Connectivity (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: Facebook has released as open source an application, called Augmented Traffic Control (ATC), that can simulate the connectivity of a portable telephone accessing an app over 2G, Edge, 3G, or LTE network. It can also simulate weak and erratic WiFi connections. The simulations can give engineers an estimate of how long it would take a user to download a file, for instance, given varying network connections. It can help engineers re-create problems that crop up only on very slow networks.
Medicine

First Prototype of a Working Tricorder Unveiled At SXSW 61

Posted by samzenpus from the scan-me dept.
the_newsbeagle writes The $10 million Tricorder X-prize is getting to the "put up or shut up" stage: The 10 finalists must turn in their working devices on June 1st for consumer testing. At SXSW last week, the finalist team Cloud DX showed off its prototype, which includes a wearable collar, a base station, a blood-testing stick, and a scanning wand. From the article: "The XPrize is partnering with the medical center at the University of California, San Diego on that consumer testing, since it requires recruiting more than 400 people with a variety of medical conditions. Grant Campany, director of the Tricorder XPrize, said he’s looking forward to getting those devices into real patients hands. 'This will be a practical demonstration of what the future of medicine will be like,' said Campany at that same SXSW talk, 'so we can scale it up after competition.'"

Comment Re:Quitting coffee? (Score 1) 7

by BarbaraHudson (#49323357) Attached to: Strange way to quit drinking coffee

I guess there's a bit of a communications problem. When someone is comparing how it is with how it was before, these are not absolute scales. It's more like saying - "compared to what I felt like last year, if last year were a 10, this year would be a 3" or some such. It''s a relative scale, not absolute.

I'm sorry to hear about your sister - I knew someone who was manic-depressive, and it's like that story - "When she was good she was very very good, but when she was bad she was horrid." It's not their fault, so pretty all we can do is hang on for the ride ... at least that's what it felt like.

I fully intend to continue to follow my doctor's orders. I wish I had been referred to someone like him the first time I went to see a doctor about depression. It would probably have saved a lot of anguish and suffering. Then again, we didn't know all that much, if anything, about ptsd then. It's tough, but the other option sure isn't much better, even if it seems like it is every so often.

Did you ever manage to get your knuckles back in place?

BTW - thanks. I appreciate it, I really do.

Submission + - Pixar Releases Free Version of RenderMan

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: A year ago the animation studio Pixar promised its RenderMan animation and rendering suite to eventually become free for non-commercial use. This was originally scheduled to happen in the SIGGRAPH 2014 computer graphics conference, but things got delayed. Nevertheless, today Pixar is releasing the free version into wild. Free non-commercial RenderMan can be used for research, education, evaluation, plug-in development, and any personal projects that do not generate commercial profits. This version is fully featured, without a watermark or any kind of artificial limits. Featuring Pixar's new RIS technology, RenderMan delivers extremely fast global illumination and interactive shading and lighting for artists. The software is available for Mac, Linux and Windows. In conjunction with the release, Pixar has also launched a new RenderMan Community site where users can exchange knowledge and resources, showcase their own work, share assets such as shaders and scripts, and learn about RenderMan from tutorials.
Australia

World's Largest Asteroid Impacts Found In Central Australia 74

Posted by samzenpus from the call-bruce-willis dept.
schwit1 writes Scientists doing geothermal research in Australia have discovered evidence of what they think is the largest known impact zone from an meteorite on Earth. The zone is thought to be about 250 miles across, and suggests the bolide split in two pieces each about 6 miles across before impact. The uncertainty is that the evidence for this impact is quite tentative: "The exact date of the impacts remains unclear. The surrounding rocks are 300 to 600 million years old, but evidence of the type left by other meteorite strikes is lacking. For example, a large meteorite strike 66 million years ago sent up a plume of ash which is found as a layer of sediment in rocks around the world. The plume is thought to have led to the extinction of a large proportion of the life on the planet, including many dinosaur species. However, a similar layer has not been found in sediments around 300 million years old, Dr Glikson said. 'It's a mystery – we can't find an extinction event that matches these collisions. I have a suspicion the impact could be older than 300 million years,' he said."

Comment Re:Spies are sneaky (Score 1) 202

by BarbaraHudson (#49322313) Attached to: Leaked Snowden Docs Show Canada's "False Flag" Operations

I hope people aren't basing their studies on freedom based on a work of fiction. If you're going to do that, why not pick Lord of the Flies?

Or if you want to base it on reality, Black Like Me.

Just because it's difficult to study, doesn't mean 'absolute freedom' doesn't/can't exist.

There is no such thing. Everyone is constrained in what they can do. You might want to fly like Superman, but physics and biology say it's not going to happen. Or you might want to lgo to a live Beatles concert. Nature kind of limits your freedom to.

"Absolute" is a very dangerous word.

Comment Re:How would Stallman know what Facebook is? (Score 0) 165

by BarbaraHudson (#49322263) Attached to: RMS Talks Net Neutrality, Patents, and More
So much for his I don't use a web browser stance.

For personal reasons, I do not browse the web from my computer. (I also have no net connection much of the time.) To look at page I send mail to a daemon which runs wget and mails the page back to me. It is very efficient use of my time, but it is slow in real time.

... or this rant. Since most sites no longer work without javascript, hahahaha. He's still, for all intents and purposes, stuck in the last century.

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