sh3l1 - Slashdot User

What Did You Change Your Mind About in 2007? 578

Posted by Zonk on Tuesday January 01, 2008 @01:41PM from the read-dawkins'-its-awesome dept.

chrisd writes "The Edge 2008 question (with answers) is in. This year, the question is: 'What did you change your mind about and why?'. Answers are featured from scientists as diverse as Richard Dawkins, Simon Baron-Cohen, George Church, David Brin, J. Craig Venter and the Astronomer Royal, Lord Martin Rees, among others. Very interesting to read. For instance, Stewart Brand writes that he now realizes that 'Good old stuff sucks' and Sam Harris has decided that 'Mother Nature is Not Our Friend.' What did Slashdot readers change their minds about in 2007?"

Dvorak Looks Back At 'Another Crappy Tech Year' 253

Posted by Zonk on Tuesday January 01, 2008 @12:28PM from the so-cranky dept.

twitter writes "The Vista Death Watch is PC Magazine's most popular column. That is just one of many items in Dvorak's review of yet another 'disappointing' year in Technology. 'I was not a fan of 2007. It was another crappy tech year--just the latest in a string of bad years dating back to 2000. Let's see some of the highlights and lowlights in no particular order ... The whopper for Intel, though, was its Viiv initiative, which was a dog from the get-go and was dropped--finally. Somewhere along the way, Intel bought into the Silicon Valley crock that CPUs were not important any more. What a laugh. Luckily for the company, it refocused on processor chips and found itself in the driver's seat once again. Of course, Intel will fall off the path again, of that you can be sure.'"

OLPC CTO Quits to Commercialize OLPC Technology 168

Posted by Zonk on Tuesday January 01, 2008 @11:45AM from the there's-more-money-in-money-than-in-charity dept.

theodp writes "The One Laptop Per Child project suffered a blow Monday, with CTO Mary Lou Jepsen quitting the nonprofit to start a for-profit company to commercialize technology she invented with OLPC (the first of Jepsen's pending OLPC patents was published by the USPTO on Dec. 13). The OLPC project halted consumer sales of the cheap laptop at the end of December."

Microsoft's Biggest Threat - Google or Open Source? 240

Posted by Zonk on Tuesday January 01, 2008 @10:35AM from the by-your-powers-combined dept.

Glyn Moody writes "Google always plays down suggestions that there's any looming clash of the titans between itself and Microsoft. Meanwhile, the search giant is pushing open source in every way it can. They're contributing directly by contributing code to projects and employing top hackers like Andrew Morton, Jeremy Allison and Guido van Rossum, and indirectly through the $60 million fees it pays Mozilla, its Summer of Code scheme and various open source summits held at its offices. Google+OSS: could this be the killer combination that finally breaks Microsoft?"

Office 2003 Service Pack Disables Older File Formats 555

Posted by Zonk on Tuesday January 01, 2008 @10:29AM from the always-so-helpful dept.

time961 writes "In Service Pack 3 for Office 2003, Microsoft disabled support for many older file formats. If you have old Word, Excel, 1-2-3, Quattro, or Corel Draw documents, watch out! They did this because the old formats are 'less secure', which actually makes some sense, but only if you got the files from some untrustworthy source. Naturally, they did this by default, and then documented a mind-bogglingly complex workaround (KB 938810) rather than providing a user interface for adjusting it, or even a set of awkward 'Do you really want to do this?' dialog boxes to click through. And of course because these are, after all, old file formats ... many users will encounter the problem only months or years after the software change, while groping around in dusty and now-inaccessible archives."

Submission + - New Years Resolutions: An Engineering Approach

Submitted by

Hugh Pickens

on Tuesday January 01, 2008 @10:09AM

Hugh Pickens writes: "Four out of five people who make New Year's resolutions will eventually break them and a third won't even make it to the end of January says the NY Times but experts say the real problem is that people make the wrong resolutions. The typical resolution often reflects a general desire. To engineer better behavior, it is more productive to focus on a specific goal. "Many clients make broad resolutions, but I advise them to focus the goals so that they are not overwhelmed,'' says Lisa R. Young. "Small and tangible one-day-at-a-time goals work best.'' Here are some resolutions that experts say can work: To lose weight, resolve to split an entree with your dining partner when dining out. To improve your fitness, wear a pedometer and monitor your daily activity. To improve family life, resolve to play with your kids at least one extra day a week. To improve your marriage, find a new activity you and your spouse both enjoy such as taking a pottery class. On a lighter note: What was Steve Jobs' New Year's Resolution?"

Computer Glitch Halts Seattle New Year's Fireworks 202

Posted by Zonk on Tuesday January 01, 2008 @09:33AM from the probably-not-funny-for-seattle dept.

supersat writes "At the stroke of midnight New Year's Eve, Seattle's fireworks show ground to a halt. The source of the problem is reported to be a corrupted file that wasn't checked until the last minute. After two reboots, the fireworks had to be detonated manually. And yes ... one blog commenter, claiming to have worked on prior shows, said that the shows run on Windows."

Submission + - GUI Design Book Recommendations? 8

Submitted by jetpack on Monday December 31, 2007 @07:39PM

jetpack writes: I've always hated writing user interfaces, and graphical user interfaces in particular. However, I suspect that is largely because I have no clue how to write a *good* one. By this, I don't mean the technical aspects, like using the APIs and so on. I mean what are the issues in designing an interface that is clean, easy to understand and easy to use? What are things to be considered? What are things to be avoided? What are good over-all philosophies of UI design?

To this end, I'd like to pick up a book or two (or three) and get my learn on. I'd appreciate some book suggestions from the UI experts in the Slashdot crowd.

Xbox Live - The Christmas Zombie 160

Posted by Zonk on Monday December 31, 2007 @01:15PM from the delicious-tinsel-covered-brains dept.

SEWilco writes "Xbox Live is not working, as mentioned 36 hours ago in an Xbox team blog. Even if you can get logged in, multiplayer matchmaking doesn't find enough players for games. For a while Zune Marketplace was also affected. At present Zune status claims 'Up and running' while Xbox Live status continues to say 'Users may experience intermittent issues logging onto Xbox Live. Our engineers are continuing to investigate and are working to resolve this issue. We apologize for any inconvenience.' This has been been going on for days." My assumption is that this is the result of lots of new XBLA users logging in with Christmas 360s.

Most Consumers Sitting Out The High-Def War 681

Posted by Zonk on Monday December 31, 2007 @09:11AM from the might-be-early-to-choose-sides dept.

The New York Times notes that, despite the increasing variety of programs on the Blu-ray and HD-DVD formats, most US consumers are staying out of the DVD format war. This is a wise decision, the article states, because the two formats are essentially at a stalemate. "The two camps are victims of their own earlier success with DVD. The standard DVDs offered a quantum leap in quality from the picture and sound of VHS videotape, and for many that was more than adequate. In addition, DVD players that can convert images to near high-definition quality can be found for under $100, hundreds less than a true high-definition DVD player, further reducing the urgency to upgrade to one of the new formats."

Online Collaboration Creates 'Map-Making For the Masses' 61

Posted by Zonk on Monday December 31, 2007 @07:22AM from the many-hands-make-light-work dept.

The Science Daily site has up a piece on the effect user-generated content can have on map-making. Scientists are appreciative of the data enthusiastic mappers can provide, updating maps on changes in local geographic information. "Goodchild's paper looks at volunteered geographic information as a special case of the more general Web phenomenon of user-generated content. It covers what motivates large numbers of individuals (often with little formal qualifications) to take part, what technology allows them to do so, how accurate the results are and what volunteered geographic information can add to more conventional sources of such information."

Australian Government To Mandate Internet Filters 305

Posted by Zonk on Monday December 31, 2007 @05:25AM from the just-a-bit-filtery dept.

ratzmilk writes "The Australian government is mandating the creation of 'clean' internet feeds. To be optionally made available to schools and homes that request it, the feed would offer built-in filters of 'pornography and inappropriate content'. Said Senator Controy: 'Labor makes no apologies to those that argue that any regulation of the internet is like going down the Chinese road ... If people equate freedom of speech with watching child pornography, then the Rudd-Labor Government is going to disagree.'"

Google Products You Forgot All About 95

Posted by Zonk on Monday December 31, 2007 @03:27AM from the hiding-in-plain-sight dept.

Googling Yourself writes "Lifehacker has an interesting blog post on the 'Top 10 Google Products You Forgot All About' that includes stalwarts like Google Trends and Google Alerts and a few others that may not be quite so familiar like Google Personals, Google's WYSIWYG web site creation tool, and Flight Simulator for Google Earth."

The World's Cheapest Car Set To Launch 418

Posted by Zonk on Monday December 31, 2007 @01:47AM from the be-nice-to-have-a-toolin-mobile dept.

theodp writes "Ready for one-automobile-per-child (OAPC)? India's giant Tata Group is on the verge of launching the world's cheapest car. The People's Car, slated to be unveiled January 10th at a New Delhi auto show, will carry a sticker price of 100,000 rupees ($2,500), which some analysts say could revolutionize automobile costs worldwide. The Tata is a pet project of Cornell-trained architect Ratan Tata, who helped design it. The vehicle is aimed at improving driving safety by getting India's masses off their motorbikes and into cars."

How To Lose Your Job, Thanks To The Internet 654

Posted by Zonk on Sunday December 30, 2007 @11:25PM from the it's-easy-if-you-know-how dept.

The New York Times has up an article discussing the trend of employers tracking the 'free time' activities of their employees via their web presence. "When they do go off the clock and off the corporate network, how they spend their private time should be of no concern to their employer, even if the Internet, by its nature, makes some off-the-job activities more visible to more people than was previously possible. In the absence of strong protections for employees, poorly chosen words or even a single photograph posted online in one's off-hours can have career-altering consequences." The piece likens this activity to the 'Sociological Department' that the Ford Company ran to monitor the home lives of their workers. Overstatement, or the corp as Big Brother?

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