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Music

Submission + - An Augmented Reality App Gives Users Synesthesia (vice.com)

Submitted by
pigrabbitbear
pigrabbitbear writes: "Synesthesia seems like some kind of awesome superpower, less so like a neurological abnormality. Simply: it’s when the brain translates images as sounds; or sounds as colors; or taste as touch; or really any other situation you might interpret as crossed sensory wires. Synesthetes feel one sense as another sense. Artist Perry Hall calls his own synesthesia a “tic of perception.” Hall also wouldn’t call it a superpower: “It’s just like anything else that makes someone want to play music or make visual art,” he told Motherboard last week. Yet, he designed a pretty cool app with the the concept of synesthesia in mind, called Sonified."
Games

Submission + - MIT's "Crappy Game Complaining Marathon" for charity this weekend (cgcmarathon.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab is spending twelve straight hours this Saturday bitching live about the games they hate most. Why? To raise money for their local Boys and Girls Club.

The “Crappy Game Complaining Marathon” idea came out of a different gaming marathon last year, when donations spiked whenever a particular GAMBIT researcher talked trash about Gears of War.

So this year, players from GAMBIT and the greater Boston gaming community are planning to tear apart everything from Mass Effect 2 to Guitar Hero “Van Halen”.

Their slogan while raising money for programs at the Boys and Girls Club? “We mock so they can play!”
Hardware

Submission + - Sony uses NFC to charge for using a power outlet (geek.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: If you're used to using a free power outlet to charge your gadgets, be it at work, in a coffeehouse, or at the airport. The days of free power may be numbered. Sony has added an IC chip to its latest power outlet design, which can check to see who is connected and charge them accordingly.

It sees the intelligent power outlets being deployed across a range of public locations. For consumers, it means yet another cost to using (and charging) your gadgets when you're out and about.

Submission + - How do I get a job at a data center?

Submitted by fiercepotato
fiercepotato writes: I am a recent college graduate who was lucky enough to get a decent job at a company. The only reason that I got the job is that I had a class with the son of the owner of the company. The problem is, I hate my job, and basically feel like I get paid to show up in dress clothes everyday. My official title is Systems Analyst, but since I have been here, all I have done is hack together two proprietary URL shorteners, and do some basic CSS work on a portfolio site.

I graduated with my bachelors in Information Technology, but I am not really using my skills, and I am afraid I will lose them. I took many programming classes in school, and would either like to get into programming, or doing work at a data center. I did not go to school for web development, and to be honest, it bores me. The culture here is also very middle eastern and old school, not that I have anything against that, but I don't really fit in.

Any advice on finding a job at a data center? I have no problem working 3rd shift at all. Also, if it helps, I am in Illinois, and I believe that there are a lot of data centers in Elk Grove Village. I applied to 7 of them yesterday, but no word back.
Android

Submission + - Google Chrome for Android vs Opera Mini

Submitted by donadony
donadony writes: Google released a bet a version of Google Chrome for Android devices running 4 version codename Ice cream sand witch last day. If you have a device, Google Nexus or ICS powered tablet you can find the new family member right on the Android Market. Google Chrome for Android is essentially the same as the browser for desktop. Fortunately or unfortunately the browser has tremendous resemblance with Dolphin HD, another very famous browser for Android. well, when I am already quiet in habit of its rivals Opera Mini and Mozilla’s Firefox on my android device. After working with the Chrome browser for the entire day I have gathered my impressions about the browser; what is good, what is yet to be improved. As I am mostly used to Opera Mini browser on my mobile devices, I shall compare the two browsers in my post.
Technology

Submission + - For the first year in its history,India has no cases of polio. (the-diplomat.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: India has had its first polio-free year in the country’s history. As noted by the World Health Organization (WHO), this marks major progress. In 1994 India had as many as 4,791 cases a year. The polio-free year means that India will no longer be considered a “polio-endemic” country. Hard work, modern technology, funding from Bill Gates, and India taking a leadership role in its own problems seems to have saved lives.

Submission + - Selling Used MP3s Found Legal In America (activepolitic.com) 1

Submitted by bs0d3
bs0d3 writes: After some litigation; ReDigi, a site where people can sell used MP3's has been found legal in America. One of the key decisions the judge had to make was whether MP3's were material objects or not. 'Material objects' are not subject to the distribution right stipulated in "17 USC 106(3)" which protects the sale of intellectual property copies. If MP3's are material objects than the resale of them is guaranteed legal under the first sale' exception in 17 USC 109. Capitol Records tried
to argue that they were material objects under one law and not under the other. Today the judge has sided with the first-sale doctrine, which means he is seeing these as material objects.
Android

Submission + - Researchers Dump Trove of Android App 0Days (threatpost.com)

Submitted by
chicksdaddy
chicksdaddy writes: "Researchers in China published a trove of information on previously unknown (zero day) vulnerabilities in popular applications for Google's Android mobile operating system on Wednesday, including mobile browsers and at least one mobile wallet application.

The vulnerabilities were found in a wide range of Android applications and components, including Webkit, mobile versions of the Firefox and Opera browsers, Twitter and RSS reader applications, and a mobile wallet application. The vulnerabilities vary in severity, but many would allow a malicious hacker to access personal data on the device including SMS messages, personal contacts and financial information, and manipulate or take control of social networking- and other third party services accessed from the vulnerable application."
Government

Submission + - Surveillance Drones over U.S. get OK by Congress (washingtontimes.com)

Submitted by suraj.sun
suraj.sun writes: Look! Up in the sky! Is it a bird? Is it a plane? It’s a drone, and it’s watching you. That’s what privacy advocates fear from a bill Congress passed this week to make it easier for the government to fly unmanned spy planes in U.S. airspace.

The FAA Reauthorization Act, which President Obama is expected to sign, also orders the Federal Aviation Administration to develop regulations for the testing and licensing of commercial drones by 2015.

Privacy advocates say the measure will lead to widespread use of drones for electronic surveillance by police agencies across the country and eventually by private companies as well.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/feb/7/coming-to-a-sky-near-you/

Submission + - Man claims he invented the internet, sues Google, Yahoo, and others (wired.com) 1

Submitted by sohmc
sohmc writes: Michael Doyle claims that he invented the first internet. It was designed to allow doctors to view embryos on a browser window. If the name sounds familiar, it's because back in 1999, his company Eolas successfully sued Microsoft for violating the same patent. Microsoft appealed, but eventually settled. Tim Berners-Lee — father of the early web — is scheduled to testify. As someone who denounces software patents in general, I wonder why Google, et al, would even ask him to testify. Many of these companies (think Amazon's 1-click patent) have used patent laws to their advantage. It will be interesting to see what shakes out.
IT

Submission + - MongoDB In Review (infoworld.com)

Submitted by
snydeq
snydeq writes: "Andrew Glover provides an in-depth look at MongoDB, one of several NoSQL data stores filling the voids left by traditional relational DBs. 'Working with MongoDB is not without challenges. For starters, Mongo requires a lot of memory, preferring to put as much data as possible into working memory for fast access. In fact, data isn't immediately written to disk upon an insert (although you can optionally require this via a flag) — a background process eventually writes unsaved data to disk. This makes writes extremely fast, but corresponding reads can occasionally be inconsistent. As a result, running Mongo in a nonreplicated environment courts the possibility of data loss,' Glover writes. 'The relational database is still the staple data store for the vast majority of applications built today. But for some applications, the flexibility offered by Mongo provides advantages with respect to development speed and overall application performance.'"

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