Forgot your password?

Close
typodupeerror

Comment: Re:dear god, the ADS, the ADS! (Score 1) 96

by Artifex (#40120357) Attached to: HP's Core WebOS Enyo Team Going To Google

I'm glad to see somebody mention ad server response times. That is by far the biggest factor in slow page loads for me. I don't hesitate to move on to the next site when a site is sitting there waiting for an ad server to deliver content.

I don't mind too much opening multiple tabs in order to let one load on my desktop, but it really sucks on my phone.
Just yesterday I installed Adblock (Or Adblock Plus, whichever it was) on Firefox for Android; hopefully it's as good as the desktop version of ABP.

Comment: Re:dear god, the ADS, the ADS! (Score 4, Insightful) 96

by Artifex (#40110065) Attached to: HP's Core WebOS Enyo Team Going To Google

often times they don't even vet the advertisers so that they become a vector of malware payloads, and ruin it for everyone else.

This and the fact that third party ad server response can significantly delay page loading is why I pretty much only whitelist sites that handle ads in house. Once a site sells space to a network that partners with other networks (which most do), it becomes anyone's guess what will come out.

Security

DreamHammer Wants To Corner the Drone OS Market 125

Posted by timothy
from the special-interests-with-guns dept.
nonprofiteer writes "The Pentagon is increasingly transforming the military into an unmanned force, taking soldiers out of harm's way and replacing them with drones and robots. In 2011, it spent $6 billion on unmanned systems. The problem is that the unmanned systems don't work well together thanks to contractors building proprietary control systems (to lock government into exclusive relationships and to make extra money). A company called DreamHammer plans to have a solution to this — a universal remote control that could integrate all robots and drones into one control system. It would save money and allow anyone to build apps for drones. 'DreamHammer CTO Chris Diebner compares it with a smartphone OS — on which drones and features for those drones can be run like apps. Of course, Ballista is doing something on a much larger scale. It means that it takes fewer people to fly more drones and that new features can be rolled out without the need to develop and build a new version of a Predator, for example.'"

Comment: Re:Not worth it. (Score 1) 260

by Artifex (#39890653) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: DIY NAS For a Variety of Legacy Drives?

I agree. About two months ago a 2TB drive I'd set aside for backup purposes grindingly crashed when I attempted to check to see if anything was on it. Turned out it was one of a batch of Seagate drives with bad firmware; they'd made a patch available but didn't make it easy to use back when I'd filled the drive already, and I forgot later. (And since I've now read several batches of different models have had different types of firmware-based failures, Seagate's been booted from my list of vendors.) The sticking point, of course, is that new 2TB drives are more expensive now than they were back when I bought mine.

Open Source

Two Studies on the Laptop Retail Oligopoly->

Submitted by
jrepin
jrepin writes "ESOP has just made available two studies with a focus on the retail oligopoly dominating laptop sales. The artificial exclusion of GNU/Linux-based laptops amounts to 3 to 5 Million Euros in direct impacts in the Portuguese economy. Indirect impacts may be much higher. The first study analyses the national economic impacts of introducing a series of locally-assembled laptops with an Open Source system and applications. The second study analyses this market behaviour, which is typical of retail oligopolies. The analysis derives a probability model for retail markets and addresses several malfunctioning phenomena in the frame of the existing European legislation for competition."
Link to Original Source
Google

SOPA, Copyright and Eddie Van Halen's Guitar-> 2

Submitted by
bnyrbl
bnyrbl writes "I recently posted an entry for an online contest to win a guitar by covering the Van Halen song "Tattoo", and youtube has "Matched 3rd Party Content" using some algorithm to match it against the original. It's showing the content as being owned by Universal Music Publishing Group. Thing is, there's not one byte of data from the original track in my cover version. I'm obviously not really happy about the possibility of having it taken down and missing out on a chance to win the guitar, but I'm not a copyright lawyer either.

My questions to slashdot are: 1) has this happened to anyone else where they didn't even include one sample of an original work in their upload, 2) does anyone know the secret sauce Google/Youtube is using to match the content so this hassle could possibly be avoided, and 3) does anyone else feel as I do that this "shoot first and ask questions later" approach to protecting content owners goes too far? I get that Youtube isn't a public utility and they can manage their site any way they see fit, but the phrase "Content Owned by UMPG" .. am I wrong in covering a song and posting my performance? I see a lot of cover versions (millions) all over Youtube that have been happily sitting there for years without being taken down. Does the industry "allow" cover versions as owners of the original Van Halen composition, or do I actually have rights too because I'm the one performing it?

This is what I saw minutes after uploading the track: http://i.imgur.com/8M3fd.jpg

And this is the video in question: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8v9d7yk2kM

Am I breaking any laws or infringing any other person by creating and posting a cover version?"
Link to Original Source
Science

Crabs that glow->

Submitted by Taco Cowboy
Taco Cowboy writes "Four new species of brilliantly hued freshwater river crabs have been identified, Christine Dell’Amore reported in National Geographic News.

The crab's brilliant hues may simply help the species recognize its brethren, said study author Hendrik Freitag, of the Senckenberg Museum of Zoology in Dresden, Germany.

The crabs are between one inch (2.5 centimeters) to 2 inches (5.3 centimeters) wide. Only one other species, I. unicorn, was known in the genus, having been found in 1992.

Scientists aren’t sure why the animals are so brightly colored, although they suspect it may help them recognize each other. Interestingly, dominant males of the species take on a red color, in contrast to the purple of females and less dominant males.

More info : http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2012/04/20/purple-philippine-river-crabs-freshwater-species-of-the-week/"
Link to Original Source

Pyros of the world... IGNITE !!!