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+ - Customer given a Community Order for uploading a pornographic image

Submitted by Sesostris III
Sesostris III (730910) writes "Be careful what you upload to demonstration tablets in shops! After changing the display image of a demonstration iPad to a hardcore pornographic photo, a Tesco customer in Wales, UK, has been given a 12-month Community Order by magistrates in Swansea.

The man uploaded the image a a joke, and panicked when he realised he couldn't delete the image. In court, he admitted the charge of "causing the display of indecent matter". The image was only seen by Tesco workers and not by members of the public.

The sentence includes 100 hours of unpaid work, a victim surcharge of 60 GBP and costs of 85 GBP.

Of course, the Tesco store, like most supermarkets, probably sells the Sun newspaper (prop R Murdock) with its famous (and ongoing) page 3 (NSFW)."

+ - How, and Why, Apple Overtook Microsoft

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com (3830033) writes "James B. Stewart writes in the NYT that in 1998 Bill Gates said in an interview that he “couldn’t imagine a situation in which Apple would ever be bigger and more profitable than Microsoft" but less than two decades later, Apple, with a market capitalization more than double Microsoft’s, has won. The most successful companies need a vision, and both Apple and Microsoft have one. But according to Stewart, Apple’s vision was more radical and, as it turns out, more farsighted. Where Microsoft foresaw a computer on every person’s desk, Apple went a big step further: Its vision was a computer in every pocket. “Apple has been very visionary in creating and expanding significant new consumer electronics categories,” says Toni Sacconaghi. “Unique, disruptive innovation is really hard to do. Doing it multiple times, as Apple has, is extremely difficult." According to Jobs' biographer Walter Isaacson, Microsoft seemed to have the better business for a long time. “But in the end, it didn’t create products of ethereal beauty. Steve believed you had to control every brush stroke from beginning to end. Not because he was a control freak, but because he had a passion for perfection.” Can Apple continue to live by Jobs’s disruptive creed now that the company is as successful as Microsoft once was? According to Robert Cihra it was one thing for Apple to cannibalize its iPod or Mac businesses, but quite another to risk its iPhone juggernaut. “The question investors have is, what’s the next iPhone? There’s no obvious answer. It’s almost impossible to think of anything that will create a $140 billion business out of nothing.”"

Comment: Re:Good data first, then maybe big data later (Score 1) 92

by NeutronCowboy (#48945853) Attached to: Cutting Through Data Science Hype

Absolutely true. Unfortunately, it's far easier to convince management that the problem is the lack of a shiny tool that shows them pretty graphs than shitty data that they have to pay some consultant an ungodly amount of money to fix. Because, of course, no one in the company has the time to fix the data on which they run their business.

Comment: How can she live on such a low income? (Score 1) 92

by Futurepower(R) (#48945177) Attached to: Cutting Through Data Science Hype
IBM CEO Ginni Rometty Made $16 Million Last Year -- Is She Underpaid?

Top 10 Reasons Why Ginni Rometty Will Fail as IBM's New CEO

Summary from the article:
1. IBM Forgot Who They Were.
2. Ginni Has No Vision for the Future of IBM.
3. IBM Executives are out of Touch.
4. IBM's Sales Culture is Poison.
5. IBM's Executive Compensation is Misaligned.
6. IBM's Rape, Pillage & Burn Acquisition Strategy.
7. IBM's Offshore Model will kill its Services Business.
8. IBM Sells Futures. What is IBM's strategy? Smarter Planet?
9. Watson is not the Panacea.
10. IBM Seems to be Preparing to Sell its Services Business.

Comment: ...which is therefore not parallel (Score 5, Informative) 200

by Roger W Moore (#48945117) Attached to: There Is No "You" In a Parallel Universe

Different matter distributions == a universe in which said parallel universe which is inherently different than what we see around us.

I think there is some confusion over what "parallel" universe means. This is generally taken to be a universe which has been an exact parallel of our own universe up to some point after which it diverges i.e. everything is the same up to some point in time. In the quantum multiverse interpretation of QM this happens for each possible result of collapsing the wave function.

I've never heard of this ever being associated with multiple 'universes' from inflation because QM requires that the universes interact before they separate (this is how it explains the self interference of a single particle) whereas inflation requires that the universes be causally disconnected after their creation i.e. inflationary universes are just different universes, not parallel ones. So I think the author of the article got himself rather confused.

+ - Gmail is no longer acceptable - Slashdot, please opine on alternatives! 4

Submitted by Press2ToContinue
Press2ToContinue (2424598) writes "Bettering security, I enable a VPN now (Avast Secureline) before accessing my banking and any other financial sites. Difficulty: gmail then thinks I'm a bot, and requires a captcha. In the past, after a few days of answering captchas, Google disabled access to my gmail, without recourse. It lasted 48 hours. I don't need this happening again. So, Google has now gone far enough IMHO. I need a reliable, secure email provider, with calendaring. So, (ahem, apprehensively) /.r's, you know the history (and can you see into the future?) of this sordid tale, what email service do -you- recommend to keep -my- email communications private? Or do you succumb idly to the false sense of security that accompanies the services of the almighty Goog?

(with a semi-faux-sheepish, yet vaguely wicked grin)"

+ - How Is VirtualBox Doing?->

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa (887896) writes "Phoronix notes how it has been a long time since last hearing of any major innovations or improvements to VirtualBox, the virtual machine software managed by Oracle. This comes while VMware is improving its products on all platforms, and KVM, Xen, Virt-Manager, and related Linux virtualization technologies continue to advance as well. Is there any hope left for a revitalized VirtualBox? It has been said that there is only four paid developers left on the VirtualBox team at the company, which is not enough manpower to significantly advance such a complex piece of software. The v4.3 series has been receiving some maintenance updates during the last two years, but that's about it."
Link to Original Source

+ - New Study Says Governments Should Ditch Reliance on Biofuels

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com (3830033) writes "The NYT reports on a new study from a prominent environmental think tank that concludes that turning plant matter into liquid fuel or electricity is so inefficient that the approach is unlikely ever to supply a substantial fraction of global energy demand and that continuing to pursue this strategy is likely to use up vast tracts of fertile land that could be devoted to helping feed the world’s growing population. “I would say that many of the claims for biofuels have been dramatically exaggerated,” says Andrew Steer, president of the World Resources Institute, a global research organization based in Washington that is publishing the report. “There are other, more effective routes to get to a low-carbon world.” The report follows several years of rising concern among scientists about biofuel policies in the United States and Europe, and is the strongest call yet by the World Resources Institute, known for nonpartisan analysis of environmental issues, to urge governments to reconsider those policies.

Timothy D. Searchinger says that recent science has challenged some of the assumptions underpinning many of the pro-biofuel policies that have often failed to consider the opportunity cost of using land to produce plants for biofuel. According to Searchinger if forests or grasses were grown instead of biofuels, that would pull carbon dioxide out of the air, storing it in tree trunks and soils and offsetting emissions more effectively than biofuels would do. What is more, as costs for wind and solar power have plummeted over the past decade, and the new report points out that for a given amount of land, solar panels are at least 50 times more efficient than biofuels at capturing the energy of sunlight in a useful form. “It’s true that our first-generation biofuels have not lived up to their promise,” says Jason Hill said. “We’ve found they do not offer the environmental benefits they were purported to have, and they have a substantial negative impact on the food system.”"

Comment: Trying the same abuse: Charging monthly (Score 1) 145

by Futurepower(R) (#48937519) Attached to: LibreOffice Gets a Streamlined Makeover With 4.4 Release
It amazes me how many companies are trying the same abuse: Charging monthly. It is not possible to OWN the software. If an employee uses another computer for 6 months, or is sick for 6 months, you still have to pay for the original computer. Also, there is constant outside control.

And you have to pay monthly for backup computers.

If a thing's worth doing, it is worth doing badly. -- G.K. Chesterton

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