angry tapir - Slashdot User

+ - Australian police warn on 3D printed guns-> 0

Submitted by angry tapir on Thursday May 23, 2013 @09:24PM

angry tapir writes "The police force of Australia's largest state has issued a warning about the potential for 3D printed guns to be used in crimes. The NSW police revealed that they had downloaded and printed multiple 'Liberator' pistols and conducted ballistics testing with them. They experienced one catastrophic misfire, but also managed to simulate a probably fatal shot. The police said that the government may have to examine regulations that address the issues surrounding 3D printed weapons."
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+ - LogMeIn launches cloud service for 'Internet of Things'-> 0

Submitted by angry tapir on Wednesday May 22, 2013 @02:09AM

angry tapir writes "Dealing with objects sending frequent messages back and forth between themselves is a given with the 'Internet of Things', but dealing with this traffic, and with the security of implications of networked objects, can be a pain for a devs. LogMeIn, better known for its remote access applications, has launched a service designed to make it easier to create and deploy IoT devices and applications. The awkwardly named 'Xively' offering is a 'platform-as-a-service' cloud designed to take care of much of the nitty gritty. Xively uses the same infrastructure employed for LogMeIn's remote desktop services. I had a chat to the company's CEO prior to Xively's launch about the Internet of Things and the market opportunity it represents for his company."
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+ - IBM releases 'Watson box'-> 1

Submitted by angry tapir on Tuesday May 21, 2013 @08:50PM

angry tapir writes "IBM has released a new product based on the game-show-winning technology used in Watson. The new 'Watson Engagement Advisor' is designed to let companies better interact with their customers, either directly through providing an intelligent agent that draws on natural language processing, a knowledge store and data about an individual customer or indirectly by advising the people who directly engage with a business' customers. IBM says that performance of the Watson system has increased by 240 per cent since it won Jeopardy! and its size has been reduced to the equivalent of four pizza boxes."
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+ - Pump-and-dump stock spam makes a comeback-> 0

Submitted by angry tapir on Thursday May 16, 2013 @01:04AM

angry tapir writes "So-called 'pump and dump' scams — which use spam to encourage people to buy cheap shares in a company before the price allegedly skyrockets — went into a decline for a handful of years. But now it's making a dramatic comeback, even overtaking pharma spam. The culprit is the Kelihos botnet."
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+ - WikiLeaks donations by Visa ruled OK in Iceland-> 0

Submitted by angry tapir on Thursday April 25, 2013 @09:21PM

angry tapir writes "The three-year blockade against donations to WikiLeaks may have just been chiseled away, in Iceland, by a ruling handed down by the European country's Supreme Court. The verdict says that the Visa subcontractor Valitor had unlawfully terminated its contract with WikiLeaks' donation processor, DataCell, and must re-open the processing of donations to the whistle-blowing site within 15 days or else face a fine of ISK800,000, or US$6,830, per day."
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+ - Using open source to build sustainable communities-> 0

Submitted by angry tapir on Monday April 22, 2013 @09:26PM

angry tapir writes "A documentary from Filament Features coming out this year will feature the work of the Open Source Ecology project, which aims to produce a set of open source tools capable of building environmentally sustainable communities. The project aims to design a 'Global Village Construction Set' (GVCS): a set of 50 modular, easy-to-replicate tools that can be used to construct sustainable communities, with the designs available under an open source licence."
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+ - Taking the pain out of debugging with live programming-> 0

Submitted by angry tapir on Monday April 15, 2013 @03:20AM

angry tapir writes ""Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place," Brian Kernighan once wrote (adding: "So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?") However, Sean McDirmid, a researcher at Microsoft, has been working to remove some of the pain from debugging. McDirmid, based at Microsoft Research Asia, has been studying ways of implementing usable live programming environments: a solution that is less intrusive than classical debuggers. The idea is to essentially provide a programming environment in which editing of code and the execution of code occur simultaneously — and in the same interface as code editing — with tools to track the state of variables in a more or less live manner."
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+ - Cloud's real ecological timebomb: Wireless, not data centres-> 0

Submitted by angry tapir on Monday April 08, 2013 @09:20PM

angry tapir writes "New research from an Australian university argues that increased carbon emissions from powering data centres aren't the biggest environmental threat from the growth of cloud computing. Instead, the problem is the Wi-Fi and cellular networks increasingly used to access cloud services. By 2015, the energy used to run data centres will be a "drop in the ocean" compared to the energy used to power wireless access to services. By 2015 the energy consumption associated with 'wireless cloud' will reach 43 terawatt-hours, compared to 9.2 terawatt-hours in 2012 (an increase in carbon footprint from 6 megatonnes of CO2 in 2012, up to 30 megatonnes of CO2 in 2015). Data centres will comprise only 9 per cent on this increased energy consumption, compared to up to 90 per cent for wireless access."
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+ - Prices of Windows RT tablets drop, point to failure of OS-> 0

Submitted by angry tapir on Tuesday April 02, 2013 @07:42PM

angry tapir writes "Prices of Windows RT devices have started falling, signaling an attempt by PC makers to quickly clear out stock after poor adoption of tablets and convertibles with the operating system. Microsoft released Windows RT for ARM-based devices and Windows 8 for Intel-based devices in October last year. The price drop is an acknowledgement that Windows RT has failed, analysts claim."
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+ - MySQL's creator on why the future belongs to MariaDB-> 0

Submitted by

angry tapir

on Wednesday March 27, 2013 @10:53PM

angry tapir writes "When Oracle purchased Sun, many in the open source community were bleak about the future of MySQL. According to MySQL co-creator Michael "Monty" Widenius, these fears have been proven by Oracle's attitude to MySQL and its community. In the wake of the Sun takeover, Monty forked MySQL to create MariaDB, which has picked up momentum (being included by default in Fedora, Open SUSE and, most recently, Slackware). I recently interviewed Monty about what he learned from the MySQL experience and the current state of MariaDB."
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+ - Adobe to Australians: Fly to US for cheaper software-> 0

Submitted by

angry tapir

on Friday March 22, 2013 @01:08AM

angry tapir writes "It's been a long-running joke that it's cheaper for Australians to get a plane ticket to the US if they want to buy Adobe's Creative Suite instead of paying local prices. But appearing before a parliamentary inquiry into the disparity between IT prices in Australia and elsewhere, Adobe's local chief appeared to suggest just that."
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+ - Open sourcing the Internet of Things-> 0

Submitted by

angry tapir

on Wednesday March 13, 2013 @01:53AM

angry tapir writes "Thingsquare, a company founded by Contiki OS creator Adam Dunkels, today released the code for its wireless IoT networking system, Mist, which is designed to make it easy to connect low-power devices to the Internet. The company has posted the source code (.zip) for the Thingsquare Mist firmware, which lets wireless-capable microcontrollers connect directly to the Internet. Thingsquare partnered with chip makers Text Instruments and STMicroelectronics for the launch."
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+ - Drupal's creator aims for world domination-> 0

Submitted by

angry tapir

on Sunday March 10, 2013 @11:54PM

angry tapir writes "Open-source content management system Drupal has come a long way since it was initially released in 2001. Drupal now runs 2% of the world's websites — but Drupal's creator Dries Buytaert thinks that this could easily grow to 10%. I caught up with Dries to talk about Drupal's evolution from a pure CMS to a Web platform, cracking the enterprise market, and the upcoming release of Drupal 8, which features significant architectural changes — incorporating elements of the Symfony2 Web framework to replace Drupal's aging architecture."
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Comment: Interview with Contiki's creator, Adam Dunkels (Score 4, Informative) 28

by angry tapir on Sunday March 10, 2013 @06:03PM (#43133455) Attached to: Contiki Turns Ten

Shameless plug: I had a pretty extensive chat late last year with the guy who Contiki. You can read it here.

+ - UK court orders H33t, Kickass Torrents and Fenopy blocked-> 0

Submitted by

angry tapir

on Sunday March 03, 2013 @08:44PM

angry tapir writes "A court in the U.K. has ordered key Internet service providers in the country to block three torrent sites on a complaint from music labels including EMI Records and Sony Music. The High Court of Justice, Chancery Division, ordered six ISPs including Virgin Media, British Telecommunications and British Sky Broadcasting to block H33t, Kickass Torrents and Fenopy."
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