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Wikipedia

Submission + - Wikipedia Edits Forecast Romney's Vice Presidential Pick

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "In 2008, as The Washington Post wrote at the time, "just hours before [Sen. John] McCain declared his veep choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, her Wiki page saw a flurry of activity, with editors adding details about Palin's approval rating and husband's employment. ... Palin's entry was updated at least 68 times, with at least an additional 54 changes made to her entry over the preceding five days." The obvious — in hindsight — implications of the Wiki activity: Aides were going into the entries to tune them up and clean out any material that was either embarrassing or erroneous. Now Mark Memmott writes on NPR that today's Wikipedia activity may lend a clue to Mitt Romney's vice presidential pick, expected to be announced within a few days. So what's going on now with some of those said to be among the leading possibilities to be joining Mitt Romney on the Republican ticket? On August 7, Rob Portman's Wikipedia page was revised 100 times, the Wikipedia page for Marco Rubio was revised 22 times, and the page for Tim Pawlenty was revised only 5 times. Of course, Memmott adds, somebody who knows about the 2008 Wiki tea leaves may just be messing with our minds."
Microsoft

Submission + - IE 10 will have DO NOT TRACK by default angering Google and others (zdnet.com)

Submitted by Billly Gates
Billly Gates writes: Slashdotters and webmasters alike favorite browser (sarcasm intended) will have DO NOT TRACK settings enabled by by default in IE 10. IE 10 comes with Windows 8 and will go release candidate for Windows 7 very soon according to Anne Kohn in a comment in IE's blog. IE 10 already has a score of 319 in html5test.com, while MS is trying to position IE as a great browser again. Will this pressure other browsers such as Firefox and Opera to do the same?
Iphone

Submission + - iPhone Caused "Crisis of Design" at Samsung (allthingsd.com)

Submitted by RdeCourtney
RdeCourtney writes: At the end of Monday in week two of the Apple versus Samsung case, a damning internal Samsung email was admitted into evidence — an email containing charged language from JK Shin, Samsung’s head of mobile communications.

The memo is rife with ammunition including:

“I hear things like this: Let’s make something like the iPhone.”

“When everybody (both consumers and the industry) talk about UX, they weigh it against the iPhone. The iPhone has become the standard. That’s how things are already.”

“Do you know how difficult the Omnia is to use? When you compare the 2007 version of the iPhone with our current Omnia, can you honestly say the Omnia is better? If you compare the UX with the iPhone, it’s a difference between Heaven and Earth.”

Direct link to Samsung's memo:
http://embed.docstoc.com/handlers/downloadfilefromflash.ashx?docid=125907826
Android

Submission + - Ouya teams up with XBMC (networkworld.com)

Submitted by JG0LD
JG0LD writes: The team behind open-source media platform XBMC announced today that it would be working with the developers of Ouya to make sure that XBMC works on the still-developing but widely hyped Android gaming console.
Android

Submission + - Paid Media Must Be Disclosed In Oracle v. Google (itworld.com)

Submitted by
jfruh
jfruh writes: "One of the odder moments during the Oracle v. Google trial over Java patents came when patent blogger Florian Mueller revealed that he had a "consulting relationship" with Oracle. Now it looks like we're going to find out which other tech bloggers and journalists were on the payroll of one of the two sides in this epic fight. Judge William Alsup has ordered that both parties disclose 'all authors, journalists, commentators or bloggers who have reported or commented on any issues in this case and who have received money (other than normal subscription fees) from the party or its counsel during the pendency of this action.'"

Submission + - High School Web Design Competition Topic

Submitted by coastal984
coastal984 writes: I coordinate a high school web design competition for a national Career & Technical Student Organization. The competition is weighted towards content and presentation, with the content being an annually changing topic. Past topics were, for example, Future of NASA Manned Space Exploration, Web Accessibility for the Visually Impaired, Open Source Software Alternatives, and "What Will Web 3.0 Be Like?".

I've been spinning ideas around for a new topic, but they all seem bland and uninteresting (This past topic on NASA wasn't exactly a thriller. The Accessibility, Web 3.0, and Open Source ones received far better responses and deep thinking/research.) What might the Slashdot crowd suggest for a competition topic for high schoolers?
Communications

Submission + - Appeals Court Approves Warrantless Wiretapping (wired.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The federal government may spy on Americans’ communications without warrants and without fear of being sued, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday in a decision reversing the first and only case that successfully challenged President George W. Bush’s once-secret Terrorist Surveillance Program. 'This case effectively brings to an end the plaintiffs’ ongoing attempts to hold the executive branch responsible for intercepting telephone conversations without judicial authorization,' a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals wrote (PDF). ... The San Francisco-based appeals court ruled that when Congress wrote the law regulating eavesdropping on Americans and spies, it never waived sovereign immunity in the section prohibiting targeting Americans without warrans. That means Congress did not allow for aggrieved Americans to sue the government, even if their constitutional rights were violated by the United States breaching its own wiretapping laws.
Linux

Submission + - SCO Group files Chapter 7 (groklaw.net) 3

Submitted by rkhalloran
rkhalloran writes: The remnants of the failed litigation engine that was SCOX has finally filed for liquidation under Chapter 7 of the bankruptcy code. "There is no hope for rehabilitation". At this point the lawyers will suck the marrow from the carcass and leave the bones to bleach out in the sun.

Submission + - RIP Sir bernard Lovell (man.ac.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Sir Bernard Lovell, the creator of Jodrell Bank and the Lovell telescope has just died. The Mark 1 telescope, as it was then known, was the only western telescope that could track the early Russian moon probes which ensured it's debts were paid off, but is more famous for radio astronomy including pulsar research, hydrogen line studies of the galaxy and much more as other telescopes joined it in the Merlin network.
Businesses

Submission + - Amazon Expanding Delivery Locker Service (wsj.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The WSJ reports that Amazon's new secret weapon in its fight against other retailers is its delivery locker service. Dropping a package at a customer's door is not particularly secure, so Amazon Lockers were introduced about a year ago to provide a secure location for customers to retrieve their shipments. Now, Amazon is ramping up the service, opening new sites in the San Francisco Bay Area. 'Users don't pay extra to use the service but the locker program helps Amazon save on certain shipping costs. ShopRunner's Ms. Dias said UPS and FedEx Corp. FDX 0.00% charge retailers as much as 20% more to deliver packages to residential addresses because it is more efficient to deliver multiple packages to a business address. Failed deliveries are also more expensive for online retailers because those consumers are more likely to call customer service, switch to a competitor, or get a replacement item.'
IT

Submission + - Reports cites highest IT job growth in 4 years (networkworld.com) 1

Submitted by netbuzz
netbuzz writes: The employment research firm Foote Partners says U.S. labor statistics from last month reveal an increase of some 18,200 jobs in IT, which represents the largest such monthly jump since 2008. "The overall employment situation in the U.S. is lackluster, in fact this is the fifth consecutive month of subpar results," says David Foote, CEO at Foote Partners. "But the fact that more than 18,000 new jobs were created last month for people with significant IT skills and experience — and nearly 57,000 new jobs added in the past three months — is incredibly good news."
Biotech

Submission + - Cloned Horses Given Okay For Olympics (singularityhub.com)

Submitted by
kkleiner
kkleiner writes: "Cloned horses are galloping their way toward the Olympic Games. The Fédération Equestre Internationale in Lausanne, Switzerland, announced their decision in June following a meeting in which up-to-date information on cloning was presented to the federation. Because the ruling is so recent, cloned horses do not number amongst the competition at the London Games. But we’re sure to see them at future Olympic Games. The ruling also raises a broader question: how will cloning impact animals in other sports as well?"

Submission + - Korea based SK Telecom to Launch First Ever Voice over LTE HD Calls Service (paritynews.com)

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: South Korea has left US and other developed nations behind in the race for HD calls aka Voice over LTE as SK Telecom has announced that it will be providing high-quality voice calls over LTE service from August 8. While the rest of the world is still deliberating on when to start offering 4G services and when to hold 4G spectrum auctions like the UK, SK Telecom has upped the ante by becoming the first telecoms company to offer voice call services in HD through the use of “audio codecs capable of handling 2.2 times wider frequency bandwidth than that of 3G voice calls.” The audio codec to be used is Adapted Multi-Rate Wide Band (AMR-WB) codec notes Korea IT Times. Such is the quality of voice calls that users will actually feel that the caller will think that the person he/she is talking to is just right there, next to him/her. Another startling revelation is that the call connect time for a HD call will be anywhere between 0.25 to 2.5 seconds compared to 5 seconds in a 3G call making it around 2 to 20 times faster than the latter.
Mars

Submission + - Curiosity Snaps its First Color Photo of Mars (discovery.com)

Submitted by
astroengine
astroengine writes: "This was the view from NASA's Mars Science Laboratory during the afternoon of the first day that rover Curiosity successfully touched down on the Martian surface at 1:32 a.m. ET, Monday. The view shows the north wall of the rim of Gale Crater and the image was acquired by Curiosity's Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI). But why is it so murky? For the first observation, the dust cover was, sensibly, kept closed. The cover will be removed in the coming days."
NASA

Submission + - NASA Posts Video Of Curiosity Landing (ibtimes.com)

Submitted by
redletterdave
redletterdave writes: "After the premature DMCA takedown of the Mars landing on YouTube, NASA posted a video on Tuesday that offers viewers another chance to "relive the nail-biting terror and joy as NASA's Curiosity rover successfully lands on Mars the evening of Aug. 5." The video is a stop-motion composite of 297 thumbnail images captured by the Curiosity's onboard Mars Descent Imager (MARDI)."
Politics

Submission + - What's the most depressing sci-fi you've ever read? (blogspot.ca) 2

Submitted by 50000BTU_barbecue
50000BTU_barbecue writes: Usually sci-fi provides adventure with happy endings for everyone. But what story have you read that resonates years later because of some insight about human nature or society that's basically cynical or pessimistic? For me it's Fred Pohl's "Jem" with its sharply divided resource-constrained future world driven by politics, and its conclusion that humans are just too destructive to handle contacting alien life, especially if humans have the technological upper hand.

I'm wondering what other stories have stuck in people's minds. It can be a short story, a novel or an entire series of books.

(Sorry, I have no idea what the tags are supposed to do or how they work. I click and it becomes "!politics" or there's a picture of a hat. No matter what I type in "tags" it stays as "politics" with a "x" I can click to make it "!politics". I've rarely seen something so useless be so counter-intuitive. sci-fi doesn't work, but when I type "science fiction" the space bar apparently acts as en enter key so all it sees is science. I think my next submission will be about depressing user interfaces.)
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - This is What Wall Street's Terrifying Robot Invasion Looks Like (vice.com)

Submitted by
pigrabbitbear
pigrabbitbear writes: "Given the the endless mind-whirling acronyms, derivatives and structures of the financial markets, we’re rarely served with a visualization that so elegantly illustrates the arrival of Wall Street’s latest innovation. This is what High Frequency Trading — the official monicker of Wall Street’s robot army — looks like, when specially programmed computers make massive bets at lightning speed. Created by Nanex, the GIF charts the rise of HFT trading volumes across all US stock exchanges between 2007 and 2012. The initial murmur, the brewing storm, the final detonation: Not just unsettling, it’s terrifying."
Intel

Submission + - Thin Mini-ITX platform enables DIY iMacs (techreport.com) 1

Submitted by
crookedvulture
crookedvulture writes: "Shipments of all-in-one PCs are growing exponentially faster than those for typical desktops. Unfortunately, highly integrated systems like the iMac have traditionally made it difficult to replace or upgrade parts. And forget about assembling an all-in-one for yourself. Now, however, Intel has developed a Thin Mini-ITX platform that allows system builders and end users to put together all-in-one systems with standard parts. This hands-on look at Thin Mini-ITX pieces together an ersatz iMac using off-the-shelf components, and the process is pretty easy. While the end result isn't quite as slick as one of Apple's creations, parts can be swapped out with ease, and the configuration can be tailored to suit one's needs."
The Internet

Submission + - Content Centric Networking & The Next Internet (xconomy.com)

Submitted by
waderoush
waderoush writes: "PARC research fellow Van Jacobson argues that the Internet was never designed to carry exabytes of video, voice, and image data to consumers’ homes and mobile devices, and that it will never be possible to increase bandwidth fast enough to keep up with demand. In fact, he thinks that the Internet has outgrown its original underpinnings as a network built on physical addresses, and that it’s time to put aside TCP/IP and start over with a completely novel approach to naming, storing, and moving data. The fundamental idea behind Jacobson's alternative proposal — Content Centric Networking — is that to retrieve a piece of data, you should only have to care about what you want, not where it’s stored. If implemented, the idea might undermine many current business models in the software and digital content industries — while at the same time creating new ones. In other words, it’s exactly the kind of revolutionary idea that has remade Silicon Valley at least four times since the 1960s."
Data Storage

Submission + - Cache of the titans: Are SSD accelerators any good? (extremetech.com)

Submitted by
MrSeb
MrSeb writes: "When solid-state drives first broke into the consumer market, there were those who predicted the new storage format would supplant hard drives in a matter of years thanks to radically improved performance. In reality, the shift from hard drives (HDDs) to SSDs has thus far been confined to the upper end of the PC market. For cost-conscious buyers and OEMs, the higher performance they offer is still too expensive and the total capacity is insufficient. SSD cache drives have emerged as a means of addressing this situation. They are small, typically containing between 20-60GB of NAND flash and are paired with a standard hard drive. Once installed, drivers monitor which applications and files are accessed most often, then cache those files on the SSD. It can take the software 1-2 runs to start caching data, but once this process is complete, future access and boot times are significantly enhanced. ExtremeTech compares the effect of SSD cache solutions — Intel Smart Response Technology, and Nvelo Dataplex — on the performance of a VelociRaptor, and a slow WD Caviar drive. The results are surprisingly positive."

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