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Windows

Submission + - Why is Window Phone getting such a beating? (blogs.com)

Submitted by occasional_dabbler
occasional_dabbler writes: Reviews by 'commentators' such as the link predict certain doom for both Nokia and Microsoft on the basis of the OS being a failure, yet whenever the Lumia handsets are reviewed in the mainstream press they are often highly praised. Windows phone is an immature OS, certainly, but it does pretty much everything you need in a smartphone, is getting better with each update and it is beautiful. I have a Lumia 800 and now I'm used to how it and the WP OS works I find it a painful process to go back to an Android or iPhone for some obscure app not yet supported on WP.
WP gave me the same feeling I got when I bought my first iBook, fired up OSX 10.1 and realised I had just been shifted up a decade.
So why so serious? What do slashdotters who have really tried WP think of it?

Submission + - How to sell a broken Prius (motortrend.com)

Submitted by
aisnota
aisnota writes: "Ok, where on the Internet is best to sell a Prius for an engineer, motorhead to fix with their sweat equity or a more hardcore power train fascinated individual that wants a motor generator, the manuals and so forth of a 2002 Prius. Ok, my circumstance is that a job to lower pay scale forces me to forego this project with spouse pressures plus economics. Where do the hardcore Prius engineer types hangout that want this kind of potential at low cost? Since it is potentially runable, but the need to sell is motivated, help me find a win-win situation here.

It would really be cool if this were used to either help another Prius fan fix theirs or for a plug-in Hybrid or educational/demonstator experimental science zoned project.

It should be low enough cost for most of those into the topic to consider. Plus please make sure these are people that appreciate the electrical system as well. They should appreciate amperage and so forth.

photobucket.com/fixableprius"

Submission + - Blogging For Business (empowernetwork.com)

Submitted by
Guy Swinburne
Guy Swinburne writes: "These are terms that you must be familiar with, as are other online business owners. A blogger is someone, who literally writes about anything and everything under the sun.whether they are blogging for business or just for pleasure. The writings are meant for expression of thoughts and opinions; so, any topic or subject can be taken up for blogging. Many use this concept to create an online diary or journal, to record personal life experiences. They make it public, since they wish others to read and learn from them. The website or platform where they post their writings, is referred to as a blog or mini website. We do not call the published material, articles, but posts. Thanks to advanced technology, there is even space provided for readers to comment upon these posts, or even add value to them by posting fresh content."
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft's Penis Song Faces Stiff Criticism at NDC (pingzine.com)

Submitted by Deekin_Scalesinger
Deekin_Scalesinger writes: “I got the skills to impress, I’m a computer genius. The words “Micro” and “Soft” don’t apply to my penis,” beamed the vocals of a bubblegum dance song during an entertainment break at the annual conference last week. Meanwhile, the lyrics were flashed karaoke style in the front of the stage for the crowd to sing along to as dancers moved to the beat erratically.

The performance itself was given by the dancing Windows Azure girls.
The Internet

Submission + - Aussie online retailer impose IE7 tax (afr.com)

Submitted by Techy77
Techy77 writes: Online retailer Kogan will impose a new tax on its customers that visit its website using Microsoft’s outdated Internet Explorer 7 web browser, which means they will spend 6.8 percent more than customers on browsers like Firefox, Opera, Safari and Chrome.

Submission + - Lawyer Says Suits Will be Filed Over ICANN Top-Level Domains (youtube.com)

Submitted by
edadams
edadams writes: "Some applicants for new top-level domain names, revealed today by ICANN, are likely to sue the Internet domain naming organization, Crowell and Moring partner John Murino tells Bloomberg Law's Josh Block. Top-level domains are the ".com" part of an Internet address. This will be the largest-ever expansion of the Internet's naming system. 1,930 proposals were received for 1,409 different top-level domain names. Applicants paid $185,000 for each proposed domain. Claims by owners of trademarks and suits alleging antitrust violations are likely to come, with ICANN having stockpiled $120 million to deal with the expected litigation, Murino says."
Security

Submission + - Power and Ego, Not Money, May Have Fueled Alleged Dutch Hacker (pcworld.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The alleged Dutch hacker extradited from Romania to the US appeared to be driven by his desire to rule the criminal credit-card hacking world more than money, according to a computer security expert who had extensive contact with him last year. David Benjamin Schrooten is now in Seattle facing a 14-count indictment in what is one of the largest credit-card number hacking cases since that of Max Butler, who ran CardersMarket.com.
News

Submission + - Iran's Nuclear Objectives (homelandsecuritynet.com)

Submitted by
HSNnews
HSNnews writes: "I had the privilege of being in Washington, DC to attend the annual American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) policy conference last March at the invitation of one of AIPAC’s board members. AIPAC is one of the most powerful lobbying groups in the nation; more than 13,000 people attended, including President Barack Obama, the President of Israel, Shimon Peres, and the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, and members of Congress. This year’s conference attendance certainly reflects the power of the pro-Israel lobby. Despite the concern for the nation of Israel and its supporters over a nuclear Iran and the centrality of that subject at the conference, one of the questions asked by many speakers was: should Iran be considered an Israeli issue, or is this a US/International problem?"
The Military

Submission + - Revealed: 64 Drone Bases on American Soil (wired.com)

Submitted by
MikeatWired
MikeatWired writes: "We like to think of the drone war as something far away, fought in the deserts of Yemen or the mountains of Afghanistan. But we now know it’s closer than we thought, writes Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai at Danger Room. There are 64 drone bases on American soil. That includes 12 locations housing Predator and Reaper unmanned aerial vehicles, which can be armed. Public Intelligence, a non-profit that advocates for free access to information, released a map of military UAV activities in the United States on Tuesday. Assembled from military sources — especially this little-known June 2011 Air Force presentation (.pdf) — it is arguably the most comprehensive map so far of the spread of the Pentagon’s unmanned fleet. What exact missions are performed at those locations, however, is not clear. Some bases might be used as remote cockpits to control the robotic aircraft overseas, some for drone pilot training. Others may also serve as imagery analysis depots."
Music

Submission + - Chords to 1300 songs analyzed statistically for patterns (hooktheory.com) 1

Submitted by
hooktheory
hooktheory writes: "We looked at the statistics gathered from 1300 choruses, verses, etc. of popular songs to discover the answer to a few basic questions. First we look at the relative popularity of different chords based on the frequency that they appear in the chord progressions of popular music. Then we begin to look at the relationship that different chords have with one another.

To make quantitative statements about music you need to have data; lots of it. Guitar tab websites have tons of information about the chord progressions that songs use, but the quality is not very high. Just as important, the information is not in a format suitable for gathering statistics. So, over the past 2 years we’ve been slowly and painstakingly building up a database of songs taken mainly from the billboard 100 and analyzing them 1 at a time. At the moment the database of songs has over 1300 entries indexed.

Knowing these patterns can give one a deeper more fundamental sense for how music works"

Submission + - hacking patent law (nytimes.com)

Submitted by
robkeeney
robkeeney writes: "California law requires that when microstamping (which is easily defeatable) is no longer patent encumbered, all new guns in CA must use it, so the Calguns foundation paid the fee to extend the patent to prevent the law from coming into effect."
Facebook

Submission + - Inside Facebook data mining research group (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by
holy_calamity
holy_calamity writes: "Technology Review has an in depth profile of the team at Facebook tasked with figuring out what can be learned from all our data. The Data Science Team mine that information trove both in the name of scientific research into the patterns of human behavior and to advance Facebook's understanding of its users. Facebook's ad business gets the most public attention, but the company's data mining technology may have a greater effect on its destiny — and users lives."
Advertising

Submission + - Skype to Feature Giant Ads (arstechnica.com) 1

Submitted by
benfrog
benfrog writes: "Microsoft is inserting a new "feature" into Skype calls. Giant ads. They are actually calling them "Conversation ads" because they hope the ads (as large as the picture of the person that you are talking to) will 'spark additional topics of conversation that are relevant to Skype users and highlight unique and local brand experiences.' The ads, of course, are tailored to each individual user and the opt-out process is less than easy."

Submission + - Web tracking at work?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I understand that most employers track all employee web related traffic. My question to the Slashdot world is, how many of you are aware of this info getting used or shared on a regular basis with the direct manager of the users for your average fortune 500 company? At my company, it seems to take secondary proof of some egregious crime or policy violation before they are willing to drag out the IT logs. So does your IT department proactively provide a list to front line managers of how many times you have been on Reddit today ;-)
Software

Submission + - 'Drift' Helps You Unfamiliarize Yourself in your Neighborhood

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Smart phones can get you anywhere, from anywhere, by just about any route or transportation mode imaginable, effectively eliminating the lost art of getting lost in the city. Now Emily Badger writes about a new app called 'Drift' that wants to help you “unfamiliarize” yourself with your neighborhood offering you a random series of creative cues to guide you on your own “psychogeographic walk” through the city. Getting "lost" is a means to an end on Drift, not the end in itself. Rather, by recreating that feeling of disorientation you’ll start looking for things you never notice when following the same route to work, or to school every day. "It’s a lot more using that as a starting point to understand that even though you think you know this place, there’s a lot of things you are probably missing on an ongoing basis,” says developer Justin Langlois of Broken City Lab, an artist-led interdisciplinary collective and non-profit organization. “When you’re lost somewhere, you really go out of your way to pay attention to these visual cues that become significant markers in your mind.” As you find hidden or unnoticed things, you are asked to document them with the camera and in one sense is almost a community art project, inviting you to not only view your neighborhood differently, but to see how it looks through the eyes of your neighbors as well. “What that does in a larger sense," says Langlois, "is hopefully it gets people understanding that a city, a street and a neighborhood are more than just places to pass through on your way to somewhere else.""
The Courts

Submission + - Could Selling Your Computer One Day Be a Criminal Offense? (zeropaid.com)

Submitted by Dangerous_Minds
Dangerous_Minds writes: The Atlantic is reporting that the Supreme Court will decide later this year whether or not re-selling a product that is manufactured outside the US could be a violation of copyright law. Apparently, a lower court ruled that this would be a violation of copyright law due to the wording of first-sale doctrine. Demand Progress is not happy about this saying that sites like Craigslist and eBay will be undermined should the Supreme Court agree with the lower court ruling. ZeroPaid is wondering: if the Supreme Court agrees with the lower courts ruling and the TPP is later ratified, could that mean that selling things like your personal computer one day be a criminal offense?
Verizon

Submission + - Verizon Wireless Goes Ahead With "Bucket" Data Plans (usatoday.com)

Submitted by CanHasDIY
CanHasDIY writes: Previously, it was reported that Verizon was considering eliminating their current data plan scheme, as well as the grandfathered unlimited plans, in favor of a new 'bucket' plan in which up to 10 devices would share a data allotment. Verizon officially acknowledged it today, called the "Share Everything" plan, which will go into effect as of June 28, 2012;
according to USA Today:

Under the new pricing plan, a smartphone customer opting for the cheapest data bucket, 1 gigabyte, will pay $90 before taxes and fees ($40 for phone access and $50 for 1 GB). Customers can add a basic phone, laptop and tablet to share data for $30, $20 and $10, respectively.

Those of us still grandfathered into the unlimted plan will be forced to either sign up for Share Everything, or one of the tiered pricing plans currently in effect.
Science

Submission + - Bonobos Join Chimps as Closest Human Relatives (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Chimpanzees now have to share the distinction of being our closest living relative in the animal kingdom. An international team of researchers has sequenced the genome of the bonobo for the first time, confirming that it shares the same percentage of its DNA with us as chimps do. The team also found some small but tantalizing differences in the genomes of the three species—differences that may explain how bonobos and chimpanzees don't look or act like us even though we share about 99% of our DNA.

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