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Android

Submission + - Microsoft's worst nightmare or feature limited toy? (pcworld.com)

Submitted by
ozmanjusri
ozmanjusri writes: "A company that makes keyboard docks has announced a laptop-like peripheral that uses smartphones for processing and storage.

Since many Android and Apple phones have multi-core processors powerful enough to deliver laptop-level performance, they only lack usable screens and keyboards to be productive for most office work.

ClamCase believes their 13.3-inch 1,280 x 720 ClamBook with keyboard, multi-touch touchpad, and dedicated Android keys will make up for the lack, and turn smartphones into fully-functional laptops.

A device like the Clambook could be a real game-changer for the computer industry. If it succeeds, peripheral makers could build docks which would allow any monitor, keyboard, mouse and storage to be powered by any Android phone. It's a combination which would make BYOD offices very tempting for the corporations who are the Windows/Office combination's remaining cash-cow."
Google

Submission + - Sergey's Wife Patents Parkinson's Gene Find

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: In 2008, Google co-founder Sergey Brin blogged that tests conducted by 23andme, the consumer genetics company headed by Brin's wife Anne Wojcicki (and bankrolled by Google), showed that he and his Parkinson's-afflicted mother both shared the G2019S mutation of the LRRK2 gene. 'It is clear that I have a markedly higher chance of developing Parkinson's in my lifetime than the average person,' Brin explained of the find. 'At the same time,' he added, 'research into LRRK2 looks intriguing.' Indeed. But now Nature reports that 23andme is raising hackles with the revelation that it has received its first patent, on a genetic mutation which Wojcicki explains, 'relates to our discovery of a variant in the SGK1 gene that may be protective against Parkinson’s disease in individuals who carry the rare risk-associated LRRK2 G2019S mutation.' Scientific American has more on the 23andme patent.
GNOME

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Why Aren't You Running KDE? (google.com) 4

Submitted by
mike_toscano
mike_toscano writes: "At least some of us have recently seen Linus' most recent comments on his experience with Gnome 3 — he didn't have many nice things to say about it and as you know, he's not the only one. On the other hand, there have been some great reviews and comparisons of KDE with the other options (like this one) lately. Sure, early releases of 4.x were painful but the desktop today is fully-functional and polished.

So the question: To those who run *nix desktops and are frustrated by the latest Gnome variants, why aren't you running KDE?

To clarify, I'm not asking which desktop is better. I'm really talking to the people who have already decided they don't like the new Gnome & Unity but aren't using KDE."
Software

Submission + - Ambitious-yet-Ethical Software Jobs 1

Submitted by hwaccaly
hwaccaly writes: I'm a mid-career developer with a fair amount of experience working on data-intensive, mathematically ambitious software projects for fun-- things like physics and systems simulations, written mostly in CUDA, targeted at Tesla GPUs and small clusters. Ideally, I'd like to get paid for this kind of work, but I've found little call for these skills outside of the financial and defense industries. My conscience won't allow me to accept money from either. The medical/pharmaceutical industries undoubtedly require complex software, but the unavoidable animal testing at the end of the pipeline probably lifts its body count higher even than the defense industry's. And academia pays in degrees, not dollars. So what's left? Do any ethical businesses have a pressing need for high-performance computing, or is it basically a hobbyist niche?
America Online

Submission + - Patent troll sues Google, AOL over search 'snippets' and ad serving tech (justia.com)

Submitted by WindyWonka
WindyWonka writes: Google and AOL were sued for patent infringement Thursday, accused of violating two former British Telecom patents via Google's search ‘snippets' and by Google AdSense and Advertising.com ad serving technology. Incredibly, the lawsuit by apparent patent troll Suffolk Technologies asserts that every Google search result ‘snippet’ display violates one patent, and that another really broad server patent is violated every time Google and AOL serve up ads.
Moon

Submission + - European Scientists Make a Case for a Return to the Moon (yahoo.com)

Submitted by
MarkWhittington
MarkWhittington writes: "While the official target of NASA's space exploration program remains exploring Earth approaching asteroids, the case for a return to the moon has been made from a variety of quarters.

The most recent attempt to make a case for the moon is in a paper, entitled Back to the Moon: The Scientific Rationale for Resuming Lunar Surface Exploration soon to be published in the journal Planetary and Space Science,"
Operating Systems

Submission + - MorphOS 3.0 Released: Refusing to Let the PPC Desktop OS Die Gracefully (morphos-team.net)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Version 3.0 of MorphOS has been released. It's the independent PPC OS designed for outdated Apple systems like G4 Powerbooks 5,6/5,7/5,8/5,9 and EMacs 1.25 GHz/1.42 GHz and PPC minis and some G4 Powermac models (depends on graphics hardware). It further runs on discontinued and niche Genesi desktop systems Pegasos and stunted 128-megabyte-of-RAM tiny Efika. MorphOS is a nice-looking, low-required-resources, and nimble OS that can't match the capabilities of current Windows, Mac, and Linux. Its installation/live CD is free without caveat and runs for 30 minutes at a time, as many times as you like. You may purchase MorphOS to remove the time limit. A particular weakness of MorphOS is its lack of support for wireless networking. MorphOS is evilly masterminded by Ralph Schmidt, Mark Olsen first made it work on Mac hardware, and Fabian Coeurjoly furnishes insanely perfectionist versions of KHTML web-browser and MPlayer; there are several other key contributors.
Science

Submission + - Invasive species ride tsunami debris to US shore (myway.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: When a floating dock the size of a boxcar washed up on a sandy beach in Oregon, beachcombers got excited because it was the largest piece of debris from last year's tsunami in Japan to show up on the West Coast.

  But scientists worried it represented a whole new way for invasive species of seaweed, crabs and other marine organisms to break the earth's natural barriers and further muck up the West Coast's marine environments. And more invasive species could be hitching rides on tsunami debris expected to arrive in the weeks and months to come.
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - Could the Kickstarter Model become the Future of ALL Game Funding? (kickstarter.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The following game projects have received the most funding (in U.S. Dollars) on Kickstarter.com: Double Fine Adventure — 3.3 Million, Wasteland 2 — 2.9 Million, Shadowrun Returns — 1.8 Million, OGRE — 900K, Zombicide — 780K, The Banner Saga — 720K, Leisure Suit Larry — 655K, Carmageddon Reincarnation — 625K, Yogventures — 568K, Republique — 555K, Grim Dawn — 537K, Moebius — 435K. And these considerable crowdfunding amounts have come together even though Kickstarter is a very new phenomenon, that is itself still "Beta" by some accounts. All that begs for the following question to be posed: Could there be a time in the perhaps not-too-distant future — a few years from now — when ALL, or at the very least, MANY major game projects get funded this way, with "game buyers" being transformed into "game investors", simply by using their credit cards online to pledge some money to a game project that looks promising? Could this new model help repair the current "disconnect" between what gamers want & expect from their games, and what major game publishers — driven chiefly by profitability calculations — are willing to supply? Could the new crowdfunding model encourage both better games to be developed, overall, and a new, meritocratic approach to game financing to come into being, where "he/she who has the best ideas gets the most development bucks"? Or is all of this wishfull thinking, and the Kickstarter game funding phenomenon merely a "shortlived novelty" that will eventually disappear and be forgotton?

Submission + - Where to volunteer in an IT capacity in Michigan?

Submitted by Jazz-Masta
Jazz-Masta writes: I’ll be moving from Canada to the US (Lansing, Michigan) in a few months. My wife will be going over on a TN Visa, which means I can get TD status but cannot work. I can volunteer though. I was a sysadmin (Windows and Unix) for 5 years, and have been an IT manager for 1 (latest). The NAFTA list won’t get me anywhere (should have been an ‘analyst’), nor will an H1-B, and according to the immigration people, the specialist category typically requires 10 years experience in a field (which I don’t have). I would like to stay active in IT even if I cannot work. My question is: where should I start looking for volunteer opportunities in the Lansing/Detroit area in relation to IT? Anyone part of a volunteer organization that is looking for IT help? Thanks for your help!
Biotech

Submission + - Publicly funded GMO research facing destruction (google.com)

Submitted by ChromeAeonium
ChromeAeonium writes: Shortly after the events in Rothamsted Research in the UK, where a publicly funded trial of wheat genetically engineered to repel aphids was threatened by activists with destruction and required police protection, another publicly funded experiment involving genetically engineered crops faces possible destruction (original in Italian). The trial, which is being conducted by researchers at the University of Tuscia in Italy on cherries, olives, and kiwis genetically engineered to have traits such as fungal disease resistance, started three decades ago. When field research of GE plants was banned in Italy in 2002, the trial received an extension to avoid being declared illegal, but was denied another in 2008, and following a complaint from the Genetic Rights Foundation, now faces destruction on June 12th, despite appeals from scientists. The researchers claim that the destruction is scientifically unjustifiable (only the male kiwis produce transgenic pollen and their flowers are removed) and wish to gather more information from the long running experiment.
Microsoft

Submission + - Kinect: You are the Controlled 1

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: GeekWire reports on a newly-surfaced Microsoft patent application for 'Targeting Advertisements Based on Emotion', which describes how information gleaned from Kinects, webcams, online games, IMs, email, searches, webpage content, and browsers could be used to build an 'Emotional State Database' of individuals' emotions over time for advertisers to tap into. From the patent application: 'Weight-loss product advertisers may not want their advertisement to appear to users that are very happy. Because, a person that is really happy, is less likely to purchase a self-investment product that leverages on his or her shortcomings. But a really happy person may purchase electronic products or vacation packages. No club or party advertisers want to appear when the user is sad or crying. When the user is emotionally sad, advertisements about club parties would not be appropriate and may seem annoying or negative to the user. Online help or technical support advertisers want their advertisements to appear when the user is demonstrating a confused or frustrated emotional state.'
Android

Submission + - Splashtop Drops Windows 8 Metro Testbed Onto Android (hothardware.com)

Submitted by
MojoKid
MojoKid writes: "Want to try out the Windows 8 Metro interface on your Android tablet? Splashtop apparently has a solution. The company previously released a Windows 8 Metro testbed for the iPad back in April, and now it has one for Android devices, which is available in the Google Play Store. You’ll need a PC with the Windows 8 Release Preview installed, but once you have that taken care of, you’ll be able to poke around Microsoft’s new touch interface on any Android tablet."
GNU is Not Unix

Submission + - Emacs 24.1 released

Submitted by JOrgePeixoto
JOrgePeixoto writes: Emacs 24.1 has been released. New features include a new packaging system and interface (M-x list-packages), support for displaying and editing bidirectional text, support for lexical scoping in Emacs Lisp, improvements to the Custom Themes system, unified/improved completion system in many modes and packages and support for GnuTLS (for built-in TLS/SSL encryption), GTK+ 3,
  ImageMagick, SELinux, and Libxml2.

See http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/
The Military

Submission + - Battleship Iowa Makes its Final Voyage 1

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "The LA Times reports that decades after transporting President Franklin Roosevelt across the Atlantic and fending off kamikazes in the Pacific during World War II, the 45,000 ton battleship USS Iowa completed it final voyage as it arrived at its permanent berth at the Port of Los Angeles as a living museum. "This is my first time aboard since 1946," said Bob Dedic, who served on the 887-foot-long (270-metre) battleship from 1944 to 1946 and sported a cap he had bought at the ship's store more than six decades ago. He recalled wild storms, including one typhoon in which he feared the ship would capsize. Launched from the New York Naval Yard in 1942 with a crew of 151 officers and 2,637 enlisted men, the Iowa's first wartime duty was in the Atlantic, neutralizing a German battleship. Later in the war, the Iowa pounded beachheads in the Pacific with its 16-inch guns ahead of Allied landings and took part in the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay in 1945. Iowa was decommissioned in 1958 and stayed anchored off the Philadelphia Navy Yard for most of the next 26 years. To beef up a dwindling Navy, President Ronald Reagan ordered the Iowa restored, rigged with Tomahawk and Harpoon missiles, and, at a cost of $350 million, sent back to sea in 1984. In all its years at sea, the Iowa suffered only two minor hits by enemy fire. Its greatest tragedy was in peacetime, when a gun turret explosion in the Caribbean killed 47 sailors. The Navy laid the blame for the 1989 accident on a sailor who was allegedly distraught over a failed relationship with another man. A U.S. Navy investigation detected "foreign material" and the presence of a "chemical ignition device," naming one crew member as the "principal suspect" in purposefully causing the blast. Later Sandia National Laboratories report submitted to Congress found no conclusive evidence of such a material or ignition device, speculating that a "high-speed overram" of the turret may have been to blame. "This is a great military event," says Air Force Col. Richard E. Nolan, who is stationed at Los Angeles Air Force Base. "I'm telling my sons this is part of US history and hoping they will someday bring their children to see it.""

Submission + - Neal Stephenson reinventing computer swordfighting (kickstarter.com)

Submitted by
toxygen01
toxygen01 writes: "Neal Stephenson, sci-fi writer mostly known for Snowcrash and Cryptonomicon books, takes on revolutionizing virtual sword fighting with help of crowdfunding. Inspired by a little known fictional universe "Mongoliad", an interactive book he is participating on, his company is trying to develop hardware (low-latency motion controller) and software for realistic medieval sword fighting. From what is promised, it will try to be open for other developers by having API and SDK available for further modding."
Science

Submission + - Adult Cannibalism Seen for First Time in Non-Human Primate (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Researchers trekking through the forests of western Madagascar looking for a radio-tagged female gray mouse lemur have found a male dining on her flesh. This lemur was not previously known to eat other mammals, much less practice cannibalism. What's more, although cannibalism has been observed in a variety of primates, including chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans, several monkeys, and perhaps even gorillas, all known victims of such cannibals have been infants or juveniles. Except, that is, in humans.
It's funny. Laugh.

Submission + - 'Depraved' sex acts by penguins shocked polar explorer (bbc.co.uk) 4

Submitted by PolygamousRanchKid
PolygamousRanchKid writes: Accounts of unusual sexual activities among penguins, observed a century ago by a member of Captain Scott's polar team, are finally being made public. However, scientists now understand the biological reasons behind the acts that Dr Levick considered "depraved". He was shocked by what he described as the "depraved" sexual acts of "hooligan" males who were mating with dead females.

On his return to Britain, Dr Levick attempted to publish a paper entitled "the natural history of the adelie penguin", but according to Douglas Russell, curator of eggs and nests at the Natural History Museum, it was too much for the times. "What is happening there is not in any way analogous to necrophilia in the human context," Mr Russell said. "It is the males seeing the positioning that is causing them to have a sexual reaction. "They are not distinguishing between live females who are awaiting congress in the colony, and dead penguins from the previous year which just happen to be in the same position."

Mr Russell believes they show a man who struggled to understand penguins as they really are. "He, to a certain extent, falls into the same trap as an awful lot of people in seeing penguins as bipedal birds and seeing them as little people. They're not. They are birds and should be interpreted as such."

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