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Microsoft

Kinect: You Are the Controlled 156

Posted by timothy from the read-'em-but-avoid-weeping dept.
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.'"
Education

Ask Slashdot: Best Training To Rekindle a Long Tech Career? 162

Posted by timothy from the choose-his-own-adventure dept.
New submitter SouthSeaDragon writes "I'm a computer professional who has performed most of the functions that could be expected over a 39 year career, including hardware maintenance and repair, sitting on a 800 support line, developing a help desk application from the ground up (terminal-based), writing a software manual, plus developing and teaching software courses. In recent years, I've worked for computer software vendors doing pre-sales support generally for infrastructure products including applications, app servers, integration with Java based messaging and ESB product and most recently a Business Rules product. I was laid off recently due to a restructuring and am now trying to figure out the next phase. With the WIA displaced worker grants now available I am attempting to figure out what training would be good to pursue. I am hearing that 'the Cloud' is the next big thing, but I'm also looking into increasing my development skills with a current language. I wonder what the readers might suggest for new directions."
Input Devices

Neal Stephenson Reinventing Computer Swordfighting, Via Kickstarter 151

Posted by timothy from the if-only-I-had-a-spare-10k-around dept.
New submitter toxygen01 writes "Neal Stephenson, sci-fi writer mostly known for his books Snowcrash and Cryptonomicon, takes on revolutionizing virtual sword fighting with help of crowdfunding. Inspired by the little-known fictional universe of 'Mongoliad,' an interactive book he is collaborating 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." Very few Kickstarter drives have a steel longsword as one of the rewards for investing.
Businesses

Taxes Lead Angry Birds Maker Rovio To Consider Move To Ireland 626

Posted by timothy from the actually-it's-the-delicious-green-weather dept.
jones_supa writes with this news, straight from The Irish Times: "Rovio, the Finnish company behind Angry Birds, is considering moving its headquarters to Ireland, chief executive Mikael Hed has said. Rovio employs approximately 400 people, mostly in Finland, but Rovio is in contact with IDA Ireland about establishing headquarters here. The reason for the move would be corporation tax rate, which in Finland is 24.5%, while Ireland's rate is 12.5%. Companies such as Google and Facebook have also set up European headquarter operations in Dublin for the same reason. Hed said that if the decision was made to move to Ireland, the company would then decide exactly what elements of its operations would move. 'If we did make that decision then it would be a natural thing to do to have some production [in Ireland] also.'"
Android

Linaro Tweaks Speed Up Android, By Up To 100 Percent 97

Posted by timothy from the mowing-the-other-guy's-lawn dept.
Argon writes with an excerpt from Liliputing of interest to Android users: "'The folks behind the Linaro open source software project have put a little time into tweaking Google Android to use the gcc 4.7 toolchain. The result is a version of Android that can perform many tasks between 30 and 100 percent faster than the version of Android Google 4.0 Google currently offers through the AOSP (Android Open Source Project).' Adds Argon: "Note that there are CPU optimizations only since they have only access to binary blobs for GPU code."
X

X11 7.7 Released, Brings Multi-Touch Input 128

Posted by timothy from the nostalgia-for-moderns dept.
First time accepted submitter Jizzbug writes "The X Window System made release X11 7.7 last night (June 9th): 'This release incorporates both new features and stability and correctness fixes, including support for reporting multi-touch events from touchpads and touchscreens which can report input from more than one finger at a time, smoother scrolling from scroll wheels, better cross referencing and formatting of the documentation, pointer barriers to control cursor movement, and synchronization fences to coordinate between X and other rendering engines such as OpenGL.'"
Education

Ask Slashdot: Advice On Child-Friendly Microscopes? 118

Posted by timothy from the skip-the-electrified-eye-piece dept.
OceanMan7 writes "My 7-year-old son is getting very interested in microscopic things — from bacteria to parameciums (paramecia?) Not being a biologist, I would appreciate advice on what type of microscope to get. I'd be operating it and he viewing with supervision. I'd like something better than a toy and plan to buy it used, if possible. Extra points if it's stereo and also allows me to view opaque objects at low magnification."
Crime

RMS Robbed of Passport and Other Belongings In Argentina 386

Posted by timothy from the low-and-despicable dept.
New submitter Progman3K writes "Richard Stallman, father of the FSF, had his bag containing his laptop, medicine, money and passport stolen after his talk at the University of Buenos Aires on Friday, June 8." Adds reader jones_supa, excerpting from the same linked story: "As a result of this occurrence, he was forced to cancel his talk in Cordoba, and it's still unknown how this will impact the rest of his speaking engagements throughout the world."
Microsoft

History Will Revere Bill Gates and Forget Steve Jobs, Says Author 679

Posted by Soulskill from the skynet-will-forget-both dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "PC Magazine reports that journalist Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point and Outliers, has stirred up quite a controversy in tech circles with his off-the-cuff remarks that history will remember Bill Gates fondly while Steve Jobs slips into obscurity. Gladwell likened Gates' charitable work to the German armaments maker Oskar Schindler's famous efforts to save his Jewish workers from the gas chambers during World War II, and added that because of Gates there's a reasonable shot we will cure malaria. 'Gates, sure, is the most ruthless capitalist. And then he decides, he wakes up one morning and he says, "Enough." And he steps down, he takes his money, takes it off the table ... and I think, I firmly believe that 50 years from now, he will be remembered for his charitable work,' said Gladwell. 'And of the great entrepreneurs of this era, people will have forgotten Steve Jobs. Who's Steve Jobs again?' For all his dismissal of Jobs' legacy, however, Gladwell remains utterly fascinated with him. 'He was an extraordinarily brilliant businessman and entrepreneur. He was also a self-promoter on a level that we have rarely seen,' said Gladwell. 'What was brilliant about Apple, he understood from the get-go that the key to success in that marketplace was creating a distinctive and powerful and seductive brand.' Gladwell concludes that the most extraordinary moment in the biography of Jobs is when Jobs is on his deathbed and it's over and he knows it. 'And on, I forget, three, four occasions, he refuses the mask because he is unhappy with its design. That's who he was. Right to the very end, he had a set of standards. If he was going to die, dammit, he's going to die with the right kind of oxygen mask. To him it was like making him send his final emails using Windows.'"
Image

Audacious Visions For Future Spaceflight 176

Posted by Soulskill from the it's-been-a-lonnnnng-road dept.
New submitter nagalman writes "There is a very powerful video out that takes the audio of words from Neil deGrasse Tyson, receiver of the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal, and meshes it with powerful images of the history and successful outcomes of NASA. Through Penny4NASA, Dr. Tyson is pressing for the budget of NASA to be doubled from 0.5% to 1% of the federal budget in order to spur vision, interest, dreams, public excitement, and innovation into science and engineering. With Kansas stating that 'evolution could not rule out a supernatural or theistic source, that evolution itself was not fact but only a theory and one in crisis, and that Intelligent Design must be considered a viable alternative to evolution,' and North Carolina's legislature circulating a bill telling people to ignore climate science, maybe it's time we start listening to experts who have a proven record of success, rather than ideology that has only been 'proven' in the mind of elected politicians."
Open Source

Evaluating the Harmful Effects of Closed Source Software 490

Posted by Soulskill from the probably-causes-cancer dept.
New submitter Drinking Bleach writes "Eric Raymond, coiner of the term 'open source' and co-founder of the Open Source Initiative, writes in detail about how to evaluate the effects of running any particular piece of closed source software and details the possible harms of doing so. Ranking limited firmware as the least kind of harm to full operating systems as potentially the greatest harms, he details his reasoning for all of them. Likewise, Richard Stallman, founder of GNU and the Free Software Foundation, writes about a much more limited scope, Nonfree DRM'd games on GNU/Linux, in which he takes the firm stance that non-free software is unethical in all cases but concedes that running non-free games on a free operating system is much more desirable than running them on a non-free operating system itself (such as Microsoft Windows or Apple Mac OS X)."
Cloud

Researcher: Interdependencies Could Lead To Cloud 'Meltdowns' 93

Posted by Soulskill from the we-can-only-hope dept.
alphadogg writes "As the use of cloud computing becomes more and more mainstream, serious operational 'meltdowns' could arise as end-users and vendors mix, match and bundle services for various means, a researcher argues in a new paper set for discussion next week at the USENIX HotCloud '12 conference in Boston. 'As diverse, independently developed cloud services share ever more fluidly and aggressively multiplexed hardware resource pools, unpredictable interactions between load-balancing and other reactive mechanisms could lead to dynamic instabilities or "meltdowns,"' Yale University researcher and assistant computer science professor Bryan Ford wrote in the paper. Ford compared this scenario to the intertwining, complex relationships and structures that helped contribute to the global financial crisis."
Businesses

Ask Slashdot: Comparing the Value of Skilled Admins vs. Contributing Supervisors 171

Posted by Soulskill from the class-warfare dept.
HappyDude writes "I've been asked to manage a department in our IT group. It's comprised of UNIX, VMWare, Citrix, EMC and HP SAN Admins, Technicians and Help Desk personnel. The group covers the spectrum in years of experience. I am a 20-year Admin veteran of Engineering and Health Care IT systems including UNIX, Oracle DBA, Apache HTTP/Tomcat, WebSphere, software design plus other sundry jack-of-all-trades kinds of stuff. Although I consider myself a hack at most of those trades, I'm reasonably good at any one of them when I'm submerged. I also have 10 years of Project Management experience in Engineering and Health Care related IT organizations. I do have formal PM training, but haven't bothered to seek credentialing. I'm being told that I'll be worth less to the organization as a supervisor than what I'm making now, but the earning potential is greater if I accept the management position. Out of the kindness of their hearts, they're offering to start me in the new position at the same wage I'm currently making. Does this make any sense, Slashdot? " Read on for further details.
China

China Plans Manned Space Mission This Month 168

Posted by Soulskill from the more-the-merrier dept.
jamstar7 writes "From an Associated Press report: 'China will launch three astronauts this month to dock with an orbiting experimental module, and the crew might include its first female space traveler, a government news agency said Saturday. A rocket carrying the Shenzhou 9 spacecraft was moved to a launch pad in China's desert northwest on Saturday for the mid-June flight, the Xinhua News Agency said, citing an space program spokesman. The three-member crew will dock with and live in the Tiangong 1 orbital module launched last year, Xinhua said. The government has not said how long the mission will last.' China, who is not an ISS partner, plans to see if its Shenzhou 9/Long March 2F system can get the job done like the Dragon/Falcon9 system can. They plan on two missions this year to dock with their Tiangong 1 module, which was launched in September 2011. Their eventual plans include building a complete space station by 2020, though one of only about 60 tons, compared to the ISS's 450-ish tons."
Censorship

An HTTP Status Code For Censorship? 369

Posted by Soulskill from the you-can't-get-there-from-here dept.
New submitter Tryfen writes "UK ISPs are being forced to block The Pirate Bay. One is using 'HTTP 403 Forbidden' to tell users that they cannot access the site. From the article: 'However, chief among my concerns is the technical way this censorship is implemented. At the moment, my ISP serves up an HTTP 403 error.' ... As far as I am concerned, this response is factually incorrect. According to the W3C Specifications: "The 4xx class of status code is intended for cases in which the client seems to have erred."' So, should there be a specific HTTP status code to tell a user they are being censored?"

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