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Music

Submission + - Best way to know which online Intnl Music Stores are legit?

Submitted by
rjnagle
rjnagle writes: "I'm an American lover of music who is interested in buying legally music from other countries. How do I know which CD/online music stores are legit and actually benefit the artist? I'm very cost-conscious and prefer indie music anyway, so the types of international music for sale on Amazon/itunes tends to be from the bigger labels. Suppose I wanted to buy music from Pakistan/Ukraine/China/Brazil/Chad. What's the best way to identify which labels or online stories are authorized to sell them? Perhaps all I need is a list of the best known online music stores for each region (Yesasia.com, etc)."
Ubuntu

Submission + - Netflix Desktop Application for Gnu-Linux. (iheartubuntu.com)

Submitted by tetrahedrassface
tetrahedrassface writes: An app for Netflix-Desktop that is much cleaner and easier to install was released today. It is built for Ubuntu, but per the comments some .RPM builds are being worked on. The app runs well, looks native, and plays Netflix video nicely. Trust me, after building WINE via git 5 times to get the manual method method of Netflix running on LInux, the app is a godsend. Hop over and check it out. Hopefully it's the start of a great thing for us Linux users.

Submission + - A better brain powered computer cursor (stanford.edu)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Stanford Researchers have developed a new algorithm that significantly improves the control and performance of neural prosthetics: brain-controlled computer interfaces for individuals suffering from spinal cord injury and neurodegenerative disease to aid interaction with computers, drive electronic wheelchairs, and control robotic arms and legs. With this algorithm, monkeys implanted with multielectrode arrays in motor regions of their brain controlled a computer cursor more quickly and accurately than ever before, including navigation around obstacles. Further, the system maintained this high performance across 4 years, demonstrating long-term reliability. These improvements in performance and robustness are crucial for clinically-useful neural prosthetics, and pave the way for success in clinical trails.
Software

Submission + - Best Strategy to Start Development Career Without Degree

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Hey slashdotters, first time poster here, hope I'm following protocols. I'm looking to change careers and go into software development. I have the equivalent of about a first year CS education — understanding of OOP, understanding of algorithm design and analysis, ability to code up non-trivial programs (mostly in Python), etc. However, I don't have a degree. I have enough cash set aside to where I can spend about another year honing my skills, but I will need to be making a liveable income after that. I'm located in a major metropolitan area. I was thinking about using the year to familiarize myself with programming libraries, picking up a few more languages, learning some front-end/design principles and methods, involving myself with a number of open source projects, and picking up a little bit of work from friends/contacts. Would anyone care to critique that strategy or maybe add some specifics to it?
Your Rights Online

Submission + - Coffee and Intellectual Property (allafrica.com)

Submitted by cervesaebraciator
cervesaebraciator writes: A "Coffee Branding Workshop," sponsored by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), was held recently in Arusha City wherein the Director General of the Tanzania Coffee Board presented a paper entitled "Supporting the Coffee Sector with added Value Products Through Intellectual Property and Branding." The paper encouraged the use of intellectual property claims, including trademarks, copyrights, patents, and designs, as sources of income which can be used to support agriculture in Africa. The Director General claimed, "[Intellectual property rights] are the basis for today's knowledge based economy and international competitiveness". This is no doubt related to a broader effort to advance western style intellectual property in Africa through claims of the benefits it offers agriculture. Promoting western style intellectual property law as a means of third world development is a popular strategy for WIPO, the only branch of the UN to have significant wealth deriving from contributions independent of Member States. On a related note of interest to Slashdotters, there is a history of tension between WIPO advocates and FOSS advocates.
Piracy

Submission + - The real reason why the MPAA fears piracy (aardvark.co.nz)

Submitted by
NewtonsLaw
NewtonsLaw writes: "I'm pretty sure that everyone reading this will be aware of the movie Iron Sky.

I've been waiting for a long time to watch this movie and finally it has been uploaded to YouTube so I watched it on the weekend.

As the title credits rolled, I rushed off and pre-ordered the BluRay disk of the movie, which isn't due for release here in NZ until December 14th.

I am proof that making your wares available for free can actually promote sales — but only so long as your content is good enough (which Iron Sky certainly is). So, perhaps the reason that the MPAA fears piracy is because it lets people see just how crappy most of their material is *before* they fork over their hard earned cash.

I blogged about this in more detail today"
Android

Submission + - First dual-booting tablet can run Linux/Android (pengpod.com)

Submitted by garbagechuteflyboy
garbagechuteflyboy writes: PengPod is the first dual-booting tablet; It's able to run both Linux and Android. Pengpod is now running the latest Plasma Active which gives this powerful Linux tablet features that were previously only available to iPad and Android tablets. PengPod is currently selling Pre-orders on Indiegogo.
PengPod hoping to ship inexpensive Linux tablets with 7, 10 inch displays liliputing
Android and Linux on a dual-booting tablet Ars Technica
Meet the PengPod, a 'true Linux' tablet starting at $120 PCWorld

Submission + - Hounded By Recruiters, Codes Put Themselves Up For Auction (forbes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: When Pete London posted a resume on LinkedIn in December 2009, the JavaScript specialist stumbled into a trap of sorts. Shortly after creating a profile he received a message from a recruiter at Google. Just days later, another from Mozilla. Facebook reached out the next month and over the course of the next two years, nearly every big name in tech – attempt to lure him to a new employer. He received 530 messages in all, or one every 40 hours... the only problem? Pete London didn't exist.
Nintendo

Submission + - Nintendo Wii U Teardown Reveals Simple Design (pcper.com)

Submitted by Vigile
Vigile writes: Nintendo has never been known to be very aggressive with its gaming console hardware and with today's release (in the US) of the Wii U we are seeing a continuation of that business model. PC Perspective spent several hours last night taking apart a brand new console to reveal a very simplistic board and platform design topped off with the single multi-chip module that holds the IBM PowerPC CPU and the AMD GPU. The system includes 2GB of GDDR3 memory from Samsung and Foxconn/Hon-Hai built wireless controllers for WiFi and streaming video the the gamepad. Even though this system is 5 years newer, many analysts estimate the processing power of Nintendo's Wii U to be just ahead of what you have in the Xbox 360 today.
Science

Submission + - Cancer can teach us about our own evolution (guardian.co.uk)

Submitted by
hessian
hessian writes: "Cancer, it seems, is embedded in the basic machinery of life, a type of default state that can be triggered by some kind of insult. That suggests it is not a modern aberration but has deep evolutionary roots, a suspicion confirmed by the fact that it is not confined to humans but is widespread among mammals, fish, reptiles and even plants. Scientists have identified genes implicated in cancer that are thought to be hundreds of millions of years old. Clearly, we will fully understand cancer only in the context of biological history."

Submission + - Taxing the value of copyright? (skolelinux.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: "Why isn't the value of copyright taxed?" is the question raised by Norwegian blogger Petter Reinholdtsen. He suggest to make the tax office provide incentives to get more copyrighted works to enter the public domain, and to make it easier to figure out who to contact to be allowed to use copyrighted works, by taxing the value of copyright.

Submission + - Smartphones Q3 Final Numbers & Mobile OSs in future (blogs.com) 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Tommi Ahonen's latest numbers for the top ten smartphone vendors and top OSs are up. Android's dominates with seven of the top nine vendors profitably delivering Android which confirms our recent story whilst even escluding the iPhone5 Apple does fine as the only profitable non-Android vendor.

The coming battle for third position, involving Blackberry (4.3%) , Bada (3%) and Tizen (arriving in January) is the most fascinating. RIM has managed to almost stabilize, with enterprise customers "willing to keep buying some Blackberries" even now and so BB10 has a real chance of winning this, making Blackberry development suddenly interesting again. At the same time Tommi reports that Samsung's Tizen is very ready to substitute for Bada, and has multiple big backers which might also drive it to overtake BlackBerry.

Finally in the smaller/more obscure category, Meego has gone into "hibernation" with practically no sales to be expected until Sailfish arrives, and Symbian (2.0%), whilst "really on its last legs", has for now overtaken Windows again which peaked at 3% then collapsed back to 1.9% after the abandonment of WP7 devices. Mobile operators, who previously feared that Skype would take over their billing relationships, will almost certainly give a big sigh of relief.

We discussed Gartner's Android numbers recently and Samsung's Android phone success a bit before that.
Linux

Submission + - Linux on the TI-Nspire graphing calculator (wordpress.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Developers been working hard for the past few months to get Linux ported to the TI-Nspire calculator.

The port is not yet fully stabilized nor quite ready for broad consumption and requires some user-level knowledge of Linux systems, but is definitely worth a try. Experimental support for root filesystem installed on USB mass storage is being worked on, so that Datalight’s proprietary Flash FX/Reliance filesystem used by TI’s OS isn’t a limit anymore. This also means that the native TI-Nspire OS image is not replaced by the Linux system, and Linux can been booted on demand.

Support for USB keyboard, X server, directFB, Wi-Fi (with the help of a powered USB hub) and text-based Internet browsing is progressively being added and tested.
Science

Submission + - Deathstar! Europe Building Most Powerful Laser Ever Built (singularityhub.com)

Submitted by
kkleiner
kkleiner writes: "On the coattails of CERN’s success with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), Europeans and the world at large have another grand science project to be excited about: the Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI) project to build the most powerful laser ever constructed. These lasers will be intense enough to perform electron dynamics experiments at very short time scales or venture into relativistic optics, opening up an entirely new field of physics for study. Additionally, the lasers could be combined to generate a super laser that would shoot into space, similar to the combined laser effect of the Death Star in the Star Wars trilogy, though the goal is to study particles in space, not annihilate planets."
AI

Submission + - Alien FaceHugger v Predator - Face Tracking Hots Up (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: We now have two competing face tracking methods: the new FaceHugger and the award winning Predator that got a lot of attention because it provided Kinect quality object tracking but using just a video camera. You point the camera and draw a box around what you want to track and the box follows the object as it moves around the screen — it is that simple and that powerful. It also turns out to be easy to convert a basic object tracker to a specific face tracker. There is a video to see how good it seems to be. FaceHugger not only sticks to the face it is supposed to be tracking but it refuses to be fooled into tracking the wrong face. You can download an executable to try it out on your own machine but so far the source code hasn’t been released. This is one respect that the Predator algorithm wins out. In tests FaceHugger seems to be as good or better than Predator. Can we resist saying it looks like a "face-off".
Censorship

Submission + - You Can't Say That on the Internet (nytimes.com) 1

Submitted by
hessian
hessian writes: "A BASTION of openness and counterculture, Silicon Valley imagines itself as the un-Chick-fil-A. But its hyper-tolerant facade often masks deeply conservative, outdated norms that digital culture discreetly imposes on billions of technology users worldwide.

What is the vehicle for this new prudishness? Dour, one-dimensional algorithms, the mathematical constructs that automatically determine the limits of what is culturally acceptable."
Software

Submission + - What's the shelf life of a techie? Just 15 years (indiatimes.com)

Submitted by
NewYork
NewYork writes: ""The shelf life of a software engineer today is no more than that of a cricketer — about 15 years," says V R Ferose, MD of German software major SAP's India R&D Labs that has over 4,500 employees . "The 20-year-old guys provide me more value than the 35-year-olds do.""
Privacy

Submission + - Salt Lake City Police Plan Compulsory Headcam Use

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "The Salt Lake City Tribune reports that the Salt Lake City police chief has announced his intention to make wearable cameras mandatory at his police department so that officers can record a crime scene or any interaction with the public, adding to the footage already produced by dashboard cameras in their cars. "I think this is the way of the future," says Chief Chris Burbank. "It is a technology that is coming very quickly." The Taser AXON Flex on-officer system is a small, light-weight camera with 14 hours of a battery life that an officer clips to an item like a headband or sunglasses so it can record whatever that officer is seeing or doing. BART police in San Francisco have already received $141,000 from the federal Transit Security Grant Program for the cameras which will be used with counter-terrorism investigations. "We receive complaints about incidents that are then taken to court,” says Lieutenant Kevin Franklin, BART’s manager of security programs,. “The idea is that the cameras should help with that.” But Nick Pickles, director of the Big Brother Watch campaign group is already concerned about use of the "body camera" in the UK. "We're already seeing traffic wardens, bailiffs and council officials using them in Britain and it's a sad indictment of authorities who see every member of the public as a suspect," says Pickles. ""What is the problem they are trying to solve? Are lots of police officers being assaulted and people getting off because there's no CCTV? Of course not. This is a one-sided tool. How would police officers react if members of the public routinely filmed them?""

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