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Comment *THIS*? (Score 1) 180

by evel aka matt (#41444087) Attached to: Flatlining User Base May Spell End of RIM

This is the begininng of the end for RIM? Yeah, that might've been poignant what, 4? 5? Years ago. They were like a dinosaur standing on a big block of wood...on top of a tar pit. It was just a matter of time without a miracle, and from the looks of it, they haven't even been praying.

Comment Re:I see it both ways (Score 1) 630

by evel aka matt (#41354241) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: When Does Time Tracking at Work Go Too Far?

Well, when you talk about salaried employees, the breakdown & specifics of their workday are essentially irrelevant. The only issue should be whether or not said-salaried employee is getting their work done. A good, competent employee will get their work done in a satisfactorily-timely manner. If they're getting the job done, it shouldn't matter if their lunch hour is 30 minutes or 2 hours. If the work isn't getting done right, then they should be chastised or reprimanded or what-have-you. Companies that want to dictate every minute of an employee's work-week should be paying hourly.

Submission + - PirateBay Seems Nullrouted at Every Carrier in the Globe (torrentfreak.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: While TorrentFreak is talking about a "local" downtime, i can confirm from my trace-routes as well as various online tools that EVERY major carrier is dropping piratebay.se at their gateway level. While allot of mirror sites have popped-up , I would advise everyone to be very careful as some copy cats mallicious sites are appearing as fast. Is this the end of PirateBay?

Submission + - Project Fedora: Return of Tex Murphy (kickstarter.com) 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Well, it looks like Chris Jones, and Aaron Conners, have finally bit the bullet and are charging forward with an new Tex Murphy Adventure game. With some of the best full-motion-video out there, these are classic adventure games. Head on over to kickstarter and take a look. Their intro video is fabulous, and they are up to 25% of their goal in less than the first day.

Submission + - Dell Apologizes for 'Shut Up Bitch' Comments (wired.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Last month, Dell held a special event for Dell partners, which Michael Dell himself attended. The emcee was Mads Christensen, a Danish “inspirational speaker” who did his best to crack up the crowd of about 800 Dell partners and employees with offensive lines such as: "The IT business is one of the last frontiers that manages to keep women out," and "We can thank women for rolling the pin." Mads wrapped up by telling the mostly-male audience to "go home and say, ‘shut up bitch!’” Dell said nothing during the event, but has since quietly apologized via a post on Google+.
Advertising

Submission + - General Motors: "Facebook Ads aren't Worth it" (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by
Fluffeh
Fluffeh writes: "General Motors spends around $40 million per year on maintaining a Facebook profile and around a quarter of that goes into paid advertising. However, in a statement, they just announced that "it's simply not working". That's a bit of bad news just prior to the Facebook IPO — and while Daniel Knapp tries to sweeten the news, he probably makes it even more bitter by commenting "Advertising on Facebook has long been funded by marketing budgets reserved for trying new things. But as online advertising investments in general are surging and starting to cannibalize spend on legacy media, advertisers are rightfully asking whether the money spend is justified because it has reached significant sums now.""
Math

Submission + - The Mathematics of Obesity

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "The NY Times reports that Carson C. Chow, an MIT trained mathematician and physicist, has taken a new look at America's obesity epidemic and found that a food glut is behind America’s weight problem with the national obesity rate jumping from 20 percent to over 30 percent since 1970. "Beginning in the 1970s, there was a change in national agricultural policy. Instead of the government paying farmers not to engage in full production, as was the practice, they were encouraged to grow as much food as they could," says Chow. "With such a huge food supply, food marketing got better and restaurants got cheaper. The low cost of food fueled the growth of the fast-food industry. If food were expensive, you couldn’t have fast food." Chow and mathematical physiologist, Kevin Hall created a math model of a human with hundreds of equations, boiled it down to one simple equation, and then plugged in all the variables — height, weight, food intake, exercise. The slimmed-down equation proved to be a useful platform for answering a host of questions. For example, the conventional wisdom of 3,500 calories less is what it takes to lose a pound of weight is wrong because the body changes as you lose. The fatter you get, the easier it is to gain weight so an extra 10 calories a day puts more weight onto an obese person than on a thinner one. Another finding: Huge variations in your daily food intake will not cause variations in weight, as long as your average food intake over a year is about the same. Unfortunately another finding is that weight change, up or down, takes a very, very long time. All diets work but the reaction time is really slow: on the order of a year. Chow has posted an interactive version of the model on the web where people can plug in their information and learn how much they’ll need to reduce their intake and increase their activity to lose. "There’s no magic bullet on this. You simply have to cut calories and be vigilant for the rest of your life.""

Comment Re:The other thing people dislike about Apple (Score 2) 194

by evel aka matt (#35966482) Attached to: iPhone 3G and iOS4 Lack Chemistry

A ridiculous argument. Compare the current resale values of other personal computers with a similar MSRP from the same era with a G5 and you'll see that the Mac has far and away more residual value. And it's not only financial. Despite the fact that PCs dominate the desktops of my social circle, I don't know anybody using a PII or PIII-based machine for anything significant, yet I know of a fair amount of living, breathing, productive PowerPC-era Macs.
Sony

Submission + - Judge orders IP logs released to Sony from PS3... (wired.com) 2

Submitted by masterwit
masterwit writes: A story on wired and also at The Registrar and also Wired tells of the following:
'A federal magistrate has awarded Sony a subpoena allowing the company to obtain the IP addresses of everyone who visited the personal website of PlayStation 3 jailbreaker George Hotz for the past 26 months.

Magistrate Judge Joseph C. Spero of San Francisco also granted Sony's request for subpoenas on Google, Twitter, and another service for information relating to accounts held by the 21-year-old Hotz, who goes by the moniker GeoHot. Thursday's move comes in a lawsuit Sony filed in January alleging that Hotz and more than 100 other other hackers violated US copyright law by showing others how to bypass technical measures built in to the game console so they would run games and software not authorized by Sony.'

This is not only a major change in policy on privacy but disturbing on a multitude of levels. Both of these articles are worth checking out.

Submission + - Gawker Media Traffic down 25% since redesign (yahoo.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A few weeks ago, Gawker Media disputed reports that its traffic had plummeted due to the redesign recently implemented across its blog network. And Gawker boss Nick Denton had even recently made a cash bet that the relaunch wouldn't cost him page views.

But at Thursday's paidContent conference, Denton acknowledged that his numbers have in fact suffered due to the makeover, which abandoned the standard reverse-chronological scroll of blogs for a more traditional layout in which a single story dominates the homepage.
NASA

Submission + - LED Technology Reduces Chemotherapy's Side Effects (ibtimes.com) 2

Submitted by
gabbo529
gabbo529 writes: "Medical researchers have developed a new technology that will help cancer patients stave off the effects of chemotherapy.

Called High Emissivity Aluminiferous Luminescent Substrate, or HEALS, it's a chip covered with hundreds of sand-grain sized light emitting diodes, each of which emits energy equivalent to 12 times that of the sun. The lights are in a small box that is held near the patient's head, while the light, which is in the far red and infrared part of the spectrum, shines on the skin.

The technology was originally developed by NASA for plant growth experiments on space shuttle flights."
Government

Submission + - Germany Builds Encrypted, Identity-Confirmed Email (itworld.com)

Submitted by
jfruhlinger
jfruhlinger writes: "Looking to solve the problems of spam, phishing, and uncomfirmed email identities, Germany is betting very, very big. The country will pass a law this month creating 'De-mail,' a service in which all messages will be encrypted and digitally signed so they cannot be intercepted or modified in transit. Businesses and individuals wanting to send or receive De-mail messages will have to prove their real-world identity and associate that with a new De-mail address from a government-approved service provider. The service will be enabled by a new law that the government expects will be in force by the end of this month. It will allow service providers to charge for sending messages if they wish. The service is voluntary, but will it give the government too much control?"

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When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle. - Edmund Burke

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