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Windows

Windows 10 Release Date: July 29th 374

Posted by Soulskill from the onward-and-upward dept.
Ammalgam writes with news that Windows 10 will be released worldwide on July 29th, 2015. It'll be immediately available for PCs and tablets — their announcement doesn't mention smartphones. The upgrade will be free (within one year of launch) for users running legitimate copies of Windows 7 and 8.1. Another reader notes that users of those two operating systems are now being prompted to upgrade by a message in their notification area (system tray).

Comment Huge disconnect and so many questions (Score 1) 504

by I_say (#45386279) Attached to: Feinstein and Rogers: No Clemency For Snowden
How come government officials are reacting the exact opposite fashion of what most Americans are reacting? Majority agree that Snowden did us a great favor, as citizens, but still the people who take our money and supposedly speak for us are labelling him a villain? It's not just the typically backwards GOP, this time; it's the Democrats, too. How are things this bad? If we voted for you, why do you hate us?

Submission + - Congress was in session only 120 Days in the past year! (wvec.com)

Submitted by Cat_Herder_GoatRoper
Cat_Herder_GoatRoper writes: They are wildly unpopular, and on pace to be the most unproductive ever. While you work long hard hours, the House gave themselves 240 days off this year. ”It doesn’t seem fair. Nobody gets that many days off,” one taxpayer told 13News Now. And few people make $175-thousand dollars a year. Members of Congress also get great benefits like a retirement package, health care, even a gym membership. ”Oh, yea, I’d love that job,” another taxpayer said. After spending just 125 days in Washington this year, the upcoming month-long summer recess might be an opportunity for members to earn the $700 a day salaries you pay them by seeing first hand the effects of sequestration back home. "If they’re in Washington in their little bubbles, they’re not seeing the effects of that,” said Quentin Kidd, a government professor at Christopher Newport University. Kidd says the sequester will hit Hampton Roads hard this summer, and if the congressional delegation sees the pain people are feeling from something congress is directly responsible for, they might be more willing to strike a budget deal. ”I think they should be here. I think they should be on the street. I think they should be hearing what people are saying about what’s happening to them,” Kidd added. 13News Now checked with our local delegation about their summer plans. Randy Forbes’ office told us the congressman will use the break to, “focus on individuals and families burdened by furloughs.”

Comment Re:Sanity May Yet Prevail (Score 2) 413

by I_say (#44182575) Attached to: Egyptian President Overthrown, Constitution Suspended
I don't think the lunacy is strictly Islamic. It seems to be born more from Fundamentalism. It's true that Christians are the minority in that corner of the world, but that doesn't mean they are more "right" than the region's Muslims. I've visited Kuwait, Iraq, Syria, Jordan and Isreal while studying for Cultural Anthro and I can tell you, first hand, that there is no shortage of fundies from every religion.

Comment Re:What is the point of this? (Score 1) 306

by I_say (#44036549) Attached to: Google Aims To Cull Child Porn By Algorithm, Not Human Review

When people try to share this disgusting content they are caught and prosecuted.

That seems like the wrong way of going about it. The image has already been created and the child has already been exploited; The fact that perverts share the image shouldn't really matter. They should be putting more effort towards finding the image source, the guy who's touching kids. It's a bit of a weak analogy, but compare this to the way we handled the drug war in the past. Users were being pursued just as much as the Producers, and then nobody thought about the User after incarceration. If the User springs a trap, fine, that's cool. It's a great chance to get him some therapy and make him better. But the User is not the one hurting children, and this is defintely aimed at the Users. The algorithm looks for images that have already been circulated, instead of new ones. The new images are important because they'll help trap Producers, but Google is just doing a PR stunt with this program. Unrelated: It also bothers me that there are pictures of dead children and exsanguinated teens floating around, but that's perfectly legal to see. That's some shaky logic.

Submission + - Remote controlled guard towers to Afghanistan (google.com) 1

Submitted by maggern
maggern writes: It looks like an ordinary containter, but is a remote controlled guard tower optimized to provide rapid organic direct fire-power support for combat outposts, patrol bases, forward operating Bases, ports, and shipboard-defense applications. The "Containerized Weapon Station" is being developed by the Norwegian Kongsberg Protech Systems and will be tested in Afghanistan by the american military this summer, as troops pull out, according to the Norwegian Teknisk Ukeblad (Technical Weekly).

Submission + - Israeli Army Retweeting 1967 War As It Happened

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: This is a new one, twitter as a form of historical reenactment: " ISRAEL'S army is giving a "live" blow-by-blow account of the 1967 Six Day War, tweeting each air strike at the exact time it occurred 46 years ago ... @IDF1967 "is an official Israel Defence Forces account that is aimed at retweeting the events of the Six Day War in live time", ... The account was tweeting key events in the battle against the armies of Egypt, Jordan and Syria that took place from June 5 to 10, 1967 and includes pictures and videos, the army said. The tweets are mostly in Hebrew, with some translated into English. "In response to repeated provocations by Egypt, the State of Israel and the IDF are going to war. We will not sit idly as the enemy forces tighten the noose around our necks," the opening tweet said around 8.00am (1500 AEST) on Wednesday when Israel landed its first pre-emptive air strike 46 years ago." I wonder if tomorrow anyone will be doing D-Day, also known as Operation Overlord? From what I hear the French were quite ready for German occupation to end and welcomed their new overlords.

Submission + - GM Crop Producer Monsanto Using Data Analytics to Expand Its Footprint (slashdot.org)

Submitted by Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: Monsanto is more infamous for growing its genetically modified crops than its use of software, but a series of corporate acquisitions and a new emphasis on tech solutions has transformed it into a firm that acts more like an innovative IT vendor than an agribusiness giant. Jim McCarter (the Entrepreneur in Residence for Monsanto) recently detailed for an audience in St. Louis how the company's IT efforts are expanding. Monsanto’s core projects generate huge amounts of bits, especially its genomic efforts, which are the focus of so much public attention. Other big data gobblers are the phenotypes of millions of DNA structures that describe the various biological properties of each plant, and the photographic imagery of crop fields. (All told, there are several tens of petabytes that need storage and analysis, a number that’s doubling roughly every 16 months.) With all that tech muscle, the company has launched IT-based initiatives such as its FieldScripts software, which uses proprietary algorithms (fed with data from the FieldScripts Testing Network and Monsanto research) to recommend where to best plant corn hybrids. “Just like Amazon has its recommendation engine for what book to buy, we will have our recommendations of what and how a grower should plant a particular crop,” said McCarter. “All fields aren’t uniform and shouldn’t be planted uniformly either.” Despite its increasingly sophisticated use of data analytics in the name of greater crop yields, however, Monsanto faces pushback from various groups with an aversion to genetically modified food; a current ballot initiative in Washington State, for example, could result in genetically modified foods needing a label in order to go on sale here. The company has also inspired a “March Against Monsanto,” which has been much in the news lately.
Data Storage

Kingston Introduces 1TB Flash Drive 170

Posted by samzenpus from the small-package dept.
Deathspawner writes "If there's one thing that each CES can bring, it's a handful or products that manage to drop jaws everywhere. Kingston's latest flash drive series, DataTraveler HyperX Predator 3.0, manages to be one of those. It's aimed at folks who actually need mass storage on the go at speeds that mechanical hard drives cannot offer. Available soon will be a 512GB model, followed by the 1TB later this quarter. The drive features read speeds of 240MB/s and write speeds of 160MB/s — not quite desktop SSD speeds, but much faster than a mechanical hard drive, and with vastly reduced latencies due to it being flash storage. Not surprisingly, pricing has not yet been discussed."
Games

Submission + - Frame latency spikes plague Radeon graphics cards (techreport.com)

Submitted by
crookedvulture
crookedvulture writes: "AMD is bundling a stack of the latest games with graphics cards like its Radeon HD 7950. One might expect the Radeon to perform well in those games, and it does. Sort of. The Radeon posts high FPS numbers, the metric commonly used to measure graphics performance. However, it doesn't feel quite as smooth as the competing Nvidia solution, which actually scores lower on the FPS scale. This comparison of the Radeon HD 7950 and GeForce 660 Ti takes a closer look at individual frame latencies to explain why. Turns out the Radeon suffers from frequent, measurable latency spikes that noticeably disrupt the smoothness of animation without lowering the FPS average substantially. This trait spans multiple games, cards, and operating systems, and it's "raised some alarms" internally at AMD. Looks like Radeons may have problems with smooth frame delivery in new games despite boasting competitive FPS averages."
Android

Journal Journal: Google Nexus 7 5

Journal by stoolpigeon

A brand spanking new Google Nexus 7 arrived in the office today. I told the person who brought it to go ahead and mess with it and try it out- so the first thing I did was a factory reset and then it updated to Android 4.2 Very nice. So I've been messing with it a couple hours and here are my very first impressions.

Submission + - The curious physics of light means it ties itself in knots. (aeonmagazine.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Light is something we think of as purity itself, even as symbol for goodness and understanding. However we may have to rename the Enlightenment as recent discoveries show light is far from straight forward. On the particle level it habitually ties itself in knots.
Patents

Submission + - New EU wide patents system approved (itworld.com)

Submitted by Dupple
Dupple writes: There's a two page article over on IT World detailing the new European patent system

Parliament adopted all three proposed regulations needed to form the new patent system on Tuesday: the regulation on a Unitary Patent, the language regime and the formation of a new unified patent court system.

Not all European Union member states want a part in the new system: Italy and Spain refused to participate, although they may join at any time. The new system will cut the cost of obtaining a patent in the participating countries by up to 80 percent, the Parliament said. The patents will be made available in English, French and German and applications will have to be made in one of those three languages.

Not everyone was pleased with the newly adopted regulation though. MEPs opposing the adopted text are concerned the new system is going to be bad for innovation and business, and by voting for the text, the Parliament is giving away powers, they said.

The new regulation "means the European Parliament will abdicate all its political powers to an organization ... that is outside of the E.U.," said Christian Engström, Pirate Party member of parliament, adding that he still wanted a European patent as long as it did not hamper innovation as he believes the proposal in its current form does.

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