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Submission + - Ask Slashdot: What Is The Most Painless Intro To GPU Programming? 3

Submitted by dryriver
dryriver writes: Dear Slashdotters. I am an intermediate level programmer who works mostly in C# NET. I have a couple of image/video processing algorithms that are highly parallelizable — running them on a GPU instead of a CPU should result in a considerable speedup (anywhere from 10x times to perhaps 30x or 40x times speedup, depending on the quality of the implementation). Now here is my question: What, currently, is the most painless way to start playing with GPU programming? Do I have to learn CUDA/OpenCL — which seems a daunting task to me — or is there a simpler way? Perhaps a Visual Programming Language or "VPL" that lets you connect boxes/nodes and access the GPU very simply? I should mention that I am on Windows, and that the GPU computing prototypes I want to build should be able to run on Windows. Surely there must a be a "relatively painless" way out there, with which one can begin to learn how to harness the GPU?

Submission + - MIT computer program makes TCP twice as fast (mit.edu)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: MIT is claiming they can make the Internet faster if we let computers redesign TCP/IP instead of coding it by hand. They used machine learning to design a version of TCP that's twice the speed and causes half the delay, even with modern bufferbloated networks. They also claim it's more "fair." The researchers have put up a lengthy FAQ and source code where they admit they don't know why the system works, only that it goes faster than normal TCP. On the same day that MIT went to court to stop Aaron Swartz's documents from being published, the school is devoting its main website to an animated GIF about faster TCP.

Submission + - Google is going Puritan on us (zdnet.com)

Submitted by DougDot
DougDot writes: In three days, Google's Blogger will begin to delete scores of blogs that have existed since 1999 on Monday under its vague new anti-sex-ad policy purge.

On Wednesday night at around 7pm PST, all Blogger blogs marked as "adult" were sent an email from Google's Blogger team.

blogger sex purge
The email told users with "adult" blogs that after Sunday, June 30, 2013, all adult blogs will be deleted if they are found to be "displaying advertisements to adult websites" — while the current Content Policy does not define what constitutes "adult" content.

To say that Twitter ignited with outrage would be an understatement. Blogger users are panicked and mad as hell at Google.

Submission + - IT Spending In Engineering

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I work in the engineering division at a large organization, about 2000 people total and about 900 in the engineering division. As I'm sure many institutions have been faced with recently, we are dealing with reduced budgets. We have a new director who has determined that the engineering division spends too much on "IT" and has given us a goal of reducing IT spending by 50%. We currently spend about 8% of the total engineering budget on IT related purchases. About 10% of that (i.e. 0.8% of the total budget) is spent on what I consider traditional IT such as email, office automation software, etc.. The rest goes towards engineering related IT such as clusters for large computations, workstations for processing, better networks to handle the large data sets generated, data collection systems for testing facilities, etc.. My gut says that 8% is low compared to other engineering institutions. What do other engineering organizations spend on IT (traditional and engineering)? What strategy would you use to convince your management that 8% spending on IT is already very efficient?

Submission + - Japan Spends Millions of 2011 Tsunami Relief Funds On Sea Turtle Research (ibtimes.com)

Submitted by Rebecka
Rebecka writes: “Priorities” is the word residents of Japan may be uttering today after reports that officials reportedly spent a majority of the 200 billion set aside for 2011 tsunami relief efforts not on rebuilding their cities, but on sea turtle research.

The prefecture Kagoshima, located roughly 800 miles from the affected zone of Ishinomaki, was awarded three million yen after the devastating 2011 storm, a new report claiming the donated funds were reportedly spent in an effort for researchers to observe and protect sea turtles according to The Telegraph via the Asahi Shimbun newspaper.

Submission + - How Unity3D Became a Game-Development Beast (slashdot.org)

Submitted by Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: In the early 2000s, three young programmers without much money gathered in a basement and started coding what would become one of the most widely used pieces of software in the video game industry. “Nobody really remembers how we survived in that period except we probably didn’t eat much,” said David Helgason, the CEO and co-founder of Unity Technologies, maker of the Unity3D game engine. A decade later, untold numbers of developers have used Unity3D to make thousands of video games for mobile devices, consoles, browsers, PCs, Macs, and even Linux. The existence of Unity3D and similar products (such as the Unreal Engine and CryEngine) helped democratize game development, making the kinds of tools used by the world’s largest game companies available to developers at little or no cost. This has helped developers focus less on creating a video game’s underlying technology and more on the artistic and creative processes that actually make games fun to play. In this article, Helgason talks about how Final Cut Pro helped inspire his team during the initial building stages, how it's possible to create a game in Unity without actually writing code, and how he hopes to make the software more of a presence on traditional consoles despite Unity3D being several years late to supporting the PS3 and Xbox 360.

Submission + - Google Glass Developers Angered at Facial Recognition Ban (ibtimes.co.uk)

Submitted by DavidGilbert99
DavidGilbert99 writes: Google Glass has caused its fair share of headlines already and it's not even on sale yet, but developers creating apps for the device are the latest to throw their toys out of the pram, angered by Google's move to ban apps which use facial recognition in response to growing concerns from privacy groups. One commenter on the Google Glass page, said: "The sky isn't falling and Glass will not steal your identity because it can see you. Go back to your caves and let the rest of us live in the future."

Submission + - Congressman's Chief of Staff Implicated in Internet Voter Fraud (miamiherald.com) 3

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Voting technology and fair elections have been topics of many discussion on Slashdot. Now the repercussion of voter fraud, often asserted to be mythical, despite previous sightings and more than one recent conviction, have cost a congressman's chief of staff his job: "Congressman Joe Garcia’s chief of staff abruptly resigned Friday after being implicated in a sophisticated scheme to manipulate last year’s primary elections by submitting hundreds of fraudulent absentee-ballot requests. . . Hours earlier, law enforcement investigators raided the homes of another of Joe Garcia’s employees . . .The raids marked a sign of significant progress in the probe that prosecutors reopened in February, after a Herald investigation found that hundreds of 2,552 fraudulent requests for the Aug. 14 primaries originated from Internet Protocol addresses in Miami. The bulk of the requests were masked by foreign IP addresses."

Submission + - Atomic clock built with 10^-18 instability. (arxiv.org)

Submitted by c0lo
c0lo writes: Apropos accuracy polls and missing options:

A collective of NIST, University of Colorado, Instituto Nazionale di Ricerca Metrologica and Politecnico di Torino announces (warning: PDF linked) the creation of an atomic clock with an instability of 10^-18. Such a level of instability is equivalent to specifying the Earth’s diameter with a precision to less than the width of an atom.
Better still, consider the gravitational redshift, a consequence of general relativity dictating that clocks ‘tick’ slower in stronger gravitational elds. With a maximum instability of 10^-18, one can discern a difference shown by two such clocks separated by only 1 cm in elevation above the Earths surface.

Now, it is likely that an operator of half-a-world-away-remote-controlled-drones won't actually need such a precision, but it becomes important in designing experiments to test unification theories employing non-metric couplings without asking for a cosmological setup (may one dream of gravitational waves detection without causing — or expecting — supernova explosions or birth of blackholes type of events?)
Transportation

NTSB Recommends Lower Drunk Driving Threshold Nationwide: 0.05 BAC 996

Posted by Soulskill from the americans-pledge-to-get-fatter-in-response dept.
Officials for the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board have recommended a nationwide lowering of the blood-alcohol level considered safe for operating a car. The threshold is currently 0.08% — the NTSB wants to cut that to 0.05%. "That's about one drink for a woman weighing less than 120 lbs., two for a 160 lb. man. More than 100 countries have adopted the .05 alcohol content standard or lower, according to a report by the board's staff. In Europe, the share of traffic deaths attributable to drunken driving was reduced by more than half within 10 years after the standard was dropped, the report said. NTSB officials said it wasn't their intention to prevent drivers from having a glass of wine with dinner, but they acknowledged that under a threshold as low as .05 the safest thing for people who have only one or two drinks is not to drive at all. ... Alcohol concentration levels as low as .01 have been associated with driving-related performance impairment, and levels as low as .05 have been associated with significantly increased risk of fatal crashes, the board said."
Windows

ZDNet Proclaims "Windows: It's Over" 863

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the netcraft-confirms dept.
plastick writes "You can think Windows 8 will evolve into something better, but the numbers show that Windows is coming to a dead end. ZDNet is known to take the side of Microsoft in the past. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols explains: 'The very day the debate came to an end, this headline appeared: IDC: Global PC shipments plunge in worst drop in a generation. Sure, a lot of that was due to the growth of tablets and smartphones and the rise of the cloud, but Windows 8 gets to take a lot of the blame too. After all, the debate wasn't whether or not Windows 8 was any good. It's not. The debate was over whether it could be saved.'"
Windows

Ask Slashdot: How Best To Set Up a Parent's PC? 418

Posted by Soulskill from the be-a-dear-and-install-the-cloud-on-my-computer dept.
CodingHero writes "My mother uses a recent enough PC running Windows XP and has a broadband connection, but her primary method of interacting with the online world remains the AOL software. She also likes to download and use various seasonal wallpapers, screensavers, etc. Usually all this works fine and I don't get family tech support calls, but occasionally something big goes wrong. Since she lives 400 miles away, that means I get to provide phone tech support. While I can usually get something fixed through simple instructions, sometimes it's just too complicated to properly diagnose and explain over the phone (e.g., a trojan infection that anti-virus won't get rid of on its own). I'd like to set up the system so that her account is not an Administrator and that I can easily (and securely) remotely connect to fix problems, install stuff she really wants to use (after proper vetting of course), and so on. Moving to Linux or a Mac is not an option. Upgrading the system to Windows 7 and breaking the AOL habit, while seemingly the best course of action, is going to mean a lot of my time up front to explain how to do things all over again, time that I don't have a lot of right now. Has anyone else had a similar experience? If so, what did you find was the best way to re-educate a parent and/or set up a method to securely and remotely manage a system, or at least lock it down to better protect it?"
Cellphones

Submission + - Smartphone Screen Real Estate: How Big Is Big Enough? (hothardware.com)

Submitted by
MojoKid
MojoKid writes: "Aside from the terrible nickname (it sounds like a term for the spoiled offspring of fabulous people), phablets are somewhat controversial because they seem to be the epitome of inflated phone sizes. A lot of people wanted bigger, and this is “bigger” to the extreme. A larger screen on a smartphone is attractive for obvious reasons, but surely there’s a limit. So how big is too big? If you’re not into parsing out the particulars of form factors and use cases, here’s a really easy way to figure out if your phone or phablet is too big: Can you hold the device in one hand and 1) unlock the phone, 2) type out a text message with your thumb, and 3) adjust the volume with the rocker without using your other hand? If not, you might need a smaller phone."

Comment Re:Fixed (Score 1) 1106

by RCGodward (#43018429) Attached to: The U.S. minimum wage should be
Minimum wage isn't for people to live off of. It's for high school kids. It's for entry level work. You aren't supposed to have kids on it. You aren't supposed to pay rent with it. You're supposed to save for college and buy video games and beer if you know someone with a fake.

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