Comment Why not beer as a cloud service? (Score 1) 61
Raining beer - funnel included for premium subscribers.
Comment Re:The "lightweight" person that you mention (Score 1) 1010
Most of the things that used to be standalone applications they now do online:
...
In short, Windows loses the home market when the home users switch from the old pirated copy of Office 2003 to cloud services.
Comment Re:Like a refrigerator (Score 2) 1010
The "death of the PC" has been overhyped. The PC isn't dead, it's just mature.
Agree. And like refrigurators, people won't use put them all over their houses. PCs (as we know them) will resign to the home offices again, after their recent advancements to living rooms and kitchens. Tablets are designed to be home-user media machines, PCs are designed for work.
Submission + - Engineer sends RC plane into space (rcexplorer.se) 1
mask.of.sanity writes: A Swedish engineer has sent his radio controlled airplane to the edge of space using a weather balloon. It reached 33,100 metres before the balloon popped. The trip is captured on film and he has detailed the project in a blog. Amazing stuff.
Comment Agile (Score 1) 167
Author is obsessed with the random encounters idea but effective teamworking is hardly mentioned at all.
In my view Agile is what's killing telework.
Submission + - Windows 8 killing PC sales
yl-roller writes: IDC says Windows 8 is partly to blame for PC sales suffering the largest percentage drop ever.
"As if that news wasn't' troubling enough, it appears that a pivotal makeover of Microsoft's ubiquitous Windows operating system seems to have done more harm than good since the software was released last October."
Another article said IDC originally expected a drop, but only half the size.
I think people going to buy new PCs as often as they do cars — or even refrigerators. They're appliances. Microsoft should have realized it, and innovated in a new field instead of trying to update the old stuff. Maybe it's scroogled.
"As if that news wasn't' troubling enough, it appears that a pivotal makeover of Microsoft's ubiquitous Windows operating system seems to have done more harm than good since the software was released last October."
Another article said IDC originally expected a drop, but only half the size.
I think people going to buy new PCs as often as they do cars — or even refrigerators. They're appliances. Microsoft should have realized it, and innovated in a new field instead of trying to update the old stuff. Maybe it's scroogled.
Submission + - The Solar Industry Is Finally Making More Power Than It Uses (vice.com)
derekmead writes: Last year was by all accounts a very good year for solar power, with the US market growing 76 percentaccording to the latest stats from the Solar Energy Industries Association, and global capacity doubling since 2010. Theres now roughly 282 gigawatts of solar power, in both its photovoltaic and concentrating forms, installed around the world. Thats a lot of theoretically carbon-free electricity.
But according to new research from Stanford University, published in Environmental Science & Technology, only now is the amount of energy produced by solar power around the world probably surpassing the energy required to make more solar power modules. Thats a big threshold to cross. Just five years ago, the solar power industry consumed 75 percent more energy than it produced.
Heres an even better thing: At the rate installations are going, the energy and carbon debt incurred in making all the solar photovoltaics made to date could be paid off as soon as 2015, and certainly by 2020.
But according to new research from Stanford University, published in Environmental Science & Technology, only now is the amount of energy produced by solar power around the world probably surpassing the energy required to make more solar power modules. Thats a big threshold to cross. Just five years ago, the solar power industry consumed 75 percent more energy than it produced.
Heres an even better thing: At the rate installations are going, the energy and carbon debt incurred in making all the solar photovoltaics made to date could be paid off as soon as 2015, and certainly by 2020.
Submission + - 'CodeSpells' video game teaches children Java programming (blogspot.com)
CyberSlugGump writes: Computer scientists at UC San Diego have developed a 3D first-person video game designed to teach young students Java programming. In CodeSpells a wizard must help a land of gnomes by writing spells in Java. Simple quests teach main Java components such as conditional and loop statements. Research presented March 8 at the 2013 SIGCSE Technical Symposium indicate that a test group of 40 girls aged 10-12 mastered many programming concepts in just one hour of playing.
Submission + - BitCoin Value Collapses, Possibly Due to DDoS (arstechnica.com) 1
hydrofix writes: The BitCoin-to-USD exchange rate had been climbing steadily since January 2013, from around 30 USD to over 250 USD only 24 hours ago. Now, the value bubble seems to have burst, at least partially. The primary trading site MtGox is currently reporting a value of 140 USD, a loss of almost half in real value. With many sites unreachable or slow, there are also news of a possible DDoS attack on MtGox: "Attackers wait until the price of Bitcoins reaches a certain value, sell, destabilize the exchange, wait for everybody to panic-sell their Bitcoins, wait for the price to drop to a certain amount, then stop the attack and start buying as much as they can. Repeat this two or three times like we saw over the past few days and they profit."
Comment Re:slow news day? (Score 1) 631
This seems perfectly normal to me. I can't see why everyone seems so puzzled about the idea of tax on benefits. But then of course taxes are a national sport here in Sweden.
Comment Re:Never liked coffee (Score 1) 584
Ever since I was a teenager people around me have kept telling me "You'll grow to like it". Well, I'm 30 now and I still don't like coffee. I've come to enjoy a lot of foods and beverages that are considered acquired tastes but never coffee.
You'll grow to like it.
Submission + - Spontaneous human combustion explained (wordpress.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Human spontaneous combustion is real and scientifically explainable and not super-natural. More than that it is not a product of alcoholism, the most commonly accepted scientific theory to date, but of ketosis, which results from many different conditions, including diabetes. These are the conclusions of Brian J. Ford, a well known, in the UK, independent researcher into microbiology and are based on his attempts to burn pig flesh marinated in both alcohol and acetone (produced by ketosis sufferers).
Submission + - "Cloud Computing" Surfing Huge Wave of Hype: Gartner (slashdot.org)
Nerval's Lobster writes: "Research firm Gartner’s new 2012 Hype Cycle of Emerging Technologies identified "Cloud computing" (along with a few other terms, such as “Near Field Communication” and “media tablets”) as terms attracting a good deal of buzz in the tech world.
Gartner uses the report to monitor the rise, maturity and decline of certain terms and concepts, the better for corporate strategists and planners to predict how things will trend over the next few months or years. As part of the report, Gartner’s analysts have built a Hype Cycle, seen above, which positions technologies on a graph tracing their rise, overexposure, inevitable fall, and eventual rehabilitation as quiet, productive, well-integrated, thoroughly un-buzz-worthy technologies.
Right now, Gartner views hybrid cloud computing, Big Data, crowdsourcing, and the “Internet of Things” as on the rise (i.e., positioned along the “Technology Trigger” portion of the research firm’s Hype Cycle), while private cloud computing, social analytics and the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) phenomenon are coasting at the Peak of Inflated Expectations."
Gartner uses the report to monitor the rise, maturity and decline of certain terms and concepts, the better for corporate strategists and planners to predict how things will trend over the next few months or years. As part of the report, Gartner’s analysts have built a Hype Cycle, seen above, which positions technologies on a graph tracing their rise, overexposure, inevitable fall, and eventual rehabilitation as quiet, productive, well-integrated, thoroughly un-buzz-worthy technologies.
Right now, Gartner views hybrid cloud computing, Big Data, crowdsourcing, and the “Internet of Things” as on the rise (i.e., positioned along the “Technology Trigger” portion of the research firm’s Hype Cycle), while private cloud computing, social analytics and the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) phenomenon are coasting at the Peak of Inflated Expectations."
Submission + - How to Line a Thermonuclear Reactor (sciencemag.org)
sciencehabit writes: One of the biggest question marks hanging over the ITER fusion reactor project—a giant international collaboration currently under construction in France—is over what material to use for coating its interior wall. After all, the reactor has to withstand temperatures of 100,000C and an intense particle bombardment.
Researchers have now answered that question by refitting the current world's largest fusion device, the Joint European Torus (JET) near Oxford, U.K., with a lining akin to the one planned for ITER. JET's new "ITER-like wall," a combination of tungsten and beryllium, is eroding more slowly and retaining less of the fuel than the lining used on earlier fusion reactors, the team reports.
Researchers have now answered that question by refitting the current world's largest fusion device, the Joint European Torus (JET) near Oxford, U.K., with a lining akin to the one planned for ITER. JET's new "ITER-like wall," a combination of tungsten and beryllium, is eroding more slowly and retaining less of the fuel than the lining used on earlier fusion reactors, the team reports.
Submission + - Kentucky lawmakers shocked to find evolution in biology tests (arstechnica.com) 2
bbianca127 writes: Kentucky mandated that schools include tests that are based on national standards, and contracted test maker ACT to handle them. Legislators were then shocked that evolution was so prominently featured, even though evolution is well-supported and a central tenet of modern biology. One KY Senator said that he wanted creationism taught alongside evolution, even though the Supreme Court has ruled that teaching creationism in science classes is a violation of the establishment clause. Representative Ben Wade stated that evolution is just a theory, and that Darwin made it all up. Legislators want ACT to make a Kentucky-specific ACT test, though the test makers say that would be prohibitively expensive. This is just the latest in a round of states' fight against evolution — Louisiana and Tennessee have recently passed laws directed at teaching evolution.
