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Comment Software's inherent divine contradiction (Score 1) 579

by Simonetta (#29788047) Attached to: Are Software Developers Naturally Weird?

Software gets its deep appeal to the intellectual class of people because of its inherent contradiction: The ability to change the operation of physical machinery by manipulating symbols.

    Sure the more technical you are, the more you can understand the rationity behind this seemingly divine contradiction. Ones and zeros controlling electrical voltage levels channeled through thousands of transistors, etc...

    But the ability to change physicality by manipulating symbols has been an art reserved to magicians, shamans, and high priests. This ability to stand in the shadow of divinity has always appealed to men, because it is an analog or approximation of a divine absolute power.
This is the subconscious appeal of software programming.

    It also explains why software is primarily a masculine field of interest and employment. Women get the 'shadow of the divinity' power and feeling not by controlling physical nature through the manipulation of symbols, but by actually creating life inside themselves. This is something that men can and will never be able to do.

Comment Re:Format "Wars" a foregone conclusion. (Score 2, Informative) 308

by st6787 (#22644634) Attached to: Lessons From the HD Format War

Blu-ray was bound to win this so-called format war, because HD-DVD doesn't have as good of a picture. HD-DVD can't do 1080p, and therefore was always going to be the big loser in this battle. I don't understand how anyone wasted their hard earned money on a shoddy, pseudo-HD format.
Um, I don't know where you are getting this notion that HD-DVD does not do 1080p, but this link proves that wrong: http://www.tacp.toshiba.com/hddvd_products/product.asp?model=hd-a30
Science

The Blackest Material 299

Posted by kdawson from the reflect-on-this dept.
QuantumCrypto writes "Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have created 'the world's first material that reflects virtually no light.' This anti-reflection technology is based on nanomaterial and could lead to the development of more efficient solar cells, brighter LEDs, and 'smarter' light sources. In theory, if a room were to be coated with this material, switching on the lights would only illuminate the items in the room and not the walls, giving a sense of floating free in infinite space."
Media

Submission + - USA Today adds social networking features

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The online version of USA Today has undergone a major redesign, adding a bunch of social features to allow readers to create a profile, write a blog, comment and vote on articles, upload images (citizen journalism-style), and send each other messages. The general response throughout the tech-blogosphere has been positive, but, perhaps unsurprisingly, many USA Today readers seem resistant to change. In response, ZDNet's The Social Web argues that old media needs to "resist the urge to roll out any or all 2.0-style social features — just because they can — but should first think long and hard about what added value they want to bring to readers, and what they can expect in return. Sure, social features are a commodity, but community isn't and never will be."
Space

Submission + - Scientists Break Speed of Light

Submitted by PreacherTom
PreacherTom writes: Scientists at the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, NJ are reporting that they have broken the speed of light. For the experiment, the researchers manipulated a vapor of laser-irradiated atoms, causing a pulse that shoots about 300 times faster than it would take the pulse to go the same distance in a vacuum, to the point where the pulse seemed to exit the chamber before even entering it. Apparently, Uncle Albert is still resting comfortably: relativity only states that an object with mass cannot travel faster than light. Still, the results are sufficient to merit publication in the prestigious journal, Nature.
The Courts

Submission + - Internet Radio Now Under RIAA Interdiction

Submitted by
music-in-a-box
music-in-a-box writes: "The Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) has announced its decision on Internet radio royalty rates, rejecting all of the arguments made by Webcasters and instead adopting the "per performance" rate proposal put forth by SoundExchange(a digital music fee collection body created by the RIAA).

A "performance" is defined as one song being streamed to a single listener. In other words, a station with 1000 listeners is charged for 1000 performances of each song it broadcasts.

The new rates are retroactive to 2006, and increase rapidly each year. The rates per performance are as follows:

$0.0008 in 2006
$0.0011 in 2007
$0.0014 in 2008
$0.0018 in 2009

These may look like fairly small numbers, but the reality is grim for all but the richest broadcasters such as AOL and Yahoo!. As Kurt Hanson's Radio and Internet Newsletter points out, "That math suggests that the royalty rate decision — for the performance alone, not even including composers' royalties! — is in the in the ballpark of 100% or more of total revenues."

More info here: save-internet-radio.com, savenetradio.org, blog.wired.com.

Paraphrasing one poster on the Wired blog, "The irony is that web radio in the United States is going to need the same technology to broadcast that people in China use to express views contrary to the government." .

Of course, the popular alternative for the time being is to move broadcast operations to Canada."
Microsoft

Microsoft Wanted To Drop Mac Office To Hurt Apple 479

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the airing-the-dirty-laundry dept.
Overly Critical Guy writes to mention that more documents in the Iowa antitrust case have come out. This time, it's revealed that Microsoft considered dumping the Mac Office Suite entirely in a move to harm Apple. "The email complains at poor sales of Office, which it attributes to a lack of focus on making such sales among reps at that time. It describes dumping development of the product as: 'The strongest bargaining point we have, as doing so will do a great deal of harm to Apple immediately.' The document also confirms that Microsoft at the time saw Office for the Mac as a chance to test new features in the product before they appeared in Windows, 'because it is so much less critical to our business than Windows.'"
Data Storage

Submission + - Disk drive failures 15 times what vendors say

Submitted by
sysrammer
sysrammer writes: "Computerworld has an article on disk drive failures from the 5th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies in San Jose, showing, among other things, "no evidence that Fibre Channel (FC) drives are any more reliable than less expensive but slower performing Serial ATA (SATA) drives", and that "that temperature seems to have little effect on drive reliability" (it looks like they're talking about temps closer to the upper operational limit, not catastrophic a/c failures, etc.). FTA: "About 100,000 disks are covered by this data, some for an entire lifetime of five years. The data include drives with SCSI and FC, as well as SATA interfaces. The mean time to failure (MTTF) of those drives, as specified in their datasheets, ranges from 1,000,000 to 1,500,000 hours, suggesting a nominal annual failure rate of at most 0.88%. We find that in the field, annual disk replacement rates typically exceed 1%, with 2-4% common and up to 13% observed on some systems. This suggests that field replacement is a fairly different process than one might predict based on datasheet MTTF." The authors did not identify particular vendors vs. the drive stats...their goal "is not choosing the best and the worst vendors but to help them to improve drive design and testing". Another note is that the study shows disk replacement rates, not necessarily actual failure. The article is at... http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?com mand=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9012066&source=NLT _AM&nlid=1 ...and the Usenix site is here... http://www.usenix.org/events/fast07/tech/schroeder .html mp"
It's funny. Laugh.

Submission + - John Edwards Second Life HQ Flooded with Feces

Submitted by
silentounce
silentounce writes: "The Table of Malcontents reports that late Monday, February 26, John Edwards Second Life Campaign HQ was attacked by cyber-vandalists. 'They plastered the area with Marxist/Lenninist posters and slogans, a feces spewing obsenity, and a photoshopped picture of John in blackface.' Related post on John Edwards blog.

Stories like the above and this make me almost want to visit Second Life."
Nintendo

Submission + - WiiCade Opens New Gaming Possibilities

Submitted by
AKAImBatman
AKAImBatman writes: "WiiCade.com has finally done what the Nintendo Wii community has long thought to be impossible. They have found a way to let online games use the full range of buttons on the Wii Remote, potentially opening up new possibilities for online gaming. WiiCade has released a freely available API designed for use with their site."
Announcements

Submission + - The world's most anti-reflective coating

Submitted by
Roland Piquepaille
Roland Piquepaille writes: "Researchers from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) have created a material that reflects virtually no light — or absorbs it like a black hole. They've built this new material by stacking layers of 'silica nanorods.' And they reached a refractive index of 1.05. This can be compared with 1.0 for air or 2.4 for diamonds. This coating, which is effective for all wavelengths, could be used for brighter light-emitting diodes (LEDs), more efficient solar cells, and new classes of 'smart' light sources that adjust to their environments. But don't expect to see your next glasses or the windshields of your cars protected with this coating: it's too sensitive to water and it would be destroyed by rain. Here is a link to more details and references about this anti-reflective coating."
Businesses

Submission + - Off-the-Shelf Car Parts Can Fight Global Warming

Submitted by
Aaron Huertas
Aaron Huertas writes: "The Union of Concerned Scientists has designed a car that uses a package of off-the-shelf technology to cut global warming pollution from all classes of vehicles by more than 40 percent. The design dismantles automobile industry claims that they can't affordably comply with clean car standards adopted in 11 states.

See animation, design and specs here: http://ucsusa.org/clean_vehicles/avp/"
Space

Submission + - Wasabi threatens the International Space Station

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes: "A NASA report issued to congress this week showed that the International Space Station faces a number of significant risks — not surprisingly flying space rocks crushing the hull among the biggest risks. But it didn't account for this: Wasabi. Yep, the hot green stuff that goes so well with sushi is a great threat when exposed to weightlessness as it could get in eyes, air ducts and all manner of things that might screw up a space mission. According to an AP report Astronaut Sunita Williams this week was trying to make a pretend sushi meal with bag-packaged salmon and accidentally squirted a load of the green stuff into the air. After a lengthy cleanup, the wasabi was exiled to a cargo bay. http://www.networkworld.com/community/?q=node/1199 9"
Media (Apple)

Submission + - 64-bit Vista is hard to get

Submitted by daria42
daria42 writes: For some crazy reason, Microsoft makes you firstly buy the 32-bit version of Vista, then order a CD of the equivalent 64-bit version online. The issue has started to grate on some users. "Imagine going into a shop and buying a music CD only to get it home and open it up and find a bit of paper inside telling you to go online to pay to have the actual CD mailed out to you at an additional cost," wrote one.

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