MilesTails - Slashdot User

Submission + - SPAM: Physical appearance more important than CV for job

Submitted by

varungates

on Tuesday August 11, 2009 @03:17AM

varungates writes: "Forget polishing resume to find a suitable job, for your looks are more than enough to do the trick, suggests a new study, which has found that new employees are hired on the basis of their 'personality or appearance'."
Link to Original Source

Submission + - Fifteen classic game console design mistakes (technologizer.com)

Submitted by

Harry

on Tuesday August 11, 2009 @01:08AM

Harry writes: "Some bad decisions in game console design get made over and over. (How many early systems had nightmarish controllers?) Others are uniquely inexpicable. (Like the Game Boy Advance's lack of a headphone jack.) And others stem from companies being too clever for their own good. (Like the way the RCA Studio II and Atari 5200 drew their power through their RF switches.) Benj Edwards has rounded up 15 classic examples, and has attempted to figure out what was going on in the designers' heads--and what we can learn from their mistakes."

Submission + - FCC says US broadcasters play no RIAA music (yahoo.com) 1

Submitted by

Death Metal

on Tuesday August 11, 2009 @12:49AM

Death Metal writes: "U.S. regulators have launched an inquiry into whether certain broadcasters are refusing to air the music of artists who demand to be paid when their songs are played on the radio.

The coalition, called musicFIRST, also said in the petition that some broadcasters are refusing to run advertisements that support the legislation.

MusicFIRST, which includes the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), said artists whose songs are played on the Internet and satellite radios are compensated."

Submission + - Green Cement Absorbs Carbon

Submitted by

Peace Corps Online

on Tuesday August 11, 2009 @12:31AM

Peace Corps Online writes: "Concrete accounts for more than 5 percent of human-caused carbon-dioxide emissions annually, mostly because cement, the active ingredient in concrete, is made by baking limestone and clay powders under intense heat that is generally produced by the burning of fossil fuels. Now Scientific American reports that British start-up company Novacem has developed a "carbon-negative" cement that absorbs more carbon dioxide over its life cycle than it emits. The trick is to make cement from magnesium silicates rather than calcium carbonate, or limestone, since this material does not emit CO2 in manufacture and absorbs the greenhouse gas as it ages. "The building and construction industry knows it has got to do radical things to reduce its carbon footprint and cement companies understand there is not a lot they can do without a technology breakthrough," says Novacem Chairman Stuart Evans. Novacem estimates that for every ton of Portland cement replaced by its product, around three-quarters of a ton of CO2 is saved, turning the cement industry into a big emitter to a big absorber of carbon. Major cement makers have been working hard to reduce CO2 emissions by investing in modern kilns and using as little carbon-heavy fuel as possible, but reductions to date have been limited. Novacem has raised $1.7 M to start a pilot plant that should be up and running in northern England in 2011."

Submission + - Hadoop Creator Doug Cutting Leaving Yahoo!

Submitted by

e9th

on Monday August 10, 2009 @11:48PM

e9th writes: "The New York Times reports that Doug Cutting is leaving Yahoo! Cutting, the creator of Hadoop, will be joining Silicon Valley start-up Cloudera. His leaving Yahoo! makes sense, since Microsoft's Bing will be taking the place of Yahoo!'s own search engine, however Cutting states that he was in discussions with Cloudera before the Microsoft-Yahoo! deal was reached. The Register has a few more details."

Submission + - VMware Acquires SpringSource

Submitted by Comatose51 on Monday August 10, 2009 @11:04PM

Comatose51 writes: VMware today announced the acquisition of SpringSource. SpringSource is the privately held company responsible for the Spring framework for Java and other various Java development tools. According to the VMware blog, "... whether it's around speed of deployment, application performance guarantees, or providing resiliency in the face of component outages, we will be able to provide even more capabilities as we bring even more knowledge of the application and infrastructure layers together. We will do this by adding interfaces into vSphere that SpringSource offerings (and other application frameworks) can take advantage of and by extending our management and automation capabilities to be aware of these interactions."

Submission + - No Windows 7 XP Mode for Sony Vaio Owners

Submitted by

Voyager529

on Monday August 10, 2009 @08:16PM

Voyager529 writes: "While virtually every Core 2 Duo processor supports the hardware virtualization technology that powers the Windows 7 XP Mode, The Register UK reports that the Core 2 Duo processors in the Sony Vaio Z series laptops had the virtualization features intentionally crippled in the BIOS. Senior manager for product marketing Xavier Lauwaert stated that the QA engineers did this to make the systems more resilient against malicious code. He also stated that while they are considering enabling VT in some laptop models due to the backlash, the Z series are not among those being retrofitted."

Submission + - Reliable family photo sharing sites? 1

Submitted by

m2pc

on Monday August 10, 2009 @01:28AM

m2pc writes: "With the recent death of a distant family member, I have been charged with creating a website for sharing photos among various relatives. While the popularity of social networking sites like Facebook, Flickr and Photobucket make them easy first choices, are there any other options that offer better SLA in terms of uptime, reliability, guaranteed archival/backup of data, etc.? Or am I better off "rolling my own" system using open-source software hosted on my own hardware or with a hosting company?"

Submission + - The iPhone SMS Hack Explained

Submitted by GhostX9 on Sunday August 09, 2009 @10:15PM

GhostX9 writes: Tom's Hardware just interviewed Charlie Miller, the man behind the iPhone remote exploit hack and winner of Pwn2Own 2009. He explains the (now patched) bug in the iPhone which allowed him to remotely exploit the iPhone in detail, explaining how the string concatenation code was flawed. The most surprising thing was that the bug could be traced back to several previous generation of iPhone OS's (he stopped testing at version 2.2). He also talks about the failures of other devices such as crashing HTC's Touch by sending a SMS with "%n" in the text.

Submission + - tr.im url shortener closes it's doors. (tr.im)

Submitted by

sukotto

on Sunday August 09, 2009 @08:46PM

sukotto writes: "The popular url-shortener tr.im (primarily used by Twitter users) has closed its doors citing lack of funding and inability to find someone to buy them out. Too bad. It was a great service.

Here's the press statement:
tr.im is now in the process of discontinuing service, effective immediately.

Statistics can no longer be considered reliable, or reliably available going forward.
However, all tr.im links will continue to redirect, and will do so until at least December 31, 2009.
Your tweets with tr.im URLs in them will not be affected.

We regret that it came to this, but all of our efforts to avoid it failed.
No business we approached wanted to purchase tr.im for even a minor amount.

There is no way for us to monetize URL shortening — users won't pay for it — and we just can't
justify further development since Twitter has all but annointed bit.ly the market winner.
There is simply no point for us to continue operating tr.im, and pay for its upkeep.

We apologize for the disruption and inconvenience this may cause you."

Submission + - AT&T makes its terms of service even worse 1

Submitted by techmuse on Sunday August 09, 2009 @01:11PM

techmuse writes: AT&T has changed its terms of service (including for existing contracts)to prevent class action suits. Note that you are already required to submit your case to arbitration, a forum in which consumers are often at a substantial disadvantage. Now you must go up against AT&T alone.

Submission + - Nerd Needs Help With Webkit Python Fiasco 1

Submitted by

lkcl

on Sunday August 09, 2009 @12:55PM

lkcl writes: "I'm in need of slashdot advice and help, as I recognise that I'm taking the wrong approach. Background: I'm a free software developer and, to put it charitably, "I don't get out much" (i.e. I don't see why people have difficulty with what I do). As a result, I've been banned from about five major free software projects mailing lists, and blamed for causing problems (but often I then see reports months later, of other people encountering the same thing with the same team!). I decided a year ago to put python on a par with javascript when it comes to DOM bindings, and have ported pyjamas to XULrunner, webkit, and recently IE's MSHTML. The trouble I'm having is with webkit (webkit doesn't have DOM python bindings, but IE and XULRunner do). At around 300 comments, we've got past the roaring bun-fight stage, and just got to the point where things were finally moving along, when one of the webkit maintainers decided to engineer an excuse to disable my bugs.webkit.org account. Ordinarily, I'd leave this alone, but I feel that this complex project — of making python truly the equal of javascript when it comes to web application development — is too important to just let it go. So — seriously: I'm not messing about, here; I'm not looking for an excuse to whinge; I truly need some advice and help because i am absolutely not going to quit on this one. What do you feel needs to be done, to get Webkit its free software python bindings?"

Submission + - Dogs as Intelligent as Average Two-Year-Old Child

Submitted by

Ponca City, We love you

on Sunday August 09, 2009 @10:07AM

Ponca City, We love you writes: "The Telegraph reports that researchers using tests originally designed to demonstrate the development of language, pre-language and basic arithmetic in human children have found that dogs are capable of understanding up to 250 words and gestures, can count up to five and can perform simple mathematical calculations putting them on par with the average two-year-old child. While most dogs understand simple commands such as sit, fetch and stay, a border collie tested by Professor Coren showed a knowledge of 200 spoken words. "Obviously we are not going to be able to sit down and have a conversation with a dog, but like a two-year-old, they show that they can understand words and gestures," says Professor Stanley Coren, a leading expert on canine intelligence at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Coren has also found that dogs can count using established tests developed for young children. and when something unexpected happens with an object, children and dogs will stare at it for a longer period of time. "Dogs can tell that one plus one should equal two and not one or three.," says Coren adding that dogs "can also deliberately deceive, which is something that young children only start developing later in their life." Coren believes centuries of selective breeding and living alongside humans has helped to hone the intelligence of dogs. "They may not be Einsteins, but are sure closer to humans than we thought.""

Submission + - Better Living Through Electromagnetic Radiation

Submitted by

Doug Treadwell

on Sunday August 09, 2009 @05:10AM

Doug Treadwell writes: "Nason Schooler, who holds an M.S. in Pharmacology and Toxicology from the University of Louisville, believes it may be possible to use lasers to destroy lipofuscin — the junk inside our cells that builds up over time and likely contributes to aging. Similar lasers are already being used cosmetically to treat age spots. The next stage is to find out how to destroy this junk safely. Apparently, some test subjects have been known to explode. (Worms.) If Schooler's research is successful we could be one step closer to ending aging."

Submission + - PrankNet hijinks are considered cruel or funny?

Submitted by

BStorm

on Sunday August 09, 2009 @12:54AM

BStorm writes: "The Globe and Mail in both print and online has a story about a group of anonymous "pranksters."
The gist is that members of PrankNet have been using VOIP and counting on anonymity to pull puerile pranks. Members are able to listen on the prank as it being performed. It started with members pretending to be radio DJ's and convincing people to smash dishes on air by promising them $200.00. This behavior had escalated where people have been conned into triggering sprinkler systems by a prankster claiming to be a person in authority.
This raises some interesting issues:
Should the anonymity of a prankster be protected?

If not, what steps should be taken that would protect privacy rights of most people, while enabling individuals and authority a means of identifying those responsible for pranks causing damage?"

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