61121377
submission
jfruh writes:
AMD, once on the ropes in its uphill battle against Intel, is now riding high, especially after getting its chips into both the PlayStation 4 and the XBox One. But years of cost-cutting and layoff have hollowed out the company, particulary in its chipset division, and now AMD may be outsourcing chipset design to companies in Asia. Is AMD giving up one of its core competencies? As blogger Andy Patrizio puts it, "No one gets excited about new chipsets like they do over a CPU, but CPUs absolutely need chipsets to run."
61119649
submission
itwbennett writes:
Web applications may one day surpass desktop applications in function and usability — if developers have more programming languages to choose from, according to a Google engineer. 'The Web is always available, except when it is not,' said Gilad Bracha, software engineer at Google and one of the authors of Google Dart, speaking to an audience of programmers Wednesday at the QCon developer conference in New York. 'It isn't always available in a way that you can always rely on it. You may have a network that is slow or flaky or someone may want to charge you.' Therefore any Web programming language, and its associated ecosystem, must have some way of storing a program for offline use, Bracha said. The Web programming language in the future must also make it easier for the programmer to build and test applications.
61083623
submission
jfruh writes:
A recent survey of developer salaries across various nations has come up with some interesting numbers. Developers have the highest average salary in Switzerland, which makes sense because Swiss salaries are generally quite high. But if you want to make a lot more money than everyone else in the country, move to Pakistan.
61083465
submission
jfruh writes:
For many tech-savvy folks, it may come as surprise that physical media like DVD and Blu-Ray still generate more movie revenue than streaming services. But PriceWaterhouse Coopers is predicting that the the lines will cross in 2017 as physical media sales and rentals decline; already, fully half of those reveneues come from supermarket Redbox kiosks. Still, there are signs that physical media won't vanish entirely, including the obsessive needs of collectors and the music industry's increasing suspicions of digital sales.
61063163
submission
jfruh writes:
Steve Jobs did it, Bill Gates did it, Mark Zuckerberg did it, and now a whole new crop of young coders are dropping out of college to jump into the computer industry. Many of these young people are joining companies rather than launching their own, and the question persists: will they regret their decision later, either personally or professionally? Or are the rewards to great to ignore?
61009199
submission
itwbennett writes:
At an event on Saturday at the Royal Society in London, a conversation program running on a computer called Eugene Goostman was able to convince more than a third of the judges that it was human — the first time that any machine has passed the Turing Test. The program, dubbed Eugene, was developed by Vladimir Veselov and Eugene Demchenko and competed against four other supercomputers at the Royal Society event. Eugene is designed to simulate the responses of a 13-year-old boy. 'Our main idea was that he can claim that he knows anything, but his age also makes it perfectly reasonable that he doesn't know everything,' Veselov said in a statement.
61007799
submission
jfruh writes:
As displays jump past 1080p to 4K, many have wondered if anyone is going to find the upgrade worth bothering over. But if new 4K displays are as cheap as less pixel-rich models, why not? An Intel exec says the chipmaking giant is working with display makers to deliver sub-$400 4K displays by the end of this year, as well as sub-$1,000 all-in-one PCs with built-in 4K displays.
61007369
submission
jfruh writes:
If you're a Verizon broadband customer and you've tried streaming Netflix over the past few days, you might've seen a message telling you that the "Verizon network is crowded" and that your stream is being modified as a result. Verizon isn't taking this lying down, saying that there's no proof Verizon is responsible for Netflix's issues, and is threatening to sue over the warnings.
60910595
submission
jfruh writes:
Blue River Technology built a robot named LettuceBot that uses computer vision to kill unwanted lettuce plants in a field. Rather than build their creation from scratch, they built off of the Robot Operating System, an open source OS that, in the words of one engineer, 'allowed only a few engineers to write an entire system and receive our first check for service in only a few months.' With ROS robots starting to appear everywhere, including the International Space Station, it looks like open source may be making huge strides in this area.
60873805
submission
jfruh writes:
An advisor to the EU's top court says that European libraries can create digital copies of books without having to acquire an agreement with the books' publishers — but there are a number of restrictions to this right. The digital copies can only be used on terminals in the libraries themselves, and must be actually created by the libraries, not merely downloaded from an already available eBook.
60873659
submission
jfruh writes:
Imagine you've spent years making credit card purchases in your home state of California, and suddenly a bunch of charges appear the card in Russia. Your bank might move to shut the card down for suspected fraud, which would be great if your account number had been stolen by hackers — but really irritating if you were on vacation in Moscow. AT&T is proposing a service that would allow customers to let their bank track their movements via their cell phone, to confirm that you (or at least your phone) and your credit card are in the same place.
60839801
submission
itwbennett writes:
In the three weeks since a key ruling by the European Court of Justice about the so-called right to be forgotten, Google has already received around 41,000 requests to delete links to personal information from its search results (within 24 hours of putting the form online, Google had reportedly received 12,000 deletion requests). It should be noted, though, that there is no absolute right to have information deleted, and Google will have to weigh a number of criteria in responding to the requests to delete links, including relevance of the information, and the time passed since the facts related.
60833467
submission
itwbennett writes:
On Tuesday, Kickstarter announced 'Launch Now,' a feature that will let creators launch their project as soon as they're ready and not require review by 'community managers'. Instead of human feedback, the tool uses an algorithm incorporating thousands of data points to check whether a project is ready to go live, such as its description, funding goal, and whether it's the creator's first project, Kickstarter said. As part of the changes, Kickstarter also said it simplified its rules for projects, allowing projects to be hosted on its site that previously weren't allowed, including more types of software.
60833463
submission
jfruh writes:
Ben Wellington is a New Yorker and city planner with an interest in NYC Open Data, the city's online open government initiative. One thing he noticed in this vast dataset was that just two fire hydrants in the city generated tens of thousands of dollars a year in tickets. The sleuthing by which he figured out why is a great example of how open government data can help citizens in concrete ways.
60833273
submission
jfruh writes:
"Experience" as a resume component is a Catch-22 proposition: it's difficult to get experience without a job, and difficult to get a job without experience. Career coach Eric Bloom has some advice to techies on ways to break out of the cycle, including some nonconventional ways to gain experience and ways to make experience you do have look more attractive to potential employers.
