Comment Old school (Score 2) 185
Google Drive is recommended as an alternative
Or, you know, FTP.
Google Code Deprecates Download Service For Project Hosting 185
New submitter c0d3g33k writes "Google Project Hosting announced changes to the Download service on Wednesday, offering only 'increasing misuse of the service and a desire to keep our community safe and secure' by way of explanation. Effective immediately, existing projects that offer no downloads and all new projects will no longer be able to create downloads. Existing projects which currently have downloads will lose the ability to create new downloads by January 2014, though existing downloads will remain available 'for the foreseeable future.' Google Drive is recommended as an alternative, but this will likely have to be done manually by project maintainers since the ability to create and manage downloads won't be part of the Project Hosting tools. This is a rather baffling move, since distributing project files via download is integral to FOSS culture."
Dart Is Not the Language You Think It Is 312
An anonymous reader writes "Seth Ladd has an excellent write-up of Dart: 'When Dart was originally launched, many developers mistook it for some sort of Java clone. In truth, Dart is inspired by a range of languages such as Smalltalk, Strongtalk, Erlang, C#, and JavaScript. Get past the semicolons and curly braces, and you'll see a terse language without ceremony. ... Dart understands that sometimes you just don’t feel like appeasing a ceremonial type checker. Dart’s inclusion of an optional type system means you can use type annotations when you want, or use dynamic when that’s easier. For example, you can explore a new idea without having to first think about type hierarchies. Just experiment and use var for your types. Once the idea is tested and you’re comfortable with the design, you can add type annotations."
Amazon, Google and Apple Won't Need To Pay Tax, Despite Goverment Threats 327
girlmad writes "Despite moves by government to get Google, Amazon and Apple to admit they make sales in the UK and US, and therefore should pay tax on these earnings, this article argues these are empty threats and that any taxes paid will get returned to the tech giants in government grants and subsidies. Tough luck to the small firms out there."
Comment Re:Turn the question around (Score 1) 201
I'm not talking about glasses uploading automatically. I'm talking about them using remote storage on Google servers for anything that they shoot, which is already an option on Android, and will surely be even more important on Glass, even more so if we suppose that the glasses won't have the computing power and storage capacity required for realtime image processing which is going to be an important application for that kind of device.
Comment Re:Turn the question around (Score 2) 201
A dorky headpiece that could soon be worn by millions of people, continuously taking billions of high resolution photos and video clips with precise date/time/gps locations, and sending all of that data to a single commercial entity whose business is to harvest and process personal data, with a track record of privacy stumbles, an extremely high computational capacity and already knowing lots of details about millions of persons including faces, names, email and street address, whole phone books, geographic locations.
Comment Re:Hate labor laws? (Score 1) 293
My company has an entire office full of people in Italy that do nothing because we have no more use for the facility but the local laws do not allow us to fire them. Instead we make them show up every day, for their 7-8 hours and sit in chairs and do nothing.
Fire your lawyers then. In Italy you can fire people you no longer need, it's called "justified objective reason", and it applies in cases of crisis, downsizing, restructuring, or ceased utility of the job position in general.
iTunes: Still Slowing Down Windows PCs After All These Years 519
colinneagle sends this quote from an article at NetworkWorld:
"I run a very nifty desktop utility called Rainmeter on my PC that I heartily recommend to anyone who wants to keep an eye on their system. One of its main features is it has skins that can monitor your system activity. Thanks to my numerous meters, I see all CPU, disk, memory and network activity in real time. the C: drive meter. It is a circle split down the middle, with the right half lighting up to indicate a read and the left half lighting up for write activity. The C: drive was flashing a fair amount of activity considering I had nothing loaded save Outlook and Word, plus a few background apps. At the time, I didn't have a Rainmeter skin that lists the top processes by CPU and memory. So instead, I went into the Task Manager, and under Performance selected the Resource Monitor. Under the Processes tab, the culprit showed its face immediately: AppleMobileDeviceService.exe. It was consuming a ridiculous amount of threads and CPU cycles. The only way to turn it off is to go into Windows Services and turn off the service. There's just one problem. I use an iPhone. I can't disable it. But doing so for a little while dropped the CPU meters to nothing. So I now have more motivation to migrate to a new phone beyond just having one with a larger screen. This problem has been known for years. AppleMobileDeviceService.exe has been in iTunes since version 7.3. People complained on the Apple boards more than two years ago that it was consuming up to 50% of CPU cycles, and thus far it's as bad as it always has been. Mind you, Mac users aren't complaining. Just Windows users."
Data Leak Spurs Huge Offshore Tax Evasion Investigation 190
New submitter lxrocks writes "Tax authorities in the U.S., Britain, and Australia have announced they are working with a gigantic cache of leaked data that may be the beginnings of one of the largest tax investigations in history. The secret records are believed to include those obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists that lay bare the individuals behind covert companies and private trusts in the British Virgin Islands, the Cook Islands, Singapore and other offshore hideaways. The IRS said, 'There is nothing illegal about holding assets through offshore entities; however, such offshore arrangements are often used to avoid or evade tax liabilities on income represented by the principal or on the income generated by the underlying assets. In addition, advisors may be subject to civil penalties or criminal prosecution for promoting such arrangements as a means to avoid or evade tax liability or circumvent information reporting requirements.'"
Comment Re:Greed (Score 1) 292
So, because one particular design has a problem, you would condemn all nuclear technologies?
Where the hell did I say that? I didn't even qualify the fact as a “problem”, that's just how those things are designed to work. And why should BWR designs be “bad”? They’ve been used successfully for decades.
However, finding faults with a well designed molten salt reactor will be very difficult for an honest person.
We’ll be able to discuss that when molten salt reactors exist on the market.
Microsoft YouTube App Strips Ads; Adds Download 381
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft appears to be sticking a finger in Google's eye with the launch of its new YouTube app for Windows Phone. The app, ReadWrite has confirmed, strips out YouTube ads when it plays back videos and allows users to easily download video by way of a prominent 'download' button."
Comment Re:Greed (Score 1) 292
It depends on the design. The turbines of BWRs do become radioactive and must be properly disposed of.
Google Seeks 'Do-No-Discoverable-Evil' Patent 109
theodp writes "E-mails and other communications between employees,' explains Google in a newly-published patent application for its Policy Violation Checker invention, 'can implicate potential violations of company policy or local, state or federal law that can go unchecked by attorneys or other legal personnel.' So how can you avoid those embarrassing Goldman Sachs and Enron e-mail gaffes? Use Google's 'methods and systems for identifying problematic phrases in an electronic document'! From the patent application: 'Documents may be used as evidence in court, administrative, or other proceedings. It is in a company's best interest to minimize or eliminate policy violations and/or situations that could give rise to legal liability. It is also often in a company's best interest to be able to Pack [?] these situations. Problematic phrases include, but are not limited to, phrases that present policy violations, have legal implications, or are otherwise troublesome to a company, business, or individual.' So, if you can't Do-No-Evil, at least you can Do-No-Discoverable-Evil!"
Google Glass Is the Future — and the Future Has Awful Battery Life 473
zacharye writes "The concept of wearable tech is really buzzing right now as pundits tout smart eyewear, watches and other connected devices as the future of tech. It makes sense, of course — smartphone growth is slowing and people need something to hold on to — but the early 'Explorer' version of Google's highly anticipated Google Glass headset has major problem that could be a big barrier for widespread adoption: Awful battery life."
Also, a review of the hardware. The current Glass hardware heads south in less than five hours, which doesn't seem too short relative to similarly powerful devices, but since it is meant to be worn all the time you'd think it would have a large enough battery to make it at least 8 or 10 hours.
OpenBSD 5.3 Released 109
An anonymous reader writes "Today, OpenBSD 5.3 has been released. It has many improvements, updates, and new stuff. Also, OpenSMTPD 5.3 is included. This is the first version of OpenSMTPD considered to be ready for production. Many pre-built packages are available for many architectures. OpenBSD 5.3 ships with various Desktop Environments, including Gnome 3.6, KDE 3.5, and XFCE 4.10."
And don't forget the release song, "Blade Swimmer."
