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Comment Re:slush fund (Score 3, Informative) 52

No clue? Their Kickstarter page currently has stretch goals listed covering up to $1 million. Their site (linked from the Kickstarter) explains they estimate needing $5.45 million for the entire project - which I assume includes the parts they've completed, including the test launch this month - and that they have raised $4.2 million of that so far. They seem to have a handle on what they want to do with the money. They aren't building a mysterious slush fund.

It's hard to guess at how much they will raise in the end, but complex projects often go over budget or suffer technical issues. Any extra money not accounted for by their stated goals will likely go towards those things.

News

Lost City Discovered In Honduran Rain Forest 61

jones_supa writes: An expedition to Honduras has emerged from the jungle with the discovery of a previously unknown culture's lost city. The team was led to the remote, uninhabited region by long-standing rumors that it was the site of a storied "White City," also referred to in legend as the "City of the Monkey God." Archaeologists surveyed and mapped extensive plazas, earthworks, mounds, and an earthen pyramid belonging to a culture that thrived a thousand years ago, and then vanished. The team also discovered a remarkable cache of stone sculptures that had lain untouched since the city was abandoned. The objects were documented but left unexcavated. To protect the site from looters, its location is not being revealed.
Graphics

Haswell Integrated Graphics Promise 2-3X Performance Boost 133

crookedvulture writes "Intel has revealed fresh details about the integrated graphics in upcoming Haswell processors. The fastest variants of the built-in GPU will be known as Iris and Iris Pro graphics, with the latter boasting embedded DRAM. Unlike Ivy Bridge, which reserves its fastest GPU implementations for mobile parts, the Haswell family will include R-series desktop chips with the full-fat GPU. These processors are likely bound for all-in-one systems, and they'll purportedly offer close to three times the graphics performance of their predecessors. Intel says notebook users can look forward to a smaller 2X boost, while 15-17W ultrabook CPUs benefit from an increase closer to 1.5X. Haswell's integrated graphics has other perks aside from better performance, including faster Quick Sync video transcoding, MJPEG acceleration, and support for 4K resolutions. The new IGP will support DirectX 11.1, OpenGL 4.0, and OpenCL 1.2, as well." Note: Same story, different words, at Extreme Tech and Hot Hardware.
Open Source

Pushing Back Against Licensing and the Permission Culture 320

kthreadd writes "Luis Villa has an interesting discussion on the topic of not licensing at all, what he calls POSS or Post Open Source Software. With a flood of new hackers flocking to places like GitHub which doesn't impose any particular requirements for hosted projects, the future of Open Source may very well be diminishing. Skip licensing, just commit to GitHub. What legal ramifications will this have on the free and open source community going forward?" From the article: "If some 'no license' sharing is a quiet rejection of the permission culture, the lawyer’s solution (make everyone use a license, for their own good!) starts to look bad. This is because once an author has used a standard license, their immediate interests are protected – but the political content of not choosing a license is lost. Or to put it another way: if license authors get their wish, and everyone uses a license for all content, then, to the casual observer, it looks like everyone accepts the permission culture. This could make it harder to change that culture — to change the defaults — in the long run. So how might we preserve the content of the political speech against the permission culture, while also allowing for use in that same, actually-existing permission culture?"

Comment Re:mac (Score 1) 732

No. At leat not in the version of Boot Camp I'm running. The trackpad configuration options are limited. You can disable the tap and you can independently disable two-finger tap.

Looking closely at that configuration screen gives me the impression it was written in a hurry. The checkbox to disable two-finger tapping says "secondary tap." There's no other description and no indication if that affects the two-finger scrolling behaviour.

Piracy

Submission + - Rackspace: SOPA 'Is a Deeply Flawed Piece of Legis (itproportal.com)

hypnosec writes: Cloud based hosting service provider Rackspace has joined the ever expanding list of companies that are opposed to the US Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). In a blog post, Rackspace CEO Lanham Napier, said that the controversial bill, which will get its final vote before the House Judiciary Committee, will do more harm than good, punishing innocent users in the process. "The SOPA bill, as it stands, is a deeply flawed piece of legislation. It is bad for anyone who uses the Internet, including Rackspace, the more than 160,000 business customers that we serve, and the tens of millions of retail customers that they serve. It is bad for job creation and innovation," Napier wrote.
Businesses

Submission + - Prospects Darken for Solar Energy Companies

Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Although global demand for solar power is still growing — about 8% more solar panels will be installed this year compared with 2010 — bankruptcies, plummeting stock prices and crushing debt loads are calling into question the viability of the solar energy industry that since the 1970s has been counted on to advance the world into a new energy age. Only a handful of manufacturers are now profitable in the face of too much capacity, which has contributed to a plunge in prices as government subsidies have been curbed. Prices for solar panels started 2011 near $1.60 per watt, but a buildup of inventory forced manufacturers into a fire sale toward the end of the second quarter that has pushed prices to near $1 per watt now. "The prices that we're seeing today are likely not covering manufacturing costs in many cases," says Ralph Romero, director in management consulting for Black & Veatch, which provides engineering and due diligence consulting services to solar manufacturers. With at least seven solar-panel manufacturers filing for bankruptcy or insolvency in the last several months and six of the 10 largest publicly traded companies making solar components reporting losses in the third quarter, public-market investors are punishing the solar sector, sending shares down nearly 57% this year and although winners are expected to emerge eventually, the question is how much more carnage there will be before that happens. "The fact of the matter is, nobody really knows which solar companies will be pushed out of business or be forced to merge," writes industry analyst Rodolfo Avalos. "Nobody also knows how long it will take for the solar industry to improve even when the forecasted solar global demand for the next 5-10 years is quite promising.""
The Courts

NH Supreme Court To Rule On Bigfoot Video Shoot In Public Park 166

alphadogg writes with this excerpt from the Boston Globe: "On a whim two years ago, performance artist Jonathan Doyle paraded around the bustling peak of New Hampshire's Mount Monadnock in a $40 Bigfoot costume from iParty. He thought his deadpan video interviews with hikers describing their Bigfoot sightings would be worth a few chuckles on YouTube, and might boost the profile of his other artwork. But the staff at Monadnock State Park found the Yeti act abominable. When Doyle returned with friends to shoot a sequel, the park manger quashed the production and ordered Doyle off the mountain, insisting he needed a state permit to film a movie in the park. Bigfoot stepped up with a lawsuit, alleging that the park's permit regulations are unconstitutional. The New Hampshire Supreme Court next month will hear Doyle's complaint. Though many elements of the dispute border on the absurd, the case raises some serious free speech issues."

Comment Re:typing class in school (Score 1) 362

I'm under 30, but I had the benefit of being taught to type starting when I was 6. Somebody (probably dad) realized my visual impairment was going to lead me to using computers for everything and therefore I should spend a lot of time at school learning to type. It amazes half my friends how fast I can touch type and I'm not really very fast (between 60 and 80 wpm in most cases). My speed was terrible until I took the optional typing course in high school. Perhaps half the course was typing and the rest was about using things like Paint and Word.

At no point in school did they ever really force anyone to learn touch typing. There was a half-hearted effort in grade 4 and that was about it. It amounted to "do this exercise today and you can play Oregon Trail." I was completely appalled at this by the time I was in high school. They were having us do all sorts of assignments with computers, but there was no effort anywhere in education to even try and have a basic standard for computer knowledge.

I learned to type using the same sort of materials my mom used in the 70s. For her it means she can type really fast and uses all kinds of manual tabbing tricks to format documents in MS Word. For me it means I can type faster when looking at something else to copy than I can when looking at the screen.

Comment Re:Intense training? (Score 1) 214

The weird thing was even though they nagged us about handle times they didn't do much about them. They let me get away with spending half a day fixing some people's machines. If I was the one selling a support contract on a call like that it made my close rate and resolution rate look awesome. They even let me fix stuff we weren't supposed to touch because hardware support had tried and ruined the person's week.

Of course they decided working like this was too expensive and moved our jobs to a centre in the Philippines. Spent the last three months of my job fixing credit card fraud committed by those guys, who were magically still loved by the American customers. It seems they were told to sell something at all costs.

Comment Re:Intense training? (Score 5, Informative) 214

This was often the case when I worked at Dell. If the hardware guys in India were past their quota of dollars in parts to send for the day they would hang up on customers. I worked in paid software support, so that wasn't usually something I saw unless I called on behalf of a customer to get something fixed. The last time that happened to me it resulted in me learning how to exchange a laptop myself by request of my superiors.

That said, a huge number of them really were useless. I got told to confim a part number with hardware support before transferring the lady who wanted it to spare parts. The guy on the other end took my description and part number and then came back with the number for a power cable! The Indians on my team hated these guys too, so it seemed to be partially a corporate culture problem (despite that being a Dell-owned facility) in addition to a regular accent/culture problem.

Games

ESRB To Automate Game Rating 119

The Entertainment Software Rating Board, which has struggled to keep up with the flood of games produced for app stores and other online markets, is now taking steps to automate the rating process. "Starting on Monday the ratings board plans to begin introducing computers to the job of deciding whether a game is appropriate for Everyone, for Teens or for Mature gamers (meaning older than 16). To do this the organization has written a program designed to replicate the ingrained cultural norms and predilections of the everyday American consumer, at least when it comes to what is appropriate for children and what isn’t. ... the main evaluation of hundreds of games each year will be based not on direct human judgment but instead on a detailed digital questionnaire meant to gauge every subtle nuance of violence, sexuality, profanity, drug use, gambling and bodily function that could possibly offend anyone. The questionnaire, to be filled out by a game’s makers (with penalties for nondisclosure), is like a psychological inquest into the depths of all the things our culture considers potentially unwholesome."

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