Dezzamon - Slashdot User

Submission + - Apple wins $625.5 million ruling over Cover Flow (edibleapple.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 04, 2011 @11:01PM

An anonymous reader writes: A federal judge today reversed a $625.5 million judgement against Apple in a patent infringement lawsuit pertaining to Apple’s Cover Flow feature. The lawsuit was filed by Mirror Worlds, a company founded by Yale professor Dave Gelertner.

“Mirror Worlds may have painted an appealing picture for the jury, but it failed to lay a solid foundation sufficient to support important elements it was required to establish under the law,” U.S. District Judge Leonard Davis explained in his decision.

Submission + - Afghanistan Called First "Robotic War" (cnn.com)

Submitted by

retroworks

on Monday April 04, 2011 @10:07PM

retroworks writes: "Fareed Zakaria (Editor of Time, CNN GPS) writes that one in 50 USA combatants in Afghanistan is now a robot. There are more fighting robots than elevators in the country. Article has links to film of robots in action, allusions to Terminator films."

Steam UI Update Beta Drops IE Rendering For WebKit 244

Posted by Soulskill on Thursday February 25, 2010 @06:58AM from the what-a-coincidence-with-battle.net-in-beta-too dept.

Citing massive growth in their user base ("25 million users, 1000+ games, 12 billion player minutes per month, and 75 billion Steam client minutes per month"), Valve unveiled a revamped UI for Steam on Tuesday, opening the beta test to anyone who wants to try it out. There are many changes, and an increased focus on social features: "Right from within your own game Library, you can now track which of your friends plays each game or invite them to play one with you. Before you've even bought a game, knowing whether your friends play it is one of the most useful pieces of information to have. So on the store homepage, there's a new listing of what your friends have bought or played lately." Tracking games and achievements have both gotten simpler, and Valve has dropped the Internet Explorer rendering engine in favor of WebKit. An enterprising user also found files that may indicate the existence of an OS X Steam client.

Submission + - SPAM: Can Curiosity Be Programmed?

Submitted by destinyland on Wednesday January 27, 2010 @05:11AM

destinyland writes: AI researcher Jurgen Schmidhuber says his main scientific ambition "is to build an optimal scientist, then retire." The Cognitive Robotics professor has worked on problems including artificial ants and even robots that are taught how to tie shoelaces using reinforcement learning, but he believes algorithms can be written that allow the programming of curiosity itself. "Curiosity is the desire to create or discover more non-random, non-arbitrary, regular data that is novel and surprising..." He's already created art using algorithmic information theory, and can describe the simple algorithmic principle that underlies subjective beauty, creativity, and curiosity itself. And he ultimately addresses the possibility that the entire Universe, including everyone in it, is in principle computable by a completely deterministic computer program."
Link to Original Source

Submission + - Newsday Gets 35 Subscriptions to Pay Web Site

Submitted by

Hugh Pickens

on Wednesday January 27, 2010 @12:35AM

Hugh Pickens writes: "In late October, Newsday put its web site behind a pay wall, one of the first non-business newspapers to take the pay wall plunge, so Newsday has been followed with interest in media circles anxious to learn how the NY Times own plans to put up a pay wall may work out. So how successful has Newsday's paywall been? The NY Observer reports that three months into the experiment only 35 people have have signed up to pay $5 a week to get unfettered access to newsday.com. Newsday's web site redesign and relaunch reportedly cost about $4 million and the 35 people who've signed up have earned Newsday about $9,000. Still publisher Terry Jimenez is unapologetic. "That's 35 more than I would have thought it would have been," said Jimenez to his assembled staff, according to five interviews with Newsday employees. The web project has not been a favorite among Newsday employees who have recently been asked to take a 10 percent pay cut. "The view of the newsroom is the web site sucks," says one staffer. "It's an abomination," adds another."

Journal Journal: Google's Exit Announcement as Covered in China's News

Journal by eldavojohn on Friday January 15, 2010 @09:06AM

When it comes to understanding what the Communist Party of China is thinking, it seems one of the few inputs we have is two of China's state run news sites (their English mouthpieces): China Daily and (the official press agency of the PRC) Xinhua. What follows is a brief news analysis of articles from these two sites over the past two days (note I do not speak Chinese and am therefore

Submission + - Is Amazon's Cloud Experiencing Growing Pains? (datacenterknowledge.com)

Submitted by 1sockchuck on Friday January 15, 2010 @08:59AM

1sockchuck writes: Some developers using Amazon EC2 are wondering aloud whether the popularity of the cloud computing service is beginning to affect its performance. Amazon this week denied speculation that it was experiencing capacity problems after a veteran developer reported performance issues and suggested that EC2 might be oversubscribed. Meanwhile, a cloud monitoring service published charts showing increased latency on EC2 in recent weeks. The reports follow a incident over the holidays in which a DDoS on a DNS provider slowed Amazon's retail and cloud operations.

Submission + - SPAM: Should Gaming Worlds Join the Workplace?

Submitted by destinyland on Friday January 15, 2010 @04:04AM

destinyland writes: A Stanford professor argues gaming worlds can keep workers engaged, and advocates elements of World of Warcraft or Second Life to hone workplace skills like teamwork, leadership, and data analysis. And one IBM report also argues games like World of Warcraft teach leadership and "asserts that there is no reason to think that the same cannot be done in corporate settings of various sizes..." The professor even suggests putting online gaming experiences into your resume. ("There's just so much that gets done [in a virtual world] that's just right on target with what happens in real business.") And Google's CEO also claims that multiplayer gaming also provides good career training, especially for technology careers. "Everything in the future online is going to look like a multiplayer game. If I were 15 years old, that's what I would be doing right now... It teaches players to build a network, to use interactive skills and thinking."
Link to Original Source

Submission + - Tech NGOs working in Haiti

Submitted by d5w on Friday January 15, 2010 @12:51AM

d5w writes: There are a thousand and one NGOs responding in some way to the disaster in Haiti, but the necessary infrastructure is usually overlooked when people give charity donations. (In fact, some popular sites actively downgrade charities for spending on infrastructure.) Here are two organizations responding to Haiti, though, that have a purely tech infrastructure focus:

Télécoms Sans Frontières brings mobile telecom rigs and satellite phones to disaster sites, making sure that responders on the ground can communicate with each other and that individuals can contact families abroad.

MapAction sends experienced GIS people and GPS equipment to provide up-to-date mapping, which is important when the landscape has just changed drastically.

Any others?

Submission + - Dragging telephone numbers into the Internet Age (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by azoblue on Friday January 15, 2010 @12:43AM

azoblue writes: E-mail, IM, Facebook, phones—what if all of these ways to reach you over a network could be condensed into a single, unique number? The ENUM proposal aims to do just that, by giving everyone a single phone number that maps to all of their identifiers. Here's how it works, and why it isn't already widely used.

Submission + - Another attack, on law firm suing China

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15, 2010 @12:18AM

An anonymous reader writes: In the wake of the attack on Google, another company claims to be the victim of a similar attack. Gipson Hoffman & Pancione is a Los Angeles law firm whose client, CYBERsitter is suing the government of China and several Chinese companies for using their intellectual property in the infamous Green Dam censorship filter. According to the firm, they have been targeted by a spear phishing attack from China. I think I'll submit this story anonymously.

Comment Landfill fodder (Score 1) 561

by Dezzamon on Wednesday June 04, 2008 @04:00AM (#23648517) Attached to: The One-Use, Self-Destructing DVD Returns

The content may expire after 48 hours but somehow I think it'll take a bit longer for the rest of the DVD to move onto the great bargain bin in the sky. Are they that scared about DRM on digital downloads being broken that they're willing to crap up the planet instead?

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