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Nestle's GPS Tracking Candy Campaign 172

Posted by samzenpus from the oompa-loompa-I'm-tracking-you dept.
colinneagle writes "In a cool yet creepy marketing campaign, Nestle plans to stalk UK consumers. The company kicked off a unique promotion called 'We will find you' that involves GPS trackers embedded in chocolate bars. When a winning consumer opens the wrapper, it activates and notifies the prize team who promises to track them down within 24 hours to deliver a check for £10,000. A Nestle spokesman added that 'inside their wrappers, the GPS-enabled bars looked just like normal chocolate bars.'"
Programming

2011's Fastest Growing Language: Objective-C 356

Posted by Soulskill from the language-war-ammo dept.
mikejuk writes "Every January, it is traditional to compare the state of programming language usage as indicated by the TIOBE index. So what's up and what's down this year? The top language is still Java, but it's slowly falling in the percentages. Objective-C experienced the most growth, followed by C# and C. JavaScript climbed back into the top 10, displacing Ruby. Python and PHP experienced the biggest drops. If you like outside runners, then cheer for Lua and R, which have just entered the top 20. However, I have to wonder why Logo is in the top 20 as well. I know programming education is becoming important, but Logo?"
Cellphones

Video Game Consoles Are 'Fundamentally Doomed,' Says Lord British 374

Posted by Soulskill from the depends-on-your-timescale dept.
zacharye writes "Microsoft sold nearly one million Xbox 360s last week alone, but we're nearing the end of the road for video game consoles according to one industry visionary. Richard Garriott, known for having created the fantasy role-playing franchise Ultima, says converged devices such as computers, smartphones and tablets will soon render dedicated game consoles obsolete: '... the power that you can carry with you in a portable is really swamping what we've thought of as a console.'"

Comment Re:How long till they can print money? (Score 1) 212

by Gori (#37465124) Attached to: Gang Used 3D Printers To Make ATM Skimmers

You are forgetting the basic laws of conservation of energy and mass. There is a reason by replicators are a science fiction tech.

Creating mass out of energy/electricity would require m/(c^2) Joules or energy. With the current speed of light and price of electricity, I would hate to see the power bill for replicating a glass of water.

Even if you are not creating stuff out of energy, but just printing it from some base material, that base stuff needs to be produced, with the relevant chemical/material properties. That is not exactly for free either.

So don't worry, the traditional economy isn't going anywhere just yet.
Handhelds

Why Amazon Can't Manufacture a Kindle In the US 598

Posted by Soulskill from the american-line-workers-try-to-eat-them dept.
theodp writes "Ever wonder why all those job listings for Amazon subsidiary Lab126 — the internal group behind the Kindle and, by all accounts, an upcoming Android tablet — have travel requirements? Over at Forbes, Steve Denning explains why Amazon can't make a Kindle in the U.S., and why that really does matter. 'The idea that there is a lot of outsourcing going on is hardly news', writes Denning. 'The idea that it is irreversible and destructive of the economy's ability to grow is less well known. Even so, it's not exactly new news: the HBR article that I cite is two years old. What is really new news is that (1) these fairly obvious truths haven't yet dawned on economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, CEOs, accountants, politicians, among others and (2) the way to manage in a radically different way to deal with these issues is now more fully articulated than it has been before.' Denning concludes his trilogy-of-management-terror by noting that the decline is also occurring in software."
Security

Testing Free English Anti-Malware On Non-English Threats 78

Posted by Soulskill from the may-you-direction-me-to-the-ham dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Brazilian technology news site O Globo posted an interesting comparison on how free anti-malware behaves against non-English threats (Google translation of Portuguese original). By using a database of over 3000 samples from Brazil's Security Incident Contact Center, the numbers are quite different from all US anti-malware reviews. While Avira achieved the best score, 78%, Microsoft Security Essentials stopped less than 14%. This can be a headache for some large multinational corporations, whose IT departments deploy US anti-malware on the entire network, but have network segments outside US with many 'unknown' threats roaming around. I wonder what the results would be in other countries."

Comment Re:Translation (Score 1) 507

by Gori (#34559222) Attached to: Annual power consumption at your residence?

But that is only true if you assume 100% conversion of gas to electricity which is obviously not correct. A really high end gas powered power plant may convert 40 % of that into electricity. Which, transported and used for heating even further reduces the efficiency. So lets say, overall, this gas I used corresponds to 3000 kWh of actual electricity. I am still under the apartment category :(

Comment Re:Translation (Score 1) 507

by Gori (#34484708) Attached to: Annual power consumption at your residence?

- 2500-5000 kWh I live in an apartment

wow, you americans...

Those ranges are a scary. As a family of 4, in a semi detached house in north-western europe we use 3000 kWh of electricity and 1000 m3 of gas a year! According to your numbers I would use more than 3 times more if I was in the US.

No wonder that people say that if the whole world would like like Americans,we would need two to three planets to support us...
Earth

Utah Assembly Passes Resolution Denying Climate Change 787

Posted by kdawson from the still-snowing-here dept.
cowtamer writes "The Utah State Assembly has passed a resolution decrying climate change alarmists and urging '...the United States Environmental Protection Agency to immediately halt its carbon dioxide reduction policies and programs and withdraw its "Endangerment Finding" and related regulations until a full and independent investigation of climate data and global warming science can be substantiated.' Here is the full text of H.J.R 12." The resolution has no force of law. The Guardian article includes juicy tidbits from its original, far more colorful, version.

Comment How about non Floating Point performance ? (Score 4, Insightful) 260

by Gori (#29881605) Attached to: Asus Releases Desktop-Sized Supercomputer

San somebody who has actually worked with such machines enlighten me about its performance on tasks that are not floating point intensive? Our simulations mainly push many,many objects around, with relatively little, or no floating point math in them.

Do such machines still make sense, or are we better off with a bunch of general purpose CPUs clustered together? How do they compare to Suns Niagara cpus that have umpteen hardware threads in them ?

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