Mad Martigan - Slashdot User

Bands Bypass iTunes With iPhone Apps 155

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Friday February 20, 2009 @06:20PM from the more-you-tighten-your-grip-tarkin dept.

iminplaya writes to tell us that the band "The Presidents of the United States of America" (yes, the peaches guys), are trying to expand their engagement with fans by selling their music via Apple's App store, something others have experimented with but never dealt with on this level. "The app, called 'The Presidents' Music — PUSA,' sells for $2.99 on the App Store (iTunes link) offers users access to four full albums, including the band's early 'lost' recordings. This includes the previously-unavailable FroggyStyle — 'unless you have one of the 500 cassettes the band sold in 1994, you've never heard this before,' reads the app description. The app also features a number of extras and exclusives that the band says are updated regularly, and fans can read the band's blog directly from the app on their iPhones or iPod touches. The music, however, is not actually contained within the application itself; instead, it is streamed to the app from a server, requiring the user to be connected to a network of some kind (iPhone users on the cell or WiFi network, iPod touch users on WiFi) in order to access the media."

Small Asteroid Making 400,000 Mile Pass By Earth 157

Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday January 26, 2009 @11:17AM from the summon-bruce-willis dept.

AtariKee writes "Universe Today is reporting that a small 10m asteroid, discovered earlier this month and named 2009 BD, is passing within 400,000 miles of Earth. Although the asteroid poses no threat to the planet, the site reports that the asteroid is still very interesting, as it may be a rare co-orbital asteroid (as in, shares the same orbit as Earth)."

Comment Re:Move to Arizona (Score 4, Interesting) 755

by weierstrass on Thursday October 23, 2008 @05:40PM (#25489073) Attached to: Alternatives to Daylight Saving Time?

Just everyone use GMT (UTC) and get used to it. What is the point of timezones anyway? Oh, you like that it's 12 in the middle of the day and in the middle of the night. So what. Get over it. It's going to happen eventually anyway.

Wikipedia For Schools DVD Released 132

Posted by timothy on Wednesday October 22, 2008 @05:54PM from the nothing-naughty dept.

David Gerard writes "SOS Children's Villages has released the 2008/9 Wikipedia Selection for Schools — 5500 checked and reviewed articles matching the English National Curriculum, produced by SOS for use in their own schools in developing countries. The 2007 edition was a huge success, with distributions to schools in four countries, use by the Hole in the Wall education project, thousands of downloads and disks and around 6000 unique IPs a day visiting the online version — the most successful end-user distribution version of Wikipedia to date."

Large Hadron Collider Goes Live September 10th 409

Posted by timothy on Thursday August 07, 2008 @03:26PM from the get-your-affairs-in-order dept.

Naznarreb writes "CERN announced today that the first attempt to circulate a beam through the Large Hadron Collider will be on September 10th, 2008. You can read the press release here. They also announced the event will be webcast live. According to the release, they're just planning to run a few tests laps, not smash any particles, so the world won't be ending quite yet." And despite that September 10th date, according to the BBC, "On 9 August, protons will be piped through LHC magnets for the first time."

Comment I Need Tungsten To Live ... Tungsten! (Score 1) 165

by Mad Martigan on Saturday June 14, 2008 @04:05AM (#23789897) Attached to: Genetic Building Blocks Found In Meteorite

From http://www.snpp.com/episodes/BABF03

-----

The Simpsons make a shopping excursion to ShÃp, the place to go for modern Swedish furniture and accessories. A green end table catches Marge's eye, and she's impressed that those crazy Swedish furniture designers could invent such a far-out concept. Homer tests a bean-bag chair -- and it immediately swallows him up. He joins Captain McAllister, who fell victim to the same chair.

Luckily, Homer rejoins his family in time to look at assemble-it-yourself wall units. A costumed character that looks like an Allen wrench with arms and legs walks up.

Allen: You put it together yourself. All you need is me -- Allen
Wrench.
Homer: [giggles] He's named after what he is.
Bart: [knocking on the wrench] Cool costume.
Allen: [turns away from the rest of the family to face Bart, and
begins talking in a robotic tone]
It's not a costume. They found me inside a meteor.
Marge: Excuse me, where are your hamper lids?
Allen: [friendly] Hamper lids? Uh, third floor.
[turns to Bart again]
[robotic] Help, I need tungsten to live. [raises arms]
Tungsten!
[Bart flees]
-- "Eight Misbehavin'"

Google To Host Ajax Libraries 285

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday May 28, 2008 @10:23AM from the cache-once-cache-often dept.

ruphus13 writes "So, hosting and managing a ton of Ajax calls, even when working with mootools, dojo or scriptaculous, can be quite cumbersome, especially as they get updated, along with your code. In addition, several sites now use these libraries, and the end-user has to download the library each time. Google now will provide hosted versions of these libraries, so users can simply reference Google's hosted version. From the article, 'The thing is, what if multiple sites are using Prototype 1.6? Because browsers cache files according to their URL, there is no way for your browser to realize that it is downloading the same file multiple times. And thus, if you visit 30 sites that use Prototype, then your browser will download prototype.js 30 times. Today, Google announced a partial solution to this problem that seems obvious in retrospect: Google is now offering the "Google Ajax Libraries API," which allows sites to download five well-known Ajax libraries (Dojo, Prototype, Scriptaculous, Mootools, and jQuery) from Google. This will only work if many sites decide to use Google's copies of the JavaScript libraries; if only one site does so, then there will be no real speed improvement. There is, of course, something of a privacy violation here, in that Google will now be able to keep track of which users are entering various non-Google Web pages.' Will users adopt this, or is it easy enough to simply host an additional file?"

The Smartest Browser and OS 436

Posted by kdawson on Monday May 26, 2008 @08:16PM from the correlation-is-not-causation dept.

The IQ League maintain a "60 Second IQ Test" online. Interestingly, they correlate the results of this test with a number of statistics available from their server logs. Along with the geographical distinctions like city and country, the referrer and OS/Browser user-agent strings are also mined, to determine the Smartest Browser and OS. Cutting to the chase, the very smartest is Firefox on Unknown (which internal evidence suggests is MacOS-Intel), and the dumbest, as of this writing, is IE on WinNT. Quick! Test out and move the bars on the pretty graph! Can we make Slashdot.org the "Smartest Website in the World?" (It's currently number 2 behind ScienceBlogs.com.)

LifeLock Spokesperson's Stolen ID Inspires Lawsuits 217

Posted by timothy on Thursday May 22, 2008 @02:34PM from the now-he-is-a-formless-protoplasmic-blob dept.

OrochimaruVoldemort writes "It seems as though LifeLock isn't as secure as Todd Davis makes it out. According to a LifeLock spokesman, his identity has been stolen. For two years, Davis has been daring hackers to steal his ID. Looks like he got what he wanted. CNN reports: 'Now, LifeLock customers in Maryland, New Jersey and West Virginia are suing Davis, claiming his service didn't work as promised and he knew it wouldn't, because the service had failed even him.'"

Parent-Friendly Wireless Bridge To Span 500 Meters? 558

Posted by timothy on Thursday May 22, 2008 @01:10PM from the your-meterage-may-vary dept.

GonnaBRichYeahYeah! writes "My dad lives down a dirt road 500 meters off the main road. The cable company will not put cable down his lane for any less than the ridiculous sum of $10,000. And he cannot get phone line DSL since he is so far away from the central terminal, so he relied on painful 22k/sec dial-up for access to the Internet. He got sick of it and relies on Hughes satellite Internet, at $60/month, but he still has to be connected to a phone line to upload to the Internet. It's not a good solution, but better than dial-up. His friend lives on the corner of the main drag with his lane and has cable, thus hi-speed Internet. I suggested that he get a wireless access point, and put it at his friend's house and then get a wireless card for access. The problem is that no wireless routers go that far (max range of -N is 200 feet) and WiMax is too complex for a 70-year old man. Any suggestions from Slashdot crowd would be helpful." Plenty of people make wireless links over longer distances, but often they're not suited for people who want simplicity and reliability. What's the best out there right now?

Journal Journal: freecycle yuppies

Journal by weierstrass on Sunday May 04, 2008 @09:38AM

WANTED: dead laptop for my child to play on

Posted by: "sveapolster" svea@stardotbmp.com sveapolster
Sat May 3, 2008 6:00 am (PDT)
has anyone got a dead laptop (preferably mac but i'm not choosy - though the husband is)
for my little daughter to play on?
this would save our 'proper' computers from destruction.

[Emphasis mine]

Journal Journal: 512MB

Journal by weierstrass on Saturday April 26, 2008 @11:39AM

To celebrate doubling the amount of memory in my laptop, I am using Firefox with 12 to 15 tabs open at once, and also edited an image in The GIMP earlier.

UK ISP Admitted to Spying on Customers 163

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Friday April 04, 2008 @06:11PM from the don't-worry-sir-we're-from-the-internet dept.

esocid writes "BT, an ISP located in the UK, tested secret spyware on tens of thousands of its broadband customers without their knowledge, it admitted yesterday. The scandal came to light only after some customers stumbled across tell-tale signs of spying. At first, they were wrongly told a software virus was to blame. BT said it randomly chose 36,000 broadband users for a 'small-scale technical trial' in 2006 and 2007. The monitoring system, developed by U.S. software company Phorm, formerly known as 121Media, known for being deeply involved in spyware, accesses information from a computer. It then scans every website a customer visits, silently checking for keywords and building up a unique picture of their interests. Executives insisted they had not broken the law and said no 'personally identifiable information' had been shared or divulged."

RIAA Drops Case, Should Have Sued Someone Else 195

Posted by Zonk on Wednesday January 30, 2008 @02:02PM from the well-why-didn't-you-tell-us-you-were-innocent dept.

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "Once again the RIAA has dropped a case with prejudice, this time after concluding it was the defendant's daughter it should have sued in the first place. In the case of Lava v. Amurao, mindful that in similar scenarios it has been held liable for the defendant's attorney fees (Capitol v. Foster and Atlantic v. Andersen), the RIAA went on the offensive. In this case there was actually no attorney fee motion pending, making their motion all the more intriguing. The organization argued that it was the defendant's fault that the record companies sued the wrong person, because the defendant didn't tell them that his daughter was the file sharer they were looking for."

The Impatience of the Google Generation 366

Posted by Soulskill on Friday January 18, 2008 @06:27AM from the everything-i-need-to-know-i-learned-from-google dept.

profBill writes "As a fifty-something professor who teaches introductory computer science, I am very aware that the twenty-somethings in my class are much more at ease with computers than any other generation. However, does that mean they are more adept at using those computers? Apparently not, according to the researchers at University College London. Their research indicates that while more adept at conducting searches, younger users also show 'impatience in search and navigation, and zero tolerance for any delay in satisfying their information needs'. Moreover, these traits 'are now becoming the norm for all age-groups, from younger pupils and undergraduates through to professors'. The panel makes two conclusions: That libraries (and I wonder what a library will become in the future, anyway) will have to adapt, and that the information processing skills of todays young people are lacking. Why are those skills lacking and, if they are, what can be done about it?"

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