Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
Politics

Submission + - Petition for metric in US halfway to requiring response from the White House (whitehouse.gov)

Submitted by
fsterman
fsterman writes: "Without any prompting from the US Metric Association, a We The People petition to standardize the US on the metric system has received 13,000 signatures in six days. That's half the number needed for an official response from the White House. It looks like ending the US's anti-metric alliance with Liberia and Burma (the only other countries NOT on the US metric system) might rank up there with building a death star."
Microsoft

Submission + - How CES 2013 has Lost its Star Appeal (ibtimes.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: It's hard to know who the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) really benefits. A common perception is that CES is the place where all the major technology companies launch their latest and greatest gadgets. But this is simply not the case.

Let's look at 2012 as an example. Last year's most talked about consumer technology products (in no particular order) were: the iPhone 5, iPad 3, iPad mini, Microsoft Surface, Samsung Galaxy S3, Google Nexus 7, Amazon Kindle Fire HD and the Wii U.

How many were launched at CES 2012? None.
Space

Submission + - Dwarf galaxies orbiting M31 are not randomly distributed. (nature.com)

Submitted by
Janek Kozicki
Janek Kozicki writes: "It has been long thought that dwarf galaxies orbiting Andromeda galaxy (M31), or any other galaxy for that matter, are distributed more or less randomly around the host galaxy. It seemed so obvious in fact that nobody took time to check this assumption. Until a 15 year old student Neil Ibata working with his father at the astronomic observatory wanted to check this out of curiosity. It turned out that dwarf galaxies tend to be placed on a plane around M31. The finding has been published in nature. Local press (especially in France) is ecstatic that a finding by a 15yr old got published in Nature. However, there's another more important point: what other obvious things we didn't really bother to check?"

Submission + - Death of Printed Books May Have Been Exaggerated 1

Submitted by razor88x
razor88x writes: Although just 16% of Americans have purchased an e-book to date, the growth rate in sales of digital books is already dropping sharply. At the same time, sales of dedicated e-readers actually shrank in 2012, as people bought tablets instead. Meanwhile, printed books continue to be preferred over e-books by a wide majority of U.S. book readers. In his blog post Will Gutenberg Laugh Last?, writer Nicholas Carr draws on these statistics and others to argue that, contrary to predictions, printed books may continue to be the book's dominant form. "We may be discovering," he writes, "that e-books are well suited to some types of books (like genre fiction) but not well suited to other types (like nonfiction and literary fiction) and are well suited to certain reading situations (plane trips) but less well suited to others (lying on the couch at home). The e-book may turn out to be more a complement to the printed book, as audiobooks have long been, rather than an outright substitute."

Comment Get moving (Score 1) 379

by MeTaLoRn (#41945927) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: How Would You Convince Someone To Give Up an Old System?

Non profit means nobody gets paid? How important are those documents? Access to the system is owned by the board, not Bob. Find someone who can be trusted, lure him with the opportunity of doing some altruist job, allow him to research and understand how your system currently works and ask him to present a "sanated" version of it.
Science

Submission + - 'Huge' water resource exists under Africa (bbc.co.uk) 2

Submitted by gambit3
gambit3 writes: Scientists say the notoriously dry continent of Africa is sitting on a vast reservoir of groundwater. They argue that the total volume of water in aquifers underground is 100 times the amount found on the surface.
Across Africa more than 300 million people are said not to have access to safe drinking water.
Freshwater rivers and lakes are subject to seasonal floods and droughts that can limit their availability for people and for agriculture. At present only 5% of arable land is irrigated.
Games

Submission + - If You Resell Your Used Games, The Terrorists Win (hothardware.com) 1

Submitted by
MojoKid
MojoKid writes: "Game designer Richard Browne has come out swinging in favor of the rumored antipiracy features in the next-gen PlayStation Orbis and Xbox Durango. "The real cost of used games is the damage that is being wrought on the creativity and variety of games available to the consumer," Browne writes. Browne's comments echo those of influential programmer and Raspberry Pi developer David Braben, who wrote last month that "...pre-owned has really killed core games. It's killing single player games in particular, because they will get pre-owned, and it means your day one sales are it, making them super high risk." Both Browne and Braben conflate hating GameStop (a thoroughly reasonable life choice) with the supposed evils of the used games market. Braben goes so far as to claim that used games are actually responsible for high game prices and that "prices would have come down long ago if the industry was getting a share of the resells." Amazingly, no game publishers have stepped forward to publicly pledge themselves to lower game prices in exchange for a cut of used game sales. Publishers are hammering Gamestop (and recruiting developers to do the same) because it's easier than admitting that the current system is fundamentally broken."
Android

Submission + - Android Tablets Were Born Too Soon

Submitted by adeelarshad82
adeelarshad82 writes: When you look at the Apple iPad's sales figures, it's not hard to see why every technology company on the planet is jumping on the tablet bandwagon, alot of which are Android tablets. Unfortunatley though, some of these Android tablets were born way too early. They are haunted with a series of problems including flimsy hardware, low-quality resistive touch screens, serious display resolution issues, and old Android versions with limited or non-existent access to apps. Even the Samsung Galaxy Tab came well before it's time. Even though it's fast, well-designed, and comes with a decent Android implementation, it's functionalities are limited to those of an Android smartphone. So here's to hoping that Honeycomb's functionalities make up for the lost ground.
Apple

Submission + - NFL Teams Considering iPads To Replace Playbooks (cnet.com)

Submitted by bonch
bonch writes: Pete Walsh, technology head for the Dallas Cowboys, says he and other teams are considering iPads and other tablets as a replacement for paper playbooks, saving about 5,000 pages of printouts per game. Not only is it a huge savings in paper, but a lost iPad might also be remotely wiped to prevent a team's plays falling into the wrong hands. One concern is security and whether or not a tablet could be wirelessly hacked.

Slashdot Top Deals

The hardest part of climbing the ladder of success is getting through the crowd at the bottom.

Close