A New Car UI 237

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday February 18, 2014 @07:41PM from the eyes-on-the-road dept.

An anonymous reader writes "As our cars have become more complex, so have the user interfaces with which we control them. Using the current crop of infotainment systems embedded in a car's dash is byzantine and frustrating. UI designer Matthaeus Krenn has put up a post demonstrating his efforts to reinvent in-car UIs in a way that doesn't force people to squint at tiny buttons, instead leaving more of their attention for the road. It's based on using a touch-screen display that realigns the interface to wherever you put your fingers down. It also reacts differently depending on how many fingers you use to touch the screen."

Ask Slashdot: What Online News Is Worth Paying For? 361

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday February 05, 2014 @06:08AM from the pennies-on-the-page dept.

schnell writes "The increasing prevalence of online news paywalls and 'nag walls' (e.g. you can only read so many articles per month) has forced me to divide those websites into two categories: those that offer content that is unique or good enough to pay for vs. those that don't. Examples of the former for me included The Economist and Foreign Policy, while other previous favorite sites The New York Times and even my hometown Seattle Times have lost my online readership entirely. I also have a secret third category — sites that don't currently pay/nag wall, but I would pay for if I had to — Ars Technica and Long Form come to mind. What news/aggregation sites are other Slashdotters out there willing to pay for, and why? What sites that don't charge today would you pay for if you had to? Or, knowing this crowd, are the majority just opposed to paying for any web news content on principle?"

Robots Test Their Own World Wide Web 64

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday January 15, 2014 @11:38PM from the no-humans-allowed dept.

An anonymous reader writes "A new system called RoboEarth is currently being tested at Eindhoven University which will enable robots to complete tasks by sharing knowledge through a cloud based world-wide-web. The current study is based in a hospital setting where robots are sharing information to complete tasks like moving around by sharing a map of the room and serving drinks to 'patients'. The aim of the system is that robots and humans will be able to upload information to a cloud based database which can be accessed and used by robots. This will enable robots to share information and also to learn from each other. It will also allow robots to react to changes within their environment without having to be reprogrammed."

New Ford Mustang May Have Electronic "Burnout" Button 290

Posted by samzenpus on Monday December 09, 2013 @07:02PM from the nobody-with-a-good-car-needs-to-be-justified dept.

cartechboy writes "Ford has decided to take the burnout into the 21st century for the new 2015 Mustang. The Mustang's new 'electronic' burnout system is intended to enable perfect burnouts every time, much like launch control has made it easier to accelerate quickly from a stop. So think of every new Mustang with a bright red 'burnout' button. While the details on how the burnout control system will work remain secret, it's possible that a combination of the features used in a typical launch control system, including traction and rev-limiting controls, together with a front brake locking system, could enable Ford to pull together existing technology in a completely new way. So far Ford has no comment."

RF Safe-Stop Shuts Down Car Engines With Radio Pulse 549

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday December 03, 2013 @04:03PM from the i'll-order-a-dozen dept.

An anonymous reader writes with news of a device built by a company in the U.K. which uses pulses of electromagnetic energy to disrupt the electronic systems of modern cars, causing them to shut down and cut the engine. Here's a description of how it works: "At one end of a disused runway, E2V assembled a varied collection of second-hand cars and motorbikes in order to test the prototype against a range of vehicles. In demonstrations seen by the BBC a car drove towards the device at about 15mph (24km/h). As the vehicle entered the range of the RF Safe-stop, its dashboard warning lights and dials behaved erratically, the engine stopped and the car rolled gently to a halt. Digital audio and video recording devices in the vehicle were also affected.''It's a small radar transmitter,' said Andy Wood, product manager for the machine. 'The RF [radio frequency] is pulsed from the unit just as it would be in radar, it couples into the wiring in the car and that disrupts and confuses the electronics in the car causing the engine to stall.'"

Microsoft Azure Platform Certified "Secure" By Department of Defense 90

Posted by timothy on Tuesday October 01, 2013 @12:06PM from the until-proven-otherwise dept.

cagraham writes "Microsoft's cloud storage platform Azure received their first government certification yesterday, less than 24 hours before the official shutdown. The certification, which grants Azure 'Provisional Authority to Operate,' should make it easier for Microsoft to compete with rivals like IBM and Amazon Web Services for government contracts. The certification signifies that the Department of Defense, Homeland Security, and US General Services Administration have all deemed Azure safe from external hackers. Government cloud contracts are a lucrative market, as seen by Amazon's recent tussle with IBM over a $600M contract for a private CIA cloud."

Malware Now Hiding In Graphics Cards 125

Posted by timothy on Thursday September 26, 2013 @05:44PM from the batteries-graphics-cards-and-lcd-screens dept.

mask.of.sanity writes "Researchers are closing in on a means to detect previously undetectable stealthy malware that resides in peripherals like graphics and network cards. The malware was developed by the same researchers and targeted host runtime memory using direct memory access provided to hardware devices. They said the malware was a 'highly critical threat to system security and integrity' and could not be detected by any operating system."

GNOME 3.10 Released 218

Posted by timothy on Thursday September 26, 2013 @04:21PM from the upwards-or-sideways dept.

kthreadd writes "Version 3.10 of the GNOME software collection has been released. New in this release is improved support for Wayland, the upcoming X replacement. The system status menus have been consolidated into one single menu. Many of the applications in GNOME now features header bars instead of title bars, which merges the titlebar and toolbar into a single element and allows applications to offer more dynamic user interfaces. GNOME now also includes an application for searching, browsing and installing applications called Software. Several other new applications have also been added to GNOME including Music, Photos, Notes and Maps."

Should Developers Support Windows Phone 8? 345

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday August 01, 2012 @12:04AM from the yes-no-maybe dept.

Un pobre guey writes "Should you develop apps for Windows 8? Well, the hype and flogging are apparently in full swing. From the article: 'To be clear, Windows Phone 8 is not a slam dunk. Some, such as IDC, believe Windows Phone will eclipse iOS by 2016. Others, though, believe the trajectories of Android and iOS can't be slowed in the next few years. Nonetheless, I think a bet on Windows Phone 8 is justifiable, even wise, since anyone who purchases a new Windows Phone 8 device likely will want to load it with the latest and greatest apps.'" Another reader points out that the full Windows Phone 8 SDK was leaked online recently, which led to some interesting discoveries: "For starters, it appears that the API is very much like the full WinRT API, but it has no JavaScript support. There is also no support for creating and working with Silverlight/XNA style. This is a bit surprising because I and most developers were under the impression that Microsoft would support the migration of Silverlight apps to HTML5 and JavaScript, but there isn't even support for JavaScript to access the phone's services. The best you can hope for is using the JavaScript support in IE10."

Comment "Web scale" and hand-held devices (Score 1) 484

by acooks on Friday June 15, 2012 @01:15AM (#40332025) Attached to: Windows 8 Pre RTM Metro UI Leaked

I think the interface is simple, because it's quicker for a vm to draw, scales better to weird screen sizes and pixel densities and compresses better on a remote desktop connection. Maybe MS is betting the farm on the cloud and want the best interactive experience when the installation count of the OS peaks in 5 years time.

Ask Slashdot: What's Your Beef With Windows Phone? 1027

Posted by timothy on Thursday June 14, 2012 @12:57PM from the gave-baby-to-dingo dept.

First time accepted submitter occasional_dabbler writes "Reviews by 'commentators' such as this one predict certain doom for both Nokia and Microsoft on the basis of the OS being a failure, yet whenever the Lumia handsets are reviewed in the mainstream press they are often highly praised. Windows phone is an immature OS, certainly, but it does pretty much everything you need in a smartphone, is getting better with each update and it is beautiful. I have a Lumia 800, and now I'm used to how it and the WP OS works I find it a painful process to go back to an Android or iPhone for some obscure app not yet supported on WP. WP gave me the same feeling I got when I bought my first iBook, fired up OS X 10.1 and realized I had just been shifted up a decade. So why so serious? What do Slashdotters who have really tried WP think of it?"

Comment Re:Salaries (Score 1) 886

by acooks on Thursday May 31, 2012 @04:26AM (#40164339) Attached to: IT Positions Some of the Toughest Jobs To Fill In US

Don't the H.R. people hate "jack of all trades" people, too?

Yes, but I'm convinced that recruitment agents are even worse. If you don't fit their template, they butcher your carefully structured resume into something that basically says: "This guy has been working for x years, but we're not actually sure what he did in that time." If it's all just buzzword soup to these intermediaries, the connection between the type of problems that the candidate has experience in and the need that the prospective employer has gets lost.

Then there's also the fact that some industries, like banking, believe that their domain knowledge is so absolutely unique and special that nobody could possibly transfer valuable skills from a different sector.

Comment Re:Pure FUD. Available on iTunes (Score 1) 1004

by acooks on Monday May 21, 2012 @09:19PM (#40071879) Attached to: Who's Pirating Game of Thrones, and Why?

iTunes is 2 Episodes behind.

Yahoo CEO Wrongly Claimed To Have Degree In Computer Science 363

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday May 03, 2012 @10:06PM from the was-that-wrong? dept.

jmcbain writes "Scott Thompson, Yahoo!'s CEO who was hired on January 4 of this year, was found to have lied about his CS degree from Stone Hill College. Investigation from an activist shareholder revealed that his degree was actually in accounting, and apparently Thompson had been going with this lie since the time he served as president of PayPal's payments unit."

Mozilla Ponders Major Firefox UI Refresh 282

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday May 03, 2012 @08:06AM from the fresh-new-face dept.

CWmike writes "Mozilla is working on a revamp of Firefox to synchronize its various versions — desktop, tablet, phone and Windows 8 Metro — into a single visual style, according to documents posted by members of its user interface (UI) design team. The project, which does not have a name, and the earlier blending of Mozilla's mobile and desktop design groups, is meant to bring more coherence to the various versions of the open-source browser. 'One of our major goals for the year [is] getting Firefox to feel more like one product — more 'Firefoxy' — across all our platforms, desktop to tablet to phone,' Madhava Enro of the Mozilla UI design team, said in a post to his personal blog on Tuesday. Enro posted a slideshow he and others used the week before to present their proposals at a company get-together. According to the presentation, some UI elements will be shared across all Firefox editions, among them a lean toward 'softer texture' and smoother curves in the design."

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