Comment wait for the other shoe to drop... (Score 1) 500
If history is any guide, the next move will be for Microsoft to offer an attractive discount.
RIP, SunSolve 100
Kymermosst writes "Today marks the last day that SunSolve will be available. Oracle sent the final pre-deployment details today for the retirement of SunSolve and the transition to its replacement, My Oracle Support Release 5.2, which begins tomorrow. People who work with Sun's hardware and software have long used SunSolve as a central location for specifications, patches, and documentation."
Comment Re:Ken Perlin? (Score 1) 280
Yup.
1928 Time Traveler Caught On Film? 685
Many of you have submitted a story about Irish filmmaker George Clarke, who claims to have found a person using a cellphone in the "unused footage" section of the DVD The Circus, a Charlie Chaplin movie filmed in 1928. To me the bigger mystery is how someone who appears to be the offspring of Ram-Man and The Penguin got into a movie in the first place, especially if they were talking to a little metal box on set. Watch the video and decide for yourself.
US Navy Considering Wii Fit and DDR For Boot Camp 104
almehdaaol writes "New military recruits are coming in physically heavier and out of shape, so the US Navy has decided to take an interesting course of action by creating a new training regimen inspired by the fitness-centric Wii Fit and Dance Dance Revolution."
This comes alongside a report confirming some of the BS we told our parents when we were growing up: "Bavelier said playing the kill-or-be-killed games can improve peripheral vision and the ability to see objects at dusk, and the games can even be used to treat amblyopia, or lazy eye, a disorder characterized by indistinct vision in one eye. She said she believes the games can improve math performance and other brain tasks."
Fixing Internet Censorship In Schools 207
jcatcw writes "Schools and libraries are hurting students by setting up heavy-handed Web filtering. The problem goes back for years. A filter blocked the Web site of former House Majority Leader Richard Armey because it detected the word 'dick,' according to a 2001 study from the Brennan Center of Justice. The purpose of schools should be to teach students to live in a democratic society, and that means teaching critical thinking and showing students controversial Web sites, says Craig Cunningham, a professor at National-Louis University. He quoted from a National Research Council study: 'Swimming pools can be dangerous for children. To protect them, one can install locks ... [or] teach them to swim.' Web filtering also leads to inequities in education based on household income. Students from more affluent areas have access to the Internet at home and, often, more enlightened parents who can let them access information blocked in schools and libraries. Poorer students without home access don't have those opportunities."
Analyzing (All of) Star Trek With Face Recognition 140
An anonymous reader writes "Accurate face recognition is coming. Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition, a face recognition start-up spun out from Carnegie Mellon University, has posted a tech demo showing an analysis of the entire original Star Trek series using face recognition. The online visualization includes various annotated clips of the series with clickable thumbnails of each character's appearance. They also have a separate page showing the full data of all the prominent characters in every episode including extracting thumbnails of each appearance." Their software can recognize frontal or near-frontal face instances.
Comment Why not just lower the precision? (Score 1) 499
I'm not able to find Dr. Palem's original paper from the "computer science meeting in San Francisco," but if, as I surmise, he's advocating a new probabilistically-based microprocessor, the question needs to be asked: If we're willing to consider new architectures (and new ways to program them), is a probabilistic one the best solution to the power consumption and performance problems?
One alternative that should be compared to Palem's would be to do the same thing he's advocating -- reduce the precision -- in a more traditional way: explicity reduce the size of the data path. Quite a few applications could get by with shorter-than-32-bit integers. If not 16, maybe 24? For floating point calculations, many GPUs already support a 16-bit "half" or "s10e5" format (IEEE 754 2008) that's just fine for multimedia. There's also a 24-bit format.
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