macslocum - Slashdot User

Submission + - Amazon lets students rent digital textbooks (pcpro.co.uk)

Submitted by

nk497

on Monday July 18, 2011 @10:49AM

nk497 writes: "Amazon has unveiled a new digital textbook rental service, allowing students to choose how long they'd like access to an eBook-version of a textbook via their Kindle or app — with the retailer claiming savings as high as 80%. Kindle Textbook Rental will let students use a text for between 30 to 360 days, adding extra days as they need to. Any notes or highlighted text will be saved via the Amazon Cloud for students to reference after the book is "returned". Amazon said tens of thousands of books would be available to rent for the next school year."

Submission + - Poole To Zuckerberg: You’re Doing It Wrong (zdnet.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 15, 2011 @12:18PM

An anonymous reader writes: At South by Southwest Interactive 2011 in Austin, Texas this week, 4chan founder Christopher Poole (also known as “moot”) took the stage to talk about various online issues. One of these was how important anonymity is on the Internet and how Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t get it.

Submission + - Apple Nixes Contactless Payments (ibtimes.com)

Submitted by RedEaredSlider on Tuesday March 15, 2011 @09:30AM

RedEaredSlider writes: Citing fears over a lack of an industry standard, Apple has ditched plans to include near field communication technology in its next iPhone, The Independent reports.

The technology, which allows users to make payments simply by waving their devices over special readers, is widely believed to be the next major step in both cell phone and payment technologies. Apple's decision to avoid it is a significant blow to its adoption.

Submission + - NASA buys 12 seats on Soyuz (nasa.gov)

Submitted by jamax on Tuesday March 15, 2011 @07:56AM

jamax writes: NASA has announced that it has bought 12 seats on Soyuz flights to be flown in the period 2014- june 2016.

Submission + - Book piracy: Less DRM, more data (oreilly.com)

Submitted by macslocum on Monday January 10, 2011 @03:04PM

macslocum writes: Ambiguity surrounds the real impact of digital book piracy, notes Brian O'Leary in an interview with O'Reilly Radar, but all would be better served if more data was shared and less effort was exerted on futile DRM.

Submission + - Facebook Ads Could 'Out' Gay Users (itworld.com) 1

Submitted by itwbennett on Friday October 22, 2010 @09:07AM

itwbennett writes: Researchers at Microsoft Research India and the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Germany have written a paper showing that a users may be inadvertently revealing their sexual preference to advertisers. 'One example was an advertisement for a nursing program at a medical college in Florida, which was only shown to gay men. The researchers said that persons seeing the ad would not know that it had been exclusively aimed at them solely based on their sexuality, nor would they realize that clicking on the ad would reveal to the advertiser, by implication, their sexual preference in addition to other information they might expect to be sent, such as their IP (Internet Protocol) address.' For its part, Facebook 'downplayed the study, saying that the site does not pass any personally identifiable information back to an advertiser.'

Submission + - It's time to build the Analytical Engine (oreilly.com)

Submitted by macslocum on Tuesday October 05, 2010 @09:42AM

macslocum writes: John Graham-Cumming is launching a project to finish Charles Babbage's dream and build an Analytical Engine for public display. The goal: inspire future generations of scientists to work on their own 100-year leaps.

Submission + - The encryption pioneer who was written out of hist (pcpro.co.uk)

Submitted by nk497 on Tuesday October 05, 2010 @09:21AM

nk497 writes: Clifford Cocks is one of three British men who developed an encryption system while working for the UK Government in the early 1970s, but was forced to keep the innovation quiet for national security reasons. Just a few years later, their Public Encryption Key was developed separately by US researchers at Stanford and MIT, and eventually evolved into the RSA encryption algorithm, which now secures billions of transactions on the internet every day. "The first I knew about [the US discovery] was when I read about it in Scientific American. I opened it one lunchtime and saw a description and thought ‘Ah, that’s what we did’," he said. "You don’t go into the business to get external credit and recognition – quite the opposite. Quite honestly, the main reaction was one of complete surprise that this had actually been discovered outside." The UK trio have now won recognition for their accomplishment in the form of the Milestone Award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

Submission + - Microsoft IE browser share dips below 50% (networkworld.com)

Submitted by alphadogg on Tuesday October 05, 2010 @08:44AM

alphadogg writes: Microsoft's Internet Explorer, which has dominated the Web browser market since blowing by Netscape in the late 1990s, last month fell below the 50% market share level for the first time in years.

IE’s share of the worldwide market fell to 49.87% in September, down from 51.3% in August and 58.4% a year ago. It is followed by Firefox, which increased its share slightly from 30.09% to 31.5% and Google Chrome, which grabbed 11.54% share, more than triple its September 2009 share, according to market watcher StatCounter.

"This is certainly a milestone in the Internet browser wars," said Aodhan Cullen, CEO of StatCounter, in a statement. "Just two years ago IE dominated the worldwide market with 67%."
Back in 2002, IE had more than a 90% share in the wake of operating system/Web browser bundling that got the Department of Justice’s attention in the form of an antitrust lawsuit.

Submission + - Xbox head proclaims Blu-ray dead (thinq.co.uk) 3

Submitted by Blacklaw on Wednesday September 22, 2010 @08:54AM

Blacklaw writes: Microsoft has sided with Apple in a rare case of solidarity between the two companies, and declares that Blu-ray will be "passed by" as a high-definition format.
In many ways, it's hard to disagree. US markets have seen the demand for legal digital downloads of PC games exceed sales of the physical object for the first time, and Apple famously refuses to put a Blu-ray drive in its Macs, as Jobs prefers to send people towards iTunes to download their entertainment. That said, there's an argument for physical media, too. A recent survey suggested that the majority of gamers prefer physical discs, and digital downloads have the secondary effect of entirely cutting out the popular market for second-hand films and games — a plus for publishers, but a big negative for the consumer.

Submission + - evercookie: the invulnerable cookie (downloadsquad.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 22, 2010 @07:44AM

An anonymous reader writes: Using eight different techniques and locations, a 'security' guy has developed a cookie that is very, very hard to delete. If just one copy of the cookie remains, the other locations are rebuilt.

My favourite storage location is in 'RGB values of auto-generated, force-cached PNGs using HTML5 Canvas tag to read pixels (cookies) back out' — awesome.

Submission + - Why Twitter's t.co is a game changer (oreilly.com)

Submitted by macslocum on Monday September 13, 2010 @10:49AM

macslocum writes: If Twitter is so inclined, the company could turn the new t.co shortening service into a powerful analytics tool that solves the marketing and tracking issues of off-site engagement.

Submission + - 25 Years of Super Mario Bros. (technologizer.com)

Submitted by harrymcc on Monday September 13, 2010 @10:36AM

harrymcc writes: On September 13th 1985, Nintendo released Super Mario Bros. for the Famicom (NES) in Japan. It went on to become the best-selling video game of all time, a title it only recently lost. Over at Technologizer, Benj Edwards is celebrating the anniversary with a look at some of the weirdest variations, spinoffs, and tributes the game has inspired over the years, from edibles to art projects.

Submission + - The state of mapping APIs, 5 years on (oreilly.com)

Submitted by macslocum on Tuesday September 07, 2010 @11:48AM

macslocum writes: Map APIs took off in 2005, and during the ensuing years the whole notion of maps has changed. Where once they were slick add-ons, map functionality is now a necessary — and expected — tool. In this piece, Adam DuVander looks at the current state of mapping and he explains how mobile devices, third-party services and ease of use are shaping the map development world.

Submission + - iPhone App in App Store Limbo Open Sourced (giveabrief.com)

Submitted by recoiledsnake on Sunday August 29, 2010 @07:31PM

recoiledsnake writes: The author of iPhone prototyping tool Briefs has decided to open source it after the App store submission has been in limbo for over three months. The app had got into trouble for what Apple believes being able to run interpreted code though the author denies it, saying all the compiling happens on the Mac. While Rob stays civil, his co-worker blasts Apple for not even rejecting the app. Three months is nothing compared to Google Voice for the iPhone though, which is still being studied further by Apple from over a year.

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