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Education

Submission + - DePaul U. to Offer Degree in Predicting the Future (itworld.com)

itwbennett writes: The Chicago-based DePaul University will offer what it says is the nation's first master's degree in predictive analysis, the school announced on Wednesday in conjunction with IBM, which will provide resources for the program. 'We realized there was a need to create a program that prepared students in careers in data analytics and business intelligence,' said Raffaella Settimi, an associate professor at DePaul's College of Computing and Digital Media, who helped craft the program. 'A lot of the professionals who work in these fields have a variety of backgrounds, but there really isn't a program dedicated to data analytics,' Settimi said.
Iphone

Submission + - Apple Eases Restrictions On iPhone Developers (macrumors.com)

WrongSizeGlass writes: MacRumors has a story on a report by Apple Outsider's Matt Drance that Apple is easing their restrictions on interpreted code used in iPhone development, a change which allows game developers in particular to continue to use interpreted languages such as Lua in their App Store applications. The change comes alongside Apple's further modifications of its iOS developer terms that again allow for limited analytics data collection to aid advertisers and developers, but appear to shut out non-independent companies such as Google's AdMob from receiving the data.

It's not enough of an 'about face' to let Adobe or Google back in the picture but they've backpedaled enough to let the little guys squeeze through.

Submission + - Out of control Job Responsibilities 5

greymond writes: I was originally hired as an Online Content Producer to write articles for a company website as well as start up the company’s social media outlets on Facebook and Twitter. With budget cuts and layoffs I ended up also taking over the website facilitation for three of the company’s websites (they let go of the current webmaster). During this time the company has been developing a new website and I was handed the role of pseudo project manager to make sure the developer stayed on course with the projects due date. Now that we’re closer to launch the company has informed me that they don’t have the budget or staff in place to set up the web server and have tasked me with setting up the LAMP and Zend App on an Amazon EC2 setup, which while it’s been years since I worked this much with Linux I’m picking it up and moving things along. Needless to say I want to ask for more money, as well as more resources, as well as a better title that fits my roles, but what is the best way to go about this? Of course my other thought is that I'd much rather go back to writing and working with marketing than getting back into IT.
Power

Submission + - ITER Fusion Reactor Enters Existential Crisis

deglr6328 writes: The long beleaguered experimental magnetic confinement fusion reactor ITER, is currently in what some are calling the worst crisis of its 25 year history. Still existing only on the paper of thousands of proposed design documents, latest cost estimates for the superconducting behemoth are soaring to nearly 20 billion USD; roughly twice the estimates of as recent as a few years ago. Anti-nuclear environmentalist organizations have seized upon the moment as an opportunity to use the current global economic crisis as a means to push for permanently killing the project. If ITER is not built, the prospect of magnetic confinement fusion as a technique to reach thermonuclear breakeven and ignition in the laboratory would be in serious question. Meanwhile, the largest laser-driven inertial confinement fusion project, the National Ignition Facility, has demonstrated the ability to use self generated plasma optical gratings to control capsule implosion symmetry with high finesse, and is on schedule to achieve ignition and potentially high gain before the end of the year.

Submission + - China Drops in Domain Registrations from #2 to #4 (enterprisenetworkingplanet.com)

darthcamaro writes: A year ago, it looked like the .cn country code Top Level Domain (ccTLD) for China was growing so fast that it would displace .com. In 2010 that's no longer the case, as .cn has dropped from being the number two global domain by registrations to number four. And yes, .com is still number one. According to VeriSign, the top 10 list of TLDs in the first quarter was: .com, .de, .net, .cn, uk, .org, .info, .nl, .eu and .ru.
So why did .cn decline? Spammers.

"Many of these are low-priced promotional names that have now come up for renewal at a higher price," Pat Kane, vice president of naming services at VeriSign, told InternetNews.com. "The .cn registration decline was also based on the CNNIC (China Internet Network Information Center) registry's implementation of the real names directive from the Chinese government primarily around verifiable 'whois' data."


Robotics

Submission + - Bionic-Eyed Man Wants To Stream Eye Video Online (ieee.org)

An anonymous reader writes: According to this IEEE article (http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/biomedical/bionics/061110-eyeborg-bionic-eye), Canadian filmmaker Rob Spence, who calls himself Eyeborg because he replaced his false right eye with a bionic one (http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/06/2344220), is showing off his latest prototype. The new bionic eye contains a battery-powered, wireless video camera that can transmit low-res feed to a nearby receiver. Now Spence plans to share his 'vision' online, literally. According to the IEEE article, "soon people will be able to log on to his video feed and view the world through his right eye."
Microsoft

Submission + - SPAM: Microsoft's sleep proxy lowers PC energy use

alphadogg writes: Microsoft researchers have slashed desktop energy use with a sleep proxy system that maintains a PC's network presence even when it is turned off or put into standby mode.

Microsoft has deployed the sleep proxy system to more than 50 active users in the Building 99 research facility in Redmond, Wash., according to the Microsoft Research Web site and a paper [spam URL stripped] that will be presented at the Usenix technical conference in Boston later this month.

"A number of studies have noted that most office machines are left on irrespective of user activity," Microsoft researchers write in a paper titled "Sleepless in Seattle no longer." "At Microsoft Research, we find hundreds of desktop machines awake, day or night – a significant waste of both energy and money. Indeed, potential savings can amount to millions of dollars per year for larger enterprises."

Sleep proxies allow machines to be turned off while keeping them connected to the network, waking the machines when a user or IT administrator attempts to access it remotely.

Link to Original Source

Submission + - Microsoft explains mystery Firefox extension 1

Ricky writes: Microsoft has fixed the distribution scope of a toolbar update that, without the user's knowledge, installed an add-on in Internet Explorer and an extension in Firefox called Search Helper Extension. Microsoft told us that the new update is actually the same as the old one; the only difference is the distribution settings. In other words, the update will no longer be distributed to toolbars that it shouldn't be added to. End users won't see the tweak, Microsoft told Ars, and also offered an explanation on what the mystery add-on actually does.

Ars Technica

Comment Re:Regarding #4 (Score 1) 161

Well, I don't really see where your aggressive-sounding post is coming from, since I don't personally run any websites, it was just a casual observation. Just to point out though, you would post a website's content on another website's forum, a forum that would probably require registration anyway?

Comment Regarding #4 (Score 1) 161

I agree with most of them, but #4 (requiring users to register) is pretty much absolutely essential for a web site to have "stickiness": keeping the user coming back for more. How is a website supposed to customize itself to a specific user's tastes without having users first register?

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