Comment Re:I got a different email (Score 1) 104
Same here
Comment Is this only free accounts? (Score 2) 104
My email said the following:
Dear Customer,
Since Oracle acquired Dyn in 2016 and subsequently acquired Zenedge. The engineering teams have been working diligently to integrate Dynâ(TM)s products and network into the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure platform. A majority of Dyn products have now been integrated and upgraded on the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
Accordingly, DynDNS Pro/Remote Access is decoupling from the Dyn brand and business unit this summer, and will remain a business unit within Oracle.
Your organization has the right to access and use DynDNS Pro/Remote Access. This product will continue to be available from Oracle without any disruption of service and no action is required on your part at this time.
Comment Old news (Score 4, Informative) 115
This is old news, going back to 1975.
Yawn.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_space_model
Where Does Dell Go After Losing 3Par? 169
crimeandpunishment writes "It was the big deal Dell wanted in a big way. But now that it has lost out to Hewlett-Packard in the bidding war it started for 3Par, where does Dell go in its effort to diversify its business and move into the higher-profit area of selling technology to other companies? The company faces significant challenges, largely due to its lower-end focus, and because many of its competitors beat Dell into branching out. One analyst says, 'People see [Dell] as box-pushers'."
The Ignominious Fall of Dell 604
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Bill Snyder discusses the ignominious decline of Dell, one akin to that of Computer Associates, leaving the company forever tainted by scandal and a 'shocking breach of faith with customers.' Dell's pioneering business model and supply chain helped make desktop computing ubiquitous, affordable, and secure. But years of awful quality control and customer service have finally caught up to the company in a very public way that will do irreparable damage to the company for years to come. 'What we've learned about Dell recently doesn't qualify as an understandable mistake. Only a rotten company sells defective computers and lies about it.'"
Can Curiosity Be Programmed? 269
destinyland writes "AI researcher Jurgen Schmidhuber says his main scientific ambition 'is to build an optimal scientist, then retire.' The Cognitive Robotics professor has worked on problems including artificial ants and even robots that are taught how to tie shoelaces using reinforcement learning, but he believes algorithms can be written that allow the programming of curiosity itself. 'Curiosity is the desire to create or discover more non-random, non-arbitrary, regular data that is novel and surprising...' He's already created art using algorithmic information theory, and can describe the simple algorithmic principle that underlies subjective beauty, creativity, and curiosity itself. And he ultimately addresses the possibility that the entire Universe, including everyone in it, is in principle computable by a completely deterministic computer program."
How To Teach a 12-Year-Old To Program? 799
thelordx writes "I've got a much younger brother who I'd like to teach how to program. When I was younger, you'd often start off with something like BASIC or Apple BASIC, maybe move on to Pascal, and eventually get to C and Java. Is something like Pascal still a dominant teaching language? I'd love to get low-level with him, and I firmly believe that C is the best language to eventually learn, but I'm not sure how to get him there. Can anyone recommend a language I can start to teach him that is simple enough to learn quickly, but powerful enough to do interesting things and lead him down a path towards C/C++?"
New Motorcycle World Speed Record, 367.382 mph 253
An anonymous reader, apparently a member of the BUB racing team, wrote to let us know that on Thursday, their crew set the new ultimate motorcycle world speed record at 367.382 mph with the BUB Seven Streamliner at the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah. The Seven is powered by a 3 Liter, turbocharged, 16-valve V4 engine that produces a claimed 500 hp and 400 lb-ft of torque at 8500 rpm. The pilot, Chris Carr, hit 380 mph during the run.
Old Operating Systems Never Die 875
Harry writes "Haiku, an open-source re-creation of legendary 1990s operating system BeOS, was released in alpha form this week. The news made me happy and led me to check in on the status of other once-prominent OSes — CP/M, OS/2, AmigaOS, and more. Remarkably, none of them are truly defunct: In one form or another, they or their descendants are still available, being used by real people to accomplish useful tasks. Has there ever been a major OS that simply went away, period?"
Rude Drivers Reduce Traffic Jams 882
BuzzSkyline writes "Traffic jams are minimized if a significant fraction of drivers break the rules by doing things like passing on the wrong side or changing lanes too close to an intersection. The insight comes from a cellular automata study published this month in the journal Physical Review E. In effect, people who disregard the rules help to break up the groups that form as rule-followers clump together. The risk of jamming is lower if all people obey the rules than if they all disobey them, according to the analysis, but jamming risk is lowest when about 40 percent of people drive like jerks."
The Mathletes and the Miley Photoshop 555
Frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton's essay this week is about
"A Tennessee man is arrested for possessing a picture of Miley Cyrus's face superimposed on a nude woman's body. In a survey that I posted on the Web, a majority of respondents said the man violated the law -- except for respondents who say they were good at math in school, who as a group answered the survey differently from everyone else."
Continue on to see how.
Extracting Meaning From Millions of Pages 138
freakshowsam writes "Technology Review has an article on a software engine, developed by researchers at the University of Washington, that pulls together facts by combing through more than 500 million Web pages. TextRunner extracts information from billions of lines of text by analyzing basic relationships between words. 'The significance of TextRunner is that it is scalable because it is unsupervised,' says Peter Norvig, director of research at Google, which donated the database of Web pages that TextRunner analyzes. The prototype still has a fairly simple interface and is not meant for public search so much as to demonstrate the automated extraction of information from 500 million Web pages, says Oren Etzioni, a University of Washington computer scientist leading the project." Try the query "Who has Microsoft acquired?"
Space Vulture 73
stoolpigeon writes "In 1953 John Myers brought his friend Gary Wolf a book he had just read, Space Hawk by Anthony Gilmore. The two were already avid readers but this would be their introduction to an entire genre, Science Fiction. They both say that it was Space Hawk that sparked a life long love of all things Sci-Fi. According to both of them, they had an opportunity to re-read it as adults and found that it had not weathered the years well. They decided they would write their own science fiction adventure in the same style, but do a better job. The result is their book Space Vulture." Keep reading for the rest of JR's review.
Computer-Controlled Cargo Sailing Vessels Go Slow, Frugal 210
An anonymous reader writes "Big container ships are taking it very slow these days, cruising at 10 knots instead of their usual 26 knots, to save fuel. This is actually slower than sailing freighters traveled a hundred years ago. The 1902 German Preussen, the largest sailing ship ever built, traveled between Hamburg (Germany) and Iquique (Chile): the best average speed over a one way trip was 13.7 knots. Sailing boats need a large and costly crew, but they can also be controlled by computers. Automated sail handling was introduced already one century ago. In 2006 it was taken to the extreme by the Maltese Falcon, which can be operated by one man at the touch of a button. We have computer-controlled windmills, why not computer-controlled sailing cargo vessels?"
Ubuntu's Laptop Killing Bug Fixed 271
jeevesbond writes "Back in October of 2007 we discussed a bug that would dramatically shorten the life of laptops using Ubuntu. Ubuntu users will be glad to know that a fix has finally been released for Ubuntu versions 9.04, 8.10 and 8.04 (LTS). However, as this fix is not yet in the update repositories, anyone wishing to test it should follow these instructions for enabling the 'proposed' repository. Report your results on the original bug report. Happy testing!"
