Comment The Imagineers of War by Sharon Weinberger (Score 1) 312
This is a great piece about the history of (D)ARPA.
Airship Company Gets First Civilian Customer 81
Zothecula writes "Hybrid Air Vehicles has recently achieved two massive commercial wins that seem to indicate that the airship has a very rosy future indeed. The aircraft's versatility plus an ability to stay airborne for 21 days enabled HAV to win a 517million contract (€370million) to supply a Long-Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle (LEMV) to the U.S. Army for deployment in Afghanistan starting in 2012. Whilst the LEMV is a relatively small vehicle designed for surveillance, HAV has now announced a civil customer for their heavy-lift variant."
Facebook To Make Facebook Credits Mandatory For Games 116
An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from TechCrunch:
"Facebook has confirmed that it is indeed making Facebook Credits mandatory for Games, with the rule going into effect on July 1 2011. Facebook says that Credits will be the exclusive way for users to get their 'real money' into a game, but developers are still allowed to keep their own in-game currencies (FarmBucks, FishPoints, whatever). For example, Zynga can charge you 90 Facebook Credits for 75 CityCash in CityVille. ... The company acknowledges that some developers may not be pleased with the news, explaining this is why it is announcing the news five months in advance, so it can 'have an open conversation with developers.' The rule only applies to Canvas games (games that use Facebook Connect aren't affected), and while it's games only at this part, Facebook says that it eventually would like to see all apps using Facebook Credits. It's a move that's been a long time coming — there has been speculation that Facebook would do this for a year now, spurring plenty of angst in the developer community."
Kongregate App Pulled From Android Market 139
itwbennett writes "Last week Google took a page from Apple's book and pulled the Arcade by Kongregate app from the Android Market for violating its terms of service. In particular, the part that forbids distributing 'any Product whose primary purpose is to facilitate the distribution of Products outside of the Market.' As Kongregate's Jim Greer explained to Joystiq, the app is essentially a custom web browser that loads in a Flash game from the mobile version of Kongregate. Plus, it will cache the game so you can play offline. And this may be the feature that got it yanked, speculates Ryan Kim at GigaOm."
Journal Journal: Big Assange News!
[yawn] Assange is releasing more documents. Maybe these will not be doctored.
How To Grow a Head 355
Taco Cowboy writes "British scientists have found a mechanism within our gene sequence that allows the growing of a new head — with brains, etc. The gene is tentatively known as smed-prep, and the information contained in smed-prep also makes the new cells appear in the right place and organise themselves into working structures."
Project-Natal-Style Interface For Mobile Phones 49
An anonymous reader writes "The University of Tokyo is developing a Project-Natal-style interface for mobile phones, which allows you to interact with a phone by waving your finger around. Members of the Ishikawa-Komuro Lab have used a high-frame-rate camera to track the motion of a finger and recognise input gestures. The touchless interface can be used to navigate around a phone's screen and even to type."
Why the First Cowboy To Draw Always Gets Shot 398
cremeglace writes "Have you ever noticed that the first cowboy to draw his gun in a Hollywood Western is invariably the one to get shot? Nobel-winning physicist Niels Bohr did, once arranging mock duels to test the validity of this cinematic curiosity. Researchers have now confirmed that people indeed move faster if they are reacting, rather than acting first."
Yellowstone Supervolcano Larger Than First Thought 451
drewtheman writes "New studies of the plumbing that feeds the Yellowstone supervolcano in Wyoming's Yellowstone National Park shows the plume and the magma chamber under the volcano are larger than first thought and contradicts claims that only shallow hot rock exists. University of Utah research professor of geophysics Robert Smith led four separate studies that verify a plume of hot and molten rock at least 410 miles deep that rises at an angle from the northwest."
Wi-Fi Patent Victory Earns CSIRO $200 Million 267
bennyboy64 writes "iTnews reports the patent battle between Australia's CSIRO and 14 of the world's largest technology companies has gained the research organization $200 million from out of court settlements. CSIRO executive director of commercial, Nigel Poole, said the CSIRO were wanting to license their technology further, stating that he 'urged' companies using it to come forward and seek a license. 'We believe that there are many more companies that are using CSIRO's technology and it's our desire to license the technology further,' Poole said.'We would urge companies that are currently selling devices that have 802.11 a,g or n to contact CSIRO and to seek a license because we believe they are using our technology.'"
Apple Issues Firmware Upgrade For MacBook Pro 52
Lucas123 writes "After declining comment on an apparent downgrade to the serial ATA hard drive interface in its new MacBook Pros, from 3Gbps to 1.5Gbps, Apple today issued a firmware upgrade to fix a problem reported by 'a small number of customers' using drives based on the latest SATA specification. Apple warned that it has not shipped drives operating at the higher-speed specification, saying, 'While this update allows drives to use transfer rates greater than 1.5Gbit/sec, Apple has not qualified or offered these drives for Mac notebooks and their use is unsupported.'"
SQL in a Nutshell 86
stoolpigeon writes "The cover of SQL in a Nutshell sports a chameleon, the little lizard well known for its ability to blend in just about anywhere. This is a great choice for the Structured Query Language. SQL has been around since the seventies, helping developers interact with the ubiquitous relational database management system. Thirty some years later, SQL grinds away in the background of just about any interactive web site and nameless other technologies. New alternatives are popping up constantly but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that SQL is going to be around for a long time. Anyone interacting with an RDBMS is in all likelihood going to need to use SQL at some point. For those who do, who also want a handy desktop reference, SQL in a Nutshell has been there for the last 9 years. The SQL language itself has not stood still over those years, and neither have the products that use SQL, and so now the book is available in a third edition." Read on for the rest of JR's review.
Project Management For Beginners? 168
lawpoop writes "At my current workplace, I'm tasked with creating a rather complicated and metastasizing web-database application. I've mostly been the sole 'IT guy' at my workplaces in the past, so I've never had to, nor taken the time, to learn proper project management routines — code comments mostly got me through it. Now for this project, it's getting somewhat hairy and I'm sensing that I need to start doing things in a more organized manner. What resources would you direct me to? Books? (I wouldn't mind buying one good one.) Websites? What do proper 'specs' look like? Must I use UML (seems complicated and unintuitive) or a simpler ER diagram? For this job, I just need to provide better estimates for completing features, but what will I need if/when I would be working with a team?"
