49113869
submission
siliconbits writes:
The debate about tagging has been going for nearly a decade. The Slashdot community has been covering it a number of times.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/07/01/15/136219/the-need-for-a-tagging-standard, http://slashdot.org/story/05/01/04/0117245/folksonomies-in-delicious-and-flickr & http://slashdot.org/story/05/01/15/0015249/technorati-does-tags
But it seems that nobody has yet to come up with a foolproof solution to tagging. Even luminaries like Engadget, The Verge, Gizmodo and Slashdot all have different tagging schemes. Commontag, a venture launched in 2009 to tackle tagging, has proved to be all but a failure despite the backing of heavyweights like Freebase, Yahoo and Zemanta. Even Google gave up and purchased Freebase in July 2010.
Somehow I remain convinced that a unified, semantically-based solution, using a mix of folksonomy and taxonomy, is the Graal of tagging. I’d like to hear from fellow Slashdotters as to how they tackle the issue of creating and maintaining a tagging solution, regardless of the platform and the technologies being used in the backend.
22977164
submission
siliconbits writes:
AMD has quietly released a new range of memory products and recycled the Radeon brand, which moves from graphics processing units to memory modules. According to the product page, AMD Radeon for systems are "ideally" suited for the company's APU and CPU solutions and have been "tested to the highest industry standards on AMD platforms". Three different categories are currently on offer, roughly matching AMD's APU/CPU product categorisation; Entertainment, Ultra Pro and Enterprise. Oddly enough, the company is offering only 2GB modules with data rates at 1333.33MT/s and 1600MT/s, with 9-9-9 and 11-11-11 timings for the first two product ranges respectively.
22824122
submission
siliconbits writes:
One of the architects of US foreign policy under George W. Bush, General Michael Hayden, suggested that the US Government should consider creating a "Digital Blackwater" during an open conversation with Bloomberg's Allan Holmes and several other cybersecurity specialists on stage, during an event called the Aspen Security Forum. Blackwater refers to the US private military group founded in 1997 and which has been renamed as Xe Services LLC, a move possibly linked with a number of high controversies that arose after the company expanded its security-related operations into Iraq and Afghanistan.
Recruiting mercenaries, Hayden suggested “might be one of those big new ideas in terms of how we have to conduct ourselves in this new cyber domain,” referring to cyber warfare.
22652860
submission
siliconbits writes:
Selling Google+1 "likes" is gradually becoming a rather lucrative business, helped by cheap labour and ever-falling internet access worldwide; the trend is not unlike what we saw previously with Twitter & Digg during the days except that this has a more widespread implication for SEO and could turn the nascent social networking service into a massive headache for Google as many try to game the system. Google+1 selling sites like Googleplus1supply, buygoogleplus1 or Blackcatseo have cropped up during the last few months — amongst so many other websites — with the sole aim of selling Google+1 "likes" to publishers and businesses.
22541072
submission
siliconbits writes:
GE Global Research announced earlier today that it has managed to cram up to 500GB worth of data on a standard DVD-size disc, an increase in storage density of roughly 100x. What's more, the tech arm of conglomerate General Electric Company says that the storage solution will record data at the same speed as Blu-ray disks while increasing storage capacity by 25 times. The Blu-ray Disk Association says that the commonly available 12x speed Blu-ray writers have a maximum writing speed of up to 400Mbps (or 50MBps) which means that in theory, it would take just over three hours to fill that new holographic hard disks. GE has confirmed that its R&D and licensing team will be sampling the media to qualified partners that may be interested in licensing the technology.
22540046
submission
siliconbits writes:
Two months after Apple joined the Bluetooth special interest group board, the company launched the world's first truly mainstream Bluetooth 4.0 devices, namely the new Macbook Air & Mac Mini 2011 editions. The products came only one year after the official core specifications of Bluetooth 4.0 were adopted and it looks likely that Apple fast-tracked Bluetooth 4.0's adoption so that the forthcoming iPhone 5 can use this technology with at least one Apple product. This could mean that the manufacturer is considering giving up on NFC altogether, a technology embraced by all of its rivals. Thunderbolt Anyone?
22511188
submission
siliconbits writes:
A new worrying phenomenon has cropped up in China and Apple has been its first victim; meet the first fake Apple Stores, entire buildings that have been designed to look like the real ones. Chinese companies have long been known for being master copiers but this takes the concept of plagiarism and copying to a whole new level. As expected, everything, from the architecture of the building, the colour of the paint, to the products, the T-shirt worn by the staff down to the logo and the badge design come from Cupertino.
22489552
submission
siliconbits writes:
After having pwned Rupert Murdoch's flagship news website, thesun.co.uk, by redirecting its readers to a spoof front page and pilfer its email servers, Anonymous' unofficial mouthpiece, Sabu, has revealed that the group is "sitting on [the sun's & NOTW's] emails" with a press release from Anonymous & possibly more coming in a few hours.
While that website has already been taken down (you can check a screen capture of the web page here), the email bounty is likely to be potentially more damaging with Sabu releasing details of two of the Sun's top three employees, Rebekah Wade and Bill Akass, the former editors of the Sun and News of the World respectively as well as Lee Wells & Danny Rogers, Editorial Support Manager at News International and Sun Online Editorial Manager respectively, as a taster of what's coming next.
22027740
submission
siliconbits writes:
Despite countless WikiLeaks copycats popping up since the secret-spilling site first dumped its cache of State Department cables last year, the new generation of leaking sites has produced few WikiLeaks-sized scoops. So instead of waiting for insider whistleblowers, the hacker movement Anonymous hopes that a few outside intruders might start the leaks flowing.
21764444
submission
siliconbits writes:
Intel has laid down its roadmap in terms of computing performance for the next seven years in a press release; in addition, it revealed its expectations until 2027 in one deck of slides shown last week. The semiconductor wants a supercomputer capable of reaching 1000 Petaflops (or one Exaflop) to be unveiled by the end of 2018 (just in time for the company's 50th anniversary) with four Exaflops being the upper end target by the end of the decade.The slide that was shared with us also shows that Intel wants to smash the ZettaFlop barrier — that's one million Petaflops or one billion Teraflops — sometimes before 2030. This, Intel expects, will allow for significant strides in the field of Genomics research, as well as much more accurate weather prediction (assuming Skynet or the Matrix hasn't taken over the world).
21762946
submission
siliconbits writes:
US Electronics retailer Best Buy has been slow but steady in the fight to protect its Geek Squad trademark but some are wondering whether the 800-lbs gorilla of tech retailing sector is not going too far in its war to right some wrongs.
The word "Geek" is a century-old word that used to mean a fool or crazy but has, since the beginning of the 1980's, been associated with fans of technology in general and computers in particular.
That hasn't prevented a number of geek-related themed companies from being hit over the last decade by Best Buy's legal team including Geek Housecalls, Rent a Geek, Geek Rescue, Speak with A Geek and, not surprisingly, archrival Newegg.
21371080
submission
siliconbits writes:
We've learnt that AMD will open a new research and development center in Israel in the Tel-Aviv area, one which will be built around Graphic Remedy, the small startup they purchased in September 2010 and which specialises in development tools for heterogeneous computing and 3D graphics. Although the chip company hasn't published any press releases yet, the news is a clear indication that AMD sees its future (and its survival) in a more fragmented market where x86 is no longer the dominating platform.
21324286
submission
siliconbits writes:
Just 24 hours after Asus launched its padfone, ECS is toying with an idea that resembles the Asus PadFone, in a nutshell, a tablet that becomes a docking station for your smartphone just by slotting it at the back. We spoke earlier today to Jaryson Wu, project manager at ICE Computer, ECS' partner for the project and he presented us with a mock, non-working prototype.
21299368
submission
siliconbits writes:
You may recall a little group of Linux-loving chums called Linaro, which was formed almost a year ago in the hopes of speeding up Linux development. Today at Computex, the company's taking one step further with the announcement of the Origen development board. Based on Samsung's beefy Exynos 4210 dual core chipset, the kit packs all the essential ports — including HDMI, USB 2.0 host, SD slot, etc. — for keen developers to get their hands dirty on, and its base board is also removable to accommodate future chipsets. Potential buyers are told to keep an eye on Insignal, which will soon be offering the basic Origen package for $199, along with optional parts at an extra cost.
20388486
submission
siliconbits writes:
UK-based cable broadband provider Virgin Media announced this morning that it has begun testing internet speeds of up to 1.5Gbps in London using four startups from the "Silicon Roundabout" hub as lucky guinea pigs. The 1.5Gbps trial, Virgin Media claims, uses the same cable infrastructure and technology that powers the broadband service for millions of households in the UK and is even faster than the projected 1Gbps speed that South Korean ISPs are proposing to implement in 2012. Earlier this year, ARRIS announced that it is working with SK broadband to deliver speeds of up to 800Mbps by combining 16 Downstream channels.Link to Original Source
