| How To Talk Like a CIO May 17th 2013, 00:03 itwbennett writes "Today's CIOs speak business-buzzwords as a second language. And there's a good reason for that. There is a trend among CIOs to distance themselves from being regarded as technologists and to put themselves forward as business strategists. It boils down to one simple rule: Just as you should never be the first to mention compensation in the interview process, you should never be the first to break out the tech jargon in a business setting." Read more of this story at Slashdot.     |  | Google Betting Its Google+ Systems Know What's Best For You May 16th 2013, 23:19 Nerval's Lobster writes "But at this year's Google I/O conference in San Francisco, Google announced that it has a plan to make Google Plus users more engaged, courtesy of new features backed by a handful of data-analytics tricks. Google Plus postings now feature Google-generated hashtags that, when clicked, direct the user to related content from across their network. From a backend-infrastructure perspective, that sort of thing leans heavily on Google's semantic analysis and the ability to make the right connections between various pieces of data. Google Plus will also automatically highlight certain photos out of dozens or even hundreds of shots. Say you went on vacation to India and took some photos of your significant other in front of the Taj Mahal; Google Plus will leverage its database of information to recognize that as a prominent landmark and pluck those photos out of the pile as 'special.' In the words of that posting on the Google+ Blog: 'Your darkroom is now a Google data center.' Are all these nifty, analytics-intensive features enough to change the larger fortunes of Google Plus? That's the big question. Google has a handsome-looking platform, one that performs certain activities with a high degree of polish and zip—but is that enough to counter Facebook?" Read more of this story at Slashdot.     | | Ask Slashdot: Dealing With a Fear of Technological Change? May 16th 2013, 22:36 An anonymous reader writes "Despite the fact that I am fairly young at twenty-four years old, people see me as rather 'old school.' I regularly use Lynx, IRC, Pine, have many consoles open, and am currently typing this on an older plain black laptop that has a matte 4:3 display and no chiclet keys. As the days progress, I am coming to the realization that the 'old school' computing world that I grew up in is slowly fading away and a new world of Windows 8, Web 3.0, tablets, smart televisions, and social networking is starting to become fairly common. If there is anything I have learned, it is that most humans have a desire to throw out the old and accept the new without any sort of hesitation. Like many Slashdot users (I am sure you know who you are), I do not accept the new as easily as I probably should. How have you learned to adapt and accept things that are new and different in the world of technology and computers? If not, what are some effective strategies to utilize to keep these kids off my lawn?" Read more of this story at Slashdot.     | | Rice Professor Predicts Humans Out of Work In 30 Years May 16th 2013, 21:54 kkleiner writes "Rice University professor Moshe Vardi has been evaluating technological progress in computer science and artificial intelligence and has recently concluded that robots will replace most, if not all, human labor by 2045, putting millions out of work. The issue is whether AI enables humans to do more or less. But perhaps the real question about technological unemployment of labor isn't 'How will people do nothing?' but 'What kind of work will they do instead?'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.     | | Ubuntu Developers Revisit Replacing Firefox With Chromium May 16th 2013, 21:15 Via Phoronix comes news that Ubuntu is revisiting replacing Firefox with Chromium as the default browser. Reasons include that Chromium is the basis of Ubuntu Touch and their new web apps platform, and using a single browser for all versions of Ubuntu would simplify maintenance. From the article: "Expressed shortcomings of switching to Google's Chromium open-source web-browser is that data migration from Firefox isn't too obvious, extensions don't migrate between browsers, Chromium isn't supported on all architectures (e.g. PowerPC), the browser doesn't work with the Orca screen reader and doesn't integrate well for accessibility reasons, there is no native PDF plug-in, and Chromium is said to have worse performance under memory pressure. There were also some concerns expressed about differences with WebApps in Chromium. ... It looks like the switch to Chromium will happen in the name of a better user experience for the desktop with Chrome/Chromium now arguably surpassing Firefox in its features and performance while pushing Chromium as the default leads to a more consistent experience across Ubuntu form factors from phones/tablets to the desktop." The Ubuntu community will have their input solicited as the next step. The Ubuntu Developer Summit session has notes and a full video of today's discussion. Read more of this story at Slashdot.     | | Florida DOT Cuts Yellow Light Delay Ignoring Federal Guidelines, Citations Soar May 16th 2013, 20:33 New submitter zlives writes in with news that Florida's DOT changed some language in their yellow light timing regulations, leading to a decrease in the yellow delay. Especially at lights with red light cameras. "From the article: 'Red light cameras generated more than $100 million in revenue last year in approximately 70 Florida communities, with 52.5 percent of the revenue going to the state. The rest is divided by cities, counties, and the camera companies. In 2013, the cameras are on pace to generate $120 million.' I wonder what the camera company cut is?" At least one areas has promised to undo the reduction now that they have been caught. Read more of this story at Slashdot.     | | Dust Devils Scour Surface of Mars May 16th 2013, 19:49 astroengine writes "Dust devils are a well-known atmospheric phenomena on Mars, and as these new HiRISE observations show, the devilish vorticies can carve beautiful patterns in the Martian dust. What's more — in side-by-side comparisons of observations of the same Mars region years apart — it appears that the active Mars atmosphere acts like an Etch A Sketch, rubbing out the dust devils' tracks, only for the dust devils to make brand new tracks years later." Read more of this story at Slashdot.     | | LulzSec Hackers Sentenced To Short Prison Terms May 16th 2013, 19:07 mask.of.sanity writes with news of the jail sentences for three members of LulzSec. From the article: "Three members of the hacktivist group LulzSec have been sentenced to a total of six years in prison. Ryan Ackroyd, Jake Davis and Mustafa al-Bassam were charged with attacks on the Serious Organised Crime Agency, Sony, Nintendo, 20th Century Fox and governments and police forces in a 50-day spree in the summer of 2011. Davis was sentenced to 24 months in a young offender's institution and he will serve half of the sentence. Al-Bassam received a 20-month sentence, suspended for two years and 300 hours unpaid work. Ackroyd was given a 30-month sentence; he will serve half. Cleary also pleaded guilty to possession of child abuse images following a second arrest on October 4, 2012. He will be sentenced at separate hearing." The Guardian has a short article on the remaining loose ends in the story of LulzSec. Read more of this story at Slashdot.     | | Vitsoe 620 Project di Dieter Rams May 16th 2013, 18:49 STYLE | Interni d’autore firmati Dieter Rams Dieter Rams, Wiesbaden, 20 maggio 1932.il suo approccio al design è noto con la frase: «meno, ma meglio» Da Braun
al design d’interni Dieter Rams è conosciuto come uno dei designer più influenti della nostra epoca. Dagli anni 60 in poi, come responsabile del ha disegnato veri e propri oggetti di culto che, negli anni recenti, hanno ispirato il lavoro di Jonathan Ive e dei più grandi successi commerciali di Apple. «Good design is as little design as possible» Il contributo al design di Dieter Rams non è rimasto confinato solo agli elettrodomestici di consumo ma anche agli elementi d’arredo. Quella nella foto è denominata 620 Chair Program. Una poltrona singola o combinabile con altri elementi prodotta da Vitsoe e firmata Dieter Rams. Una poltrona, molteplici forme I singoli elementi, disponibili in diversi colorazioni, sono modulari e possono essere unite per comporre un divano. L’unica nota dolente è il prezzo. Ogni pezzo parte da un minimo di 3.500 dollari. Non per tutte le tasche. Ma per un pezzo di design del genere non ci si può aspettare meno. Potete acquistarlo qui.  | | Linux is an Obvious Choice for Automating the Beer-Brewing Process (Video) May 16th 2013, 18:25 Linus Torvalds, Jon 'maddog' Hall, and many other names closely associated with Linux are also closely associated with beer. (Ed. note: I have personally watched them associate with beer, and may have even joined them.) It comes as no surprise, therefore, when Linux advocate and LinuxAutomation.org founder Kurt Forsberg talks about using Linux to control his beer brewing. Kurt is a strong believer in Linux Automation who talks about home thermostats, sprinklers, and many other application, "anything you can automate..." but, he adds, "we spend all our time brewing beer so we haven't explored many of those yet." He says this with a big smile, of course. And if you want to keep up with Linux Automation on Faceboook, go ahead; like everyone + dog they have a Facebook page. Read more of this story at Slashdot.     | | Leaked Microsoft Video Parodies Chrome Ad May 16th 2013, 18:01 First time accepted submitter Stratus311 writes "An article from The Verge shows a video leaked from Microsoft that parodies Google's Chrome ad. From the article: 'Microsoft and Google have been locked in a war of words over a YouTube Windows Phone app, but in the midst of the arguments a new Scroogled ad has emerged. Designed to be an internal-only video, a copy has somehow managed to find its way onto the web right in the middle of Google's I/O developer conference.'" "Somehow" leaked. Read more of this story at Slashdot.     | | Paul Otellini: Intel Lost the iPhone Battle, But It Could Win the Mobile War May 16th 2013, 17:46 kenekaplan writes "In an interview with The Atlantic before stepping down as CEO of Intel, Paul Otellini reflects on his decision not to make a chip for the then yet released iPhone. 'The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,' he said. 'My gut told me to say yes.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.   | | After Paul Otellini: Intel Lost the IPhone Battle, But It Could Win the Mobile War May 16th 2013, 17:46 kenekaplan writes "In an interview with The Atlantic before stepping down as CEO of Intel, Paul Otellini reflects on his decision not to make a chip for the then yet released iPhone. 'The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,' he said. 'My gut told me to say yes.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.     | | Apache OpenOffice Downloaded 50 Million Times In a Year May 16th 2013, 17:32 An anonymous reader writes with this quick bite from the H: "Just a few days after the one year anniversary of the release of the first version of OpenOffice from the Apache Foundation (Apache OpenOffice 3.4) on 8 May 2012, the project can now boast 50 million downloads of the Open Source office suite. 10 million of those downloads happened since the beginning of March. In contrast, LibreOffice claimed it had 15 million unique downloads of its office suite in all of 2012." Read more of this story at Slashdot.     | | Water Isolated for Over a Billion Years Found Under Ontario May 16th 2013, 17:06 ananyo writes "Scientists working 2.4 kilometers below Earth's surface in a Canadian mine have tapped a source of water that has remained isolated for at least a billion years. The researchers say they do not yet know whether anything has been living in it all this time, but the water contains high levels of methane and hydrogen — the right stuff to support life. Micrometer-scale pockets in minerals billions of years old can hold water that was trapped during the minerals' formation. But no source of free-flowing water passing through interconnected cracks or pores in Earth's crust has previously been shown to have stayed isolated for more than tens of millions of years (paper abstract)." Read more of this story at Slashdot.     | | Irish Judge Orders 'The Internet' To Delete Video May 16th 2013, 16:35 New submitter edanto writes "A young Irish man wrongly accused of jumping from a taxi without paying the fare has secured a judgement from an Irish court ordering the video removed from the entire Internet. Experts from Google, Youtube, Facebook, and others must tell the court in two weeks if this is technically possible. The thing is, the video is accurate, it is only a comment that wrongly identified Eoin McKeogh as the fare-jumper in the video that is inaccurate. It's not clear if the judge has made any orders about the comment." Read more of this story at Slashdot.     | | Groklaw Turns Ten May 16th 2013, 16:03 Founded just to cover the SCO/Caldera UNIX lawsuits back in 2003, Groklaw has proven itself a great place to read and discuss many of the major tech trials since. And today, it turns ten: "We made it. A decade of Groklaw as of today. Who'd a thunk it? Not I. When I started, I thought I'd do a little fiddling around for a couple of months to learn how to blog. But then all you guys showed up and taught me some important things that I didn't know, and vice versa I hope, and here we are, on our 10th anniversary, still going strong, together on a very different path than I originally imagined. The important moment for me was when I realized the potential we had as a group and decided to try to surf this incredible wave all of you created by contributing your skills and time. I saw we could work as a group, explain technology to the legal world so lawyers and judges could make better decisions, and explain the legal process to techies, so they could avoid troubles and also could be enabled to work effectively to defend Free and Open Source Software from cynical 'Intellectual Property' attacks from the proprietary world." This despite a smear campaign by SCO and nearly shutting down in 2009. And it's archived in the Library of Congress. Read more of this story at Slashdot.     | | Used Game To Survive? EA Plans To Drop Online Pass May 16th 2013, 15:30 Krazy Kanuck writes "Introduced in 2010, Online Pass was marketed as a way to 'preserve' online content or DLC as titles were sold in the used game market. Many saw this as a way to cut out the second hand game market. EA has now decided to end this program 'partly because the players didn't like it.' Unfortunately this appears to only be for future released games, those previously released will still be subject to this feature. Activision and Ubisoft still use this form of content control, it will be interesting to see if they follow suit." Read more of this story at Slashdot.     | | Newegg Defeats Alcatel-Lucent in Third Patent Win This Year May 16th 2013, 14:51 Newegg's policy of not backing down from patent trolls, even ones as large as Alcatel-Lucent, continues to result in victory. Earlier this year, Overstock and Newegg successfully defended themselves with a jury invalidating Alcatel-Lucent's main patent used to force companies as large as Amazon to settle. Naturally, Alcatel-Lucent appealed, but the appeals court quickly ruled in favor of Newegg and Overstock.com. From Ars: "Federal Circuit judges typically take months, and occasionally years, to review the patent appeals that come before them. Briefs in this case were submitted last year, and oral arguments were held last Friday, May 10. The three-judge panel upheld Newegg's win (PDF), without comment — in just three days. ... Alcatel-Lucent dropped the case over its other two patents, desperate to get back the '131 patent that Newegg and Overstock had killed at trial. 'If they had been able to revive this patent, the litigation machine would have continued on,' Reines told Reuters after the win." Read more of this story at Slashdot.     | | Google's House of Cards May 16th 2013, 14:13 theodp writes "In 'The Design That Conquered Google,' The New Yorker's Matt Buchanan reports that 'cards' — modeled after real cards — are set to become one of the dominant ways in which Google presents certain types of information to users. The power of a card as a visual-organization metaphor according to Matias Duarte (lead designer of Android), is that 'it makes very clear the atomic unity of things; it's still flexible while creating a kind of regularity.' Hey, maybe that Bill Atkinson was really on to something with that dadgum HyperCard software of his back in the '80s!" Read more of this story at Slashdot.     | | Honeynet Project Researchers Build Publicly Available ICS Honeynet May 16th 2013, 13:30 msm1267 writes "Conpot, short for Control Honeypot, is one of the first publicly available honeypots for industrial control systems (ICS) and SCADA gear. Built by two researchers from the Honeynet Project, the hope is that others will take what they started, deploy it on their own critical infrastructure networks and share the findings. 'The main goal is to make this kind of technology available for a general audience,' said Lukas Rist, one of the developers. 'Not just for security researchers, but also for people who are sysadmins setting up ICS systems who have no clue what could happen and want to see malware attacks against their systems and not put them in any danger.'" Unlike previous ICS Honeypots, this one simulates the control systems rather than requiring that you happen to own an actual industrial control system. Read more of this story at Slashdot.     | | Google and NASA Snap Up D-Wave Quantum Computer May 16th 2013, 12:48 ananyo writes "D-Wave, the small company that sells the world's only commercial quantum computer, has just bagged an impressive new customer: a collaboration between Google, NASA and the non-profit Universities Space Research Association. The three organizations have joined forces to install a D-Wave Two, the computer company's latest model, in a facility launched by the collaboration — the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab at NASA's Ames Research Center. The lab will explore areas such as machine learning — useful for functions such as language translation, image searches and voice-command recognition. The Google-led collaboration is only the second customer to buy computer from D-Wave — Lockheed Martin was the first." Read more of this story at Slashdot.     | | Google Demands Microsoft Pull YouTube App For WP8 May 16th 2013, 12:07 First time accepted submitter exomondo writes "Google has given Microsoft until May 22nd to pull their Windows Phone 8 YouTube app from the marketplace and disable it on customer devices. It not only includes a built-in ad blocker but also allows users to download videos and doesn't impose device-specific streaming restrictions outlined in the YouTube Terms Of Service. A Microsoft spokesperson said in part: 'YouTube is consistently one of the top apps downloaded by smartphone users on all platforms, but Google has refused to work with us to develop an app on par with other platforms. Since we updated the YouTube app to ensure our mutual customers a similar YouTube experience, ratings and feedback have been overwhelmingly positive. We'd be more than happy to include advertising but need Google to provide us access to the necessary APIs. In light of Larry Page's comments today calling for more interoperability and less negativity, we look forward to solving this matter together for our mutual customers.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.     | | Canada Courts, Patent Office Warns Against Trying To Patent Mathematics May 16th 2013, 09:27 davecb writes "The Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO) has recently published two notices for patent examiners relating to patent interpretation, and in particular computer-related/business method type patents saying: 'for example, what appears on its face to be a claim for an "art" or a "process" may, on a proper construction, be a claim for a mathematical formula and therefore not patentable subject matter.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.     | | Add Conversations to Any Site with Moot Forums May 16th 2013, 07:12 
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SponsorsProfessional Web Icons for Your Websites and Applications  | | A Peek At Google's Software-Defined Network May 16th 2013, 07:07 CowboyRobot writes "At the recent 2013 Open Networking Summit, Google Distinguished Engineer Amin Vahdat presented 'SDN@Google: Why and How', in which he described Google's 'B4' SDN network, one of the few actual implementations of software-defined networking. Google has deployed sets of Network Controller Servers (NCSs) alongside the switches, which run an OpenFlow agent with a 'thin level of control with all of the real smarts running on a set of controllers on an external server but still co-located.' By using SDN, Google hopes to increase efficiency and reduce cost. Unlike computation and storage, which benefit from an economy of scale, Google's network is getting much more expensive each year." Read more of this story at Slashdot.     | | Inside One of the World's Largest Data Brokers May 16th 2013, 04:35 itwbennett writes "Contrary to recent reports, data broker Acxiom is not planning to give consumers access to all the information they've collected on us. That would be too great a challenge for the giant company, says spokesperson Alexandra Levy. Privacy blogger Dan Tynan recently spoke with Jennifer Barrett Glasgow, Chief Privacy Officer at Acxiom (she claims to be the very first CPO) about how the company collects information and what they do with it. This should give you some small measure of comfort: 'We don't know that you bought a blue shirt from Lands End. We just know the kinds of products you are interested in. We're trying to get a reasonably complete picture of your household and what the individuals who live there like to do,' says Glasgow." Read more of this story at Slashdot.     | |
