more free stuff on Listia
|
Slashdot News for nerds, stuff that matters AirPlay Alternative Mirrors and Streams To TVs and PCs DeviceGuru writes "AirTame has developed an AirPlay-like protocol and HDMI dongle for 1080p video streaming and screen mirroring from PCs to PCs and TVs, and has substantially exceeded its $160,000 Indiegogo funding goal. AirTame streams from Windows, Mac, and Linux PCs to other PCs via apps at both ends, and to TVs via the HDMI dongle, and also offers a multicast mode for broadcasting to multiple PCs and TVs for use in classrooms or conferences. But at least initially, there won't be support for Android or iOS devices in the mix, due OS restrictions. The company says it plans to release AirTame's software, API, and protocol source code under a dual-license enabling free use with GPL-like restrictions, and paid use for commercial applications requiring proprietary modifications."
Read more of this story at Slashdot. Linux Voice Passes Its Crowdfunding Target super_rancid writes "The team that quit Linux Format magazine to launch a competitor that pledges 50% of profits back to the Free Software community, plus the release of all its content as CC-BY-SA after nine months, have hit their ambitious £90,000 Indiegogo crowdfunding target. The campaign now includes endorsements from Karen Sandler, Executive Director of the Gnome Foundation, Eben Upton, Founder of the Raspberry Pi and Simon Phipps, President of the OSI, with the first issue promised for February 2014."
Read more of this story at Slashdot. Ask Slashdot: To Publish Change Logs Or Not? Linnerd writes "A software company I work for has decided to no longer publish change logs when updated versions of the software are made available. A change log consists of sections pulled directly from the issue management system that is automatically processed into a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet can be sorted/viewed by many criteria, such as date of the fix, component affected, severity and more. There usually are a fair number of entries (sometimes more than 1000), because each update published contains all the accumulated changes made since some base release in the past and the change log has entries for everything from major bugs to minor improvements to documentation changes and spelling errors fixed. The main reasons for pulling the change logs was the fear of putting the software in a bad light and risking ridicule, especially from the competition. Although I can follow these arguments up to a point, I've personally always been more comfortable with software that had explicit and detailed change logs: Errors and bugs happen, whether they are communicated or not, and I'd rather know what was changed than blindly install some patch without knowing if it's relevant for the issues I'm trying to solve. What is your opinion? Should change logs / errors / bugs be communicated openly? How is this handled in the companies you work for? Can you provide publicly available references on the pros and cons of open and honest communication of changes and bug fixes, especially in commercial environments?"
Read more of this story at Slashdot. Nokia Takeover In Jeopardy Due To Alleged $3.4B Tax Bill In India New submitter Snotboble_ writes "The government of India apparently thinks Nokia owes a lot of taxes. They originally told Nokia that the company owed around $340 million, but now reports suggest it could be an order of magnitude higher. Such a large liability would have consequences for Nokia's sale of its handset division to Microsoft. From the article: 'Nokia Corp.'s tax troubles in India worsened Tuesday as local authorities ratcheted up the amount of tax they say the Finnish company may owe to more than $3 billion. Nokia's battle to defend itself from the claims—one of the latest surprise tax bills slapped on big foreign companies in India—could affect its plans to sell its handset division to Microsoft Corp. as the phone company's factory in India is part of the $7 billion deal.'"
Read more of this story at Slashdot. New Documentary Chronicles Road Tripping Scientists Promoting Reason Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Dennis Overbye reports in the NY Times that two years ago Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss set off on a barnstorming tour to save the world from religion and promote science. Their adventure is now the subject of The Unbelievers, a new documentary. 'If you think a road trip with a pair of intellectuals wielding laptops is likely to lack drama, you haven't been keeping up with the culture wars,' writes Overbye. The scientists are mobbed at glamorous sites like the Sydney Opera House. Inside, they sometimes encounter clueless moderators; outside, demonstrators condemning them to hellfire. At one event, a group of male Muslim protesters are confronted by counterprotesters chanting, 'Where are your women?' 'Travelogue shots, perky editing and some popular rock music, as well as interview bits with such supportive celebrities as Woody Allen, Cameron Diaz, Sarah Silverman and Ricky Gervais, shrewdly enliven the brainy — but accessible — discourse,' writes Gary Goldstein in the LA Times, 'but mostly the movie is an enjoyably high-minded love fest between two deeply committed intellectuals and the scads of atheists, secularists, free-thinkers, skeptics and activists who make up their rock star-like fan base.' The movie ends at the Reason Rally in Washington, billed as the largest convention of atheists in history. Dawkins looks out at the crowd standing in a light rain and pronounces it 'the most incredible sight I can remember ever seeing' and declares that too many people have been cowed out of coming out as atheists, secularists or agnostics. 'We are far more numerous than anybody realizes.'"
Read more of this story at Slashdot. Watch Out, Amazon: DHL Tests Drug-Delivery Drone Nerval's Lobster writes "Amazon is apparently not alone in its desire to use miniature drones to deliver packages. On the morning of Monday, Dec. 9, employees at the Bonn, Germany headquarters of package-delivery giant DHL challenged Amazon's plan for dominance of the skies by having medicine delivered from a local pharmacy via a mustard-yellow package-carrying helicopter the Germans dubbed 'Paketkopter.' The quad-rotored mini-drone flew a box of medicines from a launching point near the pharmacy, above traffic and across the Rhine River to DHL's headquarters just over a kilometer away. It made the flight in about two minutes, was unloaded quickly and returned to the launch team near the pharmacy. Amazon has owned total mindshare of the still-imaginary drone-based package delivery market since CEO Jeff Bezos gushed about his plans for Amazon PrimeAir during a TV interview last week. The plan generated immediate controversy due to the negative image of drones following heavy use for surveillance and targeted anti-personnel strikes by the U.S. military in Afghanistan and Iraq. Within the United States, the FAA, FTC and a host of consumer-protection groups objected to the possibility that thousands of autonomous drones would be hovering over U.S. cities, potentially invading the privacy and endangering the lives of those who might run afoul of either cameras or rotors."
Read more of this story at Slashdot. High-Frequency Trading For Your Private Data New submitter fierman writes "In a work to be presented at the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (ISOC NDSS'14), INRIA researchers show the privacy risks of Real-Time Bidding (PDF) and High-Frequency Trading for selling advertisement spaces. Combining Real-Time Bidding and Cookie Matching, advertisers can significantly improve their tracking and profiling capabilities. Both technologies are already prevalent on the Web. The research discusses the value of users' private data (browsing history) retrieved directly from the advertisers, leveraging an exposed information leak in RTB systems. Advertisers will pay about $0.0005 to display a targeted ad to a single user, while at the same time acquiring information about them. The research also shows evidence of price variation with users' profiles, physical location, time of day and content of visited sites."
Read more of this story at Slashdot. Private Mars One Mission Contracts Lockheed For Exploratory Mission coondoggie writes "Private Mars mission planners said today that Lockheed Martin is on board to build the spacecraft that would land a technology demonstration robot on the Red Planet by 2018. The Mars One group ultimately wants to establish a human outpost on Mars. The lander robot would use technology Lockheed previously built for NASA's Phoenix lander, which touched down on Mars in 2008. The Mars One lander will evaluate the use of the Phoenix design for the Mars One mission and identify any modifications that are necessary to meet future requirements. In addition, the mission would go a long way toward determining the cost and schedule of future missions."
Read more of this story at Slashdot. JPMorgan Files Patent Application On 'Bitcoin Killer' Velcroman1 writes "Banking giant JPMorgan Chase has filed a patent application for an electronic commerce system that sounds remarkably like Bitcoin — but never mentions the controversial, Internet-only currency. The patent application was filed in early August but made publicly available only at the end of November; it describes a 'method and system for processing Internet payments using the electronic funds transfer network.' The system would allow people to pay bills anonymously over the Internet through an electronic transfer of funds — just like Bitcoin. It would allow for micropayments without processing fees — just like bitcoin. And it could kill off wire transfers through companies like Western Union — just like Bitcoin. There are 18,126 words in the patent application. 'Bitcoin' is not one of them."
Read more of this story at Slashdot. Open Source 'Wasn't Available' Two Years Ago, Says UK Gov't IT Project Chief An anonymous reader writes "The head of delivery for the UK's Department for Work and Pensions' flagship welfare reform project, Universal Credit, has said that the department didn't adopt open source and web-based technologies at the beginning of the project because 'such things weren't available' two and a half years ago. Howard Shiplee told the Work and Pensions Committee this week that the department is now using open source technologies in its enhanced version of Universal Credit, which was initially developed by the Government Digital Service (GDS) and will be rolled out nationally by 2017 for most claimants. The existing system being used in pathfinder pilots and developed by the likes of IBM, HP and Accenture will be largely be replaced by the digital version."
Read more of this story at Slashdot. Google's Plan To Kill the Corporate Network mask.of.sanity writes "Google has revealed details on its Beyond Corp project to scrap the notion of a corporate network and move to a zero-trust model. The company perhaps unsurprisingly considers the traditional notion of perimeter defense and its respective gadgetry as a dead duck, and has moved to authenticate and authorize its 42,000 staff so they can access Google HQ from anywhere (video). Google also revealed it was perhaps the biggest Apple shop in the world, with 43,000 devices deployed and staff only allowed to use Windows with a supporting business case."
Read more of this story at Slashdot. Coldest Spot On Planet Earth Identified Thorfinn.au sends this news from NASA: "What is the coldest place on Earth? It is a high ridge in Antarctica on the East Antarctic Plateau where temperatures in several hollows can dip below minus 133.6 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 92 degrees Celsius) on a clear winter night. Scientists made the discovery while analyzing the most detailed global surface temperature maps to date, developed with data from remote sensing satellites including the new Landsat 8, a joint project of NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). Ted Scambos, lead scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., joined a team of researchers reporting the findings Monday at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco. Researchers analyzed 32 years' worth of data from several satellite instruments. They found temperatures plummeted to record lows dozens of times in clusters of pockets near a high ridge between Dome Argus and Dome Fuji, two summits on the ice sheet known as the East Antarctic Plateau. The new record of minus 93.2 C was set Aug. 10, 2010."
Read more of this story at Slashdot. Firefox 26 Arrives With Click-To-Play For Java Plugins An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla today officially launched Firefox 26 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Additions include Click-to-Play turned on by default for all Java plugins, more seamless updates on Windows, and a new Home design for Android. Firefox 26 has been released over on Firefox.com and all existing users should be able to upgrade to it automatically. As always, the Android version is trickling out slowly on Google Play. Release notes are here: desktop and mobile."
Read more of this story at Slashdot. Gift Idea: Custom Photomosaics With AndreaMosaic and PhotoGrabber Bennettt Haselton has a gift idea for this year that needn't necessarily cost you any money (if you have a color printer available), though as he points out there are ways to invest in a higher-quality result. The gift? A unique picture created with a few pieces of free software and a bit of your time. Bennett writes: "You can use these little-known free programs to create a photomosaic of a friend's wedding photo or other favorite photograph, for a uniquely personal gift that doesn't cost much but can still delight. Follow these steps to use the programs most effectively and get the best results." Read on for the rest.
Read more of this story at Slashdot. Ask Slashdot: Practical Bitrot Detection For Backups? An anonymous reader writes "There is a lot of advice about backing up data, but it seems to boil down to distributing it to several places (other local or network drives, off-site drives, in the cloud, etc.). We have hundreds of thousands of family pictures and videos we're trying to save using this advice. But in some sparse searching of our archives, we're seeing bitrot destroying our memories. With the quantity of data (~2 TB at present), it's not really practical for us to examine every one of these periodically so we can manually restore them from a different copy. We'd love it if the filesystem could detect this and try correcting first, and if it couldn't correct the problem, it could trigger the restoration. But that only seems to be an option for RAID type systems, where the drives are colocated. Is there a combination of tools that can automatically detect these failures and restore the data from other remote copies without us having to manually examine each image/video and restore them by hand? (It might also be reasonable to ask for the ability to detect a backup drive with enough errors that it needs replacing altogether.)"
Read more of this story at Slashdot. Newsfeed display by CaRP |
|
CNN.com - Technology CNN.com delivers up-to-the-minute news and information on the latest top stories, weather, entertainment, politics and more. 200,000 people apply to live on Mars Mars One says it is moving along with its plan to send four lucky Earthlings to colonize the Red Planet. The catch: They won't ever come back. Google Glass users fight privacy fears Carolyn Capern and her business partner Greg Trujillo were eating breakfast in a Panera bakery in Florida recently, each wearing Google Glasses but actually immersed in their smartphones when they were accosted by an angry stranger. 200,000 people apply to live on Mars Mars One says it is moving along with its plan to send four lucky Earthlings to colonize the Red Planet. The catch: They won't ever come back. Report: Feds spied on 'World of Warcraft' Spies with surveillance agencies in the United States and United Kingdom may have spent time undercover as orcs and blood elves, infiltrating video games like "World of Warcraft" in a hunt for terrorists "hiding in plain sight" online. Where they found the 'god particle' Scientists and technicians are hard at work upgrading the machinery so that the $10 billion dollar Large Hadron Collider can ramp back up in 2015 at unprecedented energies. This pic is actually an iPad painting Watching digital artist Kyle Lambert's stunning photo-realistic iPad paintings emerge from a blank screen is an awe-inspiring experience. The image of Morgan Freeman in the video above, created from a picture by Scott Gries, is so rich in detail that it is difficult to believe that you aren't looking at a photograph. Google Glass users fight privacy fears Carolyn Capern and her business partner Greg Trujillo were eating breakfast in a Panera bakery in Florida recently, each wearing Google Glasses but actually immersed in their smartphones when they were accosted by an angry stranger. Bouncing camera ball could save lives The Bounce Imaging Explorer is a small black probe about the size of a baseball, fixed with an array of sensors and cameras that can be thrown or dropped into dangerous environments Can airships revolutionize transportation Commercial development of the Arctic's natural resources has so far been near to impossible, but transportation throughout the inhospitable region may soon be revolutionized. Mars Curiosity rover finds life-supporting chemicals Curious about life on Mars? NASA's rover Curiosity has now given scientists the strongest evidence to date that the environment on the Red Planet could have supported life billions of years ago. Report: Government spied on 'Warcraft' Spies with surveillance agencies in the United States and United Kingdom may have spent time undercover as orcs and blood elves, infiltrating video games like "World of Warcraft" in a hunt for terrorists "hiding in plain sight" online. Tourist trips to the Moon by 2043? Space excursions beyond sub-orbital flights could become if companies like Virgin Galactic realize their ambitions. This picture is actually an iPad painting Watching digital artist Kyle Lambert's stunning photo-realistic iPad paintings emerge from a blank screen is an awe-inspiring experience. The image of Morgan Freeman in the video above, created from a picture by Scott Gries, is so rich in detail that it is difficult to believe that you aren't looking at a photograph. Gadget gifts your kids will love Technology touches all ages. Here are some gadgets aimed at the 18-and-under set. Ryan Seacrest wants to pimp your iPhone Steve Jobs. Bill Gates. Mark Zuckerberg. Newsfeed display by CaRP |
|
CNN.com - Science & Space CNN.com delivers up-to-the-minute news and information on the latest top stories, weather, entertainment, politics and more. Mars Science Lab launch delayed two years NASA's launch of the Mars Science Laboratory -- hampered by technical difficulties and cost overruns -- has been delayed until the fall of 2011, NASA officials said at a news conference Thursday in Washington. Shuttle lands at California air base NASA officials Sunday waved off the first opportunity for space shuttle Endeavour to return to Earth, citing poor weather conditions. iReporters watch planets, moon align Inspiration for 'Contact' still listening From a remote valley in Northern California, Jill Tarter is listening to the universe. Indian lunar orbiter hit by heat rise Scientists have switched off several on-board instruments to halt rising temperatures inside India's first unmanned lunar spacecraft. Newsfeed display by CaRP |
