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Contact Customer Support? (5 points, Insightful) by eldavojohn on Friday July 10, @10:22AM attached to Getting a Classic PC Working After 25 Years? Re:I'm always taken back by this (5 points, Insightful) by Marble1972 on Saturday July 11, @06:11AM attached to Memristor Minds, the Future of Artificial Intelligence Impressive (5 points, Funny) by rjstanford on Friday July 10, @10:30AM attached to Getting a Classic PC Working After 25 Years? Re:Contact Customer Support? (5 points, Informative) by bentfork on Friday July 10, @10:30AM attached to Getting a Classic PC Working After 25 Years? Re:Fertility (5 points, Funny) by DinDaddy on Friday July 10, @02:24PM attached to Sperm Travels Faster Toward Attractive Females
Poll I hold paper to vertical surfaces by preference with
Magnets.
Thumbtacks.
Blu-Tac, putty, or similar.
Spring-loaded clips.
Glue.
The force of my mind alone.
Something else entirely, or a combination of above.
[ Results | Polls ]
Comments:257 | Votes:13530

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Dolibarr ERP/CRM - Great
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This is not free software: the source code isn't available, nothing in the repo...
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09/07/11/1155220 story
Posted by Soulskill on Saturday July 11, @09:17AM
from the i-blame-the-schools dept.
United States
ZeroSerenity was one of many to write with news of a survey from the Pew Research Center which sought to find out how Americans feel about science and contrast that with the opinions of actual scientists. The study showed that "nearly 9 in 10 scientists accept the idea of evolution by natural selection, but just a third of the public does. And while 84% of scientists say the Earth is getting warmer because of human activity, less than half of the public agrees with that." 27% of the respondents said that the advances of the US in science are its greatest achievement, down from 44% ten years ago. The study is lengthy, and it contains many more interesting tidbits. For example: scientists decry the level of media coverage given to science, and they also think research funding has too much influence on study results. 32% of scientists identify themselves as Independent, while 55% say they're Democrats and 6% say they're Republicans.
science usa idiocracy science usa story
09/07/11/0216229 story
Posted by Soulskill on Saturday July 11, @08:15AM
from the also-adding-special-tinfoil-bezel dept.
Cellphones
Hugh Pickens writes "Business Week reports that the Chinese government has received an application from Apple seeking a Network Access License to sell the iPhone for officially-sanctioned use in the country. However, the application is for an iPhone that does not include WiFi connectivity, a sticking point in negotiations with the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, which wants the phone to only run on the cellular networks. 'Apple was hellbent on having the iPhone be WiFi-enabled,' says analyst Matt Mathison. 'The Chinese government has been just as adamant that it not be.' For many years now, China ministry officials told wireless consumers that WiFi would not be allowed on mobile phones for fear that consumers might be tempted to illegally load VoIP apps and make calls over the Net, undermining carriers' interests. However Glenn Fleishman says that China uses WAPI, a homegrown proprietary extension to Wi-Fi that only a handful of Chinese manufacturers have access to, and that equipment sold in China must have WAPI support and chips made in China. Fleishman speculates that China's WAPI standard contains backdoor technology to allow China to monitor any communications sent over 'secure' links."
apple cellphones china crippleware apple cellphones story
09/07/11/0114226 story
Posted by Soulskill on Saturday July 11, @05:12AM
from the boldly-stated-claims dept.
Robotics
godlessgambler writes "Within the past couple of years, memristors have morphed from obscure jargon into one of the hottest properties in physics. They've not only been made, but their unique capabilities might revolutionize consumer electronics. More than that, though, along with completing the jigsaw of electronics, they might solve the puzzle of how nature makes that most delicate and powerful of computers — the brain."
hardware robot technology singularity commanderdata tech robot story
09/07/11/038252 story
Posted by Soulskill on Saturday July 11, @02:09AM
from the moo-moomoo-moo-moomoomoo-mooooooo dept.
Games
Kotaku is running an opinion piece discussing why video games are having a harder time being funny as they've shifted away from text-driven adventures and toward graphics-intensive environments. "As technology improved, things began to get more serious. With the rise of 3D technology a strong focus was put on making games look good, delivering a more realistic — and often darker — experience to the player. Cartoonish comedic games became more of a novelty than the norm. Few titles, such as Rare's Conker's Bad Fur Day for the Nintendo 64, fully embraced humor." The article also talks about how the trend could soon reverse itself. LucasArts' Dave Grossman said, "As the games get smarter and start paying attention to more things about what the player is actually doing, using that ability not just to create challenges but to create humorous moments will be pretty cool. Eventually I expect to be out of a job over that."
games !jakanddaxter armedanddangerous !tf2 monkeyisland games games story
09/07/10/2318252 story
Posted by Soulskill on Saturday July 11, @12:07AM
from the what's-a-few-decades-among-friends dept.
Encryption
99luftballon writes "Nearly 70 years after Station X (aka the Bletchley Park cryptanalysis unit) was set up, the surviving members are to be honored by the British government. Bletchley was one of the most important computing centers of its time and housed giants of the technology industry (as it was) like Tommy Flowers, who built Colossus, and Dr. Alan Turing. I was lucky enough to meet one of the staff at the site 11 years ago, and she was very bitter that their work was never recognized, and that they were bound by the Official Secrets Act and couldn't talk about it. It's just a shame that so few of the staff are still alive to receive the award."
news encryption government cryptonomicon turing news encryption story
09/07/11/0029255 story
Posted by Soulskill on Friday July 10, @10:05PM
from the your-information-wants-to-be-free-but-not-ours dept.
Privacy
Late last year, a web service called Power.com launched with the aim of allowing users to unify their use of multiple social networks. Facebook quickly filed a lawsuit, objecting to the (user-authorized) gathering of their data. Reader sufijazz writes with news that Power.com has now countersued Facebook, saying, "Facebook improperly restricts its users' access to their private information," and that Facebook's own data scraping makes their lawsuit an attempt to stifle competition. According to TechCrunch, "Facebook can point to its efforts with Facebook Connect, which lets you log in with your Facebook username at third party sites and import some select data from your profile, as evidence of its openness. But this isn't true data portability, it's just a new walled garden — third parties are generally only allowed to cache your data, which means that you're still tethered to Facebook."
privacy social yro privacy story
09/07/10/2310235 story
Posted by Soulskill on Friday July 10, @08:01PM
from the americans-still-too-lazy-for-this-diet dept.
Biotech
destinyland writes "UCLA researchers made a startling discovery: genetic alterations enable mice to convert fat into carbon dioxide. Mammals digest fats differently than bacteria — so researchers introduced bacteria genes into mouse livers, and 'the excess fat was literally released into thin air.' (One researcher calls it 'an unconventional idea which we borrowed from plants and bacteria.') The research potentially could help treat serious medical conditions including diabetes, heart disease — and of course, obesity."
globalwarming biotech science medicine doctorwho science biotech story
09/07/10/2219208 story
Posted by Soulskill on Friday July 10, @07:11PM
from the yes-your-honor-it's-100k-per-cd-trust-us dept.
The Courts
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In the Boston, Massachusetts case SONY BMG Music Entertainment v. Tenenbaum, the Court had ordered the RIAA to produce certain revenue information, which would be relevant to a determination of the 'fair use' defense. The RIAA has now moved for a protective order to keep the information 'confidential.' In the opinion of the undersigned, the fact that the motion is made jointly by four competitors shows that any claim suggesting the information is valuable or 'proprietary' would be unfounded, and the sole purpose for making the motion is to keep the information out of the hands of lawyers for other defendants, thus increasing the defense costs in other cases."
collusion court money music mafiaa yro court story
09/07/10/200204 story
Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Friday July 10, @06:22PM
from the come-back-so-we-can-fire-you-again dept.
Businesses
itwbennett writes "Businesses that cut experienced mainframe administrators in an effort to cut costs inadvertently created a skills shortage that is coming back to bite them. Chris O'Malley, CA's mainframe business executive VP, says that mainframe workers were let go because 'it had no immediate effect and the organizations didn't expect to keep mainframes around.' But businesses have kept mainframes around and now they are struggling to find engineers. Prycroft Six managing director Greg Price, a mainframe veteran of some 45 years, put it this way: 'Mainframes are expensive, ergo businesses want to go to cheaper platforms, but [those platforms] have a lot of packaged overheads. If you do a total cost of ownership, the mainframe comes out cheaper, but since the costs of a mainframe are immediately obvious, it is hard to get it past the bean-counters of an organization.'"
business it payme bitterlaughter pennywise it business story
09/07/10/1916238 story
Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Friday July 10, @05:42PM
from the drilling-giant-holes-in-secure-communications dept.
Government
oliphaunt writes "As regular readers will recall, after the 2004 elections the New York Times revealed that the NSA had been conducting illegal wiretaps of American citizens since early 2001. Over the course of the next four years, more information about the illegal program trickled out, leading to several lawsuits against the government and various officials involved in its implementation. This week several of these matters are coming to a head: Yesterday, the lawyers for the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation filed a motion for summary judgment in their lawsuit against the Obama DOJ. The motion begins by quoting a statement made by Candidate Obama in 2007, acknowledging that the warrantless wiretap program was illegal. US District Judge Vaughn Walker has given indications that he is increasingly skeptical of the government's arguments in this case. In what might just be a coincidence of timing, today the long-awaited report from the DOJ inspector general to the US Congress about the wiretapping program was declassified and released. Emptywheel has the beginnings of a working thread going here."
privacy government communications treason republicans news government story
09/07/10/1856200 story
Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Friday July 10, @05:01PM
from the far-too-trusting dept.
Wireless Networking
schwit1 writes to tell us that a recent study by a Silicon Valley-based security company shows that black-hats have been ramping up their use of tempting free or unsecured wireless access points in high travel areas like airports and hotels. "According to their study, even the 'secure' networks weren't all too safe. Eighty percent of the private Wi-Fi networks at airports surveyed by Airtight were secured by the aging Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) protocol, which was cracked back in 2001. Almost as many — 77 percent — of the networks they surveyed were actually private, peer-to-peer networks, meaning they weren't official hotspots. Instead, they were running off someone else's computer."
security wireless useavpn foxnews https hardware wireless story
09/07/10/1835252 story
Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Friday July 10, @04:13PM
from the soon-to-be-ad-supported dept.
Cellphones
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at Dartmouth College have developed new software that uses the microphone on the iPhone to track and interpret a user's everyday activities using sound. The software, called SoundSense, picks up sounds and tries to classify them into certain categories. SoundSense can recognize completely unfamiliar sounds and runs entirely on the phone. It automatically classifies sounds as 'voice,' 'music,' or 'ambient noise.' If a sound is repeated often enough or for long enough, SoundSense gives it a high 'sound rank' and asks the user to confirm that it is a significant sound and offers the option to label the sound. In testing, the SoundSense software was able to correctly determine when the user was in a particular coffee shop, walking outside, brushing her teeth, cycling, and driving in the car. It also picked up the noise of an ATM and a fan in a particular room. The results [PDF] of the experiments were recently presented at the MobiSys 2009 conference."
privacy cellphones bigbrother yro songsmith mobile cellphones story
09/07/10/1830217 story
Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Friday July 10, @03:30PM
from the let-the-injections-begin dept.
Networking
An anonymous reader writes "A new router, designed by one of the creators of ARPANET, manages flows of packets instead of only managing individual packets. The router recognizes packets that are following the first and sends them along faster than if it had to route them as individuals. When overloaded, the router can make better choices of which packets to drop. 'Indeed, during most of my career as a network engineer, I never guessed that the queuing and discarding of packets in routers would create serious problems. More recently, though, as my Anagran colleagues and I scrutinized routers during peak workloads, we spotted two serious problems. First, routers discard packets somewhat randomly, causing some transmissions to stall. Second, the packets that are queued because of momentary overloads experience substantial and nonuniform delays, significantly reducing throughput (TCP throughput is inversely proportional to delay). These two effects hinder traffic for all applications, and some transmissions can take 10 times as long as others to complete.'"
networking hardware river heavyflow caspian tech networking story
09/07/10/1545251 story
Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Friday July 10, @02:46PM
from the foxes-gazelles-and-natural-selection dept.
Microsoft
Ars Technica reports that Microsoft has opened up about "Gazelle," a new browser prototype of theirs that is modeled after the underlying concepts of operating system design. "A research team led by Microsoft's Helen Wang recently published a report about an experimental browser prototype called 'Gazelle' that uses processes to isolate page content elements originating from different domains. It builds on the concept of multiprocess browsing but uses more fine-grained isolation to expand on the security advantages that are already delivered by existing multiprocess browsing models. But is it an operating system, Microsoft Research's analogue to Google's Chrome OS? Not quite."
software microsoft research wang bittorrent tech microsoft story
09/07/10/1726256 story
Posted by samzenpus on Friday July 10, @02:08PM
from the like-father-like-gamete dept.
thumbnail
A new study has shown that even sperm can be superficial. Researchers found that males of many animal species, including humans, can adjust the speed and effectiveness of their sperm by regulating the amount of seminal fluid they produce during copulation. The determining factor on that amount of fluid seems to be whether the male finds the female attractive.
science idle !spam everyspermissacred horray science science story
09/07/10/1539206 story
Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Friday July 10, @02:03PM
from the good-design-always-a-good-idea dept.
Programming
Linux and open source have long struggled to gain acceptance from the wider (read: non-technical) audience. This has improved in recent years, but still has a long way to go. Columnist Matt Asay suggests that perhaps open source projects should attempt to emulate Apple's design philosophy, with whoever succeeds becoming the "winner" of the hearts and minds of the vast majority of users. "Some projects already accomplish this to some extent. The strength of Mozilla, for example, is that it has figured out how to enable 40 percent of its development to be done by outside contributors, as BusinessWeek recently wrote. The downside is that these contributors are techies, but the upside is that they're techies who add language packs, accessibility features, and other "niche" areas that Mozilla might otherwise struggle to deliver. This suggests a start: enable your open-source project to accept meaningful outside contributions that make the project reflective of a wider development community. But the real goldmine is broadening the definition of "developer" to include lay users of your software. The day that I, as a nontechnical software user, can meaningfully participate in an open-source project is the day that open source will truly have won."
apple programming opensource developers learntosteal tech programming story
09/07/10/1536218 story
Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Friday July 10, @01:17PM
from the trying-desperately-to-regain-the-cool-factor dept.
Microsoft
Many different sources are reporting that Microsoft has unleashed the third major version of Silverlight to the masses. With 3.0 we see things like better 3D graphics support, the ability to offload tasks to a GPU, and the ability to run apps outside of the browser. "Silverlight's video capabilities have always been impressive when compared to Flash, and the new version boasts some new features that should keep the competition with Flash hot. It uses a media broadcasting technology Microsoft calls Smooth Streaming, an adaptive technology for playing the same H.264 video stream at the highest bitrate the device and its bandwidth limitations will allow. So if you've got a fast computer with an HD monitor and a wide open pipe, you'll see super high quality video at up to full 1080p HD. If you've got a dinky smartphone with mid-level data service, you'll see a constrained version of the same video."
software microsoft silverlight activex directx tech microsoft story
09/07/10/1529215 story
Posted by kdawson on Friday July 10, @12:33PM
from the presumed-innocent dept.
The Courts
Sqwuzzy notes a judge's ruling in Spain that makes that country one of the most lenient in the world as respects sharing copyrighted material over P2P networks. "The entertainment industries in Spain must be progressively tearing their hair out in recent months as they experience setback after setback. ... After Spain virtually ruled out imposing a '3-strikes' regime for illicit file-sharers, the entertainment industries said they would target 200 BitTorrent sites instead. Now a judge has decided that sharing between users for no profit via P2P doesn't breach copyright laws and sites should be presumed innocent until proved otherwise." This ruling occurred in a pre-trial hearing; the case will still go to trial.
court p2p !outbreak suddenoutbreakofcommonsense sudden news court story
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