Slashdot Mirror

Looks like 4chan was affected by the leap second too. https://twitter.com/#!/4chan

Yup, Reddit got nailed.
Here's the tweet on @redditstatus. According to them "We are having some Java/Cassandra issues related to the leap second at 5pm PST."

https://twitter.com/redditstatus/status/219244389044731904 just said so -- "We are having some Java/Cassandra issues related to the leap second at 5pm PST. We're working as quickly as we can to restore service." :D

> RIM is about as far from dead as you can get.

Wow.

I just pasted the URL of your comment into an Outlook reminder. We'll revisit this statement in one year.

I don't know what metric you're using--market cap? cash in the bank?--but Apple in 1997 was near death because they were slowly going from tiny to very tiny. RIM, at the moment, is in a total nosedive. Different velocities = different results. I also don't know what you mean by "the #1 smartphone vendor"--maybe they had the most units out there at some moment last year, but Apple has had great sales--and, more importantly, HUGE profits--for quite a while. Meanwhile there's just one story after another about how badly RIM is doing right now. As someone pointed out today, "Since release of iPhone 5 years ago, market caps of companies most affected: $AAPL +376%; $GOOG +9%; $RIMM -85%; $NOK -89%"

Oh, and that brilliant new OS? You'll see it Q1/2013 at the earliest.

I agree that there is a market (smaller than all of consumerdom, but not negligible) of people who want the security that BB offers, but I don't know if RIM will continue to be the company that offers it. Besides, the people that need security the most can roll their own--they always have--if there's not a vendor handy to supply it.

Yes, that was pretty funny when Gene Smith tweeted it: Joke going around the office: Microsoft buys Yammer, renames it SharePoint Cloud Server 2012 Mobile Enterprise Social Networking Edition.

Better yet, do they realize Android Phones already had GPS navigation? https://twitter.com/SharkSandwich73/status/212551053898559488

And I would not consider research that much, as most companies would most likely not benefit from a trip to Mars, other than prestige. And that would be a quite expensive PR stunt.

Did you think the same about docking with the ISS? There's not cash at the ISS. But that's going to be profitable for SpaceX, as is moving people to-and-from. They were testing the SuperDraco escape rocket engines a couple days ago for manned flights with the Dragon capsule... https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/214831794103664640

Lo and behold... the same profit model exists for Mars:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX#.22Red_Dragon.22_Mars_mission_concept

Meanwhile, Elon Musk has been talking quite a bit about manned trips to mars and eventual colonization. Last I heard he was estimating 10-15 years if things go well, at an eventual cost of about half a million per head.

There are lots of people that make silly estimates. He has a knack for coming through, with a certain margin for error, on big-ass goals.

Hopefully that allows for modifications.. AND typos. Protocololololol: https://twitter.com/ClintJCL/status/215171446115278848

Well....kind of.

https://twitter.com/BenedictEvans/status/212254527137652739

HBO has actually responded to the Take My Money HBO campaign in a way, albeit via Twitter.

Love the love for HBO. Keep it up. For now, @RyanLawler @TechCrunch has it right: http://itsh.bo/JLtSFE #takemymoneyHBO

The TechCrunch article in question basically goes over the math based on the fact that the average person is willing to pay $12/month, and comes to the conclusion that it's not enough to replace the revenue they would lose, on top of the higher costs of having to directly serve up content.

The Atlantic also has a good article up covering the revenue and business realities, and is a good companion piece to the TechCrunch article.

TL;DR: HBO responded saying that cord cutters wouldn't pay enough

Oracle Cloud is combine best of both world: cheap of Oracle Enterprise DB and simple of J2EE.

source

According to the CryptoCat developer, border guards confiscated his passport

Maybe I'm the only one that was confused by that but the phrasing of this in the summary lead me to believe that they confiscated his passport indefinitely in some sort of draconian move to prevent him from leaving the country or traveling in general. But, luckily, I read the article:

This: “Also worth noting: my passport was confiscated for around an hour.”

I'm not saying it's okay but I've been pulled into secondary coming back from the Caribbean and, the customs official had my passport for about 45-60 minutes while he asked me the stupidest of questions (far more mundane and pointless than what algorithms I develop).

The same is true for the medical profession. Medical device manufacturers don't need booth babes at their conventions.

http://exhibitcitynews.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2471:evolving-from-booth-babe-to-exhibit-staff&catid=76:features&Itemid=142

Maybe not, but they hire from the same agency they just put nicer clothes on them.

But hey out at the medical design and manufacturing show
https://twitter.com/1TradeShowModel/statuses/206122956412289025

guess they do hire them after all.. ooops..
another "insightful" post on slashdot.

Her ramblings reminded me of this individual on Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/poeticallady
Read that for a while and your brain will start to hurt. Especially when you realize that one of the accounts she talks to all day long is another one of her accounts with her own pic on it. She's spent two years harassing a friend who is a prof at a University, contacting his employers, and anyone and everyone she can find on Facebook and Twitter that shares a common last name with him.
I really hope that this "lawyer" isn't as persistent in trying to make Mr. Lee's life a living hell as the Twitter stalker is.

Round-trippers (one full page per GET with some sprinkling of JS effects here and there) are going out of style. It seems though that some companies, notably Twitter are heading towards doing more work on the back-end for users who have less capability to render the page, for performance reasons. Client-side heavy apps scale better by default, but if UX is the primary goal, some of the stuff they're doing is pretty cool to consider.

> Honestly, wouldn't that be a legit Apple killer than
> enterprise shops would embrace en-masse?

No.

The thing is, to dethrone a king, you can't be "about as good as" or "as good as and slightly cheaper" or "10% better in some key ways" or even "15% better across the board." You have to be a LOT better--like a night-and-day different--to overcome all the inertia of a large installed base. The last time we saw that happen was in 2007.

Apple might not have the absolute world's best email client but pretty much every major company is happy with it (and all the other stuff it does) so someone else coming out with a whole new device that is slightly better in some ways is not going to gain any traction. Apple is so far ahead (in terms of overall quality, customer satisfaction, number and quality of apps, etc.) that I'm guessing it'll be literally 5-10 years (if ever) before they aren't in the lead.*

HP and BB both tried to displace Apple once and failed. They pulled out all the stops and each managed to create products that were roughly comparable to 1- or 2-year-old Apple products. No freaking way will those two be able to put their corporate heads together and produce, in 12-24 months, something substantially better than what Apple will be producing at the same time in the future.

Tying two anchors together does not result in something that floats.

* They may or may not be actually leading now in terms of raw units out there in the world, but a) they're doing far better than any single competitor in the smartphone arena, and b) they are taking the vast majority of the industry's profits -- about 3x their one and only really profitable competitor.

...publish and make your work freely available...

My philosopy with pretty much everything. Don't worry, as soon as I have a working prototype, I plan on telling everyone.

(Incidentally, I have a tech blog and a twitter account, both of which contain my sporadic ramblings about random bits of tech, and will be where anything I discover/create will be announced. Don't hold your breath though, I have a life outside of technology...)

How about I follow each of the MEPs around and write down on a list everyone they speak to, when they speak and where, over the course of 6 months? That would probably mark me as a terrorist.

We already do follow our MPs (and MEPs).
Eye Spy MP

Uh-oh, now she's after me: https://twitter.com/Bostonglobalz/status/206188080007348225

He's here: https://twitter.com/HAL9000_

The Jury was leaning heavily on them not being copyrightable anyway. See: https://twitter.com/FedcourtJunkie/status/205370887078285313

We all just interviewed juror, who said jury was split 9-3 for google on copyright fair use. Um, wow.

https://twitter.com/#!/SenRehmanMalik/status/203961375087788032

@Rehman Malik
@SenRehmanMalik
  Follow

Dear all, I assure u that Twitter and FB will continue in our country and it will not be blocked. Pl do not believe in rumors.

So that Douchebag Minister of ours is finally good for something :p

Now while I really hate the Indo-Pak rivarly that pops up on the internet, I have to say, that source in the link is an Indian newspaper.

Should I pull out my tinfoil hat?

This should make for a good topic from the professor on the Tom Leykis show Monday!!!

https://twitter.com/#!/tomleykis/status/204110248502493184

I posted about this on twitter a month ago.

The frequency chosen had to be a multiple of 900 and had to be somewhere in a limited range of frequencies (above 40Khz, below some number I forget). The 900 comes from a factor of 300 (to guarantee it was divisible by 50 and 60 for PAL/NTSC), and a factor of 3 (the preferred number of samples per scanline; 2 was too few, 4 would have been wasteful).

There is no evidence that the specific multiple of 900 from the required range (40Khz to 47Khz) was chosen because of what the factors of the multiplier would be, but rather because the frequency wanted to be as high as possible (giving a wider region between limits of human hearing and the nyquist freq, thus making filtering it cheaper), but higher frequencies would have required encoding samples in the vertical blank part of the signal.

Certainly the fact that 900 itself is already the product of the squares of the three smallest primes is coincidence, since the factors of 300 and 3 were essentially independently motivated--the 3 wasn't chosen because it "completed the set" with the 300. Likewise, I don't believe the additional factor of 49 was chosen because of that factor. (Having more divisibility is useful in some circumstances, but 7 is such an uncommon divisor; 900*48 would be far more useful on the general divisibility front, introducing more factors of 2 and 3. But, in fact, nobody NEEDS this number to be more divisible, as it's not needed to be divisible beyond the factor of 900 that was required.)

There's a wikipedia page about it (do an "I feel lucky" search on google for "44.1").

We've automated BitTorrent to do deploys at Twitter. Works really really well. Way more efficient to have all the web frontends seed to each other than to scp the whole app thousands of times. Here's a blog post about it, including a link to the code: http://engineering.twitter.com/2010/07/murder-fast-datacenter-code-deploys.html

https://twitter.com/#!/YourAnonNews

Anonymous @YourAnonNews
YES The Pirate Bay is down. YES it's under DDoS attack. NO we don't know who from. We'll update as we hear more. http://bit.ly/L75LB3 #TPB

Myles Peterson has retweeted a link to the torrentfreak story - http://twitter.com/#!/tpb/status/198910412371136512

I signed up for a Hulu trial a month ago. Here's the subsequent interaction I had with them on Twitter:

Me: "Wait, so let me get this straight: you have to pay for Hulu Plus, but you still get commercials? BitTorrent doesn't have commercials. #fail"
@hulu_support: "@kstrauser Hi there! Current season content is expensive, and ads help us compensate our content providers."
Me: "@hulu_support Thanks, but no. I won't be finishing my trial week."

According to Wikipedia, NBCUniversal, Fox Entertainment Group, and Disney-ABC Television Group own a total of 90% of Hulu. You seriously mean to tell me that a company almost totally owned by 3 of the 4 major broadcast networks can't afford to air those networks' own content commercial-free, even when I'm paying them directly without any cable or dish operator acting as an intermediary? I call BS.

Netflix isn't perfect, but I can understand why some content is out of their reach. Qwikster misstep last year aside, I'm happy with their service. I just can't find a reason why I'd ever pay for Hulu, though. If I'm going to have to pay for ad-laden content, I'll get basic cable and be done with it.

And yes, I cancelled my free trial before the week was over. I was sure to tell them why on my way out the door.

I signed up for a Hulu trial a month ago. Here's the subsequent interaction I had with them on Twitter:

Me: "Wait, so let me get this straight: you have to pay for Hulu Plus, but you still get commercials? BitTorrent doesn't have commercials. #fail"
@hulu_support: "@kstrauser Hi there! Current season content is expensive, and ads help us compensate our content providers."
Me: "@hulu_support Thanks, but no. I won't be finishing my trial week."

According to Wikipedia, NBCUniversal, Fox Entertainment Group, and Disney-ABC Television Group own a total of 90% of Hulu. You seriously mean to tell me that a company almost totally owned by 3 of the 4 major broadcast networks can't afford to air those networks' own content commercial-free, even when I'm paying them directly without any cable or dish operator acting as an intermediary? I call BS.

Netflix isn't perfect, but I can understand why some content is out of their reach. Qwikster misstep last year aside, I'm happy with their service. I just can't find a reason why I'd ever pay for Hulu, though. If I'm going to have to pay for ad-laden content, I'll get basic cable and be done with it.

And yes, I cancelled my free trial before the week was over. I was sure to tell them why on my way out the door.

I signed up for a Hulu trial a month ago. Here's the subsequent interaction I had with them on Twitter:

Me: "Wait, so let me get this straight: you have to pay for Hulu Plus, but you still get commercials? BitTorrent doesn't have commercials. #fail"
@hulu_support: "@kstrauser Hi there! Current season content is expensive, and ads help us compensate our content providers."
Me: "@hulu_support Thanks, but no. I won't be finishing my trial week."

According to Wikipedia, NBCUniversal, Fox Entertainment Group, and Disney-ABC Television Group own a total of 90% of Hulu. You seriously mean to tell me that a company almost totally owned by 3 of the 4 major broadcast networks can't afford to air those networks' own content commercial-free, even when I'm paying them directly without any cable or dish operator acting as an intermediary? I call BS.

Netflix isn't perfect, but I can understand why some content is out of their reach. Qwikster misstep last year aside, I'm happy with their service. I just can't find a reason why I'd ever pay for Hulu, though. If I'm going to have to pay for ad-laden content, I'll get basic cable and be done with it.

And yes, I cancelled my free trial before the week was over. I was sure to tell them why on my way out the door.

I think the OP had a legitimate gripe. Not everyone wants to run a local executable from a company that has demonstrated a lot of interest in prying into your privacy. Granted, if you are choosing to store your files on drive, you must have some trust in them. However, what guarantee do the paranoid have that the drive client will not just be silently uploading everything you have to google. I'm not sure it's even hyperbole to suggest a point in the future where the drive client might say, "good news! you can now store everything you have on Drive! To make it easy for you, we've already uploaded all your data!" Google could easily have provided a client built upon an open api and won a lot of favor.

This is an interesting twist on thing

So far I have been able to use a combo of open source and commercial products to create a distributed workflow, but tying it all together under single sign on is next to impossible especially to a wiki for organizing all the fiction. Anyone interested feel free to visit us, we seriously need some more creative people working on the site and projects.

Check out the project I've been working on for some time: www.HEX.xxx

Taking place in an alternate universe known as Obscure Delusion, several videos are now coming to light.

* Maniac Loveseat is a short episodic format show in the Obscure Delusion universe. Featuring HEX and Jacky Paper, it is an unscripted improvised brainstorming session. Things that may be used for building parts of the canon universe and considered madness are wrenched from our viscera on the Maniac Loveseat.

* The Unknown Truth is a science documentary show in the Obscure Delusion universe. Now in it’s land mark 37th season, welcome to **The Unknown Truth** Episode 2012-03-16 with your host, Doctor Watt.

Obscure Delusion Fictional Universe Original Material with references to public domain H.P. Lovecraft characters and works.

Our Distribution Channels:
* Our Main Site www.HEX.xxx
* Facebook Page & Twitter Updates
* YouTube Channel (Original Content Verified!)
* DailyMotion (Original Content MotionMaker!)
* Funny or Die Channel (Funny Videos!)
* Phone 1-800-HEX-SETX - Located Downriver in Trenton, MI.

I'd go through his twitters to see if he posted anything damaging his own case. Garen Meguerian is also a lawyer. If he's an attorney complaining about a $200 bill, you know business MUST be slow and he's doing what any lawyer with bills piling up would due: sue.

"@rachel_marone
Looking for a good press agent. With all of this Facebook drama I think I am going to need one."

Did Fox News write this?

J. Peter Bruzzese did. He's simply a

Microsoft MVP, Triple-MCSE, MCT, MCITP: Messaging. J.P.B. is the Enterprise Windows columnist for InfoWorld and an avid Windows and Exchange advocate.

Why wouldn't he be fair and balanced?

Facebook may never make that $1b back, but it's still smart. Instagram was the only thing challenging their dominance in photo sharing. Via Twitter

Here's their reaction to Instagram on android: http://www.androidpit.com/en/android/blog/404116/instagram-for-android

More here: https://twitter.com/#!/AndroidAGram

And my personal favourites:

The Bad Guy @DamnLes
Apple needs to stop whoever is converting their programs.. Now android have temple run and instagram.. its not special to have an iphone

Michael @Periphereality
@DamnLes I agree they need to stop the guy who keeps converting the iPhone apps! It should be illegal isn't it against copywright?!1

You mean this Claire Perry? http://www.claireperry.org.uk/ or https://twitter.com/#!/claire4devizes

https://twitter.com/#!/AnonymousChina

And in a move of supreme irony, he is glady leaving to support Chinese Hackerspaces:

Tomorrow I'm leaving for China. I organized a Hacker Trip To China. 10 of us visiting all hackerspaces!

Here's a clue, kiddo - try to find anything of significance in China that doesnt have involvement from the People's Liberation Army. But you got no problem supporting that?

Yep. The name is a joke and some of the features (Ex. "A ending that makes sense") but Notch is working on this for real. He wrote on Twitter later: https://twitter.com/#!/notch/status/186739199523831810

The article starts out with...

New rules require British Airways and other airlines flying to certain airports outside America to submit passengers' personal data to US authorities. [...] Even if the flight plan steers well clear of US territory, travellers whom the Americans regard as suspicious will be denied boarding.

Emphasis mine. This statement is what is supposed to re-assure us that it's ridiculous.
( Not to say that it isn't, but keep reading... )

Washington has extended the obligation to air routes that over-fly US airspace, such as Heathrow to Mexico City or Gatwick to Havana.

Emphasis again mine. So here's the twist. If you fly through a particular nation's airspace, are you 'steering clear of' that nation's territory?
Wikipedia (don't worry, dictionaries appear to agree) states...

"Airspace means the portion of the atmosphere controlled by a country above its territory, including its territorial waters or, more generally, any specific three-dimensional portion of the atmosphere."

Emphasis once again mine.

Their airspace, their rules. Some flights not too long ago were probably barred from entering Polish airspace as well and had to skim along its borders for its flight.
( http://twitter.com/#!/flightradar24/statuses/128071958293266432 )

It's still ridiculous because it makes little sense. Not just because of the notion that you wouldn't actually set afoot in said territory, but because the few cases in which you might (such as an emergency requiring diverting to one of that nation's airports) also apply to many other routes that don't cross that airspace but still come close enough for the pilots to decide to, or be forced to, land there - security clearance issues or no security clearance issues.

...I'll be by to take it because you don't seem very bright.

You announce on Twitter when you leave your house ("Off to IKEA!"), you're too cheap to pay for ADT (or even ADT signs and stickers), yet you don't mind paying for equipment so you can sit around and monitor your home.

Let me know when you get the webcams up and running...I'm sure you'll fail to change the default password. I'd rather use the webcams to see when you leave rather than following you on Twitter.

I think because the tweet is getting "popular" someone at slashdot posted this but forgot the source or decided to ommit
https://twitter.com/#!/briankrebs/status/185723872316882944

I'm sure Google has a similar thing going on like Facebook where companies can pay extra $$$ to get unfettered access to the data as part of "we may share your data with interested third parties".

No they absolutely do not: "We do not share personal information with companies, organizations and individuals outside of Google" (Ref: http://www.google.com/policies/privacy/). There is no "we may share your data with third-parties" clause in the Google privacy policy, unlike almost every other company out there. Read the links carefully and you will see that Google has one of the best privacy policies (at least in terms on sharing information with third parties). Also note that some of these companies have way more personal and sensitive information about you that Google.

Disclaimers:
      * I work at Google
      * These are entirely my own views and opinions and do not represent Google's in any way.

is on Twitter @DarrellIssa Anyone so inclined could tweet the link to Schneier's blog.

And we could post the link here:

http://twitter.com/#!/darrellissa

(gasp) If only an #Anonymous group could help us get these tweets to her!

is on Twitter @DarrellIssa Anyone so inclined could tweet the link to Schneier's blog.

And we could post the link here:

http://twitter.com/#!/darrellissa

why don't you provide a link to the headline you mention.. is it this one?

http://www.theverge.com/2012/3/14/2870374/new-ipad-apps-larger-size-retina-display

"The applications developed by Apple have been upgraded to support the Retina Display. For example Keynote was previously only 115MB but its latest version is 327MB. Numbers is up from 109MB to 283MB, Pages moves from 95MB to 269MB, and iMovie from 70MB to 404MB." (Translated from Vietnamese)"

iMovie is the only one that went up over 5x.. and that's because they added a new feature called Trailers. there's built in themes with animations and music so most of that increase is the stored audio/video assets.. it was NOT a straight retina bump - else it wouldn't have been demo'd in the ipad keynote. you can't compare the current and previous version because they're not (feature wise) the same app. garageband also got bigger.. from 600MB to almost a 1GB I think.. but that's because they added string instruments and the ability to "jam" with other people and record all 4 tracks in the app. those string loops are big.

here's the info about Trailers for the desktop version of iMovie - all the same features are in the iOS version.
http://www.apple.com/ilife/imovie/#movie-trailers-section

the pertinent copy from the appstore
Create movie trailers
  Choose from nine new trailers with immersive graphics and original scores by some of the world’s top film composers*
*Trailers are available on iPhone 4 or later and iPad 2 or later. (probably because of RAM constraints)

the "CMX-HD" format that Comixology and Marvel are using now caused a noticeable increase in file size.. but of all the titles I have, they average increase is about 3x.. and the ones I have (pre-HD) were around 20-25MB, now they're 75MB.

3x may seem like a lot, but look at the difference. (photo by Andy Ihnatko)
https://twitter.com/#!/Ihnatko/status/180865456389885954/photo/1
(note the paperclip in the foreground)

Well since you asked...

He tweeted it about 45mins ago. https://twitter.com/jimcameron/status/184036733959143425 An amazing achievement!