benfrog writes "Yahoo and Facebook have resolved their patent dispute. The two companies have struck a deal which brings Yahoo's lawsuit against Facebook to an end and expands their existing ad and content partnership. The two companies confirmed the deal in a press release. No money changed hands."
xTrashcat writes "I am 22 years of age and have been working in the IT field for over a year. I try to learn as much about technology as my cranium can handle; I even earned the nickname 'Google' because of the amount of time I spend attempting to pack my brain with new information. Being 22, it is, I speculate, needless to say that I am the youngest of my coworkers. If there is a piece of software, hardware, a technique, etc., I want to know everything about it. On the contrary, nearly all of my coworkers resent it and refuse to even acknowledge it, let alone learn about it. For example, we just started buying boxes from a different vendor that are licensed for Win7. A few months later, we decide that a computer lab was going to get an XP image instead of Win7. After several days worth of attempts, none of our XP images, even our base, would work, and it left everyone scratching their heads. We were on the verge of returning thousands of dollars worth of machines because they were 'defective.' I was not satisfied. I wanted to know why they weren't working instead of just simply returning them, so I jumped into the project. After almost 30 seconds of fishing around in BIOS, I noticed that UEFI was enabled. Switched it to legacy, and boom; problem solved. My coworkers grunted and moaned because they didn't have to do that before, and still to this day, they hate our new boxes. So in closing, I have three questions: What is the average age of your workplace? How easily do your coworkers accept and absorb new technology? Are most IT environments like this, where people refuse to learn anything about new technology they don't like, or did I just get stuck with a batch of stubborn case-screws?"
tripleevenfall writes "Best Buy has cut approximately 650 jobs from its Geek Squad division, according to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. The cut represents about 4% of Geek Squad's total workforce. The consumer electronics giant said the workers primarily service televisions and appliances in consumers' homes. Best Buy's performance has struggled to keep up with changes in consumer electronics , as the weight of its big-box format inhibits it from fending off competitive pressure of online retailers."
benfrog writes "A company called Per Vices has introduced software-defined radio gear that Ars Technica is comparing to the Apple I. Why? Because software radio can broadcast and receive nearly any radio signal on nearly any frequency at the same time, and thus could "revolutionize wireless." The Per Vices Phi is one of the first devices aimed at the mass hobbyist market to take advantage of this technology."
Michael J. Ross writes "Veteran computer programmers — adept with languages such as PHP, Perl, and JavaScript — typically have no trouble learning an additional language, often just by reading online tutorials and stepping through sample code. But for those new to programming, that approach can prove difficult and frustrating. Yet nowadays there appears to be growing interest among such people for learning how to write programs in Python, especially as it is seeing increasing use by Google and other organizations, and is often chosen as the primary teaching language in schools. For such budding programmers, one possible starting point is the book Head First Python." Read on for the rest of Michael's review.
The United Nations Human Rights Council has passed a landmark resolution (PDF) declaring that internet freedom is a basic human right. They wrote: "...the same rights that people have offline must also be protected online, in particular freedom of expression, which is applicable regardless of frontiers and through any media of one’s choice, in accordance with articles 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights." The council also called upon all countries to "promote and facilitate access to the Internet." The article points out that this comes alongside a report from the Pew Internet Center, which asked a group of internet stakeholders how they think firms in the private sector will handle the ethical issues that arise with countries wanting to censor or restrict internet access. The responses were varied, but skepticism was a recurring theme: "Corporations will work around regional differences by spinning off subsidiaries, doing what’s needed to optimize on future profits."
Back in May we discussed using Python, R, and Octave as data analysis tools, and compared the relative strength of each. One point of contention was whether Python could be considered a legitimate tool for such work. Now, Bei Lu writes while Python on its own may be lacking, Python with packages is very much up to the task: "My passion with Python started with its natural language processing capability when paired with the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK). Considering the growing need for text mining to extract content themes and reader sentiments (just to name a few functions), I believe Python+packages will serve as more mainstream analytical tools beyond the academic arena." She also discusses an emerging set of solutions for R which let it better handle big data.
"A student who attended a private German economics and business university is being sued by the school because he finished his degree too quickly. Marcel Pohl finished 60 exams in 20 months, completing 11 semesters worth of work in only 3. The school says it is due an extra €3,000 for lost income because, "its fees are the total price for the studies, independent of how long the studies last." "When I got the lawsuit, I thought it couldn't be true. Performance is supposed to be worth something," Pohl said.
An anonymous reader writes "Famed academic Kenneth Waltz for years has argued that more nukes around the world create peace. Why? Because the more nukes are around, the more people are afraid to start a war with a nuclear-armed state. Peace seems assured with a gun to the world's head. In a recent interview, he argues that Iran gaining nuclear weapons would be a good thing. He points out that 'President Obama and a number of others have advocated the abolition of nuclear weapons and many have accepted this as both a desirable and a realistic goal. Even entertaining the goal and contemplating the end seems rather strange. On one hand the world has known war since time immemorial, right through August 1945. Since then, there have been no wars among the major states of the world. War has been relegated to peripheral states (and, of course, wars within them). Nuclear weapons are the only peacekeeping weapons that the world has ever known. It would be strange for me to advocate for their abolition, as they have made wars all but impossible.'"
An anonymous reader writes "A year ago, we discussed this on Slashdot: E-Voting Reform In an Out Year?. The point was that due to the hoard of problems with electronic (and mechanical) voting, it is best to approach reform in an out year, when it is not on everyone's mind yet too late to do anything about it. Well, we failed, didn't we? Another election year is upon us, and our vote is less secure, less reliable, and less meaningful than ever. To reference the last article, we still have no open source voting, no end-to-end auditable voting systems and no open source governance. So don't complain if this election is stolen. You forgot to fix the system."
sfcrazy writes "The Free Software Foundation recently published a whitepaper criticizing Ubuntu's move to drop Grub 2 in order to support Microsoft's UEFI Secure Boot. The FSF also recommended that Ubuntu should reconsider their decision. Ubuntu's charismatic chief, Mark Shuttleworth, has responded to the situation during an interview, and explained the reason they won't change their stand on dropping Grub 2 from Ubuntu. Shuttleworth said, 'The SFLC advice to us was that the FSF could require key disclosure if some OEM screwed up. As nice as it is that someone at the FSF says they would not, we have to plan for a world where leaders change and institutional priorities change. The FSF wrote a licence that would give them the rights to take specific actions, and it's hard for them to argue they never would!'"
Dr. Ramsey Faragher graduated from the University of Cambridge in 2004 with a first-class degree in Experimental and Theoretical Physics. He then completed a PhD in 2007 at Cambridge in Opportunistic Radio Positioning under the direction of Dr. Peter Duffett-Smith, a world expert in this field. He is now a Principal Scientist at the BAE Systems Advanced Technology Centre specializing in positioning, navigation, sensor fusion and remote sensing technologies in the land, air, sea and space domains. We recently covered his NAVSOP project, an advanced positioning system that exploits existing transmissions such as Wi-Fi, TV, radio and mobile phone signals, to calculate the user’s location to within a few meters. Dr. Faragher has graciously agreed to answer any questions you may have about NAVSOP, the future of GPS, or what a theoretical physicist puts on his business card. Ask as many questions as you like, but please confine your questions to one per post.
An anonymous reader writes "The NY Times has a story about a small chain of managed residences that has sprung up in the Bay Area to provide a cheap place where programmers, designers, and scientists can live and work. These 'hacker hostels' are a place for aspiring entrepreneurs to gather, share, and refine ideas. 'Hackers ... have long crammed into odd or tiny spaces and worked together to solve problems. In the 1960s, researchers at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory slept in the attic and, while waiting for their turn on the shared mainframe computer, sweated in the basement sauna. When told about the hacker hostels, Ethan Mollick, an assistant professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania who studies entrepreneurship, said they reminded him of his days in the last decade studying at M.I.T., where graduate students would have bunk beds inside their small offices.'"
Google wants $4 million from Oracle to cover the costs it incurred during this spring's epic legal battle over the Android mobile operating system.
Robots are increasingly taking over dangerous tasks in the battlefield, but there's plenty left to hand over to robot underlings. At the 2012 Robeo, researchers and 'bot makers put their latest through a grueling set of tests. Wired was there to bring you this gallery of 10 of the best - and worst ideas.
The vast fires of this summer and last represent a new normal for the western United States. They may signal a radical landscape transformation, one that will make the 21st century West an ecological frontier. Unlike fires that have occurred regularly for thousands of years, these fires are so big and so intense as to create discontinuities in natural cycles. In the aftermath, existing forests may not return. New ecosystems will take their place.
It made for a funny headline from some sites to report that online dating site, Whatsyourprice.com, "dumped" Amazon after its outage late last month/last week. But other sites dependent on Amazon's EC2 service planned better. So, question is: Is it reasonable to expect no outages? InformationWeek reports: "Build it and they will come. Build it ...
Few things are more annoying on the web than hitting a video site to watch a 30-second clip of something funny only to discover you'll have to sit through a 30-second advertisement first. Here's our guide to blocking video ads on the web.
Manchester United isn't a soccer team—at least not in the business sense. It's an ad-dependent, content-producing media company that wants to go public. Sound familiar?
Now in post-production, the feature-length film takes us on a long-awaited journey into the heart of one of the most fascinating bands of all time.
From drones to toilets, Wired takes a look at the world?s most creative efforts to reinvent data-center design.
Four years after being convicted of killing his wife, Linux guru Hans Reiser returns Monday to court, this time to defend himself from a wrongful-death suit brought by his two children. The developer of the ReiserFS filesystem now claims he killed his wife, Nina, out of love for the divorcing couple's two children.
A Shanghai-based company thinks Siri is a little too similar to their own voice-recognition software and is now suing Apple for alleged patent infringement over the technology.
We talk with Sean Vanaman and Jake Rodkin, project leads on Telltale's adventure games, on today's episode of the Game|Life podcast.
Soccer has finally come to its senses. After years of discussion and debate, the sport has at long last approved the use of goal-line technology at all levels of the game. Thursday's decision by the International Football Association Board will all but end flubbed calls that have decided games as monumental as the World Cup final and made the sport look embarrassingly Jurassic in a hyper-connected age of instant replay and instant communication.
Teva's Fuse-Ion water shoes attempt to blend innovative outdoor performance with a good amount of style, and they succeed.
Until now, tech-noir auteur Christopher Nolan has kept the finer points of his highly anticipated on the down-low. Then came the nearly 50-page data dump.
A team of researchers used the commercial airship Eureka to search for pieces of a meteorite that blazed to Earth on April 22 over California?s Sierra Nevada mountains. They used a camera aboard the airship to look for signs of meteor wreckage to help locate the pieces.
What does a software developer need to provision a cloud server? In most cases nothing more than an Internet connection, an email address for authentication purposes and, depending on the cloud service provider (CSP), a credit card. You might be thinking "surely Andrew, if the developer is provisioning a cloud server for business use there ...
Amazon is having a banner week in the rumor department. On Wednesday, the China Times reported that Amazon is spinning up production of a next-gen Kindle Fire for a release date sometime in the next two month. And now the huge online retailer is once again the target of smartphone speculation -- not bad for a company that was best known for book, garment and small appliances deliveries just 12 months ago.
Apple has rectified a botched DRM update that ended up crashing apps that users recently updated.
When it comes to headlight technology, not much has changed in the last several decades. LEDs are on the cusp of becoming standard issue and adaptive headlamps that turn with the wheel have been around for years. But a system from researchers at Carnegie Mellon University has the potential to change the way we see in adverse weather by illuminating the road droplets of rain and snow.
Need to vent some frustration on the web? Font Bomb is a fun little bookmarklet that lets you "blow up" text on your least favorite web pages.
A new iPad game called takes an ongoing dispute between China and Japan and makes a game out of it -- one that paints the Japanese as invaders and tasks you with brutally killing them.
This week NASA released an ultra-high-resolution panoramic view of the Martian landscape captured by the only rover currently operating on Mars. It is made of 817 photos taken over six months.
SPDY, Google's little protocol that could, gains another convert -- the Opera web browser. Although still at the experimental stage, Opera joins Firefox and Chrome in supporting the faster, more secure alternative to good old http.
A mechanical engineer breaks down the two most common arm movements used by elite swimmers like Kara Lynn Joyce, and figures out which one is most efficient.
So you?ve built an amazing new robot or crafted a pop culture homage with Perler beads. Awesome work, but what good is building cool stuff if you can?t get Reddit riled up or make an Etsy sale?
Few things are more annoying on the web than hitting a video site to watch a 30-second clip of something funny only to discover you have to sit through a 30-second advertisement first. Here's our guide to blocking video ads on the web.
The science video community has been hard at work providing you with the best explanation of the Higgs boson. Watch some of Dot Physics blogger Rhett Allain's favorite explainer clips.
As a fresh torrent of money floods into their market, app makers are getting paranoid, constantly on the lookout for dirty tricks that can pump up traffic and user growth at strategic times, hoodwinking investors and corrupting app-store leaderboards .
Manuals are so analog. The Air Force is thinking about turning some of its training programs into apps for reservists' smartphones. Suggested functionality includes apps to teach "Air Force Core Values," and "Fitness and Nutrition Principles," as well as games to memorize?M-16 components and?military songs ("Name that Military Tune").
When you consider the San Francisco Giants' success in this year's All Star vote there is clearly something else at play than just baseball. For the Giants and other Major League teams, it's all about All Star tech savvy.