Folge drei in Microsofts Smartphone-Offensive: HTC hat in New York zwei Smartphones mit dem Microsoft Betriebssystem Windows Phone 8 vorgestellt. Microsoft dürfte grosse Hoffnungen in die beiden Geräte des langjährigen Partners stecken.
Die Smartphone-App "Signalguru" soll Autofahrer vor ärgerlichen roten Ampeln bewahren und gleichzeitig die Umwelt entlasten und den Verkehrsfluss verbessern. Die Anwendung, die von US-Wissenschaftlern vom MIT und der Princeton University entwickelt wurde, verwendet die Kamera von hinter der Windschutzscheibe fixierten Smartphones, um Ampeln schon von weitem wahrzunehmen.
Bill Gates ist das 19. Jahr in Folge der reichste Mann der USA. Mit einem Vermögen von 66 Mrd. Dollar (50,8 Mrd. Euro) führt der Microsoft-Gründer die Liste der 400 reichsten Amerikaner an, die das US-Magazin „Forbes“ am Mittwoch veröffentlichte.
Das neue mobile Firefox-Betriebssystem soll im Dezember auf den Markt kommen. Das kündigte ein Manager des beteiligten chinesischen Herstellers ZTE in Peking an, wie die Finanznachrichtenagentur Bloomberg heute berichtete.
Ein Team von Forschern der University of Cambridge hat einen innovativen Ansatz entwickelt, der die Herstellung von Lasergeräten in Zukunft deutlich einfacher und kostengünstiger gestalten könnte. Um die begehrten Laser zu produzieren, die heute etwa in DVD-Playern, Supermarkt-Scannern oder der Marssonde "Curiosity" zum Einsatz kommen, greifen die Wissenschaftler kurioserweise auf handelsübliche Tintenstrahldrucker zurück.
Die Deutsche Telekom beruft den langjährigen Branchenkenner John Legere zum neuen Chef ihrer angeschlagenen US-Tochter. Der 54-jährige Mangager werde die Leitung von T-Mobile USA am 22. September übernehmen, teilte die Telekom mit. Der Posten ist vakant, seit der ehemalige Chef Philipp Humm Ende Juni zum Konkurrenten Vodafone ging.
Der deutsche Softwareriese SAP mit Stammsitz in Walldorf will künftig stärker auf private Nutzer setzen. Die Programme des Konzerns könnten in ein paar Jahren beispielsweise in Stromablesern installiert werden - und Kunden so ermöglichen, den günstigsten Strompreis zu ermitteln, sagte ein SAP-Sprecher am Mittwoch und bestätigte damit einen Bericht des Düsseldorfer Handelsblatts.
Nach Bekanntwerden einer gefährlichen Sicherheitslücke in Microsofts Internet Explorer hat auch das IT-Sicherheitsunternehmen F-Secure empfohlen, die Benutzung des Browsers vorerst zu vermeiden.
Der Schweizer Bäderspezialist Keramik Laufen und der Armaturen-Hersteller Similor professionalisieren ihr Online-Marketing. Dazu gehört auch der Einsatz einer E-Marketing-Lösung für einen nach Ansprechgruppen getrennten und an den Interessen ausgerichteten Versand von Kunden-Newslettern.
Das Soziale Netzwerk Facebook testet derzeit neue Werbemöglichkeiten auf Basis der gesammelten Infos über seine Nutzer auf iOS- und Android-Geräten. Dabei geht es um Werbungen in Apps und auf den Websites von Drittanbietern, also ausserhalb von Facebook.
Nerval's Lobster writes "The Open Compute Project has published the final specification of the Open Rack Specification, which widens the traditional server rack to more than 23 inches. Specifically, the rack is 600 mm wide (versus the 482.6 mm of a 19-inch rack), with the chassis guidelines calling for a width of 537 mm. All told, that's slightly wider than the 580 mm used by the Western Electric or ETSI rack. The Open Compute Project said that changes in the new 1.0 specification include a new focus on a single-column rack design. The new dimensions now accommodate hotter inlet temperatures of between 18 to 35 degrees Celsius and up to 90 percent humidity, which reflects other Open Compute designs and real-world data center temperatures, according to project documents. Facebook has led the implementation of the Open Compute Project, which publicly shares the designs it uses in data centers, including its Prineville, Ore. facility. As the spec clearly shows, however, the new designs deviate from the traditional configurations and specifications, which means data center operators will need to find and then source racks from third-party vendors (or, in the case of Facebook, design their own)."
RocketAcademy writes "British billionaire Richard Branson, whose Virgin Galactic company is backing the development of SpaceShip Two, has told CBS News he is 'determined to start a population on Mars.' He said, 'I think over the next 20 years, we will take literally hundreds of thousands of people to space and that will give us the financial resources to do even bigger things. That will give us the resources then to put satellites into space at a fraction of the price, which can be incredibly useful for thousands of different reasons.' Branson isn't the only billionaire interested in the Red Planet. Elon Musk, founder of Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX), wants to put humans on Mars in the next 12 to 15 years.."
hypnosec writes "The Raspberry Pi, which was recently used to build a cluster, has officially been given a 'Turbo Mode' by The Raspberry Pi Foundation, thus enabling overclocking. It will bump the frequency of the on-board processor as high as 1GHz as long as the temperature stays below 85C. The patch would dynamically increase the voltage and frequency of the core until the thermals hold. According to the Foundation, users have the option of choosing one of five peak frequencies, the highest being 1GHz."
New submitter Nomen writes "Today's xkcd: Click and Drag (Google Maps version) is probably the world's biggest web comic at an RSI-inducing resolution of 165,888x79,872 pixels. It's made up of 225 different images that take up 5.52MB of space. Now, if only the mines were powered by nethack..."
bonch writes "Google-owned Motorola is asking the International Trade Commission to ban every Apple device that uses iMessage, based on a patent issued in 2006 for 'a system for providing continuity between messaging clients.' Motorola also claims that banning Macs and iPhones won't have an impact on U.S. consumers. They say, 'With so many participants in the highly competitive Wireless communication, portable music, and computer market, it is unlikely that consumers would experience much of an impact if the requested exclusion orders were obtained.' The ITC has yet to make a decision."
6 writes with news that the Internet Archive has launched an online archive of TV news content. According to the NY Times, it will "include every morsel of news produced in the last three years by 20 different channels, encompassing more than 1,000 news series that have generated more than 350,000 separate programs devoted to news." In addition to preserving the works of humankind, the archive is for helping citizens "better understand the issues and candidates in the 2012 U.S. elections by allowing them to search closed captioning transcripts to borrow relevant television news programs."
Daniel Knight, besides being an actor, D&D fanatic, and collector of He-Man figurines, is the director of a film version of Terry Pratchett's Discworld story Troll Bridge that's been enabled by a massive Kickstarter campaign. Filming has finished (you can see some of the raw and intermediate footage linked from that story) and now all the rest of the work that goes into the finishing and releasing the movie is underway. Why this film? Knight says he "ended up acting a small role in a short film called Star Wars: Broken Allegiance. My performance was terrible. But that introduced me to the world of fan films, and I started wondering if it would be possible to do a Discworld one." The project is clearly a labor of love — it's a massive undertaking on a shoestring budget, with a tough goal: "Troll Bridge aims to be the largest scale short film in history. Using resources garnered over eight solid years of dedication, love, sweat, and tears – Troll Bridge has already begun exceeding expectations as to what should be anticipated from a short form production." The cast and crew (even the caterers) are all volunteers, but it still takes money to construct sets, create costumes, and buy time with needed equipment. Daniel has graciously agreed to answer your questions about the process; as with other Slashdot interviews, you're invited to ask as many questions as you'd like, but please ask them in separate posts.
An anonymous reader writes "I've been working on reverse engineering the D-Link DPH-128MS VOIP phone. It's an end of life product for D-Link but a neat little desktop phone that runs Linux. I've figured out a way to exploit the tftp server running on it to get root access. I'm at the point now of trying to figure out how to update the phone with more files. Check out the writeups I have and the scripts on the link above."
MrSeb writes with news about our coming cybernetic overlords. From the article: "After more than four years of research, DARPA has created a system that successfully combines soldiers, EEG brainwave scanners, 120-megapixel cameras, and multiple computers running cognitive visual processing algorithms into a cybernetic hivemind. Called the Cognitive Technology Threat Warning System (CT2WS), it will be used in a combat setting to significantly improve the U.S. Army's threat detection capabilities. There are two discrete parts to the system: The 120-megapixel camera, which is tripod-mounted and looks over the battlefield; and the computer system, where a soldier sits in front of a computer monitor with an EEG strapped to his head, looking at images captured by the camera, wedding out false threats. In testing, the 120-megapixel camera, combined with the computer vision algorithms, generated 810 false alarms per hour; with a human operator strapped into the EEG, that drops down to just five false alarms per hour. The human brain is surprisingly fast, too: According to DARPA, CT2WS displays 10 images per second to the human operator — and yet that doesn't seem to affect accuracy."