Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Your Camera Doesn't Matter (Score 1) 569

So says Ken Rockwell:

Your Camera Doesn't Matter
http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/notcamera.htm

I'd have to agree with him. Many beginners get too caught up with gear. I'm not a "pro" by definition, though I have won photo contests and my work has been published dozens of times. All of my work was done using "cheap", "inferior" cameras.

Comment "Furniture builder" (Score 1) 263

Reminds me of an ex-colleague who said his hobby is "building furniture". I thought "Wow! A real craftsman!" until I found out that his definition of building furniture is buying stuff from Ikea and assembling it.

I didn't have the heard to tell him that his efforts would fall under the "cheap, low-skilled labor" category in third world countries. He seemed genuinely proud of the furniture he "built".

Comment Don't even need to buy the whole company (Score 1) 472

That's an intriguing idea, and they wouldn't even have to buy the whole company. Plus, they could just use their personal money, and not Google's.

For instance, Vivendi, the parent company of Universal (the largest record label) has a market cap of $25.1 bil; 10% of that is "only" $250 mil. Warner Music has a market cap of only $1.1 bil.

Here's how I'd do it:
1) Buy a 10% stake in the "big four" labels right now.
2) Every month, for the next two years, buy another %1 stake in the labels.
3) Do not negotiate or meet with the labels at all.
4) Attend all shareholder meetings at the labels, but remain silent.

They'll eventually get the message.

Media

Flash Can Rob 2 Hours From MacBook Air's Battery Life 509

The lack of Flash in the new MacBook Air may annoy some users, but it has a big upside, too. According to Wired's report (citing Ars Technica) passed on by an anonymous reader, "Having Flash installed can cut battery runtime considerably — as much as 33 percent in our testing. With a handful of websites loaded in Safari, Flash-based ads kept the CPU running far more than seemed necessary, and the best time I recorded with Flash installed was just 4 hours. After deleting Flash, however, the MacBook Air ran for 6:02 — with the exact same set of websites reloaded in Safari, and with static ads replacing the CPU-sucking Flash versions."
Software

Chatbot Suzette Wins 20th Annual Loebner Prize, Fools One Judge 257

skwilcox writes "From Wikipedia: 'The Loebner Prize is an annual competition in artificial intelligence that awards prizes to the chatterbot considered by the judges to be the most human-like. The format of the competition is that of a standard Turing test. A human judge poses text questions to a computer program and a human being via computer. Based upon the answers, the judge must decide which is which.' My chatbot, Suzette, won this year's Loebner and even confused a judge into voting for her over a human (or should I say he confused himself). Here is the blow-by-blow of this weird event." Read on below for the rest; this sounds like it would have been a fun competition to watch.

Comment Just block the social game servers (Score 2, Interesting) 130

Can't you just block the servers used by Facebook games? e.g. Zynga, Mindjolt, etc. The domains and IP ranges should be easy to track down. That should eliminate a major time sink, while still allowing access to FB messages, events, groups, etc which could possibly be used for work.

But really, if you've got someone playing Farmville 6+ hours a day at work, then it is an employee problem, not a security problem...

Slashdot Top Deals

"Well, social relevance is a schtick, like mysteries, social relevance, science fiction..." -- Art Spiegelman

Working...