Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror

Submission + - ECMAScript 6 Is Officially A JavaScript Standard

Submitted by rjmarvin
rjmarvin writes: The ECMAScript 6 specification is now a standard http://sdtimes.com/ecmascript-.... ES6 is the first major revision to the programming language since 1999 and its hallmark features include a revamped syntax featuring classes and modules. The Ecma General Assembly officially approved http://www.ecma-international.... the specification at its June meeting in France today, ECMAScript project editor Allen Wirfs-Brock announced https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2Fawbjs.

Submission + - Survey Finds Nearly 50% in US Believe in Medical Conspiracy Theories (nydailynews.com) 1

Submitted by cold fjord
cold fjord writes: NY Daily News reports, "About half of American adults believe in at least one medical conspiracy theory, according to new survey results. (paywalled, first page viewable) Some conspiracy theories have much more traction than others ... three times as many people believe U.S. regulators prevent people from getting natural cures as believe that a U.S. spy agency infected a large number of African Americans with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). J. Eric Oliver, the study's lead author from University of Chicago, said people may believe in conspiracy theories because they're easier to understand than complex medical information. ... Some 49 percent of the survey participants agreed with at least one of the conspiracies. In fact, in addition to the 37 percent of respondents who fully agreed that U.S. regulators are suppressing access to natural cures, less than a third were willing to say they actively disagreed with the theory." — One of the conspiracy theories, that the US created the AIDs virus, was created for an active disinformation campaign by the Soviet Union against the US as a form of political warfare during the Cold War, and still gets repeated.

Submission + - Your Car Will Soon Sense If You're Tired Or Not Paying Attention

Submitted by cartechboy
cartechboy writes: Distracted driving is a large issue, and it's getting worse as we become more entangled with our technology. To help combat this growing problem Volvo is showing off new technology that allows the car to sense when a driver is tired or not paying attention. The system bathes the driver in infrared light that can pick up the driver's position and eye movements. If the driver becomes inattentive or begins to drift off to sleep, it will alert you. Besides the safety aspect of this system, it will also be able to recognize the person sitting behind the wheel, allowing the car to tailor itself to that person's stored preferences. Further, it will be able to adjust the vehicle's exterior lighting in the direction the driver is looking based on the detected eye movement. Volvo's quick to note the system can't photograph the driver. People, the future is coming, and your vehicle is going to be watching you.

Submission + - OpenSUSE 13.2 To Use Btrfs By Default

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: OpenSUSE has shared features coming to their 13.2 release in November. The big feature is using Btrfs by default instead of EXT4. OpenSUSE is committed to Btrfs and surprisingly they are the first to use it by default of major Linux distributions, but then again they were also big ReiserFS fans. Other planned OpenSUSE 13.2 features are Wayland 1.4, KDE Frameworks 5, and a new Qt5 front-end to YaST.

Comment Re:IE11 is getting good! (Score 1) 111

by bwintx (#43346857) Attached to: IE11 To Support WebGL

Yeah and how many Apple users are running on anything but the latest OSX version? pretty much none, the numbers are so low as to be meaningless.

Wish that were true, but businesses who've slashed IT spending as a reacton to the tough economy of recent years are keeping their people stuck with old PCs using WinXP and/or, where applicable, old Macs using OS X 10.5 (Leopard). In my case, it's both -- i.e., old PC with WinXP and old Mac with OS X 10.5.

Submission + - Comcast buys out GE's remaining 49% stake in NBC (philly.com)

Submitted by
Bob the Super Hamste
Bob the Super Hamste writes: "On Tuesday Comcast announced that it would accelerated its acquisition of NBCUniversal and purchase the remaining 49% owned by GE for $16.7 billion.Previously GE and Comcast were expected to operate NBCUniversal jointly until mid 2014 with Comcast having the option to extend that out until 2018. So far there are not details on when the deal with be completed but the article indicates that Comcast's complete acquisition of NBCUniversal will be completed years earlier that initially thought."
Advertising

Submission + - Washington Post (& Warren Buffet-owned local newspapers) installing Paywalls (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by McGruber
McGruber writes: The Washington Post reports (http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/washington-post-reportedly-considering-adding-a-paywall-in-2013/2012/12/06/0630b2f4-3ff4-11e2-ae43-cf491b837f7b_story.html) that the Washington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com) and local newspapers owned by Warren Buffet, are all planning to follow the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com) and install metered paywalls.
Programming

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: How to catch Photoshop plagiarism 4

Submitted by jemenake
jemenake writes: A friend of mine teaches electronic media (Photoshop, Premiere, etc.) at a local high-school. Right now, they're doing Photoshop, and each chapter in the book starts with an "end result" file which shows what they're going to construct in that chapter, and then, given the basic graphical assets (background textures, photos, etc.), the students need to duplicate the same look in the final-result file.

The problem, of course, is that some students just grab the final-result file and rename it and turn it in. Some are a little less brazen and they rename a few layers, maybe alter the colors on a few images, etc. So, it becomes time-consuming for her to open each file alongside the final-result file to see if it's "too perfect".

When I first discovered that she was doing this, my first reaction was that there's got to be some automated way of catching the cheaters. Of course, my first idea of just doing MD5 hashes of each file won't work, since most kids alter the file a little bit.

A second idea I had was to alter the final-result file in a way that isn't obvious, like removing someone's shoelace, mis-spelling a word in the background, or removing/adding some dust-specks. (I know map publishers and music transcribers use this trick to catch copiers). But this still requires that she look for the alteration in each file. I'd think that Photoshop, after all these years, would have some kind of scripting language which also supports some digital watermarking, but I've just never dabbled in that realm.

And, of course, I guess another solution would be for her to not provide the end-result file in Photoshop format, but to export it as a flat image. But I'm still intrigued by the notion of being able to "fuzzily" compare two photoshop files or images to find the ones which are too similar in certain aspects (color histograms, where the edges are, level of noise, whatever).

Anybody else have any clever ideas for this?
Businesses

Submission + - Mark Cuban: Facebook Is Driving Away Brands - Starting With Mine (readwrite.com)

Submitted by
concealment
concealment writes: "Tech billionaire and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban says he is fed up with Facebook and will take his business elsewhere. He's sick of getting hit with huge fees to send messages to his team's fans and followers.

Two weeks ago Cuban tweeted out a screen grab of an offer he'd received from Facebook. The social network wanted to charge him $3,000 to reach 1 million people. Along with the screen grab, Cuban wrote, "FB is blowing it? This is the first step. The Mavs are considering moving to Tumblr or to new MySpace as primary site.""
Iphone

Submission + - Major Apple shakeup - Forstall out; iOS executive fired for maps debacle? (9to5mac.com) 1

Submitted by noh8rz10
noh8rz10 writes: Wow, just wow. Apple fires Scott Forstall, who grew iOS from its inception. Rumors say its the Maps, and problems with Siri as well. Jony Ive taking a larger human interface role, which will probably kill the skeumorphic interfaces that he hates. Browett out as well as the retail head; he never won the trust of the community. What does such a major shakeup say about Tim Cook's leadership? Decisive action, or flip-flopping?
Robotics

Submission + - Water-Prospecting Polaris Lunar Rover Prototype Built (gizmag.com)

Submitted by Zothecula
Zothecula writes: Astrobotic Technology Inc., a spin-off company of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), has debuted its full-size flight prototype of its Polaris lunar water-prospecting robot. Polaris is specially designed to work in the permanently shadowed craters at the Moon’s poles. Scheduled to be sent to the Moon using a SpaceX Falcon 9 launch vehicle, the solar-powered rover is a contender in the US$20 million Google Lunar X Prize and is tasked with seeking ice deposits that could be used by future colonists.
Hardware

Submission + - How to add 5.5 petabytes and get banned from Costco during a hard drive crisis (gigaom.com)

Submitted by
concealment
concealment writes: "“We buy lots and lots of hard drives . . . . [They] are the single biggest cost in the entire company.”

Those are the words of Backblaze Founder and CEO Gleb Budman, whose company offers unlimited cloud backup for just $5 a month, and fills 50TB worth of new storage a day in its custom-built, open source pod architecture. So one might imagine the cloud storage startup was pretty upset when flooding in Thailand caused a global shortage on internal hard drives last year.

Backblaze details much the process in a Tuesday-morning blog post, including the hijinks that followed as the company got creative trying to figure out ways around the new hard drive limits. Maps were drawn, employees were cut off from purchasing hard drives at Costco — both in-person throughout Silicon Valley and online (despite some great efforts to avoid detection, such as paying for hard drives online using gift cards) — and friends and family across the country were conscripted into a hard-drive-buying army."

Comment Re:FB shares (Score 1) 186

by bwintx (#41286547) Attached to: Mark Cuban Blames Himself For Losing Money On Facebook IPO

and then there was that other one with green background and red letters....horrible L&F. Thankfully I forgot the name of it.

Hotbot?

I don't remember the letters' colors, but the lime-green background -- yeah, that sticks with you like the bad taste resulting from a late-night case of acid reflux. (For those of you not so afflicted, trust me on that part.)

Slashdot Top Deals

I attribute my success to intelligence, guts, determination, honesty, ambition, and having enough money to buy people with those qualities.

Close