alphadogg writes "Cisco is slowly killing off its Cius business tablet less than a year after it started shipping. The Android-based collaboration tool, which featured a 7-inch touchscreen and was not intended to challenge more consumer-oriented tablets such as the Apple iPad, fell victim to the BYOD trend and cloud computing, Cisco said in a blog post. Cisco will instead 'double down' on software offerings like its Jabber and WebEx products for more popular tablets and smartphones supporting a variety of operating systems."
An anonymous reader writes "People who are outgoing, optimistic, easygoing, and have a good sense of humor and a large social network are likely to live longer than others who don't possess these personality traits, according to new research (abstract). The study reveals how saying, 'It's in their genes' could refer to more than just genetic variations that give a physiological advantage, like having high levels of HDL ('good') cholesterol, because people with positive personality traits appear to live longer than those who do not."
theodp writes "If you're a COBOL programmer, you're apparently persona non grata in the eyes of the nation's Chief Information and Chief Technology Officers. Discussing new government technology initiatives at the TechCrunch Disrupt Conference, Federal CIO Steven VanRoekel quipped, 'I'm recruiting COBOL developers, any out there?,' sending Federal CTO Todd Park into fits of laughter (video). Lest anyone think he was serious about hiring the old fogies, VanRoekel added: 'Trust me, we still have it in the Federal government, which is quite, quite scary.' So what are VanRoekel and Park looking for? 'Bad a** innovators — the baddest a** of the bad a**es out there,' Park explained (video), 'to design, create, and kick a** for America.' Within 24 hours of VanRoekel's and Park's announcement, 600 people had applied to be Presidential Innovation Fellows."
sethopia writes "In 2010, three people had the crazy idea to start a school where the teachers teach whatever they want and the students pay for classes with whatever teachers need — cutlery, art, advice — but never with money. Trade Schools have been popping up around the world and are now active in 15 cities and 10 countries, with almost no prodding from its founders. Caroline Woolard, one of the founders, discusses the challenges and opportunities of adapting their idea to an international audience and making the Trade School software — based on Python and Django — great."
Barence writes "Is it even possible to buy technology with a clean conscience? With the vast majority of gadgets and components manufactured using low-paid labor in Asia, manufacturers unable to accurately plot their supply chains, and very few ethical codes of conduct, the article highlights the difficulty of trying to buy ethically-sound gadgets. It concludes, 'The answer would appear to be no. Too little information is available, and nobody we spoke to believed an entirely ethical technology company exists – at least, not among the household names.'"
New submitter mrnick writes "Eric Simons, 19 years old, was working at incubator Imagine K2 in Silicon Valley, which was hosted at AOL's Palo Alto campus. His grant money eventually ran out, but his access badge kept working, so he moved into AOL's office. He slept on a couch, took showers and washed clothes in the office gym, and ate for free in the cafeteria, all the while working on his new start-up. He was able to get away with this for two months before being discovered by security guard."
Hexydes writes "Early in the morning (5:53 am EST) on May 26th, 2012, NASA gave the go-ahead for the Expedition 31 crew to begin the procedure to open the hatch on the Dragon capsule, now directly attached to the ISS. 'The hatch opening begins four days of operations to unload more than 1,000 pounds of cargo from the first commercial spacecraft to visit the space station and reload it with experiments and cargo for a return trip to Earth. It is scheduled for splashdown several hundred miles west of California on May 31. Wearing protective masks and goggles, as is customary for the opening of a hatch to any newly arrived vehicle at the station, Pettit entered the Dragon with Station Commander Oleg Kononenko. The goggles and masks will be removed once the station atmosphere has had a chance to mix air with the air inside the Dragon itself.' Here is a video of the procedure."
An anonymous reader writes "A fortnight ago the Bitcoin financial website Bitcoinica was hacked and the hacker stole $87,000 worth of Bitcoins. At the time the owner promised that all users would have their Bitcoins and US dollars returned in full, but one of the site developers has just confirmed that they have no database backups and are having difficulty figuring out what everyone's account balance should actually be. A failure of epic proportions for a site holding such large amounts of money."
New submitter x0d writes with this excerpt from the L.A. Times: "The Facebook spending spree may be continuing as a new report says the social networking giant might be looking to buy Norwegian company Opera Software. Now fully under the microscope of Wall Street as well as Main Street investors, Facebook is trying to solve its mobile monetizing problems and has been gobbling up various companies in recent months to increase its presence in the world of smartphones."
mikejuk writes "Google has been improving the way that its Googlebot searches dynamic web pages for some time — but it seems to be causing some added interest just at the moment. In the past Google has encouraged developers to avoid using JavaScript to deliver content or links to content because of the difficulty of indexing dynamic content. Over time, however, the Googlebot has incorporated ways of searching content that is provided via JavaScript. Now it seems that it has got so good at the task Google is asking us to allow the Googlebot to scan the JavaScript used by our sites. Working with JavaScript means that the Googlebot has to actually download and run the scripts and this is more complicated than you might think. This has led to speculation of whether or not it might be possible to include JavaScript on a site that could use the Google cloud to compute something. For example, imagine that you set up a JavaScript program to compute the n-digits of Pi, or a BitCoin miner, and had the result formed into a custom URL — which the Googlebot would then try to access as part of its crawl. By looking at, say, the query part of the URL in the log you might be able to get back a useful result."
scibri writes "The iris scanners that are used to police immigration in some countries, like the UK, are based on the premise that your irises don't change over your lifetime. But it seems that assumption is wrong. Researchers from the University of Notre Dame have found that irises do indeed change over time, enough so that the failure rate jumps by 153% over three years. While that means a rise from just 1 in 2 million to 2.5 in two million, imagine how that will affect a system like India's — which already has 200 million people enrolled — over 10 years."
New submitter wirelessduck writes "After some recent complaints from a Labor MP about price markups on software and technology devices in Australia, Federal Government agencies decided to look in to the matter and an official parliamentary inquiry into the issue was started. 'The Federal Parliament's inquiry into local price markups on technology goods and services has gotten under way, with the committee overseeing the initiative issuing its terms of reference and calling for submissions from the general public on the issue.'"
hessian writes "Scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology achieved a 17-percent increase in boiling efficiency by using an acoustic field to enhance heat transfer. The acoustic field does this by efficiently removing vapor bubbles from the heated surface and suppressing the formation of an insulating vapor film."
With its new browser, Yahoo is trying to change not only the search game but also to reverse its image as a troubled company.
Infected searchers will get an alert that they need to remove the DNSChanger malware or risk losing Internet connectivity on July 9.
The social network has checkered success rate against smut peddlers in court. Here's a recap.
Northeastern University Students develop an eye-controlled robotic feeding arm that you can build at home.
Cisco will discontinue investment and development of the tablet, less than a year after it started shipping.
Here comes the robot apocalypse: Harvard researchers build inch-long flying robots using techniques from microchip manufacturing, origami, and pop-up books.
MIT develops a magnetically driven needless drug delivery system that fires nearly as fast as the speed of sound.
Analysis: Thanks to social networks, bullying is no longer confined to the schoolyard; victims are potentially subject to harassment anytime, anywhere, and from any handheld device.
Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian and online advocacy group Fight for the Future are said to plan 'Bat-Signal for the Internet.'
Naturally, before tossing out these less-favored applications you'll want to examine them carefully so that you don't discard something that you anticipate needing some day.
Samsung, the biggest maker of Android devices, is already trying to sell both tablets and smartphones for workplaces, while Lenovo is doing the same with tablets.
Whether any such purchase of Opera by Facebook is imminent is pure speculation, but if it happens Google and Apple could be in for more competition.
A reader in Papua New Guinea seeks help with a software purchase he can't complete; also, an antivirus software company drops a customer support firm for aggressive tactics.
Why part with cold, hard cash when you can trade—on a swap site—something that you no longer need for something you really want?
Cisco Systems owned up to some miscalculations in its video collaboration strategy but showed off some promising future capabilities in a briefing with media...
As XP's life wanes, Microsoft talks dollars to get businesses to ditch 11-year-old OS.
The Facebook IPO may have been a fiasco, but don't put the nail in the coffin just yet for other tech offerings this year.
YouTube's Frontrow camera app lets you play director by zooming in and out to change views, applying filters, taking photos during the live video stream, and sharing those images via social networks.
Details have leaked of what we can expect from the first generation Dell Windows 8 tablet, and the specs don't seem adequate.
Recent patent applications are for a stylus, dubbed the iPen, that could use haptic or optical technology to work with the company's iOS devices.
CEO Ballmer uses an 80-inch touchscreen running Windows 8 for communications and productivity in his office, and the technology will hit the market "eventually."
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission approved a rule change for part of the 800MHz band Thursday, opening the door for Sprint Nextel to use the band for its 4G LTE network.
A new report from Google reveals that Microsoft dominates the field when it comes to sending takedown requests to shut down sites offering pirated software.
Sure, the world of IT is still full of frustrations. But here are a few aspects of the big picture we shouldn't forget.
Nearly 9 out of 10 downloads of the new version of OpenOffice have been for Windows machines, rather than Linux, according to recently released statistics from Apache.
This Kickstarter project keeps your smartphone in the perfect position for taking scan-quality photos of documents.
If Adobe Reader isn't getting the job done, this free substitute makes it easy to edit just about any PDF.
The newest version of the Oracle NetBeans IDE (integrated developer environment) will come with support for the latest versions of PHP and C++.
Cisco announced that it can't compete in a BYOD world, and it's getting out of the tablet business.
Finally, there's a machine to hold your cards for you when you’re playing online webcam poker with your friends.
Intuit's Quickbooks Online service suffered an outage this week that left "a small subset" of customers unable to access their data, but the company says the...
You may never be able to have Ladyada's workshop, but support this project on Lego Cuusoo, and you can at least have a toy representation of it.
Developers have released Absinthe 2.0 which can jailbreak iOS 5.1.1 devices. Jailbreaking is a personal choice, but a jailbroken iOS device poses a security risk.
UPDATE: Absinthe 2.0 can be used to jailbreak iOS 5.1.1 devices, allowing users to gain root access to the OS and -- for example -- download applications not authorized by Apple.
You may Like (or un-Like) Facebook Camera, but here's why Instagram should still have a place in your heart.
The mayor of West New York, New Jersey, was arrested together with his son on Thursday, for allegedly hacking into a website that criticized him and his...
Copyright owners want allegedly infringing links removed from search results in increasing volume, Google says.
IBM has banned the use of Siri by employees over privacy concerns, but the policies employed by Apple are not really any different than the rest of the Internet and tech world.
A recent coding competition in the Boston area brought together IT professionals, medical workers and others with an interest in health IT to show how data...
Dell's forthcoming tablet looks like standard stuff, plus some business-friendly security features.
Apple may mimic Amazon's practice of regularly offering a paid app as a free download; let's hope the App Store sticks a good selection.
The direction HP is taking with its outsourcing business remains unclear three years after its EDS acquisition.
Microsoft is in the midst of an unprecedented, massive upgrade cycle for its enterprise software products, a refresh wave that represents a major challenge for...
CIOs and IT directors tracking the barrage of major upgrades for Windows and Office also need to stay tuned to the refresh cycle for Microsoft's servers and...
The Executive Branch of the Minnesota state government had its 40,000 end users on a mishmash of e-mail systems when in 2008 its IT group, the Office of...
How easy is it to get a Facebook botnet to do your bidding? All you need is cash, the right software, and a list of fake accounts. I did it in 10 minutes for less than $70.
UPDATE: The recent release of an FCC analysis prompts members of Congress to urge another look at Google's data-collection practices for its Street View maps.
More than 50 percent of software acquired in the next five years will be open source software, according to recent data.
When Siri sends your voice to Apple's servers for conversion to text, is Apple capturing your passwords?
Apple and Android devices make up 82% of those shipped to retailers in the first quarter of 2012, IDC reports.