Vigile writes "Nintendo has never been known to be very aggressive with its gaming console hardware and with today's release (in the U.S.) of the Wii U we are seeing a continuation of that business model. PC Perspective spent several hours last night taking apart a brand new console to reveal a very simplistic board and platform design topped off with the single multi-chip module that holds the IBM PowerPC CPU and the AMD GPU. The system includes 2GB of GDDR3 memory from Samsung and Foxconn/Hon-Hai built wireless controllers for WiFi and streaming video the the gamepad. Even though this system is 5 years newer, many analysts estimate the processing power of Nintendo's Wii U to be just ahead of what you have in the Xbox 360 today."
An anonymous reader writes "When Pete London posted a resume on LinkedIn in December 2009, the JavaScript specialist stumbled into a trap of sorts. Shortly after creating a profile he received a message from a recruiter at Google. Just days later, another from Mozilla. Facebook reached out the next month and over the course of the next two years, nearly every big name in tech – attempt to lure him to a new employer. He received 530 messages in all, or one every 40 hours ... the only problem? Pete London didn't exist."
An anonymous reader writes "Developers been working hard for the past few months to get Linux ported to the TI-Nspire calculator. The port is not yet fully stabilized nor quite ready for broad consumption and requires some user-level knowledge of Linux systems, but is definitely worth a try. Experimental support for root filesystem installed on USB mass storage is being worked on, so that Datalight's proprietary Flash FX/Reliance filesystem used by TI's OS isn't a limit anymore. This also means that the native TI-Nspire OS image is not replaced by the Linux system, and Linux can been booted on demand. Support for USB keyboard, X server, directFB, Wi-Fi (with the help of a powered USB hub) and text-based Internet browsing is progressively being added and tested."
Freddybear writes "If your computer has been cracked and subverted for use by a botnet or other remote-access attack, is it legal for you to hack back into the system from which the attack originated? Over the last couple of years three legal scholars and bloggers have debated the question on The Volokh Conspiracy weblog. The linked webpage collects that debate into a coherent document. 'The debaters are: Stewart Baker, a former official at the National Security Agency and the Department of Homeland Security, a partner at Steptoe & Johnson with a large cybersecurity practice. Stewart Baker makes the policy case for counterhacking and challenges the traditional view of what remedies are authorized by the language of the CFAA.Orin Kerr, Fred C. Stevenson Research Professor of Law at George Washington School of Law, a former computer crimes prosecutor, and one of the most respected computer crime scholars. Orin Kerr defends the traditional view of the Act against both Stewart Baker and Eugene Volokh. Eugene Volokh, Gary T. Schwartz Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law, founder of the Volokh Conspiracy, and a sophisticated technology lawyer, presents a challenge grounded in common law understandings of trespass and tort.'"
lee1 writes "Using special techniques that present information to one eye while hiding the information from the conscious mind (by masking it with more distracting imagery presented to the other eye), researchers have shown two new and very unexpected things: we can read and understand short sentences, and we can perform multi-step arithmetic problems, entirely unconsciously. The results of the reading and calculating are available to and influence the conscious mind, but we remain unaware of their existence. While we have known for some time that a great deal of sensory processing occurs below the surface and affects our deliberative behavior, it was widely believed until now that the subconscious was not able to actually do arithmetic or parse sentences."
theodp writes "The WSJ catches up with FIRE's Greg Lukianoff and his crusade to expose how universities have become the most authoritarian institutions in America. In Unlearning Liberty, Lukianoff notes that baby-boom Americans who remember the student protests of the 1960s tend to assume that U.S. colleges are still some of the freest places on earth. But that idealized university no longer exists. Today, university bureaucrats suppress debate with anti-harassment policies that function as de facto speech codes. FIRE maintains a database of such policies on its website. What they share, lifelong Democrat Lukianoff says, is a view of 'harassment' so broad and so removed from its legal definition that 'literally every student on campus is already guilty.'"
smi.james.th writes "Here on Slashdot, the concept that older models of business need to be updated to keep with the times is often mentioned. A friend of mine owns a DVD rental store, and he often listens to potential customers walk out, saying that they'd rather download the movie, and not because his prices are unreasonable. With the local telco on a project to boost internet speeds, my friend feels as though the end is near for his livelihood. So, Slashdotters, I put it to you: What can a DVD store owner do to make his store more relevant? What services would you pay for at a DVD store?"
Billly Gates writes "In a bizarre, yet funny and ironic move, Microsoft warned web developers that using WebKit stagnates open standards and innovation on the Web. According to the call to action in its Windows Phone Developer Blog, Microsoft is especially concerned about the mobile market, where many mobile sites only work with Android or iOS with WebKit-specific extensions. Their examples include W3C code such as radius-border, which is being written as -WebKit-radius-border instead on websites. In the mobile market WebKit has a 90% marketshare, while website masters feel it is not worth the development effort to test against browsers such as IE. Microsoft's solution to the problem of course is to use IE 10 for standard compliance and not use the proprietary (yet open source) WebKit."
New submitter NewYork writes with this chestnut from an article about the role of age in the high-tech workplace: 'The shelf life of a software engineer today is no more than that of a cricketer — about 15 years,' says V R Ferose, MD of German software major SAP's India R&D Labs that has over 4,500 employees . 'The 20-year-old guys provide me more value than the 35-year-olds do.'" The article features similar sentiments from Mukund Mohan, CEO of Microsoft's India-based startup initiative.
cervesaebraciator writes "Saturday an article was featured on Slashdot which expressed some hope, if just a fool's hope, that a recent Republican Study Committee Brief could be a sign of broader national discussion about the value of current copyright law. When one sees such progress, credit is deservedly given. Unfortunately, others in Washington did not perhaps see this as worthy of praise. The committee's executive director, Paul Teller, sent a memo today disavowing the earlier pro-copyright reform brief. From the memo: 'Yesterday you received a Policy Brief or [sic] copyright law that was published without adequate review within the RSC and failed to meet that standard. Copyright reform would have far-reaching impacts, so it is incredibly important that it be approached with all facts and viewpoints in hand.' People who live in districts such as Ohio's 4th would do well to send letters of support to those who crafted the original brief. I cannot imagine party leadership will be happy with so radical a suggestion as granting copyright protection for the limited times needed to promote the progress of science and useful arts."
An anonymous reader writes with this snippet from cbc.ca: "'NASA's Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes (not to be outdone by the Kepler Space Telescope) have discovered the most distant galaxy identified so far in the universe... the galaxy is 13.3 billion light years away and only a tiny fraction of the size of the Milky Way. Due to the time it takes light to travel through space, the images seen from Earth now show what the galaxy looked like when the universe was just 420 million years old, according to a press statement released from NASA. The newly discovered galaxy (is) named MACS0647-JD."
An anonymous reader writes "Windows 8 may block most malware out of the box, but there is still malware out there that thwarts Microsoft's latest and greatest. A new Trojan variant, detected as Backdoor.Makadocs and spread via RTF and Microsoft Word document marked as Trojan.Dropper, has been discovered that not only adds a clause to target Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012, but also uses Google Docs as a proxy server to phone home to its Command & Control (C&C) server."
YokimaSun writes "Nintendo has today fired the first salvo in the next-gen console wars with the U.S. release of their Wii U console, which is massively more powerful than the Nintendo Wii and also the PS3/Xbox 360 (so they claim). Yet again Nintendo has done a world first and released a gamepad which is also a tablet and should provide us with games that stretch the boundaries even more. Wii games are compatible with the console, as is the Wii remote. The Wii U comes in 2 SKUs: a 32GB Deluxe package, and an 8GB Basics pack. The games lineup is a strong one, with games such as New Super Mario Bros U, Arkham City Armoured Edition, Assassins Creed 3, Call of Duty Black Ops 2, Sonic AllStars Racing, Nintendo Land, Tank Tank Tank, ScribbleNauts Unlimited, Epic Mickey 2 The Power of Two, ESPN Sports Connection, DarkSiders 2, Rabbids Land, Mass Effect 3, Ninja Gaiden 3 Razors Edge, Tekken Tag Tournament 2, Wipeout 3 and Just Dance 4 all available on launch day."
Penurious Penguin writes that "a hopeful article at The Verge persuasively suggests that through Valve, Linux could soon become a formidable contender in the gaming arena, capable of holding its own against such giants as Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and the Wii. With 50 million users, a growing Linux team, a caboodle of interesting experiments ('Steam Box' hardware baselines, etc.) and a strong conviction that more-open platforms are the way, Valve may actually see it through."
cylonlover writes "Maya Cakmak, a researcher from Georgia Tech, spent the summer at Willow Garage creating a user-friendly system that teaches the PR2 robot simple tasks. The kicker is that it doesn't require any traditional programming skills whatsoever – it works by physically guiding the robot's arms while giving it verbal commands. After inviting regular people to give it a try, she found that with few instructions they were able to teach the PR2 how to retrieve medicine from a cabinet and fold a t-shirt."
Low adoption and insufficient research has slowed the movement of Google Maps indoors, a Google software engineer said today at the Indoor Positioning and Indoor Navigation conference held at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. Google wants to make indoor maps "as solid and reliable as outdoors," said Waleed Kadous, who leads Google's indoor map acquisition efforts. However, while handset technology is ready for indoor maps, killer apps and improved location detection in unusual spaces are still needed to make indoor maps mainstream, he said. Google has in eight countries: U.S., U.K., France, Japan, Canada, Sweden, Denmark, and Switzerland. It has maps for more than 10,000 venues, including malls, airports, and museums. Google has also released tools for businesses in several countries to upload their own maps. Similar to the outdoor version of Google Maps, users can of locations indoors (such as "coffee") and then get turn-by-turn directions to that spot from their current location. Unlike outside, indoor maps can track location across multiple floors in one building. Google is starting to collect indoor images similar to Street View, he said.
The U.S. delegation to an upcoming United Nations telecom treaty-writing conference will not budge on advocating free speech online and opposing broad new regulations for the Internet, the leader of the delegation said. The U.S. delegation wants a successful World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT), said Terry Kramer, head of the U.S. delegation. But if other delegates to WCIT attempt to expand the U.N. International Telecommunication Union's telecom regulations to the Internet, "we might as well not waste our time," Kramer said during a WCIT discussion in Washington, D.C. last week. The U.S. delegation, however, will work hard to advocate for telecom competition and free expression during the ITU event, starting December 3 in Dubai. Open markets offer the only proven way to expand telecom and broadband services to more people, and the U.S. delegation has strong support for that position from parts of Europe, the Far East, and Latin America, Kramer said at the event, sponsored by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. The conference will give the U.S. delegation the opportunity to talk about the economic benefits of free speech and democracy, but the U.S. will have to be "shrewd" in how it communicates those values, Kramer said.
A team of researchers have created a proof-of-concept piece of malware that can give attackers control of USB smart card readers attached to an infected Windows computer over the Internet. The malware installs a special driver on the infected computer which allows for the USB devices connected to it to be shared over the Internet with the attacker's computer. In the case of USB smart card readers, the attacker can use the middleware software provided by the smart card manufacturer to perform operations with the victim's card as if it was attached to his own computer, said Paul Rascagneres, an IT security consultant at Luxembourg-based security auditing and consulting firm Itrust Consulting, last week. Rascagneres is also the founder and leader of a malware analysis and engineering project called malware.lu, whose team designed this USB sharing malware. There are already of malware that hijacks smart card devices on the local computer and uses them through the API (application programming interface) provided by the manufacturer.
Samsung outsold Nokia and Apple in worldwide mobile device sales in the third quarter this year, according to a Gartner report this week. Samsung sold 98 million phones in Q3, an increase of 18.6 per cent compared to the same quarter last year. That gives it 22.9 percent market share in the mobile phones overall. Read our Samsung widened its lead over Apple in smartphone sales despite both companies selling more in Q3 year-on-year. Samsung sold 55 million smartphones in the quarter, while Apple sold 23.6 million devices in Q3. Samsung now controls 32.5 percent of the smartphone market, while Apple owns 14 percent.
If the increase in supercomputer speeds continue at their current pace, we will see the first exascale machine by 2020, estimated the maintainers of the compilation of the world's fastest systems. System architects of however, will face a number of critical issues, a keeper of the list warns. "The challenges will be substantial for delivering the machine," said Jack Dongarra, a University of Tennessee, Knoxville, researcher who is one of the principals behind the Top500. Dongarra spoke at the SC2012 conference, being held this week in Salt Lake City, during a presentation about the latest edition of the list, . We still have a way to go before exascale performance is possible. An exascale machine would be capable of one quintillion FLOPS (floating point operations per second), or 10 to the 18th FLOPS. Even offer less than 20 percent of the capability of an exascale machine.
U.S. residents can save nearly $8,400 a year in entertainment, clothing, food and other expenses by subscribing to broadband, according to a study released Friday. (IIA). The savings difference between this year and last is due to a rising cost of products and services offline and an increase in comparison shopping services on the Web, said Bruce Mehlman, the IIA's co-chairman. "Consumers are spending more, and there are more opportunities for differential pricing" between offline and online products as the U.S. economy improves, he said. One of the largest savings came in the area of entertainment, where broadband customers could save nearly $2,500, or 48 percent, of their yearly expenses, according to the study, by Nicholas Delgado, principal at financial planning firm Dignitas. Broadband customers could save nearly $1,660, or 20 percent, of their travel expenses, and nearly $1,050, or 60 percent, of their clothing expenses.
Apple's iPad shipments for China nearly doubled in the third quarter, after a lengthy dispute over the iPad trademark name that once threatened to ban the device from store shelves in the country. Shipments of the tablet in the third quarter reached 2.07 million units, up from 1.15 million in the previous quarter, according to Dickie Chang, an analyst with research firm IDC. He attributed the shipment growth to Apple finally gaining ownership of the iPad trademark in China, which cleared the way for sales of the new product. Apple's third generation iPad went on sale in China on July 20, four months after it was made available in the U.S. The launch was as Apple got embroiled in a legal battle with Chinese firm Proview, which had registered for the "IPAD" trademark in China years before. Proview had wanted Apple to pay as much as US$400 million for the trademark, and had called on authorities to ban iPad sales in the country. Finally, in early July, the two companies settled the dispute, with Apple to obtain the trademark from Proview.
Never mind visiting every star in our galaxy, we're still a long, long way from being able to take an intergalactic cruise across the Milky Way. Fortunately, there are things like this Chrome Experiment called . Powered by music from Mass Effect's Sam Hulick, 100,000 Stars makes use of Google Chrome's support for Web technologies like WebGL, CSS3D, and Web Audio, as well as imagery and data from sources like NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) to create a very cool visualization of the galaxy.
Now that the latest effort to advance comprehensive in Congress, attention is now shifting to the White House, where officials have been developing an executive order to better protect the nation's critical infrastructure from digital attacks and vulnerabilities. Earlier this week, the that President Obama had signed a secret policy directive outlining new protocols for federal agencies in dealing with cyberthreats and providing new authorities for the military "to act more aggressively to thwart cyberattacks on the nation's web of government and private computer networks." That revelation came as Senate Republicans on Wednesday defeated a procedural measure that would have advanced the Cybersecurity Act backed by Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Connecticut) and Susan Collins (R-Maine), objecting that the Democratic majority was trying to push the bill through without sufficient debate and by limiting the number of amendments that members could introduce. At the very least, that will move the into next year, and likely into the new session of Congress, with the primary fault lines in the debate -- whether the government should impose cybersecurity mandates on private-sector infrastructure operators; whether the military or Department of Homeland Security should take the lead in civilian cybersecurity -- expected to resurface, while the White House could still move ahead with a more expansive executive order that the policy directive Obama reportedly signed in October.
Israeli and Palestinian forces have found a new means of wartime propaganda—social media. As the two forces continue to clash, firing rockets on each other, they've also launched a war of hashtags, English-language tweets and videos on sites like Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and Flickr. Social networks have been used in recent years to . Now social media is being used to try to sway the minds of people around the world about the in the Middle East.