Top 12 Flying Car Experiments
August 8, 2011
There have been scores of attempts to build an actual flying car since the 1920s but none has ever entered mass production.
Microsoft Continues To Bleed Mobile Market Share, Despite WP7
August 7, 2011
Windows Phone 7 was supposed to reverse Microsoft's declining market share, prove that the company was capable of designing a product that could stand against the best Android and Apple had to offer, and re-establish the company as a major player in the smartphone space. Despite generally positive reviews, WP7 has failed to improve Redmond's...
Phone companies present rural broadband plan
August 1, 2011
Read 'Phone companies present rural broadband plan' on Yahoo! News. AT&T Inc., Verizon Communications Inc. and four other telecom companies are offering a proposal to overhaul the $8 billion federal phone subsidy program to pay for high-speed Internet connections in rural and other underserved areas.
How Chartbeat wants to help save the media industry
July 31, 2011
Chartbeat's Tony Haile says the company created a special version of its real-time analytics service called Newsbeat because it wants to help publishers understand their online businesses better, by giving them more data about what readers are interested in and where they are coming from.
China officials find 5 fake Apple stores in 1 city
July 24, 2011
Read 'China officials find 5 fake Apple stores in 1 city' on Yahoo! News. Chinese officials have found five fake Apple stores in the southwestern city of Kunming, and ordered two of them to suspend business while they're investigated, a local government website said Monday.
Five Best Streaming Music Services
July 24, 2011
Whether you prefer free streaming at your computer, paid streaming on the go, or the ability to host your own music in the cloud, there are more streaming music services coming online now than ever before. Here's a look at five of the most popular ones.
7 Things Facebook Should Do To Increase Security
July 19, 2011
Many Facebook users lack knowledge and experience about how to protect themselves in the social networking environment. Online privacy expert Eugene Kapersky makes seven recommendations to Mark Zuckerberg.
Suppressed Report Found Busted Pirate Site Users Were Good Consumers
July 19, 2011
In June, police across several countries raided the operators of streaming video links portal Kino.to. This massive operation was one of the largest of its type and site admins and users alike were branded as enemies of the TV and movie business. However, it now appears that in respect of the latter group, the opposite was found to be true.
China Web users hit 485 million
July 19, 2011
The number of Chinese Internet users hit 485 million at the end of June, with microblogging and group-buying posting the highest user growth rates, a Chinese government Internet statistical
Why are web workers happier?
July 18, 2011
The research is conclusive: compared to office-based colleagues, those who are free to work where they choose are happier with their jobs. But why is this? The answer isn’t as clear as it might first appear to web work boosters.
Church of God Sues Sony Pictures and Comcast for Copyright Infringement
July 18, 2011
The ‘religious’ comedy Salvation Boulevard premiered in movie theaters last Friday, but not everyone appreciates the film’s humor. The Church of God has sued Sony Pictures, IFC Films and Comcast for infringing the copyright of the church’s logo, and is praying to stop the film’s distribution. In addition the church demands financial compensation for the substantial and irreparable harm the infringements have caused.
MIT Uses Video Games to Create the Smartest, Scariest Computer Ever
July 14, 2011
Remember how much of a pain SimCity was? Now imagine trying to play it in Russian. Researchers at MIT have created machine-learning systems that are able to analyze instruction manuals to help them beat video games.
The concept started with work by graduate student S.R.K. Branavan, working in the lab of Regina Barzilay, an associate professor in the computer science department at MIT. Branavan’s group created a script that installed software in Windows by referencing instructions from Microsoft’s website. Since then, they’ve taken it further, creating a program to play the turn-based strategy game, Civilization. The program has been a success too, winning 79 percent of the time with the help of the manual as compared to a near-random 46 percent win rate on its own.
“Games are used as a test bed for artificial-intelligence techniques simply because of their complexity,” Branavan said in an MIT press release. "Every action that you take in the game doesn’t have a predetermined outcome, because the game or the opponent can randomly react to what you do. So you need a technique that can handle very complex scenarios that react in potentially random ways.”
A computer playing games is nothing new, whether you’re battling the machine in Mortal Kombatw_CYrrk_ or chess. But in those instances the computer is always reactionary, at least in a sense. They’re programmed to play based on an algorithm devised by a human, and no matter how cleverly that algorithm is designed, the computer is stuck with those rules. If you’ve ever been bored enough to have the computer play itself in, say, a hockey game, the play is generally sloppy and the outcome is mostly a coin-flip, just like the MIT program only winning half its Civilization games when it couldn’t search for help.
The winning program was more successfu
The Case for Silver Lake Not Being Evil Incarnate
June 26, 2011
When an employee cries foul against a big tech company or its greed-driven investors, it's easy to take the side of the employee, especially when an employee comes forward on the record to state his or her case.
A wronged employee is inherently more sympathetic than a big, greedy private equity firm or a faceless corporation, and it's rare that an employee will actually publicly take a stand. In the cozy, relationship-driven world of Silicon Valley no one wants to make a public stink about a perceived or even real injustice. The temptation is to just suck it up and move on.
But as this Skype story has continued to dominate another weekend of headlines many bloggers and tweeters are missing important facts in our zeal to defend wronged employees and demand that private equity firms-- especially ones profiting off of an $8 billion deal-- just do the right thing.
Oh Cyberthugs . . . Run, run as fast as you can. FBI on victorious roll
June 23, 2011
Like some kind of modern-day cyber cowboys, the FBI has come out with cyberguns blazing, blowing away bad guys in cyberspace, and scoring major white hat wins. FBI victories include remotely disabling and reducing Coreflood Botnet, busting up two major scareware rings that 'stole' over $74 million from users, and arresting the #1 FBI Most Wanted. Agents also seem to be closing in on LulzSec.
