Free Republic

<p>Perhaps the best answer to the question posed to Bernanke moments ago whether US unemployment is structural or cyclical comes courtesy of Microsoft, which announced earlier that it was set to hire "several thousand" workers. Sadly, the catch is that the hires will be in China.</p>

Okay I'm sick of it and as we all know FR is the best place in the world for good information so this is the deal. My IE keeps getting these "popup" kinda things from some outfit called "cloudfront". Best I can tell is they're some kind of 3rd party distribution front for certain software packages like flash player and java that bug the ^$%#@ out of you to install this or that. If I want up upgrade my java, or flash player, or anything else I'll do it myself.

Now here’s the invention that we’ve all been waiting for: A device that instantly charges our cell phones. A gadget like this might soon be on its way thanks to a bright 18-year-old from Saratoga, Calif., who was recently honored at an international science fair. Eesha Khare is the mind behind a super-powerful and tiny gizmo that packs more energy into a small space, delivers a charge more quickly, and holds that charge longer than the typical battery. Khare showed off her so-called super-capacitor last week at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in Phoenix, Ariz. In her demonstration,...

<p>EARLIER THIS YEAR, thousands of people checked their e-mail and found a surprise: An American soldier needed help, and there was something in it for them. Their correspondent was a sergeant stationed in Iraq, he explained. He had accumulated millions in hundred-dollar bills—the older ones being phased out by the Treasury—from the cash brought into the country by the American occupation. The soldier needed to launder this money, fast, and needed a stateside bank account to do it. In return for a cut of the total, could he use yours?</p>

<p>Eminem, the prolific and profane rapper, is suing fellow billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's CEO whose idea of irreverence is adding tickers to your Facebook wall. According to the Detroit Free Press, Eminem claims Facebook stole the beats, melody, etc. from his 2000 "Under the Influence." The Bay Area social media giant ran an ad for its new Facebook Home app on April 4, featuring a song with beats eerily similar to Eminem's dirty ditty about popping pills and sucking his dick.</p>

NASA is funding a 3D food printer, and it'll start with pizza By Aaron Souppourison May 21, 2013 07:24 am NASA is funding research into 3D-printed food. As Quartz reveals, Mechanical engineer Anjan Contractor received a $125,000 grant from the agency to build a prototype 3D printer with the aim of automating food creation. It's hoped the system could provide astronauts food during long-distance space travel, but its creator has the loftier aim of solving the increasing food shortages around the world by cutting down on waste. The software for the printer will be open-source, while the hardware is based on...

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Boise University PhD candidate Joshua Kiepert has built a 32-way Beowulf cluster from Raspberry Pis. Kiepert says his research focuses on “developing a novel data sharing system for wireless sensor networks to facilitate in-network collaborative processing of sensor data.” To study that field Kipert figured he would need a decent simulator, preferably a cluster so he could simulate lots of distributed sensors. The University possesses just such a cluster, comprised of 32 nodes each packing a quad-core Intel Xeon E3-1225 CPU humming away at 3.1GHz. That's a lovely facility and is therefore much in-demand, which meant Kiepert could not guarantee...

Research firm Forrester says IT isn't interested in Windows 8, and that the platform's success relies on consumers and BYOD. Given that consumers aren't exactly embracing the new OS, Win8's prospects are easy to dismiss -- so much so that Frank X. Shaw, Redmond's VP of corporate communications, recently felt compelled to reprimand the media for its emphatically bleak appraisal of his company's plight. But here's the thing: Shaw could be right. Windows 8's consumer appeal is about to get a major upgrade. An important note: this prediction presupposes that the OS's usability issues are addressed in Windows 8.1, a...

Simple question here ,, I'm looking to avoid the pain of dealing directly with Microsoft... here's the problem 1.) bought off-lease Dell laptop from corporate seller a.) laptop has valid original Windows 7 product key tag b.) laptop was originally loaded with Win7Pro at Dell and immediately reloaded with authorized site licensed copy of XP by said corp. before being put in use c.) MIS dept scrubs and reloads pc to be sold with fresh copy of XP prior to sale. 2.) I installed extra memory and reloaded laptop from a DELL OEM Win7Pro 64bit disk a.) during install I...

There is little doubt that the smartphone world is dominated by two operating systems — Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS.The latest market data released by the International Data Corporation (IDC), which showed that both these platforms accounted for 92.3 percent of all smartphone OS shipments during the first quarter of 2013, proves this dominance in numbers.IDC says Android smartphone vendors and Apple shipped a total of 199.5 million devices worldwide during Q1 2013, which was up 59.1 percent from the 125.4 million units shipped during the same quarter in 2012.Android remained the market leader with a 75 percent share of the...

When it comes to hunting down humans running speeds, MIT's cheetah might come second to Boston Dynamics' own high-velocity quadruped, but by substituting pneumatics with motors, MIT's version apparently runs far more efficiently. At the recent International Conference on Robotics and Automation, the Institute of Technology showed of its newest version, which reached a top speed of 13.7 mph. To accomplish this, the runner still needs parallel support bars to constrain movement in one dimension, reducing any roll, yaw -- and the chances of a pretty expensive fall. The team says the new version's cost of transport (COT is...

An explosive, feature-length documentary hitting an expanded roster of theaters nationwide on May 17 offers a captivating look at the larger-than-life personality of the late Andrew Breitbart – a controversial new media pioneer whom the left vilified and the right hailed as an American hero. Coming more than a year after the sudden and mysterious death of the crusading 43-year-old journalist, the film Hating Breitbart was initially screened in a few theaters in October shortly before the presidential election, but is expanding to 10 markets nationwide on Wednesday, along with the film’s simultaneous release on DVD and video-on-demand.

At first glance, things could not be going worse for Microsoft. Its long-dreaded nightmare scenario is playing out. The PC industry as we've known it is collapsing. PC sales fell 14% in the first quarter, according to IDC, the worst ever drop in history. Microsoft's new Windows 8 operating system is accelerating the collapse, says IDC. The new tile-interface is scaring consumers. Microsoft is scrambling to fix Windows 8 to address these concerns. And even if Microsoft fixes Windows 8, it could be too late. Its biggest rivals — Apple and Google — have taken complete control of the next...

One of the most amazing things about Linux is how versatile it is. Let's face it - Windows and MacOS X are...boring. They look exactly how they look. When it comes to making your computer look and behave however you like, Linux is king. Let's take a stroll through some truly interesting, and beautiful, Linux Desktop Environments - the ones that many of us have never even seen.xmonad xmonad (all lower case) is a tiling window manager built in the Haskell programming language (which is interesting enough to qualify for inclusion in this list). So what is a “tiling...

Are you a writer? Or maybe just an active Facebook and Twitter-er who misses the good old days of handwritten letters, before digital media destroyed our capacity to express human emotion with words? Either way, are you tired of waiting for all communication to move past the clunky words of generations past and finally metamorphose into the dancing cat GIFs that we all know and love?Then boy, does the Internet have the thing for you. Meet Neko Font, a web app that will transform text into a new font made entirely out of cats. Well, pictures of cats, to be...

Of the many milestones in Barbara Walters’s career — her ascendance from NBC booker to on-camera powerhouse at the Today show, her soft-focus but hard-hitting 20/20 interviews on ABC, her creation of The View — perhaps the most notable is that she’s retiring of her own volition next year. But the funny thing is that, if she were interested in extending her career by a few years or decades, her sensibility would translate perfectly online. Only Diane Sawyer, sixteen years her junior, has had comparable staying power. Most of the prominent broadcast-news women of recent decades — Katie Couric, Elizabeth...

A homeless hitchhiker who achieved Internet celebrity by acting as a Good Samaritan with a hatchet was arrested at a Philadelphia bus depot Thursday in connection with the murder of a New Jersey attorney, authorities said. Caleb Lawrence McGillvary, 24, known on Facebook and YouTube as "Kai the Hatchet Wielding Hitchhiker," is facing a murder charge in Union County, New Jersey, authorities said. McGillvary was arrested Thursday evening at the Greyhound terminal by Philadelphia police after New Jersey authorities issued a public call for help in finding him, said Union County Prosecutor Theodore J. Romankow. "I am grateful for the...

For years I have avoided using a proxy server but after some concern that someone who I don't trust has knowledge of my IP address I am considering using a proxy server to avoid issues like IP spoofing, computer hacking, transmission eavesdropping, etc. Can anyone recommend a few easy-to-use proxy servers (whether free or subscription) I may wish to consider?

I love using Chrome but certain web pages freeze all the time and it's driving me nuts!!! I disabled the second Adobe Flash player as per a posting on a Chrome forum but it hasn't helped. The same pages that always freeze in Chrome load fine in Firefox and IE. Anyone else had this problem? Any solutions? (Other than not using Chrome at all, I mean.) Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

We're not sure if this is a good sign for Microsoft or a bad sign for BlackBerry, but Windows Phone is now the third largest smartphone operating system, according to IDC. Since we're optimists, we'll say it's a good sign for Microsoft. It's trying to catch up to Apple's iOS and Google's Android operating systems. It has a very long way to go before it catches either of them, but it had to start somewhere. Perhaps this is the start of the most unlikely come-from-behind victory in history. Here's the IDC numbers, via All Things D:

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. claims that the Moore’s law will survive in the long-term, despite of all issues and lack of its economic feasibility for many chip designers. However, future chips will not only gain logic transistors to drive performance up, but will absorb a lot of untraditional (by today’s standards) functionality. “If anybody pushes Moore's Law to extremes, TSMC will be there too, but that is not all we do. We also have specialized technologies such as embedded flash, high-voltage, power transistors, MEMS and image sensors – a spectrum of technologies. And as we move monolithic CMOS on to...

High Scalability has a fascinating article up that summarizes a talk by Robert Graham of Errata Security, summarizing the development choices needed to support 10 million concurrent connections on a single server. From a small data center perspective, the numbers he is talking about seem astronomical, but not unbelievable. With a new era of Internet connected devices dawning the time may have come to question the core architecture of Unix, and therefore Linux and BSD as well. The core of the talk seems to be that the kernel is too inefficient in how it handles threads and packets to maintain...

Not sure but this may be my first "vanity" thread since joining in 1998. In any case, I know there's folks on here who are deeply involved in photography and know lots about camera's and digital camera's -- something of which I know about zero. I'm taking the better half on her dream vacation this summer to Alaska for her birthday. We have a small 12mp digital pocket camera, but are thinking we'd really need something better (better zoom, image stabilization for example) for some nice nature pic's. I've been reading up on different camera's from SLR to DSLR and...

he Internal Revenue Service is now facing a class action lawsuit over allegations that it improperly accessed and stole the health records of some 10 million Americans, including medical records of all California state judges. According to a report by Courthousenews.com, an unnamed HIPAA-covered entity in California is suing the IRS, alleging that some 60 million medical records from 10 million patients were stolen by 15 IRS agents. The personal health information seized on March 11, 2011, included psychological counseling, gynecological counseling, sexual/drug treatment and other medical treatment data. "This is an action involving the corruption and abuse of power...

Mozilla is out with the Firefox 21 open source browser release today, fixing at least 8 security vulnerabilities, three of which are rated as being critical. The new release also provides new features that – depending on your viewpoint – could either improve or reduce user privacy.One of the new features in Firefox 21 is the Health Report. Mozilla first began talking about the health report in September of 2012 as a non-invasive reporting mechanism. The report is intended to deliver information to users about the 'health' of the browser and its components. The report also shares that data with...

Is There Such a Thing? All one needs to do is read the way that Google and Yahoo spin headlines to realize what the young people are absorbing.....time for a different server/host?????? Anyone??????

Microsoft claimed last week that it's made '100 million' Windows 8 sales and the claim has been widely repeated. But channel feedback and the experience on the ground point to a very different picture. The Guardian's Charles Arthur has made a stab at estimating the true figure, and suggests it's much less, at between 57 million and 59 million machines running Redmond's latest OS.Arthur looks at two metrics of browser usage: StatCounter and Net Applications' NetMarketShare, and extrapolates a usage figure from the number of PCs actually shipped. The logic here is that browser usage is a reliable proxy for...

When Apple introduced the iPad in 2009, it rolled out its own suite of Microsoft Office-like applications. It had "Pages" for word processing, "Numbers" for spreadsheets, and "Keynote" for presentations. Since Microsoft never rolled out a version of Office for the iPad, each of those three apps sold well for Apple. Pages is the most popular paid app of all-time. Keynote is the tenth most popular and Numbers is eleventh. After Apple introduced those apps in 2009, it's largely left them alone. There have been some minor tweaks, but nothing major. That could be about to change. Apple has been...

I got two computer questions that I'm hoping someone can help me with. First, in my work I regularly have to convert JPEG images from 60" x 45" at 72 DPI to 5" x 3.75" at 300DPI. I normally do this through Photoshop. However, the amount of the photos my coworkers have increased from say, 20-30 to over 800-900 at any one given time. I'm trying to find a faster method of converting them. I've looked for software to do it en-mass but I really don't know where to look or what to look for. That's one. Second, I downloaded...

The Freeper community is so intelligent and comes from a wide variety of backgrounds. I only ask this because I am (partially) stumped by this question. I am working on a project to get information about deaths to the public in a more organized and timely way. This topic may be interest to you, because other than one man in history, we will all go through this at some point. One of the problems is that when you start asking people at hospitals, mortuaries and government questions about this, people tend to clam up, as it is relatively foreboding issue....

... But if the Bible is so vital for life, why does it often feel difficult to read and understand? How can it be so hard to commit to daily devotion? It could be that all you need is the right tools. These free, downloadable Bible Study programs could help you truly delve deeper into the Word of God ...

On Friday, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) published the first public draft of Encrypted Media Extensions (EME). EME enables content providers to integrate digital rights management (DRM) interfaces into HTML5-based media players. Encrypted Media Extensions is being developed jointly by Google, Microsoft and online streaming-service Netflix. No actual encryption algorithm is part of the draft; that element is designed to be contained in a CDM (Content Decryption Module) that works with EME to decode the content. CDMs may be plugins or built into browsers. The publication of the new draft is a blow for critics of the extensions, led...

Alan Turing was a British scientist and a pioneer in computer science. He is well-known for breaking the German Enigma code during World War II. His suicide after being convicted of homosexual acts has made him a martyred hero of the gay community ... Turing made it his goal to crack the complex Enigma code used in German naval communications, which were generally regarded as unbreakable. Turing cracked the system and regular decryption of German messages began in mid-1941. To maintain progress on code-breaking, Turing introduced the use of electronic technology to gain higher speeds of mechanical working. Turing became...

"Computers aboard the International Space Station are to be switched from Windows XP to the Linux operating system in an attempt to improve stability and reliability.

The NSA has been forced because of a FOIA request to release a 607 page PDF file, a guide/document on searching the web and various deep searches, as well as hacking guidelines. I downloaded it and am reading it now. All I can say is "VERY!!!! interesting!!!!!"

... Does the mere possibility that a phone call or e-mail will soon arrive drain your brain power? And does distraction matter — do interruptions make us dumber? Quite a bit, according to new research by Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Lab. There’s a lot of debate among brain researchers about the impact of gadgets on our brains. Most discussion has focused on the deleterious effect of multitasking. Early results show what most of us know implicitly: if you do two things at once, both efforts suffer. In fact, multitasking is a misnomer. In most situations, the person juggling e-mail,...

I just ran a search under Google news for Bill Lerach, and there was one result for an Apr 24, 2013 article "Who's Teaching Your Children" to the Dallas Blog, and when I clicked on it I was directed to forgud.qhigh.com with a message "server not found." However, when I put my cursor over the link to the article on the search results page the link is to dallasblog.com Why do I got directed to a different web address and a "server not found" message when I click on the link? Thanks for any insight folks may have.

Mapping the world with Tweets Posted By Joshua KeatingWednesday, May 8, 2013 - 3:39 PM   A new paper on the peer-reviewed online journal First Monday summarizes the results of a project to use geographic data gathered from Tweets to create a picture of the world according to Twitter. The researches, led by GDELT co-creator Kalev Leetaru, used the Twitter decahose, a massive feed of 10 percent of all tweets, access to which is normally sold at high price to marketers. The project covers the period of the Oct. 23, 2102, to November 30, 2012. During this time, 1,535,929,521...

Good morning, AdLand. Here’s what you need to know today: A high ranking source at Cumulus radio told the Radio Ink that 48 out of 50 advertisers gave orders to exclude “Rush and Hannity” from their packages. Of course, the radio company that distributes Limbaugh’s show released a statement that the claim is “completely inaccurate.”There was talk earlier this week that Limbaugh’s relationship with Cumulus was in danger given the major advertising boycott he incited after calling Sandra Fluke a slut on the air. The boycott allegedly cost ABC Radio $5.5 million. …

Intel has unveiled its brand new Silvermont microarchitecture. The new Atom chips based upon 22nm Silvermont designs will yet again be pitted against ARM processors in the target market of mobile processors. Silvermont designs will power the Merrifield (smartphone) and Bay Trail (tablet) SoCs. However this time Chipzilla might have more of a chance against the ARM artillery supplied Qualcomm, Nvidia, Apple, and Samsung. According to Intel, the Silvermont architecture can deliver a choice of “approximately 3x more peak performance or the same performance at approximately 5x lower power over the current-generation Intel® Atom™ processor core”. That is indeed a...

Don't kick a man while he's down. When an Intel employee sought help in removing a "Kick Me" sign from his back, he was kicked three times by a co-worker. That co-worker and another who joined in the kicking later lost their jobs because of the prank. Intel workers secretly taped a "Kick Me" sign to the back of a co-worker as a prank, then kicked the confused man a number of times as employees at the Rio Rancho Intel plant laughed hysterically at the episode, according to a federal lawsuit.

Microsoft is preparing to reverse course over key elements of its Windows 8 operating system, marking one of the most prominent admissions of failure for a new mass-market consumer product since Coca-Cola’s New Coke fiasco nearly 30 years ago.

(Reuters) - Microsoft Corp has sold 100 million Windows 8 licenses in the six months since launch, roughly in line with the previous version, but wants to combat sputtering interest in its flagship software with a substantial update to make it easier to use, and compatible with smaller tablets. Windows 8 is the first Microsoft operating system primarily designed for touch commands, but it has failed to capture consumers' imaginations or make a dent in a tablet market dominated by Apple Inc and Samsung Electronics. "Is it perfect? No. Are there things we need to change? Absolutely. We are being...

Fans of Iron Man, take notice: A group of students at the Royal College of Art in London have created two masks that can give you superhuman sight and hearing. The first prototype covers the wearer's ears, mouth and nose and uses a directional microphone to give him the ability to hear an isolated sound in a noisy environment. For example, you could target a person in a crowd and clearly hear his words without the surrounding noise. The other prototype is worn over one's eyes. A camera captures video and sends it to a computer, which can apply a...

Intel is introducing a new 22nm Atom core, and for the first time in the history of the line it is a new microarchitecture. Lets take a look at what we can expect from this new device, and why.

Bill Gates took a shot at the iPad while explaining Microsoft's rationale for the Surface this morning on CNBC. He was asked about the declining PC market. He said that tablets are growing in popularity, and it's "going to be harder and harder to distinguish products" that are PCs versus tablets. The Surface, he says, brings the "portability of the tablet but the richness of the PC." He then said of people using iPad-like devices, "A lot of those users are frustrated, they can't type, they can't create documents, they don't have Office there." While some people are frustrated by...

When I mention online learning to my colleagues at Wesleyan University, most respond initially with skepticism. But based on my experience, I know that real learning can take place on the Web. I am currently teaching a massive online open course, or MOOC, on Coursera. Most MOOCs have great attrition, and mine is no exception: There were almost 30,000 students registered at the start, yet 4,000 remain active as we near the end of the semester. Unlike most MOOCs, which focus on science, technology, engineering and mathematics, mine is a classic humanities course. "The Modern and the Postmodern" starts off...

wesome!!! She nailed it!!! http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=2cX85u57teE

The World Wide Web consortium is considering a proposal to specify standards for HTML extensions to implement Digital Restrictions Management (DRM). The proposal is supported by Netflix, Microsoft, Google and the BBC. HTML was initially designed to describe the semantics of text and give control to the browser over how to present it. Since it became common for companies to have web sites, they have steered the development of HTML towards precise control over what the user sees and the behavior of the page -- arguably going in the wrong direction, but not an injustice ... until now. Of course, the W3C...