firehose

dexstarrofearth:

xchickengirlx:

“So my friends cat turned one. Slight change”

sobs hysterically

by roots

McGruber writes "NBC News is reporting that Microsoft's Chief Financial Officer Peter Klein is leaving the company to spend time with his extended family, as Microsoft 'struggles with sharply declining personal computer sales and a lukewarm reception for its new Windows 8 operating system.' Klein is the latest in a line of top-level executives to leave the company, following Windows head Steven Sinofsky last November."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Foxconn has apparently botched a batch of iPhones, which Apple returned to the contract manufacturer because they were not fit for sale.

In hindsight, selling Upcoming to Yahoo was a horrible mistake. Selling your company always means sacrificing control and risking its fate, and as we now know, online communities almost always fail after acquisition.

Over half of all detainees at the US-run Guantanamo Bay military prison are now taking part in a hunger strike, with many being force-fed.

SternisheFan writes "ArsTechnica reports: 'While the whole country is relieved that this past week's Boston Marathon bombing ordeal and subsequent lockdown of the city is finally over, Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis told the Washington Post that the department's facial recognition system "did not identify" the two bombing suspects. "The technology came up empty even though both Tsarnaevs' images exist in official databases: Dzhokhar had a Massachusetts driver's license; the brothers had legally immigrated; and Tamerlan had been the subject of some FBI investigation," the Post reported on Saturday. Facial recognition systems can have limited utility when a grainy, low-resolution image captured at a distance from a cellphone camera or surveillance video is compared with a known, high-quality image. Meanwhile, the FBI is expected to release a large-scale facial recognition apparatus "next year for members of the Western Identification Network, a consortium of police agencies in California and eight other Western states," according to the San Jose Mercury News. Still, video surveillance did prove extremely useful in pinpointing the suspects"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Oblivion may have its flaws, but no one can argue it isn't pretty — especially after seeing this supercut of every single graphical interface shown in the film. Impressively, I don't think this has any real spoilers, so even folks who haven't seen the movie can watch it.

Read more...

Authorities have quickly made an arrest after an anonymous threat posted to 4chan this weekend warned of an imminent school shooting. "Tomorrow, I will shoot my Dutch teacher, and as many students as I can," read the message — posted days after a terrorist attack rattled the US. Even more troubling, an attached photo seemingly shows off the gun and ammunition meant to be used in the mass show of violence. The post even goes so far as to reveal a target. "It's a school in a Dutch city called Leiden." That specificity led local authorities to keep thousands of students home Monday, according to Agence France-Presse. The individual behind the 4chan message said he would be carrying a note explaining his actions, and said a friend would publish the letter if authorities opted not to share it publicly.

Thankfully despite the perpetrator's insistence that the "police is not gonna find me before tomorrow," it didn't take long for authorities to nab their man — a former pupil reportedly expelled in 2011 over bad behavior. Sadly, previous threats posted to the popular website have turned out to be more than words. Earlier this month, minutes before opening fire in a crowded Virginia mall, a gunman outlined his plans on 4chan.

• Via The Atlantic Wire
• Source Agence France-PresseThe Daily Mail
• Related Items shooting 4chan threat

Chris Gallizi has gotten Skyrim running on the Oculus Rift, ushering in a new, dark age for the human race.

Thousands of people will now banish themselves into a harsh virtual world for days at a time, emerging only when they remember that the sweet rolls and porridges they've been desperately snarfing will only satisfy their imaginary dragonman body, and not the one that wastes away outside of the game world.

Skyrim can run on Oculus Rift, please remember the real world originally appeared on Joystiq on Mon, 22 Apr 2013 09:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Carillonneur Lyle Anderson performed the theme song of HBO’s Game of Thrones on a 56-bell carillon in a bell tower at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

via Daily of the Day

Less than a month after it had acquired Summly, an iOS news app that uses a combination of natural language processing and algorithms, Yahoo has updated its main mobile app for iPhone and iPod touch with the UK startup's new summarizing technology. In a blog post, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer outlines her company's continued dedication to mobile, introducing the new version of the Yahoo iOS app, which now features an endless stream of stories, new social and personalization features, and an overhauled search experience.

---

The new app is currently only available in the US, offering users toggles to select news that they are interested in. Article pages mimic Yahoo's new weather and mail apps for iOS, with more a more visual design that it hopes will generate interest across its entire line of mobile products. The company has also improved its search so that preferences are saved between mobile and the web, also offering better results for video and images. Yahoo said it would work to get Summly's technology into its existing mobile experiences as quickly as possible, suggesting the Yahoo! iOS app is just the beginning of its mission to "deliver the best of the web."

• Via Yahoo Blog
• Source Yahoo! (App Store)

YouTube link.

The RM 52-01 Skull is is the second piece in the Skull collection (first piece launched in 2012), and features the skull design that embodies Richard Mille’s anti-conformist spirit.  This model stands out both for its choice of materials and the way it has been crafted.  The RM 52-01 Skull has a manual winding tourbillon caliber built on a baseplate in PVD-treated titanium, much like the original RM 52.  But the skull and back of the skull are now sculpted from 5N red gold and are hand-bevelled — giving the skull a much more distinctive presence.

For the case, Richard Mille introduces a composite nano-ceramic material known as TZP, used for the RM 52-01′s bezel and case back (finished with microblasting and hand-polishing on the corners).

The RM 52-01 is released as a limited edition of 30 timepieces.

---

© Perpetuelle, 2013. | Serving Up New Luxury and Avant-Garde Timepieces Daily.
More Richard Mille

fandoms on the Tumblrmachines, ladies and gents

Squeeee! Dog and cheetah cub playing.

Hundreds of people flocked to a Medford church today for the funeral of Boston Marathon bombing victim Krystle Campbell. Some had to be turned away from the door of the packed building, while others came expressly to line the street to guard the grieving family from a protest by a fringe group.

me: What you do think about the princess marrying another princess?
her: Instead of the prince?
me: Instead of the prince
her: So her daughter would have two mommies?
me: Yes
her: two princess mommies...
me:
her:
me:
her: fabulous

“I would not be willing to do a funeral for him. This is a person who deliberately killed people. There is no room for him as a Muslim. He already left the fold of Islam by doing that.”

– Imam Talal Eid of the Islamic Institute of Boston, speaking to the Huffington Post about why he wouldn’t conduct a Muslim funeral for Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev

The post Quote of the Day: Imam Talal Eid of the Islamic Institute of Boston appeared first on Religion News Service.

The Human Printer is an ongoing art project by a collective of students at the University of Derby who take photographs and manually create a CMYK halftone printing effect by hand. CMYK refers to the four inks used in some color printing: cyan, magenta, yellow, and key (black)—the application of which is usually determined by computers, not people. The process of applying each dot by hand as you can imagine is a painfully tedious process that requires not only a knowledge of printing but also plenty of forethought before beginning each piece. You can see a rough idea of the process in the video above.

The Human Printer was setup in 2009 by Louise Naunton Morgan and having setup a design studio with Stina Gromark, the project is now run by Stinsensqueeze (STSQ). According to their website they are currently taking orders, all you have to do is upload an image that meets their requirements, select a color process, and they’ll get back to you with a quote. (via jeannie jeannie)

In order to demonstrate the functionality of its "Omni" prototype treadmill, which the company calls a "natural motion interface for virtual reality applications," technology start-up Virtuix has released the above video of the contraption being used in conjunction with an Oculus Rift and Team Fortress 2.

The setup essentially works like this: The Oculus Rift handles head tracking and display duties, while a Kinect tracks how the player walks/runs on the the Omni, and then converts that input into in-game commands. The Kinect is an in-development solution, however, and Virtuix says the Omni will include its own sensor when/if it ships to consumers.

The company plans to launch a Kickstarter campaign in May, with final production units costing somewhere between $400 and $600, sans shipping. A second example video, this time showing a better look at a prototype of the device while in use, has been tucked away beyond the veil.

Continue reading This is what playing TF2 with an Oculus Rift and an omni-directional treadmill looks like

This is what playing TF2 with an Oculus Rift and an omni-directional treadmill looks like originally appeared on Joystiq on Sat, 20 Apr 2013 19:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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thearcanetheory:

androphilia:

“Being a woman is not a means to humiliate and punish anyone”

After a policeman in the Iranian Kurdish town of Marivan paraded an accused criminal in traditional Kurdish women’s clothes in the streets in order to humiliate him, women marched in the city condemning the use of women’s attire as a kind of humiliation.

In support, an internet campaign of Kurdish and other Iranian men has sprung up showing men wearing Kurdish women’s clothes and messages and support. For example, this message says,”wearing Kurdish women’s clothes is not only not an insult, it is instead a great honor for us,” and goes on to describe how women stand side by side with men in every part of society and during wartime.

Support the campaign by liking the page!
زن بودن ابزار تحقیر و تنبیه هیچ کس نیست

(via Ajam Media Collective)

WOW

Yes.

Every well-read site gets comments. (For people like me who don’t let others publish comments directly on our articles, we still get plenty of commentary — just in other places such as email, Twitter, and Hacker News.)

Every app with a nontrivial number of downloads is likely to have comments, too, in the form of App Store reviews. This goes far beyond the app market these days, with stores like Amazon allowing anyone to review products and media, and sites such as Yelp that will publish anyone’s review of any restaurant, doctor, or church.

If you put yourself out there at all by offering a product or service, you’re going to get comments, usually anonymously and outside of your control, potentially inaccurate, malicious, or not credible, yet available for all future prospective customers to read.

Now, think of something you saw recently that had a lot of comments or reviews. They’re not all going to be positive. What could its creator have done to please all of the negative commenters?

Go ahead, this isn’t a trick question. You know the answer.

Nothing.

No matter what you make or how much you charge, some people will find things to complain about. If you drop your app’s price all the way down to free, people will still complain — just not about the price. They’ll move on to the features, the implementation, the design, the updates, the way you look, or what kind of dog you have. They’ll complain about every facet of your app, and then they’ll complain about unrelated topics just to pile on. They’ll say they use your app every day and love it, then give it a two-star rating until you add their pet feature. They’ll drop you from five stars to one star after an update that broke their edge case, then never come back to update that review after you fix it. They’ll complain that your productivity app isn’t a very fun game. They’ll scream at the world that your app is “useless” because they don’t like something about it. They’ll jailbreak and install a bunch of hacks that make your app crash, then leave you a one-star telling everyone that your app crashes constantly without mentioning their hacks.

You will never please everyone. You will never win that battle.

When evaluating complaints, we need to consider whether the complainer is credible, whether they have reasonable expectations, and whether a significant number of others have made similar complaints or are likely to have experienced similar problems. For many complaints, a reasonable outcome isn’t possible or pragmatic, and the best solution is to ignore them.

Developers are usually able to maintain a healthy balance of knowing which feature- or design-related complaints are worth paying attention to and which aren’t. So why is it that we lend so much credence to every person who complains that our $3 app is too expensive?

Someone saying they won’t buy at your price is just one data point. Each sale of your app is another data point. If you sell 100 copies of your app and get 3 comments on Twitter from people saying it’s too expensive and they won’t buy it, I’d say you’re doing great.

It’s impossible to get every customer. Fortunately, you don’t need every customer. If you sell a 99-cent app to just 1% of the people who bought new iOS devices in the 2012 holiday quarter alone, you’ll clear about $519,750. Not a bad quarter.

The most important input for your pricing is quite simple: are enough people buying it at its current price? If not, you might have a pricing problem, but not necessarily. If enough people are buying it, you face the interesting question: can you charge more?

VentureBeat

Boston bombing investigation will likely revive debate over pervasive surveillance VentureBeat The bombings in Boston and the subsequent investigation of the suspects will likely revive the debate about pervasive security camera surveillance in the U.S. Stationary security cameras near the bombing location evidently gave police a key lead in ... and more »

drtuesdaygjohnson:

catafalques:

‘THE ROUCHOMOVSKY SKELETON’:  A RUSSIAN GOLD ARTICULATED SKELETON IN SILVER-GILT SARCOPHAGUS: the fully articulated human skeleton in a velvet-lined coffin chased around on each side with three panels showing the course of life, one end with attributes of the arts, the other with attributes of war,  the removable cover with the journey in the footsteps of the Angel of Death, surrounded by the faces of infants alternately laughing and crying.

Skeleton by Israel Rouchomovsky ca. 1892-1896; sarcophagus by Mozyr and Odessa ca. 1896-1906

Wow!

its-kili:

This was the single most British thing to ever happen

Arguably. :)

A cop beat up a man whom he was ticketing for illegal smoking, after the man refused to stop video-recording the experience.