3rd June 2012 Archive

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TomTom does the dream-job-onna-island bit

Sun, sea, sand ... and satnav

Yet another competition for a dream job on a tropical island has sprung up: now satnav biz TomTom is offering two weeks of mapping and holidaying to five groups of five people this summer. The Map Paradise Project will send the winning teams on an all-expenses-paid holiday to Fiji, St Lucia, Mauritius, Cape Verde and the …

Jobs 3 Jun 10:00
Britain's military techies honoured with new combat IT awards

The same job as you do - but with people shooting at them

Military techies have been honoured for the first time in an awards ceremony for British soldiers that provide the IT infrastructure necessary to modern warfare and peacekeeping missions. Three members of the Royal Corps of Signals were honoured at the event, hosted by London's Worshipful Company of Information Technologists, …

Government 3 Jun 10:30
Dead Apple titan Steve Jobs, a flippin' in his grave

QuotW 'Flame is MEGA', 'I think you'll find it's f-LAME' etc

This was the week in which Apple supremo Tim Cook managed to spin Steve Jobs' constant flip-flopping on new product ideas sound like a good thing. The D10 tech conference featured much reminiscing and idolising of the late Apple co-founder, including these words from Cook on how Jobs' about-turns were an "art": He would flip …

Bootnotes 3 Jun 11:00
White AMERICANS will have become MEKON brain-men by 3000AD

Heads growing as bodies stay the same size, say boffins

Certain Americans' heads are getting larger at a "dramatic" rate, say researchers at the Forensic Anthropology Center at the University of Tennesse, citing a 6.8 per cent increase in skull length in the past 100 years across their sample. At this rate, the heads of this group of Americans will have doubled in length sometime …

Biology 3 Jun 12:03
R is ready for big data

Take the open road to statistical analysis

Statistical analysis has been around since mainframes were introduced to academia and corporations back in the 1960s. But the great diversity of telemetry collected by systems today, the need to sift through it for insight and the growing popularity of open-source alternatives is transforming the R programming language for …

Data Warehousing 3 Jun 23:00
Google gobbles retail reputation ranker

KikScore gets inside Google wallet

Google has beefed up its online retailing smarts by acquiring KikScore, a US company that ascribes scores to e-commerce businesses based on their level of reputation and trustworthiness. The acquisition, for an undisclosed sum, is a Google acquire- and-shutdown special with the service being discontinued from June 28. Under the …

Business 3 Jun 23:16
SETI experiment succeeds: fails to find aliens

‘It’s only a model’

If there are sentient aliens on the “habitable zone” planet circling Gliese 581, they’re not calling out to us. That’s the conclusion of Western Australian astronomers, who have released the results of a targeted SETI-hunt using Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) to sniff out radio signals from the distant red dwarf. …

Science 3 Jun 23:50
Facebook open sources production code

"Folly" trove full of high performance widgets hits GitHub

Facebook has released Folly, a collection of what it describes as “reusable C++ library artifacts developed and used at Facebook.” The trove awaits on GitHub and comprises around 50 items. Jordan DeLong, a Facebook software engineer, explained “Our primary aim with this 'foolishness' is to create a solution that allows us to …

Networks 3 Jun 23:58