En människa dödades och sex skadades på onsdagen i ett bombdåd mot de egyptiska säkerhetsstyrkorna i staden al-Arish på Sinaihalvön nära gränsen till Israel, uppger källor. Enligt vittnen till händelsen angreps ett fordon som tillhör säkerhetsstyrkorna av två män på en motorcykel, som kastade en bomb mot fordonet. Även civila ska ha dödats i attacken.

bauhausinteraction writes "A team from the Bauhaus-University and Native Instruments Developers built and programmed a fully functional interactive Lego Sequencer / Tangible Groove Machine that sends control data to the Maschine drum sequencer to make music. The thing was built within 24 hours as an unofficial weekend collaboration between bauhausinteraction and NI at the MidiHack 2014 in Stockholm. A standard webcam is mounted underneath the baseplate. The image is processed by a Python Script using the OpenCV Library to track the bricks. The tricky bit was to not track the user's hand, but we succeeded at that as well. The information about brick color, position, and orientation is derived from the image and then converted into OpenSoundControl (OSC) messages. Those are sent over a network connection to a computer running Native Instruments Maschine to play back the sounds. Of course, this would work with other sound generators as well, since the whole thing simply spits out OSC-Messages and MIDI — but hey: if the guys from Native are there, you'd better use their Maschine stuff. Being real Masterbuilders, of course we used only unmodified, standard Lego Parts and no Kragle* for the construction. (*see the Lego Movie for reference.)"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Victoria is someone we'd all like to sit down with and learn from. She's worked as a software engineer for Ford, as an engineer for Sun, as founder and CEO of a company called Grid Dynamics, and as founder and CEO of her latest company, Qubell. Before that, she and her husband taught chess. Here's an article in which Victoria talks about "Envisioning a New Language" back in 2005 when she was still at Sun. Because of this and other early musings on what came to be called network computing, grid computing, and later cloud computing, Victoria has been called "the mother of the cloud." Maybe, maybe not. In any case, she knows a great deal about cloud developments. For this conversation she brought along Qubell's CTO, Stan Klimoff, who also knows his stuff. This interview doesn't cover all we learned from Victoria and Stan, just all we could fit into our new "keep videos under 10 minutes" mandate, which we don't mind because, in return, there's a new button that lets you skip preroll ads longer than 30 seconds after only five seconds. Yay! We'll post another conversation with Victoria next week or the week after. We're looking forward to it and hope you are, too.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Victoria is someone we'd all like to sit down with and learn from. She's worked as a software engineer for Ford, as an engineer for Sun, as founder and CEO of a company called Grid Dynamics, and as founder and CEO of her latest company, Qubell. Before that, she and her husband taught chess. Here's an article in which Victoria talks about "Envisioning a New Language" back in 2005 when she was still at Sun. Because of this and other early musings on what came to be called network computing, grid computing, and later cloud computing, Victoria has been called "the mother of the cloud." Maybe, maybe not. In any case, she knows a great deal about cloud developments. For this conversation she brought along Qubell's CTO, Stan Klimoff, who also knows his stuff. This interview doesn't cover all we learned from Victoria and Stan, just all we could fit into our new "keep videos under 10 minutes" mandate, which we don't mind because, in return, there's a new button that lets you skip preroll ads longer than 30 seconds after only five seconds. Yay! We'll post another conversation with Victoria next week or the week after. We're looking forward to it and hope you are, too.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

bauhausinteraction writes "A team from the Bauhaus-University and Native Instruments Developers built and programmed a fully functional interactive Lego Sequencer / Tangible Groove Machine that sends control data to the Maschine drum sequencer to make music. The thing was built within 24 hours as an unofficial weekend collaboration between bauhausinteraction and NI at the MidiHack 2014 in Stockholm. A standard webcam is mounted underneath the baseplate. The image is processed by a Python Script using the OpenCV Library to track the bricks. The tricky bit was to not track the user's hand, but we succeeded at that as well. The information about brick color, position, and orientation is derived from the image and then converted into OpenSoundControl (OSC) messages. Those are sent over a network connection to a computer running Native Instruments Maschine to play back the sounds. Of course, this would work with other sound generators as well, since the whole thing simply spits out OSC-Messages and MIDI — but hey: if the guys from Native are there, you'd better use their Maschine stuff. Being real Masterbuilders, of course we used only unmodified, standard Lego Parts and no Kragle* for the construction. (*see the Lego Movie for reference.)"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

USA förstärker insatsen för att hitta skolflickorna som kidnappats av Boko Haram. Samtidigt har ytterligare 30 människor dödats i två nya attacker i landet.

Ännu en minister i Barack Obamas regering befinner sig mitt i en växande skandal. Denna gång i veteransjukvården med uppgifter om fusk och misstankar om att ett 40-tal krigsveteraner avled i väntan på vård.

Ännu en minister i Barack Obamas regering befinner sig mitt i en växande skandal. Denna gång i veteransjukvården med uppgifter om fusk och misstankar om att ett 40-tal krigsveteraner avled i väntan på vård.

An anonymous reader writes "We had hints at this when Zenimax accused John Carmack of stealing 'proprietary technology and know-how,' but now it's official: Zenimax is suing Oculus VR over its virtual reality headset technology. 'According to a statement released by Zenimax, the lawsuit was filed over what it perceives to be the defendants' illegal exploitation of intellectual property, including "trade secrets, copyrighted computer code, and technical know-how relating to virtual reality technology" that was developed by Zenimax. Zenimax is also seeking to take Oculus and Luckey to task for breach of contract, unjust enrichment, and unfair competition. Zenimax continues to claim that it provided IP to Oculus under a legal agreement that it would be owned exclusively by ZeniMax and could not be "used, disclosed, or transferred to third parties without Zenimax's approval."'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New submitter waspleg sends news of a letter Google sent to the Securities and Exchange Commission in which the tech giant laid out its vision of an ad-filled future. They wrote, "We expect the definition of “mobile” to continue to evolve as more and more “smart” devices gain traction in the market. For example, a few years from now, we and other companies could be serving ads and other content on refrigerators, car dashboards, thermostats, glasses, and watches, to name just a few possibilities. Our expectation is that users will be using our services and viewing our ads on an increasingly wide diversity of devices in the future, and thus our advertising systems are becoming increasingly device-agnostic."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New submitter waspleg sends news of a letter Google sent to the Securities and Exchange Commission in which the tech giant laid out its vision of an ad-filled future. They wrote, "We expect the definition of “mobile” to continue to evolve as more and more “smart” devices gain traction in the market. For example, a few years from now, we and other companies could be serving ads and other content on refrigerators, car dashboards, thermostats, glasses, and watches, to name just a few possibilities. Our expectation is that users will be using our services and viewing our ads on an increasingly wide diversity of devices in the future, and thus our advertising systems are becoming increasingly device-agnostic."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "We had hints at this when Zenimax accused John Carmack of stealing 'proprietary technology and know-how,' but now it's official: Zenimax is suing Oculus VR over its virtual reality headset technology. 'According to a statement released by Zenimax, the lawsuit was filed over what it perceives to be the defendants' illegal exploitation of intellectual property, including "trade secrets, copyrighted computer code, and technical know-how relating to virtual reality technology" that was developed by Zenimax. Zenimax is also seeking to take Oculus and Luckey to task for breach of contract, unjust enrichment, and unfair competition. Zenimax continues to claim that it provided IP to Oculus under a legal agreement that it would be owned exclusively by ZeniMax and could not be "used, disclosed, or transferred to third parties without Zenimax's approval."'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Probably the nicest most generous post ever written about me. ;-)

Probably the nicest most generous post ever written about me. ;-)

At least one person dies in fighting during a ceremony to mark the death of a Shia killed in an explosion last week.