Slashdot Mirror

Consider a Light-Field Camera.
"If you can shoot first, focus later, it's going to be the fastest camera you've ever used," Ng said in an interview with PCMag. "Because when you press the shutter button, it takes the shot instantly. It doesn't have to wait for the lens to move." That's the promise of Lytro's upcoming light-field camera, which the company says will be on store shelves by the end of the year.

That's apparently the reason for creating the Roku thumbdrive in the first place - to separate out the smart from the TV. BestBuy is going to package them with their Insignia TVs and Roku is trying to get other manufacturers to do the same.

When the latest super-duper codec or app comes out that cannot be handled with a simple firmware update, you pitch the old $50 dongle and plug in the new $50 dongle. The $600 TV stays.

It seems like a pretty good idea - its the implementation details that we need to see.

No. The key is that WP7 is a green-field effort (or near to it). That's why it's actually pretty secure and well designed unlike so many other Microsoft products...

Yes, it's so secure that any WP7 phone can be rebooted with a single text message (even from facebook!), and it won't be able to display, receive or send messages after that. Now that's what I call high quality code.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2397572,00.asp

This is relevent to Chrome being the next IE 6 of the 2010s in my opinion.

I keep trying to say the same thing yet get modded down to flamebait half the time.

NACL is the new platform of choice for Chrome OS. Those who say it is opensource do not get that is means applications written in Dart and not AJAX. Also IE 6's HTML and CSS 1 support was opensource and documented too. Look at all the IE 6 apps they can't be ported that still run today! It is a mess.

I know Google is cool and MS is bad on MS but Google has mentioned they plan to port Chrome to Andriod if Chrome OS fails and use that as the new platform. Metro at least is more Ajax and open sourced in Windows 8 than NACL/Dart/and other other proprietary technology. Even if the source code is available it violates the spirit of the web

This has 4 times the memory, twice the clock speed and twice the cores of the Pi, of course it isn't going to be less then twice the price. Everything else being equal you might expect nearly 4 times the price (i.e. ~$130)

So, $130 for a bare board with CPU and RAM?
Yeah that would sound great, except when anyone can build a whole PC for $191, http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2392163,00.asp
With 2x the RAM and a CPU that rips the ARM on PandaBoard into a thousand of tiny teddy bears in terms of performance.
And a frigging 500 GB HDD (ok, pre-HDD-crisis).

You could say, "yeah but it's not ARM and low-power etc". Okay. There are now Chinese tablets with comparable specs, http://www.aliexpress.com/product-gs/509457480-CPAM-Free-shipping-10-1-superpad-3-android-2-3-tablet-pc-flytouch-3-GPS-512MB-wholesalers.html
that cost $125 shipped. Including stuff like 10" touch screen, camera, internal flash, battery, casing, etc, etc. There's no way a bare board should cost $130. It's just vendors up until now felt just fine with hiking up the price as much as they desire, because those who need it (for development etc) would buy it anyway, or even buy on their company's funds. But hopefully the Raspberry Pi will beat some sense into competitors in this area, and this will move an ARM PC from the ranks of a too-expensive-to-be-practical dream, to reality.

Agreed. Apple is the 50% exception. Or is that Google? Anyway, Microsoft seems to be the 1.5% one in mobile space.

The fact that Mr Gingrich has been in politics for a long time and didn't bother to purchase the domain says a lot about his understanding of how some things work in this day and age.

But he has 1.2 million twitter followers surely he is a master of teh intertubez!

This news is old, and the ISP has said that it will stop, but the point I am making is that it is technically feasible to do this, and the Powers that Be don't care if the internet is usable or not by the little people (you and me).

Even microsoft now admits the "start menu" metaphor was a failed experiment.

Round, square, who cares?

Zenbook, yes - on specs and price. Series 9 not even close, even though it lists for more. The Sony is a good match performance-wise that would have been great with the addition of a decent graphics processor, which it should have included given its premium price - it isn't that extreme except in price. Apple has a distinct edge because it is setting the price points and the competition is in the unenviable position of matching specs or bettering them - at this point only one competitor is seriously challenging Apple.

With the death of the Android Update Alliance that promised timely updates for Android devices, it'll probably be a while before other phones even have a hope of seeing this update. This is going to be yet another major Android version out in the wild. Collectively, Android is more like a collection of related but not entirely compatible operating systems, and it's frustrating (particularly for developers) that there isn't a consistent version of the operating system on current phones.

Despite improvements, ICS isn't quite as smooth and responsive as iOS was four years ago on the first iPhone, and it's really becoming quite an annoyance that Google hasn't yet solved this. Much of the reason has to do with the technical foundations Android was based on, rooted in an time when the Blackberry was the most popular smartphone, and Android was expected to drive phones with keyboard input. In that scenario, interface responsiveness wash't as high a priority.

Android was started in 2003 development, while iOS was started in 2005, and before the iPhone came out, the Android emulator looked like this. It wasn't until Apple's little announcement in 2007 that Android suddenly needed to compete on real-time performance, including smooth, touch-based scrolling. iOS is based entirely on Core Animation, with every interface element backed by a GPU-accelerated layer. Android has been CPU-driven, adding bits and pieces of hardware acceleration but not adopting the kind of unified model iOS was based on.

I don't really know why Android's performance hasn't been brought up to par, or why it's taken four years for it to reach the point that ICS has reached. I suspect the requirement to remain generalized and adaptable across multiple hardware devices means many of the design decisions that Apple went with for iOS simply can't be utilized, at least not to the same degree.

By the way, I'm amused at how negative the review is toward previous Android releases, particularly in terms of performance and interface responsiveness, since any time someone brought these common performance criticisms up on Slashdot, they'd always immediately get modded down and their karma ruined:

"Surprisingly, Google never got Gingerbread working smoothly on the Nexus S, and running the stock version of 2.3.6 was a painful experience."

"The old assumption that even a dual core Android phone is not as smooth as a single core iPhone doesn’t apply any more. Apple users will probably still notice some missed frames in animations or small amounts of lag when things are being loaded in the background, but this is no longer a serious usability issue, more a cosmetic one."

"The OS looks much much slicker overall even on the relatively old Nexus S, compared to the cartoonish primitive look of stock Gingerbread."

"The browser gets a much needed overhaul as the stock 2.3 browser was slow and laggy. It is now much faster, smoother to use, and generally stays out of the way like a good browser should."

"To conclude, with no definite date for ICS upgrades for other phones, the Nexus S is a great buy. It is a great example of the importance of software over hardware in a phone, a lesson well learnt from Apple."

Whilst we know Verizon don't install Carrier IQ it is not possible for them to collect this information without installing another brand of spyware:

Verizon Wireless Now Collecting Your Web, Location, App Data

And remember your "opt-out" only opts you out of them the data for specific purposes defined in the opt-out. It doesn't stop them using the data for other purposes.

BigDog, RoboCheetah, now this ostrich thing. Imagine herds of these just roaming the earth after the nuclear armageddon / pigbirdhorse flu armageddon, scavenging for fuel and occasionally blasting each other to smithereens. What will the alien archaeologists think?

Well for laptops you can install software that can help you track your laptop or protect your files from a remote location. There are ton of them out there, listed in the article below http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2387748,00.asp

The difference is whether you have a workable, sustainable, working system or a broken, exploitable system.

Yahoo Answers's system is pretty clearly exploitable. Want to get someone banned? 6 dummy accounts will do the trick - their "ban process" automatically bans someone after 6 complaints. Amazon has some funny reviews, some funnier ones, but more importantly, they actually have humans check on complaints if there's an indication that stuff indicated here is going on.

The uglier truth is that for many sites - slashdot included - the real exploit is held by people who can do precisely what TFA's authors describe: running hundreds of accounts, commanding click-up or click-down votes through them or (in the case of Slashdot) farming for mod points. Evolving Slashdot policy has actually made this worse, not better, for three reasons I'll crib from an earlier thread:

#1 - The best posters never moderate. They're involved in discussions, and you can never moderate AND post in the same thread.
#2 - It's too easy for the modpoint-harvesters to attack someone's karma; you can go into people's posting history as far as you want, and downmod weeks-old posts for no reason other than to bury karma.
#3 - The hidden gem: Slashdot implemented something akin to Yahoo's completely retarded "auto ban" function. To wit: "Also, if a single user is moderated down several times in a short time frame, a temporary ban will be imposed on that user... a cooling off period if you will. It lasts for 72 hours, or more for users who have posted a ton." The end result here is that the modpoint harvesters have been given a weapon - they control a "ban button" with which to attack not only the karma of their targets, but the posting rights of their targets.

The worst part? You can't ever see who downmodded. Sometimes you can see the reasons, but the modpoint harvesters get wise to the tricks - currently, you'll see the majority of modpoint harvesters downmodding as "Offtopic" and "Overrated" because those didn't go through the metamod system. Although, come to think of it, I don't think I've seen a metamod nag in 3 months... do they even have that system any more?

The funny thing here is Carriers already save text message data Without Carrier IQ - and they have the ability to save URL data also since we are on their network. why would the FBI need Carrier IQ unless it was getting more data than that? Pictures we take on our phones? videos? emails ? http://www.pcmag.com/image_popup/0,1740,iid=313504,00.asp

Typically employees can't sell their shares until at least six months post-IPO.

The SEC required a 2-year wait until the early 1990s. Which is partly why IPOs that ran way up after the IPO and then crashed were so popular during the original dot-com boom.

How much is Facebook really worth, anyway? Let's look at the numbers. Facebook revenue for 2010 was $1.86 billion. Goldman Sachs, which makes a private market in Facebook stock, sent a report to their investors indicating Facebook earned $355 million in the first 9 months of 2010. That would be $473 million for the year, for a 25% profit margin. Of course, those are unaudited numbers. When the SEC filings take place for an IPO, they may decrease as accounting gimmicks are disclosed and discounted.

The next question is, do we value Facebook as a growth company or an ongoing company? Let's look at Facebook's traffic stats. Traffic went up steadily until mid-2011, when it peaked. (Before Google+ started, incidentally.) It's been down a bit since then. So Facebook may have maxed out and started on its decline, like every other social network from AOL to Myspace did. There probably isn't a lot of growth left. Is there anyone not on Facebook who wants in?

OK, what's a company with $473 million in annual revenue worth? Google's price/earnings ratio is 21.39. Microsoft, 9.34. IBM, 12.69. Netflix 16.11. AOL 26.43. Yahoo 19.51. IAC (Ask's parent) 18.27. So we can say that the market is at best valuing mature Internet companies around 20x earnings.

That gives Facebook a valuation around $9 billion.

Even that may be optimistic. That assumes Facebook's user base doesn't shrink. Remember when Myspace was on top? This is Myspace on the way down. To earn that $9 billion valuation, Facebook has to maintain its current size and profitability for 20 years. Does anybody think that will happen?

(How many people here remember when one of the founders of Slashdot was asking on here what to do with his money when VA Linux, the parent of Slashdot, went public in 1999? They had the biggest first-day runup after an IPO ever. The stock hit $239 on the first day, and then went into a screaming dive. Six months later it was around $40. Not as rich as he thought. By 2002, it had dropped to $0.54. The stock is still trading as GKNT, formerly LNUX. Here's the chart.)

I am a little uneasy of making a web browser a proprietary platform. PcMag had an article about Chrome being the next IE 6 of the browser wars 2.0.

IE 6 was a great browser in 2001 regardless of its security shortcomings found years later. Everyone on slashdot back then admitted to using it but were scared and assumed the WWW would die soon because of it. Everyone seems to be oblivious that Google is another evil big corporation no different than Microsoft. Actually synergy is behind Google now, like it was with MS a decade ago.

Dart is chrome only, the javascript libraries are Chrome only or particulary run much better on Chrome (google ones like V8), this and many other proprietary HTML 5 code like that site with the band a few months ago that only work in Chrome. This game will use HTML 5 but has other proprietary hooks to make sure it wont run in any browser.

Google is making it clear they look at the browser as an operating system. At least Microsoft today is running away from ActiveX and trying to do good with IE 10 which will be the most open and standards compliant browser to date. Firefox is dying and is losing popularity. In a year or two from now it will be a IE vs Chrome world.

Anyone else bugged or am I just paranoid? I just want a great browser and not a simple fast one, but with the real goodies underneath it that are dependent on Chrome.

Nope! "T-Mobile utilizes the Carrier IQ diagnostic tool to troubleshoot device and network performance with the goal of enhancing network reliability and our customers' experience. T-Mobile does not use this diagnostic tool to obtain the content of text, email or voice messages, or the specific destinations of a customers' Internet activity, nor is the tool used for marketing purposes."

Verizon, C Spire, MetroPCS, and US Cellular are the only US carriers currently denying Carrier IQ is used on their systems.

Great Android selling phones do about 10% of a single iPhone model.

Not true. Samsung Galaxy S Sales Hit 30 Million. The last HTC Wildfire sales figure I saw was 21.3 million. By your logic, that means Apple must have shipped in the range of 200-300 million of each iPhone model, right? But total sales of every iPhone model sold from 2007-2010 is only 73 million. Even Total sales figures per fiscal year is clearly nowhere near that level. (I couldn't find iPhone sales figures broken down by model, but total sales of every iPhone from 2007-2010 is only sold 73 million, so clearly not outselling popular Android phones by 1000%).

Potentially $20,000-$30,000. And according to this, you still have to have Blu-ray discs in the tray to watch them even though it doesn't actually access the disc.

Apple sued HTC in March 2010 From that article:

"Of note are the patents Apple asserted in its Delaware filing: one, patent 7,657,849, covers multitouch gestures, but only in a limited use case - unlocking the phone. The second, number 7,479,949, covers multitouch heuristics to determine how a device should interpret multitouch input, and was patented by Steve Jobs himself as well as a number of other co-assignees. The other patents in question are number 7,362,331, covering moving objects within a GUI; 7,469,381, covering list scrolling; 5,920,726, covering the management and recovery of a power failure by a digital camera; 7,633,076, covering how a device senses what a user is doing via the use of multiple sensors; 5,848,105, a co-channel filtering patent; 7,383,453, covering the conservation of power by a voltage reduction to the instruction portion of the processor; 5,455,599, an object-oriented graphical system, and 6,424,354, an event notification system for propagating object-change information."

That is why Google just gave HTC 9 new patents that originated at Motorola, Openwave Systems and Palm. And if those don't work, Google has another 17,000 patents thanks to its Motorola acquisition. In the end, either the patent system will break down (imagine those 17,000 patents being invalidated), or Apple is going to have to deal with the fact that it can't block competing products from the marketplace using patents. With the patent system, you only need one win with a non-workaroundable patent to be able to block a competing product. And once you get that, you can negotiate on a more level playing field.

"A government that is powerful enough to block your competitor's products from the market is powerful enough to block your products from the market".

The principle is the same though. If the U.S. International Trade Court consistently rules in favor of U.S. companies, then it is highly likely that the trade courts of other nations will rule for their domestic companies. Apple sue Samsung in U.S. and win, Samsung sue Apple in Korea and win. Apple sue HTC in U.S. and win, HTC sue Apple in Taiwan and win. It is probably no coincidence that the first company to stand up to Microsoft's Android tax has been a U.S. company, rather than the foreign device manufacturers.

As regards this particular case, this is just one ruling in response to an appeal of a previous ruling, and this ruling will in turn be appealed. And even if Apple win the appeal, it still leaves HTC with hundreds of patents from the rest of their patent portfolio, plus the 265 S3 patents they acquired, plus the new patents they got from Google. They only need to win once to be able to block sales of infringing hardware. And they can't not win some of the time - if the U.S. ITC find in favor of Apple over a foreign company hundreds of times, then the international patent system is going to tear itself apart, starting with Taiwan and Korea.

(Meanwhile, China has practically no intellectual property or patent enforcement, and is rewarded with the fastest growing economy in the world, despite a prolonged global recession. Ahh.....)

I'd say add Ubuntu / Linux Mint (which people seem to really like, more so than Ubuntu it seems). Other software could be: TrueCrypt and KeePass for internet security, calibre for ebook management,Thunderbird for email and LibreOffice for office needs. While you're at it, Skype (full download) might be good as well - i always seem to need it at the most inopportune moment). This might be a bit of a cheat, but check out here. You know your friends, see for yourself what they might like from here and download accordingly.

To read the linked article, you'd think the reviews were lukewarm to negative.

Then you click on one of them, the PC magazine review and it gives it "4/5 with its "bottom line" summary as "The first easy-to-use, affordable small-screen tablet, the Amazon Kindle Fire is revolutionary." Verge was slightly less positive, giving it 75%, but finishes with "Still, there's no question that the Fire is a really terrific tablet for its price. "

There were leaked screenshots from the internal inventory system that showed massive amounts of pre-orders.

I'm not sure what the internet douchebag dictionary definition of "on sale" is, but if you can pre-order it and it's shipping today and people are being charged for it today, I think that qualifies as "on sale".

You could also look at this article from PCmag detailing 500k pre-orders in the first month, and almost 100k on the first day.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2396308,00.asp#fbid=ymQSTFdVy5d

Look at it from a different angle; maybe it was his own fault. Maybe he forgot to lock the door.

SOI limits the depth of the conductive channel by placing a film on an insulator. If the insulator is low K Dielectric, the capacitance is reduced helping the speed. The 3D transistor on the other hand has a vertical fin of semiconductor created by etching away the surrounding material. This places the flat film of semiconductor on edge, then a wrap around gate applies the e-field on both sides and the top essentially surrounding the doped semiconductor path on 3 of 4 sides. This places all of the channel in close proximity to the gate voltage so a smaller voltage can pinch off the channel. SOI is still a gate on only one side (the top) of the semiconductor channel.

If you don't understand the tech, a photo is worth many words. A photo can be seen here.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2384909,00.asp#fbid=2uqV-rrPnOE
Most people do not understand the photo. The center lattice structure contains 12 transistors. It has 6 parallel N channel devices in series with 6 parallel P channel devices. The semiconductor is the shorter fins under the higher fins. There are 6 of these fins with 2 transistors each configured in complimentary pairs as a basic inverter. The 5 bars on top are the Source on the ends and the Drain in the center and the two Gates in-between. The gate wraps the channel under it between the source and drain of each transistor. This is considerably different than SOI technology.

Here: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2395863,00.asp

Here's a picture of one... http://www.pcmag.com/slideshow_viewer/0,3253,l%253D289592%2526a%253D289696%2526po%253D7,00.asp?p=n#fbid=0aLLDV-J5kV In Dixon.

Ok, I just found out that Verizon will unlock your phone after 60 days for international travel which is exactly what I need.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2394536,00.asp#fbid=Qzjzk7NRtVm

I imagine that one of their complaints about the Xbox was that it couldn't be tied into Windows or Office either, but it ended up being a big money-maker. And even that has stagnated since Allard left the project.

Kinect does not look like stagnation.

The Xbox 360 is likely getting a Fall update that contains significant graphical updates and a few new features, Kinect motion and voice navigation, Bing integration, and, ultimately, live television streaming.

If Microsoft's dashboard update looks familiar, it's because the design fits in the same family as the user interface for both the company's Windows Phone 7 OS and Windows 8 developer preview. In other words, Xbox Live will fit rather seamlessly into Microsoft's upcoming system OS, a future integration promised by none other than Xbox Live's own Larry "Major Nelson" Hryb.

Video Leaked: Xbox 360 Fall Dashboard Update

Whatever CALO could do or was purported to do doesn't really matter because Siri can't do those things.

Siri can't "learn" uncommon names through correction.

Siri can't even learn basic relationships.

Siri can't "learn" in even the weakest sense. It's just a chatterbot -- and not a terribly good one at that.

I stand corrected!

seriously.. just turn it off

In an email, an Amazon spokesperson said "users can completely turn off the split-browsing mode and use Amazon Silk like a conventional Web browser."

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2394732,00.asp#fbid=GbO7By1YITI

they don't sell new anymore, but that is what they did once setup.

you hit a button on the harddrive, and it ran a backup process.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,1230418,00.asp#fbid=t9YT9-CRkJe

found this from 2003....

apparently, they didn't last.. (nor maxtor)

I assume you're a fan of mobile data. Sprint is by far not the cheapest cellular provider. For cheapest, look into Virgin Mobile's $40/mo "unlimited" data and texting and T-Mobile's newest offering: "unlimited" 4G prepaid for $30/mo.

No one knows for sure, but it is believed you can install your own Android apps.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2393740,00.asp

"Jenkins said he didn't know whether the bootloader was locked, which is one hurdle Android hackers face when altering their devices. The company won't help hackers root the tablet, it just isn't actively trying to stop them. The tablet has a USB port and mass storage mode, so you can also sideload Android APK program files, even without rooting it. That will be one way to get apps not available in Amazon's Appstore onto the Fire."

This is what happens to rogue competitors.

Maybe it will use the Cortex-A5, more efficient and faster than Arm11, but supposedly lower cost than Cortex-A8. There were rumors that it would finally show the light of day in 2011/2012. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2380443,00.asp

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2393740,00.asp#fbid=ajRIdnxQUAV

"Amazon isn't doing anything special to prevent techies from "rooting" and rewriting the software on its powerful yet inexpensive new tablet, Jon Jenkins, director of Amazon's Silk browser project said."

http://www.pcmag.com/image_popup/0,1740,iid=313504,00.asp

Curious that a few things are missing, such as "voice call content" and "GPS Location". Does IP session information include the content?

President Obama... if he wants to do secret government business he'll need one of two Windows CE smartphones

Because Windows CE is the most secure Windows CE on the planet! No so much when compared to other platforms, but hey, it's the Government so it has to come from Microsoft!

VLC on iPhone was killed because it breached the licensing terms of being able to copy it from the device to another device. To quote Wikipedia "VLC was available for the iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch from the Apple AppStore, but was pulled due to a licensing conflict between the GPL and the iTunes Store agreement.[11]" Referenced details can be found here.

The story was even reported on some tech blogs...

From memory the guy who forced the removal by suing Apple was an Linux/Android developer. So, no conflict of interest there at all. But feel free to blame Apple.

The OGO had something similar with it "Clips" that slid in and out. There was all kinds of things you could slide out. There was even a bottle opener, a tiny tiny blue tooth hand set so you didn't have to hold the whole phone to your head, a slide out blue tooth camera, one that was just to add some flashing lights for fun, etc.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2159119,00.asp

Sure, VZW's 4G LTE may be "better," but you'll hit your monthly data cap after watching three movies. Enjoy your overage charges!

All you have to worry about is...
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2368269,00.asp

This one took about a week...
http://www.slashgear.com/apples-mac-os-x-security-update-2011-005-blocks-stolen-diginotar-certificates-09178410/

Maybe u can just go to slashd0t.org instead if you set up your internal certs proper if your on a mac :) .

Coming soon, can you set up local certs on a mac? rats... google returned a hit...
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2734627?start=0&tstart=0
even better :)

Agreed.

There is nobody on AT&T's network.
Its easy to be fast when your company currently offers virtually zero devices to run on its brand spanking new LTE network.

Give it a few months then the Movie streamers show up.

Then again, who can possibly use this speed when the current usage caps are so tight? Is it really that important to get
that email or that tweet that much faster? Forget movies, forget video-chat. No one can afford it with the tiers they have
set up.

Lets hope AT&T applies all $39 Billion bucks they will save by not being allowed to buy T-Mobile, adds in the $19 billion
already planned, and builds a first class LTE network that can actually carry the load.

Totally. I'll never take this guy seriously. Jeans and a black turtleneck? Suit up!