Slashdot Mirror

Wonder no more: they'll get beaten up just the same. See here: http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/16/augmented-reality-explorer-steve-mann-assaulted-at-parisian-mcdonalds/

technically incompetent

The lack of standard buttons is one of the problems with PC gaming. PC gamepads have all of the buttons numbered. I haven't done an audit, but I would suspect that an awful lot of the gamepads use the same numbered buttons for what would be start, select, a,b,x,y. If you went with the Xbox controller configuration, you would probably be fine. You definitly should not try to prevent other gamepads. Use the Windows APIs and just read the button presses that have been passed from the HIDD.

From there, you just use the directional pad which is going to be the same on all controllers, and then use button 1 and 2 as select and cancel. Even a USB Atari 2600 http://techcrunch.com/2010/01/29/atari-style-usb-joystick-sports-built-in-emulator/ will have a 1 button. By defaulting to this, configuration will not be necessary for most controllers, and any that need configuration can be done using the controller itself. You don't need to force the configuration as long as it can be reached via the controller.

Yes. I broke out the mouse to set up the emulator. It is unfortunate that I had to, but on the bright side, I set it up once, and it works with all SNES games the same. Per game configuration isn't necessary.

I have not tried Mario Paint or Yoshi's Safari, although I believe Snes9x supports them.

I have used a device called the "Romulator". It has been more than a few years since I dumped the roms, but the unit supported SNES and Genesis. I don't know what people are using today. I don't think there is any way at this time to make a large scale business with devices that download rom images from SNES carts without having legal troubles. I always thought it would be cool if someone released a device that let you plug in a real cart for use with emulators directly though.

You've made this comment twice now on this story (once receiving an up-mod), yet you've failed to provide a source. The following source states that there are 700,000 apps in the App Store. By you're numbers, that would mean that only 7,000 apps have ever broken the $1,000 mark. Now, I can only offer anecdotal evidence , but apparently I know many cream of the crop app developers.

You're not the only one. There was the "Opt-Out Day", and I've never stopped opting out. I'll do my best to waste their time so they can't man those machine.

Indeed.

It's the same mind-set as the anti-chick-a-fil protestors http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/us-news-blog/2012/aug/03/chick-fil-a-kiss-in and the anti-google protestors http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/15/10000-muslim-protesters-demonstrate-at-google-uk-hq-over-youtube-film/

both designed to shut down expression of opposing views.

Only the anti-chick-a-fil protesters are out numbered by the anti-google protesters and a lot less violent.

Given that this 'loophole' has existed for years - hell someone once added Zuckerberg to the NAMBLA group linky - and hasn't been fixed I'd say it's pretty much a feature at this point.

Apple sold 5 million iPhone 5s on opening weekend. As of 1 month ago, Nokia has sold 7 million Lumias. Total.

The Lumia was introduced in November 2011, so that's 10 months of sales. Apple sold over 100 million iPhones last year.

That is not the half of it Android activates 1.3 Million phones every day, and has a market share 4 times that of Apple, and Nokia could have had an Android product...and still had a Windows one if it really wanted.

Apple sold 5 million iPhone 5s on opening weekend. As of 1 month ago, Nokia has sold 7 million Lumias. Total.

The Lumia was introduced in November 2011, so that's 10 months of sales. Apple sold over 100 million iPhones last year.

A general response to both this post and the other reply: If I can't see a personal selection of apps/widgets/etc across my desktop multi-monitor setup without hitting a keyboard combo or mouse hotspot, then it's the UI that has failed, not my use of it. Why can I not have both interfaces visible at the same time and be able to treat the whole UI as s single entity? Also reference this interview " Usability Expert: Windows 8 on PCs is Confusing, a Cognitive Burden" or the shorter synopsis here or here. For myself I'll be sticking to Win7 for the foreseeable future, and as a Windows admin I'm more interested in the newer Server versions than I am Win8's desktop, even though older windows and scripting is where I do most of my work. - HEX

"This week we're releasing almost completely unusable alpha code, but on the bright side, the tshirts with our new logo should be shipping within a month!"

That sounds pretty much like what could be said in September of 2010.

Now that Ceph is gathering momentum since having been included in the mainline kernel, what other storage (or low level) advancements do you see on the horizon?

(full disclosure: I work for Inktank now, the consulting/services company that employs most of the core Ceph engineers)

Now that Ceph is gathering momentum since having been included in the mainline kernel, what other storage (or low level) advancements do you see on the horizon?

(full disclosure: I work for Inktank now, the consulting/services company that employs most of the core Ceph engineers)

Yeah, it's not as if he and Apple are largely responsible for making personal computing mobile thereby changing the day to day routines of a good portion of the developed world or anything.

All kidding aside despite the content - could you honestly tell me when the last time you went 24 hours without using a smartphone? Unless you're a cave dwelling neckbeard who refuses to use a smartphone for monetary, physical or philosophical reasons (or because you're a dirty, dirty hipster) - your life has been irrevocably changed along with the majority (50.4%) of the United States population.

Source: http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/07/nielsen-smartphones-used-by-50-4-of-u-s-consumers-android-48-5-of-them/

I wouldn't say they "sell so many" MacBook Pros... Apple is, after all, about 12% of the market in PCs sold (and they have iMacs, Minis, etc.) They did enjoy a bump this year while everyone else declined... (not much of one, but a bump nonetheless.)

http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/24/apple-reports-disappointing-mac-sales-despite-retina-macbook-release-4-million-units-sold-in-q3-2012/

It seems everyone's facing a crunch. Apple's margins are so high, I doubt they notice. But, this brings up a question... why is the decline in their Mac lineup continuing when it peaked a few years back? I don't know the answer to that. As for netbooks... I like my netbook, but then again, I put Linux on it and upped the RAM (and got a nicer, larger battery)... it works like a champ. Microsoft really poisoned the netbook realm with their artificial restrictions on XP equipped netbooks (only 1 MB of RAM, etc.) I also think the "bandwangoneers" of netbook makers really just saturated the market. Before the netbook, companies were claiming you couldn't make a cheap laptop... Of course Larry Ellison (when he was trying to sell thin clients) famously quipped that there was no way a PC would break the $500 price point. :)

Ultrabooks are a solution looking for a problem. The demographic who will pay that much for a laptop already bleed Apple grey. The rest of us think it's overpriced hype. :)

What you do is introduce this new "free" and "open" language that compiles down to another ubiquitous language. The new language is convenient and saves people a lot of time.

Then people get to thinking, "Why bother compiling to another language when you can directly target the virtual machine and runtime environment that that language runs on?" Sounds reasonable, doesn't it?

Now, I'm not a web developer (thank $DEITY), but there are many (slightly incompatible) implementations of JavaScript, and they are all implemented differently, i.e. they all have different bytecode interpreters/JITs and so forth. Now supposing you were the author of this particular language and the author of a certain very popular web browser, you could do this quite easily for your particular web browser, and none of the competing ones. You would thus make your browser (probably) the most fast and efficient one at running this particular language.

It does indeed sound very reasonable, and this is in fact precisely what Google does with Dart - they have a Dart-to-JS compiler, but they're also working on native support for Dart directly in Chrome, which will be better and faster. I'll be eagerly waiting for your post debunking their attempt to "embrace, extend and extinguish".

With TypeScript, on the other hand, people have specifically asked if there will be special support for it in IE. And the official answer is no.

Sure.

Price ANY Ultrabook to similarly spec'd MacBook Air.

Air wins every time. So much so that PC manufacturers are stopping building them because the Air wins. Every Time.

http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/01/remember-ultrabooks-yeah-that-was-a-good-time/

TFTFY. By and large, "real" news organizations don't make mistakes like that.

Those who do not understand history are doomed to repeat it.

What I find amusing is that Apple have a hundred billion dollars that they have no idea what to do with. Looks like they're now going to have to try and hire thousands of Nokia and Google map experts (and no, we're not just talking about software developers, they are ten a penny in comparison).

They've been doing just that : "Source: Apple Aggressively Recruiting Ex-Google Maps Staff To Build Out iOS Maps". In an sector with, as you point out, very little competition this surely must be a good thing in the long run.

Seems that 10" tablets with resolutions over HD are doing just fine ... seems there's a market for those resolutions too.

"The Retina display on the new iPad features a 2048-by-1536" - http://www.apple.com/ipad/features/
http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/19/new-ipad-sales/

1) Why is this front page? This is the result of the API and policy changes that twitter announced what, a month ago? two months?

Not even that, no. IFTTT has been in violation of Twitter's TOS since before any of the big changes were announced.

From the news piece on TechCrunch:

"Dice has been talking about building content and user engagement to be top of mind and more integral to professionals doing work, and if you think about SourceForge and Slashdot, it’s about user engagement to help you do your job... We don’t want to change the experience today. What will happen over time is that the Dice.com site is will operate more seamlessly connected to these sites. But the sites themselves will keep their look and feel and will run on their own... That absolutely includes editorial independence. We think that’s really key. We don’t profess to add much from an editorial standpoint. We will give the user bases on our sites and those the ability to interact with each other. Our goal here is to make them part of the overall tech and engineering experience at the company."

Translation: 'We are Borg. You will be assimilated.'

Damn. I'm gonna miss this place.

According to an article on TechCrunch, these three sites have a yearly profit (EBITDA) of $5 million. From what I've read the purchase price (3*profits + some) is typical of acquisitions of mature companies. It is neither insane dot-com buyout (expecting unrealistic growth), or clearance corner liquidation of assets (expecting to bleed it till it dies).

T-Mobile Sidekick Disaster: Danger's Servers Crashed, And They Don't Have A Backup

Wow. T-Mobile and Danger, the Microsoft-owned subsidiary that makes the Sidekick, has just announced that they’ve likely lost all user data that was being stored on Microsoft’s servers due to a server failure. That means that any contacts, photos, calendars, or to-do lists that haven’t been locally backed up are gone. Apparently if you don’t turn off your Sidekick and make sure its battery doesn’t run out you can salvage what’s currently stored on the device, otherwise you’re out of luck: Microsoft/Danger is describing the likelihood of recovering the data from their servers as “extremely low”.

T-Mobile Sidekick users have been suffering from a major outage all week, and that issue apparently hasn’t been resolved either.

That said, in all seriousness. If they replace backup generators with some alternate technology. I hope that they actually make sure it is reliable first. And that it stays reliable over time. (eg, three years later, you suddenly need it, does it still work?)

And growing logarithmically still. AMD is not alone though. Intel Atom chips are also going for the niche "mobile Windows" market that's struggling to crawl out of single digits.

What Microsoft did was refuse to sell Windows to OEMs

Wrong, Microsoft did not do that. They got into trouble for a similar thing that Google is doing now(though Android is not a monopoly so it's a different legal situation here). Microsoft withheld OEM incentives(which included discounts, advertising money etc.) from the OEMs that didn't toe their line. Google is withholding incentives like early code access(and perhaps will increase the price for or remove access to the Android app store, Google apps on the device which are neither free nor Free). Good luck with competition with the other Android OEMs if that happens, which is why Acer backtracker REAL quick and even canceled a scheduled launch event which companies do only in cases of dire need.

I don't see any difference with the Microsoft situation except these three

1. Android doesn't have a monopoly (although it's 67% marketshare in the market and since Acer can't get a iOS license which is the other 22% of the market, it's effectively a monopoly as far as Acer's options to get any revenue are concerned).

2. Android is "open", so they could probably go the Amazon route, fork Android, get AOSP code super late when competitors have already released devices with the latest and greatest OS and features, build an app store from scratch, get hundreds of thousands of developers to submit apps, develop in house replacements for Google Maps, GMail, Currents, etc. etc. etc. Or maybe try to hook up with Amazon and get access to the store. But again, good luck with competing with Samsung, HTC, Motorola, LG, Sony given these constraints.

Anyway this is pretty ironic coming from Google, given the same Andy Rubin's tweet about being open:

https://twitter.com/bttp/statuses/27864903610

http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/19/andy-rubin-twitter/

Well would you look at that. Earlier today, Apple CEO Steve Jobs went on a bit of a tirade against Google and Android in particular. And you know that couldn’t have made Android chief Andy Rubin too happy. But how was he going to respond? Well, he decided to awaken his dormant Twitter account and send his first tweet tonight. And sure enough, it’s clearly (but subtly) in response to Jobs.

Without further ado, here is Andy Rubin’s first tweet:

the definition of open: “mkdir android ; cd android ; repo init -u git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/manifest.git ; repo sync ; make”

For those keeping score at home, that’s Rubin using some geeked-out lingo to explain exactly what open is to Steve Jobs. In other words: Android.

i'll take being able to use the standard cables that i have at home, work, parents/friends houses, or in my bag (being standard you tend to collect a few) over being able to plug it in any way. specially being that nearly all cables have a picture on the "top" of the connector so it's not particularly difficult to tell which way it goes in.

USB 2.0 is fast enough for anything a phone will need.you can stream HD and transfer an entire album in less than a minute.
also from what i can find the iphone 5 and the new cable only support usb 2.0 speeds.

That, plus OpenLeaks was vaporware and Daniel Domscheit-Berg was kicked out of CCC ('I Doubt Domscheit-Berg's Integrity' - Top German Hacker Slams OpenLeaks Founder) for his self serving behaviour.

If your going to leak something anonymously, why settle for anyone who has not also demonstrated commitment to protecting you as a source in the face of overwhelming international pressure by powerful players, like Wikileaks has and continues to do?

Sure about that?
Kite-Like Turbines Harness Wind Power at Altitude

I was the one to my the "Anonymous Coward" comment because I was too lazy to login, but I'm not too lazy to back my post up with facts, especially when a dumbass would rather mock the poster than actually address what was said. Here is the Tech Crunch article where they admit their mistake and stop blaming Anonymous: http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/10/godaddy-outage-takes-down-millions-of-sites/ Here is where the person taking credit says it was not Anonymous, but a solo act: https://twitter.com/AnonymousOwn3r/status/245227793334546432 Anything relevant you would like to add, kaizendojo? Or just more worthless snark?

1.3 million Android activations a day. I guess we like it this way.

It is fronlit, like the Nook Glow. http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/06/amazon-officially-announces-the-new-kindle-paperwhite-paperwhite-display-frontlighting-and-212-ppi/

That's a different category from what I was talking about, but yeah, that's pretty lame. This is where they buy some company because they think they can integrate the companies products into their own plans. But often their plans are very poorly thought out,

The one that really bugs me is Jotspot. This was a sort of business wiki that they bought and shut down. It reappeared 16 months later as Google Sites. My issue here is not so much that Jotspot went away (I never used it) but that Google Sites is such a gawdawful application. (I briefly worked on a job where I had to use Google Sites to maintain web-based technical documentation It was painful.) So, they spent millions of bucks to buy an advanced wiki platform, spent a long time fiddling with it, and all they have to show for it is a poorly implemented, feature-limited CMS. Lame.

Now that I think of it, this is the same as what I was talking about before. Somebody at Google has a brilliant idea for acquiring and repurposing a company, but (as always) there's no follow-through. Obviously they got bored and moved on to something else. I imagine the same thing is now happening to Meebo.

Bruce Willis is NOT suing Apple

http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/03/bruce-willis-itunes-music-library/

FTFY

As usual the Daily Mail's full of shit:

http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/03/bruce-willis-itunes-music-library/

http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/03/bruce-willis-itunes-music-library/

"Update: Like many of our peers, we also fell for this good old British tabloid rumor at first. We have updated the story now that Willis’ wife has denied that this story was true."

Slashdot may want to retract, or update the story.

They have well over 300k miles.

Source

9 May 2008: Android application to dynamically change device settings based on location publically reported on in tech press. 22 June 2008: Apple files patent for that exact idea. Now that's what I call innovation.

If we're talking about Dropbox's general security IQ, how about the bug that allowed anyone to access any account with any password?

http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/20/dropbox-security-bug-made-passwords-optional-for-four-hours/

The team expects the stethoscope to cost..... WHAT...

http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/06/stehoclou/

Nevermind the cost of the phone is many times more.
For the same price a classic stethoscope could be had.

Better to have developed a HTML5 trainer
That can run on any phone, laptop, desktop....

Speaking of that, what Linux person would buy an Apple product?!

I dunno, some twit called tourvulds or summit.

Indeed, if you take inflation into account, IBM doubles Apple http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/20/apple-is-not-the-most-valuable-company-in-the-history-of-the-world-ibm-won-the-prize-in-1967-with-a-value-of-1-3-trillion/

It been reported that this move to fire the staff was just a way to remove the employee equity in the company, thus making the owners more of a share of the sale price. Steve Perlman may be a giant Scrooge. http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/17/source-onlive-found-a-buyer-cleaned-house-to-reduce-liability-prior-to-acquisition/

I, a non-lawyer, could competently handle this part of the case for Apple

It's a good job that you aren't, since your points are invalid:

1) Apple isn't suing for "stealing" - it is suing for "patent infringement". In contrast, Fidler is not claiming that Apple infringed his patents, he is merely pointing out that his tablet designs predate the iPad and yet contain the same "original patented" design features (flat touchscreen, rounded corners etc.)

2. Irrelevant, but yes, of course he does - however, Federer's designs date back 20 years (Microsoft's "Tablet PC" was 1999) - check out this video of Fidler's working tablet in 1994 - 2m45s in - that looks remarkably like an iPad. Also see History of tablet computers

3. Irrelevant since he isn't claiming patent infringement - he is claiming prior art.

4. Good question - generally experts are paid for their time in producing a report, not for testimony as such - but only a week ago Apple was caught paying $75,000 to a professional "expert witness" (seriously, this is how this man describes his profession on his own web site).

Nobody was able to make the technology popular before them.

Capacitive touch screens large enough for a tablet and at a consumer-friendly price point did not exist before. Now, they do. Technological advances drive new products. Suppose a car manufacturer comes out with the first mass market popular electric car - does this mean that this car manufacturer should have a 20 year monopoly on electric cars, free market be damned?

Name one situation where Apple copied details a competitor, shamelessly or otherwise.

Just one? Jeez... there are so many to choose from... ok, how about Apple's new mapping app for ios?

From tech crunch --
http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/11/goodbye-to-google-maps-with-street-view-hello-to-apples-new-maps-with-3d-flyovers/

Here are some choice quotes:
"For the most part, Apple is replicating and expanding on existing features from the currently Google Maps version."

"Another new feature on iOS â" and one that Android users have also had in similar form for a while already â" is the ability to use voice commands."

"Transit directions â" another useful Google Maps feature â" is thankfully coming back in the form of Appleâ(TM)s own version of this service."

"Stand-alone turn-by-turn navigation apps from incumbents like TomTom and startups like Waze will likely become a niche product on iOS soon as well"

(so not only do they take something that already exists, and replicate it, but then they bundle it with their OS and completely marginalize the incumbents.)

This stuff has been around for a while, and I have the following problems with it:

1. We already pretty much have CCN. They're called URLs, and companies like Akamai and others do a great job of dynamically pointing you to whatever server you should be talking to using DNS, HTTP redirects, etc. When I type www.slashdot.org, I already don't care what server it lives on. When I type https://www.slashdot.org/ I still dont care what server it is on, and I have at least some indication that the content is from someone authorized to speak on behalf of www.slashdot.org (PKI crap aside)

2. The article mentions that this tech would be used to relieve load at the core -- which I'm not sure I buy. The core is well known to be overprovisioned, and a recentish survey http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/17/netflix-largest-internet-traffic/ has shown that netflix and youtube consume 40% of downstream bytes -- both services already serviced by major CDNs pushing at least some traffic away from the core.

3. I'm unclear on the value proposition for us to redesign every router to be effectively, an HTTP proxy cache. These devices are well studied and even if we got a higher cache-hit-rate using CCN, I'm not convinced it would help anything. After all, we are doing just fine.

4. I think this approach is in the end, fundamentally wrong. Regardless of how much magic we use to find out what machine to get data from, we will always be transferring data from one computer to another (a caching router is effectively a computer). It seems to me that until we no longer need to move packets from some machine A to some other machine B, it makes sense to have host-centric primitives, and build our abstractions on top of them. That's what we've been doing, and it's been working pretty well.

I'm all for hating on the telcos, but sometimes "just build more towers" is much, much easier said than done. For instance, it takes three years to get one built in San Francisco. Granted, not every place is as downright insane as San Francisco is, but it's worth mentioning.

Then they had better get started today -- maybe they could spend less money telling me how fabulous their ultra-fast 4G network is (letting me use an entire month's data cap within 15 minutes), and more money on building out that network so I can actually use it.

I live in a busy urban area and have no 4G coverage at all within a block of my house.

I'm all for hating on the telcos, but sometimes "just build more towers" is much, much easier said than done. For instance, it takes three years to get one built in San Francisco. Granted, not every place is as downright insane as San Francisco is, but it's worth mentioning.

Considering that there's at least 20 times the number of options for Android phones, isn't this bad? Also, a lot of the Android phones, esp the crappy ones, are free. Some people just don't care what phone they get as long as it's free.

And forget about sales for a moment (you probably meant "shipments"), what about actual usage?
http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/21/real-time-research-ios-dominates-over-android-when-it-comes-to-usage-says-chitika/
FTA: iOS=67.66%; Android=27.66%
I'd argue this is a lot more meaningful as it shows real world usage.

Both casual observation and hard data disagree with your assertion.

Samsung makes lots of phones (I have not read that they make double the number of Apple, but I have read recently that they surpassed them. It's hard to imagine that they doubled Apple's production numbers the same quarter they surpassed them), but they make a lot of *different* phones.

All of the Android manufacturers do. How many Android phones do you think are one step up from a dumb flip phone, but run Android as an OS?

All the major carriers offer these phones.

I'm willing to bet that a lot of the "true" smart phones at the lower end aren't used as smart phones much, either.

Through observation in the wild, I see iPhones everywhere, every day. Android phones? They're there, but they are hardly ubiquitous like the iPhone.

Now the data: Look anywhere that is likely to have a wide representative share of users. Let's take Wikimedia, for instance: the iPhone accounts for 7% of traffic. Android is 4.73% (and tablets are probably included in this number, unlike iOS, which has the iPad segregated).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimedia_OS_share_pie_chart.png

I think the Android market share is either inflated, or they're counting people who bought an Android phone, have no data plan, have never fired up a browser, never opened the app store, and never did anything but make calls with it.

It counts if all you're interested is how many devices are in the wild, but honestly, what can you do with this statistic that is useful?

If I want to develop and deploy an app, I want to know the actual audience that can potentially be reached by it. I have some visibility of that, but not much. It's further complicated by wide fragmentation on the Android platform.

According to the math they did here, Google is doing about 1 Billion downloads a month. Apple is doing about 1.25 Billion. That's a notable, but not insurmountable gap. But, yeah. Right now Apple is winning by any objective, realistic, meaningful measurement.

http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/07/google-play-about-to-pass-15-billion-downloads-pssht-it-did-that-weeks-ago/

Disclaimer: I don't own any iOS products, and I really want Google to get their act together, because I really dislike the whole walled garden approach Apple and Microsoft are taking.

Android isn't something people *want* now. It's something people settle for because they don't want to pay the Apple premium. That's not necessarily a bad thing. Windows wasn't something people clamored for, either. It was just a standard.

My problem is that I don't want to see a standard that has a walled garden model win.