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User: shagie

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  1. Re:Is it really hard to figure out? on Russians Seek Answers To Central Moscow GPS Anomaly (yahoo.com) · · Score: 1

    Apparently, the outage is also in GLONASS too. https://translate.google.com/t... If the article is to be believed, there is another signal that has a signal that is most intense around the Kremlin.

  2. In today's world - yes on Should Everybody Learn To Code? · · Score: 1

    When you go to the car mechanic to get your car fixed, you've got some idea of what it will cost. It may bot be a good one, but its an estimate that you've got in your head. Maybe a $300 part and two hours labor at $100/hour or whatever insane rate they charge, so $400 to $600.

    Today's world is becoming more and more with someone working with a programmer.

    It may be as programmer themselves (and anyone who been on the searching for a good applicant side of an interview knows its hard to find good programmers) - we need more programmers more than we need another person working at Mc Donald's. Certainly, not everyone can be a professional programmer, but I'm sure there's a lot falling through the cracks of society never realizing that they want to be a professional programmer (or for that matter, can).

    It may also be someone hiring someone to do a job. A small business person hiring someone to write a front end to a database for a CRM, or website, or whatever. Look on eLance some time and glance at the estimates that people have - "I want a Facebook clone in 2 weeks for $500." Try not to laugh too hard. They are out there asking for such absurdities. Thats almost like going to the mechanic and expecting that part to cost $0.50 and the person to work at $5/h... um, no.

    By having an idea of what can be done, and an inkling of an idea we get clients and managers that aren't going to want *everything* done today. Well, they will still want it, but when you tell them the actual price and timeline, they'll maybe not think that we're trying to rip them off (while we sit back and click on webcomics and write our own Facebook clone all day... or at least thats what they think we do).

    There's also the aspect of people becoming a bit more literate in computing itself. They'll hopefully have an idea of what a computer can and can't do. No, cookies aren't stealing your information - the key logger that you installed with that game you downloaded is. The cloud is not affected by the weather. So on and so forth...

    Looking at the number of people who have interactions with computers today compared to 20 years ago, I suspect that more people work with computers in one way shape or form than their own oven... unless its a microwave oven, with an embedded... oh yea. Computer literacy and basic ability to write a program is almost as important as regular literacy and being able to write an essay. It doesn't mean everyone will do it every day, but its becoming basic life skills in today's world.

  3. Value: maintain, don't decrease, increase. on Ask Slashdot: Ideas For a Geek Remodel? · · Score: 1
    I've got my own house and I was thinking of all the neat tech stuff I could do in it. A custom thermostat system and other home automation type things... a handheld (ipod touch, andorid, what have you with custom software) instead of switches and the like in each room.

    Then I realized what this would do to the value of the house. All the software would be written by me. This would mean that any buyer would either: a) rip it out because they don't understand it and need to replace it (thus lowering the value of the house) or b) need to do a code audit on everything I wrote to avoid any back doors (costing money and thus lowering the value of the house) and possibly c) be calling me for support when something breaks.

    Me putting in the time and money to do such a level of home automation would ultimately make the house worth significantly less. And thus I came up with the order of things that are done in the house: Maintain the current value of the house (if there is something that needs to be done that is otherwise causing the value of the house to decrease (leaky basement walls) do that). Don't do anything that will decrease the value of the house (crazy personalized custom stuff that only has value to me is out). Increase the value of the house - a standard zone system with a Nest in each room is cheaper, likely more efficient, and improves the value of the house over a custom system.

    So unless you are never thinking of selling this house in your lifetime, avoid doing anything crazy customized to you unless you are going to accept that ultimately another buyer is going to rip it out and replace it - and factor in the ripping it out and replacing it into the resale value. Not everyone out there is a geek.

  4. Re:swift, distant and anonymous on Ask Slashdot: What Would Real Space Combat Look Like? · · Score: 1

    In Dread Empire's Fall series, this is handled by having a pilot in a small ship that stays within a few light seconds of the missiles (AI was one of the things that the Shaa prohibited). The idea being that an antimatter missile (the prime weapon of the series) will take out a ship no matter how big. Part of the interesting bit of this series is that aside from infrastructure and wormholes - the tech used is imaginable (slingshots around gravity wells, having to burn in the other direction to slow down rather than magically stoping).

    (not exactly related to the issue, bug a good series nonetheless)
    In the Star Carrier series, small manned ships were the primary thing, accelerating to near C and then releasing a kinetic slug just before decelerating. One technique employed was launching what was intended to be anti-missile 'sand' in a wide dispersion (again, at near C) which took out a number of large ships and crippled the rest. The physics of this series is a bit more out there (makes use of the Alcubierre drive and highly advanced physics to accelerate to near C within a few minutes).

  5. Re:This is revisionist history at its worst. on Why Was Hypercard Killed? · · Score: 1

    Hypercard didn't have any access natively to the serial port or similar interfaces. To do this, one had to write an XCMD (wow, Dr Dobbs has a good archive) resource in pascal or C (or possibly assembly) to talk to the low level system/hardware. This created an additional command / function that Hypercard could call. To an extent, this did cause some fragmentation of the language

    Looking at an old archive at umich, you can get an idea of what these xcmds could do.

    To do anything beyond the basic capability of Hypertalk, it required you to be able to go in with resedit, download (or write) and add the appropriate additional functionality. This was a tool that was part of a programmer's toolkit - not a user's.

  6. Re:Axis of Evil on Syrian Protesters Roll Out New iPhone Apps · · Score: 1

    Syria has been under trade embargo since October 29th, 1991 as specified in Amendment to ITAR 126.1. The appears to apply to the Arms Export Control and include Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and North Korea. The key thing is the 'arms export'. This appears to cover defense articles and defense services - not regular commercial items. Strong encryption is classified as a munition. If the Syrian app store doesn't use strong encryption algorithms for its drm or the sdk, one would presume that developer licenses and app store would be allowed.

  7. Re:You still need iPhone 4S on Siri Protocol Cracked · · Score: 1
    With iOS 5, the unique identifier is a combination of app/device - not just device. See Apple Insider for a change with the UDID.

    Deprecated in iOS 5.0
    uniqueIdentifier An alphanumeric string unique to each device based on various hardware details. (read-only) (Deprecated in iOS 5.0. Instead, create a unique identifier specific to your app.)

    It is possible (necessary?), that Apple retains private APIs to be able access this and does so with their applications - while the game that you propose writing wouldn't be able to access the UDID. If you want to do so, do so rapidly and hope your app doesn't get rejected.

  8. Re:It'd be nice if ... on The IOCCC Competition Is Back · · Score: 2

    Pardon me, but are you serious? Claiming that code is clean (or correct) because it compiles to a small executable isn't necessarily true. The demo scene prides itself on small executables and optimizes for this. Such optimizations are rarely the product of clean and correct code but rather hand crafted dark compiler (or assembler) magic.

  9. The 6,269,361 patent on MS Buying Yahoo? Bad Idea, Even At a Discount · · Score: 1

    There was an article a couple of years ago that looked into the history of one of the patents. Patent 6,269,361 that covers bid for advertisement placement in search results was developed by a company named Overture. Gates wanted it, but Yahoo bought the company in '03 for $1.63 billion. Microsoft started licensing the patent from Yahoo. There was also a settlement between Google and Yahoo over the patent. This could be the key that Microsoft wants to go after Google's ad words and keep any other competitors out of the market.

  10. Re:Stone Carving Skills on What Today's Coders Don't Know and Why It Matters · · Score: 1

    So you've seen the great computer at Apraphul? I remember when that article came out and wished I could go see it too.

  11. Re:Apple apologist on GPS Maker TomTom Submits Your Speed Data To Police · · Score: 1

    They are recording the locations of 3, 5, 7, and 11 so that if you ever realized you can see 5 and 7 you don't need to count on your fingers to figure out you are near location #35 the second time. It by no means implies that you've been at location #77 just because you have those locations in cache.

  12. Re:Why collect WiFi hotspot data? on Apple Updating iOS To Address Privacy Concerns · · Score: 1

    If you've ever turned on a GPS device that had been off for a long time and/or moved significantly it can take minutes (the key information for GPS is only broadcast every 30 seconds and the satellite data has expired) for it to get a lock on the satellites. http://jeepx.blogspot.com/2006/01/cold-start-and-aided-gps.html and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_to_first_fix are good reads about the issue. The short version of it is that in order to determine which satellites are there to listen to quickly, you need approximate information about the time and location of the receiver.

  13. Re:Including the "obsoleted" phones? on Apple Updating iOS To Address Privacy Concerns · · Score: 1

    The 3.1.3 iOS version is unaffected because data collection started with iOS 4. There is no need to to update that version. One option would be to downgrade the 3G phone to iOS 3.2.

  14. Re:You're wrong about Scarabeo on Tetris Clones Pulled From Android Market · · Score: 1

    Monoply's patent was challenged and invalidated because of prior art. This was discovered during the anti-monoply legal battle.

    Another example of a board game patent is on Khet. Claims 31-54 cover the play of the board game. It isn't unheard of for boardgammers to poke around expired patents (yes, the search is broken) for games to implement (the biggest challenge being translating legalease back into board game rules). Most games that I've come across while looking at patents I've never seen implemented/sold. Oh, another game that is covered by a patent - icehouse. Mr. Loony was quite happy and even made a Tshirt of it. Yes, that hippy is very much into patenting his games (though he also has a freeware licensing policy for computer implementations of his games).

    One tends not to go to court to challenge a patent that is valid in the first place

  15. Re:iTunes on iPhone's PIN-Based Security Transparent To Ubuntu · · Score: 1, Interesting

    On iTunes the 'Summary' tab has a set of options. One of them reads 'Encrypt iPhone backup' as a checkmark. Poking about my system (~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/...) I can find some of the raw data that on my phone there (settings, files). So, it is possible to encrypt that data as the backup is stored but it sounds like that the unencrypted data is what iTunes accesses.

  16. Re:Benefits on Steve Jobs Says PC Folks' World Is Slipping Away · · Score: 0

    My aunt also needs a device that lets her send and receive email, look at pictures, read books and read news... without having to call tech support when someone gets through some exploit in a forgotten service and rootkitted her machine. Ideally, this machine would also use a cell service so that her somewhat technical children don't need to go and set up wifi for her. It should also be able to easily access and download applications signed by a reputable authority.

    The majority of people out there are not tech savvy geeks. I personally would love a locked down interface designed on top of Linux that is as easy to use as some iDevice that fills all of her needs. Unfortunately, it doesn't exist at the same level as the iPad today. I don't want to have to drive down there and fix her computer every month, nor help her install (or uninstall) some program that isn't working right.

    Android may be a nice alternative some day. It isn't here now. Nor is there any android equivalent of a genius bar that I can have her go to when something doesn't work (so I don't have to drive down there). There is more to a given device than what OS it runs.

  17. Re:Two senses of "closed." on Flash Is Not a Right · · Score: 0

    Assuming you have an intel mac of some sort, you can download the sdk and work in the iPhone or iPad simulator without having to pay to be in the developer program. You will need to register as a developer, but that is free.

  18. Re:Apple would just be more specific in rejection on Apple May Face Antitrust Inquiry · · Score: 0

    No, I'm imagining a situation where apple changes the underlying architecture of some a device (like they did with ppc to intel). The instance on xcode mirrors what happened back then. People that were properly using XCode and Mac APIs would find that with one click they could compile for intel and continue on their merry way. If you are bundling your own framework and translation libraries with every application, you would have to wait for that company to come out with a new build.

    Lets imagine a world where Adobe and Novell (Monotouch) control 75% of the market and Apple comes out with firmware 5.0 with a bunch of new features. The adobe users would have to wait until Adobe gets around to releasing a new version. Novell would be waiting around until android catches up so it can again release for the lowest common denominator.

    The lowest common denominator is what apple never wants to have its developers writing for. Apple believes they have the best product out there for user interface and design and sees this as its competitive edge over other mobile OSes. For its developers to write for that target means they will never have anything that is better than what other mobile OSes have.

  19. Apple would just be more specific in rejection on Apple May Face Antitrust Inquiry · · Score: 1, Insightful
    Apple would start going and imposing more specific restrictions on apps. For example, if your app size is too large (monotouch hello world is 5mb while objective c is 50 kb) it gets rejected. If the app memory foot print is too large it gets rejected (garbage collection is automated in flash). If the app doesn't play nicely with multitasking in 4.0, it gets rejected. If the app doesn't run under hypothetical future architecture it gets rejected. Etc..

    Any of these technical requirements would reject apps written under other frameworks without saying "must be written in C / C++ or Objective C".

    Even if Adobe wasn't giving up on the flash to iDevice, consider how far behind they will fall when firmware 4.0 is released. How long would it take Adobe to release an update that handles background services, voip and other new features?

    This really is the crux of Apple's restriction. If Adobe (or any other iDevice packager other than Xcode) became the dominant platform, it would be up to that company to add in new features that the previous firmware released. Apple has been burned by Adobe before and doesn't want to be beholden to anyone to have support for their firmware now. This is also likely why HP bought Palm - so that HP wouldn't have to wait for Microsoft or Google to do something new and game changing.