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Comment Re:For those w/o Windows - video (Score 1) 255

Why would they use an external visualization library? Since the sound is encoded in executable (using a format similar to MIDI), it would be trivial to sync the contrails with those notes in code. Furthermore, there's no way that WMP is good enough to pick out individual notes from a raw audio feed like that. There are a lot of smart people working on audio rhythm/beat analysis, and nobody's produced anything nearly that good. Hell, nothing's that good even when the audio file is available, so the analysis doesn't have to be done in real time and can take multiple passes.

The contrails appear to be a simple shader effect. There's no need to use texture maps for something like that.

Comment Horrible UI (Score 1) 145

The UI gestures on this thing are terrible. They're not at all obvious. I don't imaging anyone will be able to figure out how to bring up, say, text entry without being told. It's also unclear how some of the gestures (such as the upward swipe) are distinguished from scrolling. Just stick an address bar and a few buttons in there, it'll make all of your user's lives easier. There's definitely room. Sacrificing usability for a "full-screen-web" aesthetic isn't a good idea.

Comment Re:Soup cans and string (Score 1) 541

And that's where Ahmadinejad got his 60% of the vote. It might be interesting to enable the 'intellectual elite' of Iran living in the big cities to make their displeasure known to the rest of the world. But as long as they have a semblance of a democratic system, their fundies are going to run the place.

Wrong. This is a popular misconception that has been trotted out by the talking heads that the US news networks have gotten to play devil's advocate on this topic. Most of the rural poor in Iran are ethnic minorities, and have a tendency to vote overwhelmingly for the candidate which shares their ethnicity. This is why Iranian elections often result in runoff elections, as the three or four candidates which get all of the various ethnic minority votes push the two frontliners below 50%.

Television

Submission + - Comedy Central buys 26 new Futurama episodes 1

e9th writes: "TVWeek reports that 20th Century Fox TV and Comedy Central have officially struck a deal for 26 new episodes of Futurama, due to the strong ratings of its reruns and feature-length specials. Matt Groening is quoted as saying, 'We're thrilled Futurama is coming back. We now have only 25,766 episodes to make before we catch up with Bender and Fry in the year 3000.'"
Handhelds

Submission + - iPhone, iPod Touch 1.1.1 Firmwares Jailbroken (engadget.com)

vertigoCiel writes: "Hackers Niacin and Dre have recently gained full read and write access to the filesystems of both the iPhone and the iPod Touch. The Jailbreak exploits a vulnerability in Safari's TIFF library to execute the necessary code when the specially crafted image is loaded. Access can then be permanently sustained by modifying the fstab file with iPhuc"

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