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Portables (Apple)

Submission + - The ghost of the Newton haunts Apple's iPhone

Submitted by
PetManimal
PetManimal writes: "David Haskin has looked back at why the Newton failed to succeed in the early PDA market, and warns that Apple may be setting itself up for a similar failure with the iPhone. The iPhone appears to have a revolutionary interface, and the product has generated tons of interest from the Mac community — just like the Newton did, back in the 1990s. But the iPhone also shares with the Newton a hefty starting price — $500 for the iPhone, vs. $700 (in 1993 dollars) for the Newton. And Joe Public may not be so keen on the cost, as recent survey data suggests (see Slashdot discussion). Moreover, Haskin notes that the iPhone will have to deal with two additional factors that were not issues for the Newton: Competition, and wireless service providers: 'Besides overcharging for iPhone, Apple faces significant competition, something it didn't face in 1993 when it launched Newton. And you can bet that competition from the likes of Samsung and LG will both be good (although probably not as good as iPhone) and most assuredly cheaper. It's also becoming clear that Apple may be suffering from excessive hubris. That is evident by its strong demands on its partner in the U.S., Cingular/AT&T. The demands, including a slice of the cellular revenues and control of the sales channel, were so strong that Verizon Wireless turned the deal down. I'm more convinced than ever that, after an initial frenzy of publicity and sales to early adopters, iPhone sales will be unspectacular. If Apple doesn't respond quickly by lowering the price and making nice to AT&T, which surely will be ticked off, iPhone may well become Apple's next Newton. Remember that two years after Newton was introduced, a smaller, cheaper PDA appeared — the Palm Pilot — which truly did rock the world.'"
Microsoft

Submission + - Visual Studio: Industry Leading IDE, but in what?

Submitted by
Yoooder
Yoooder writes: "I've used Visual Studio 2005 for some time, but the longer I use it the more frustrated I get with it. Amid all it's wonderful features there's something smelly, something that oozes from the cracks and lets me know that underneath me there is something disturbing and wrong. Random crashes, out of control memory usage, a finicky designer, and a lack of updates all plague this IDE — and the grand-daddy of them all is a Service Pack that runs umpteen times, requiring user interaction the whole way through and lacking proof of any real fixes.

Does anyone else have the feeling that Microsoft's flagship programming tool is a victim of Too Much Too Fast? What are your horror stories within the unpredictable vessel of vs2005?"
Privacy

Surveillance Cameras Get Smarter 186

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the walk-without-rhythm-and-you-won't-attract-the-one dept.
kog777 writes to mention that the IB Times is taking a look at where surveillance camera technology is headed. Soon researchers tell us that cameras will be available that not only record, but are able to interpret what they see. "The advancements have already been put to work. For example, cameras in Chicago and Washington can detect gunshots and alert police. Baltimore installed cameras that can play a recorded message and snap pictures of graffiti sprayers or illegal dumpers. In the commercial market, the gaming industry uses camera systems that can detect facial features, according to Bordes. Casinos use their vast banks of security cameras to hunt cheating gamblers who have been flagged before."
United States

Submission + - EU beats North America in Open Access policy

Submitted by
robotninja
robotninja writes: "Everyone's favourite professor, Michael Geist, provides a great overview of Open Access in this article, published today in the Toronto Star. In it, he briefly outlines how the Eurpoean Union is leapfrogging both the US and Canada in Open Access policies. From the article:

"the European Commission committed over $100 million toward facilitating greater open access" whereas "Neither the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, nor the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, which together have an annual budget of more than $1 billion, are anywhere near incorporating open access requirements into their funding policies"; and that although "last year the Federal Research Public Access Act was introduced in the U.S. Congress", the bill has yet to become law.

For a movement toward openness that started in large part among North American scholars, are the U.S. and Canada dropping the ball on Open Access?"
Announcements

Submission + - $25 Mill for solution to removing greenhouse gases

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes: "The Virgin Earth Challenge (of Virgin Airlines fame) is a prize of $25m for whoever can demonstrate to the judges' satisfaction a commercially viable design which results in the removal of anthropogenic, atmospheric greenhouse gases so as to contribute materially to the stability of Earth's climate. http://www.virginearth.com/"
Wireless Networking

Submission + - Welcome to garage door opener hell

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes: "The Washington Post has an interesting story of military abuse today: abuse of garage door openers. Seems a large number of folks living near the Quantico Marine base in eastern Virginia have found their garage door openers being rendered useless by a wireless signal coming from the base. And they aren't the first, the story says. Garage door openers have been zapped in other towns near military operations for a couple years now experts say. http://www.networkworld.com/community/?q=node/1184 7"
Education

Submission + - Jakon Nielson on Life-Long Computer Skills

Submitted by
khendron
khendron writes: "The Jakob Nielson's latest newsletter, he laments the fact that schools appear to be teaching kids how to use specific computer application (he cites Excel in his example). What a waste of time, since these skills will be useless by the time the kids graduate. Instead, he lists a number of "life-long" computer skills that we should be teaching kids: Search Strategies, Information Credibility, Information Overload, Writing for Online Readers, Computerized Presentation Skills, Workspace Ergonomics, Debugging, and User Testing and other Basic Usability Guidelines.

From the article about Debugging: "We shouldn't turn everyone into a programmer, but the basic debugging concept is a fundamental survival skill in the computer era. Most spreadsheets contain formula errors, for example, and unless people know how to find such mistakes, they'll make decisions based on the wrong numbers."

Who thinks his list is accurate? Or complete?"
Security

Submission + - Modern Day Witch-Hunt in Connecticut

Submitted by zhenya00
zhenya00 writes: USAToday is reporting on a story most of us are already familiar with; the case of Julie Amero, a 40 year old Norwich, Connecticut substitute teacher who has been convicted of four counts of risk of injury to a minor when the un-patched Windows 98 computer she had used to check her email began to display a flurry of pornographic pop-ups to the students in her classroom. She faces up to 40 years in prison when she is sentenced this Friday March 2.
From the article:

"Julie Amero was a victim of a school that couldn't be bothered to protect its computers, of a prosecutor without the technology background to understand what he was doing, a police "expert" who was not, and a jury misled by all of them. "Miscarriage of justice" doesn't begin to describe it."
Can this country really allow something like this to happen? Why isn't there general outrage on the front page of every newspaper? Why aren't those responsible being flooded with calls and emails from angry citizens?
Role Playing (Games)

Submission + - FreedroidRPG 0.10.1 is out!

Submitted by
FreedroidRPG development team
FreedroidRPG development team writes: "Version 0.10.1 of FreedroidRPG, the open-source isometric role playing game featuring Tux, has been released on Sunday, Februar 25th.
This new release brings lots of small improvements, mostly in the form of bug fixes and new UI features:

# Dozens of bugs fixed
# Performance improvements, especially on load/save operations.
# A few tweaks to dialogs
# Started implementing magical items
# An alpha-stage translation support for dialogs has been written. German version included.
# Gameplay slightly adjusted — items don't wear out as fast as before"
The Internet

Submission + - Wikipedians are 42% Liberal, 8% Conservative

Submitted by
Jon
Jon writes: "Jimmy Wales has claimed that Wikipedians are more likely to be liberal, and Wikipedia has been accused of liberal bias. But a sampling of 901 Wikipedians reveals surprising statistics. 42% of Wikipedians self-identify as liberal (49% is current American average) 8% of Wikipedians self-identify as conservative (41% is current American average) 42% of Wikipedians self-identify as libertarian (5% is a rough American average) So liberals are proportionately represented on Wikipedia, conservatives are very under-represented, and libertarians are extremely over-represented."
Patents

Submission + - Sequoia Claims VC Firm Ripped Off its Website

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes: "VC giant Sequoia Capital has sued ComVentures, accusing it of copyright infringment related to the firm's website design: http://www.pehub.com/wordpress/?p=622 ________________________ The VSP Capital Memorial trophy is awarded each year to the venture capital firm that most effectively turns itself into a punching bag. The 2007 frontrunner is ComVentures. First came the recent FilmLoop flap, in which ComVentures engineered the sale of one portfolio company to another. Now comes another troubling development: While ComVentures was working to sell FilmLoop last December, it also was being sued by Sequoia Capital for copyright infringement. ComVentures says the case has since been "resolved amicably," even though no resolution has yet appeared in the court's online records system. Neither Sequoia nor its attorney returned request for comment or confirmation (download all relevant court filings after the jump). This is a bizarre story for two reasons. First, because of how dumb ComVentures seems to have been. Second, because such cases generally get resolved long before they reach litigation. According to court documents, both Sequoia and ComVentures redesigned their websites last year. Sequoia went first with an August 30 launch, and even took the unusual step of registering the site as an original work of authorship with the U.S. Copyright Office. Soon after, the firm's servers began "to detect significant and prolonged access to the site from someone sharing the IP address for, and presumably within, the ComVentures network." A printout of Sequoia's server logs were filed with the court, and can be downloaded below as Docs 2. In all there were 373 recorded visits. Six weeks later, ComVentures unveiled its own redesign. The new site had a number of striking similarities to the Sequoia site, in terms of both setup and style. For example, check out this ComVentures page and this Sequoia Capital page. Pay particular attention to the geography and company-stage navigation bars. Had the complaint stopped here, I would have assumed that some ComVentures lackey/designer had simply made a mistake in not knowing that you can't rip off someone else's site. He/she was told that the ComVentures brain-trust admired the Sequoia site, and took that to mean "copy it." After all, the first question any web designer asks when building a new site is: "What other sites do you like?" And maybe that's exactly what happened. But what happened next is bizarre. Sequoia's Mike Moritz called ComVentures chief Roland van der Meer to complain on at least two separate occasions. Sequoia's outside counsel also formalized the request in a letter to ComVentures' outside counsel. The complaint alleges that ComVentures agreed to make "certain changes," but then that the only real changes made were that the offending pages were not directly linkable from the ComVentures homepage. In other words, the alleged copyright infringement remained, but was just a bit harder to find. Again, I would like to think this was a slip up (sometimes hard to find all legacy pages) — except that the offending pages STILL are online nearly three months after the suit was filed. Maybe there was concern that full retreat would be perceived as admittance of guilt, but ComVentures isn't willing to get into that level of detail with me (not that I blame them). Sequoia had been seeking both real and punitive damages, and I do not know if any money changed hands via the apparent settlement. But I do know that this is just one more headache ComVentures did not need right now..."
Education

Submission + - Student protests "Racism"; threatens Educa

Submitted by
Fred
Fred writes: "Through education, we've improved our ability to understand one another and grow more tolerant towards racial, ethnic, political and religious differences. Today, we're finding it more and more difficult to distinguish between racist speech and intellectual discourse in academia. Below is an article on point, it discusses a recent University of Wisconsin Law School controversy: a student demands an apology from a law professor for his in-class commentary on race and our legal process. Title: "Is speech really free? www.racism.edu" The author contends that neither the Professor or his comments were racist and to determine otherwise and punish the scholar for his remarks is a threat to our educational learning process about race, tolerance and general cultural differences. Published in the Badger Herald Professor Kaplan allegedly said, Hmong men have no talent other than to kill and All second-generation Hmong end up in gangs and other criminal activity. Also, All Hmong men purchase their wives, so if he wants to have sex with his wife and she doesnt consent, you and I call it rape, but the Hmong guy is thinking man, I paid too much for her."
Power

GE Announces Advancement in Incandescent Technology 619

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the never-underestimate-ingenuity dept.
finfife writes to tell us that GE has announced an advancement in incandescent technology that promises to increase the efficiency of lightbulbs to put them on par with compact fluorescent lamps (CFL). "The new high efficiency incandescent (HEI(TM)) lamp, which incorporates innovative new materials being developed in partnership by GE's Lighting division, headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio, and GE's Global Research Center, headquartered in Niskayuna, NY, would replace traditional 40- to 100-Watt household incandescent light bulbs, the most popular lamp type used by consumers today. The new technology could be expanded to all other incandescent types as well. The target for these bulbs at initial production is to be nearly twice as efficient, at 30 lumens-per-Watt, as current incandescent bulbs. Ultimately the high efficiency lamp (HEI) technology is expected to be about four times as efficient as current incandescent bulbs and comparable to CFL bulbs. Adoption of new technology could lead to greenhouse gas emission reductions of up to 40 million tons of CO2 in the U.S. and up to 50 million tons in the EU if the entire installed base of traditional incandescent bulbs was replaced with HEI lamps."The California legislature may want to revisit the wording of their proposed ban on incandescents (AB 722). How about mandating a level of efficiency rather than assuming that innovation can't happen?"
Media

Submission + - What is the best Media Center software out there?

Submitted by
brm1974
brm1974 writes: "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_center

For the product by J. River.
A media center is a computer adapted for playing music, watching movies and pictures stored on a local harddrive or on a (in some cases wireless) network, watching DVD movies and often for watching and recording television broadcasts.

Have You guys tried any of those?
What do you think?

        * SageTV
        * Front Row (Apple)
        * GeeXboX (Linux)
        * GBPVR (Windows)
        * SesamTV (http://www.sesamtv.com)
        * MythTV (Linux)
        * Freevo (Linux)
        * Elisa (Linux) (http://www.fluendo.com/elisa/index.php)
        * My Media System (Linux)
        * MediaPortal
        * TVedia
        * Windows XP Media Center Edition
        * Xbox Media Center (not to be confused with Windows XP Media Center eXtender)
        * Domotix (http://www.mydomotix.com)
        * XLobby (windows) http://www.xlobby.com/"

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