malbrech - Slashdot User

Submission + - How the Facebook platform is changing the world

Submitted by

malbrech

on Wednesday June 13, 2007 @02:06PM

malbrech writes: "An article in the Guardian technology blog points us to how the Facebook platform makes web applications explode virally. There is also an excellent analysis of Facebook by Marc Andreesen (remember? the guy who did Mosaic and Netscape). In a nutshell: the carefully designed instant awareness of your friends of the application you just started using, makes them use it too. That cascades onto their friends, and so on. The result: your servers get blown apart in very short time. You might be famous, but flat out beaten by traffic."

Submission + - Is SDK-less iPhone out of business? (infoworld.com)

Submitted by

InfoWorldMike

on Wednesday June 13, 2007 @01:57PM

InfoWorldMike writes: "InfoWorld's Tom Yager hits a new low in his love affair with Apple, writing "Steve Jobs told the crowd in January that Apple's upcoming mobile device, iPhone, runs OS X. A Unix phone with Apple's UI panache? Touch, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and mobile phone in one device? I was ready to take a three month sabbatical from InfoWorld just to spelunk around inside iPhone's APIs and its OS X core. Looks like I'll have to continue to hone my mobile app development chops in the familiar domains of BlackBerry, Symbian/Nokia, and Windows Mobile. At the Worldwide Developer Conference this week, Jobs paved the way for the June 29 delivery of iPhone by telling a crowd of some 4,000 that where developers are concerned, iPhone is a handheld Safari browser. "You don't even need an SDK,' Steve said before he invoked the magic phrase 'AJAX and Web 2.0,' to let the press know that iPhone is open to all applications that take advantage of these state of the art paradigms. Steve cited Salesforce.com as the exemplar of the type of Web-based application one would run on an iPhone. That sounds pretty until you realize that of all the ways to write and package software, none is less suited to mobile use than a Web application. Salesforce makes this plain with Salesforce To Go, custom native software targeted to Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, and Symbian devices. I can handle having my expectations go unmet. But to trumpet AJAX and Web 2.0 as iPhone's development platform is worse than spin. It strains my faith in Apple." I did not help, either, that Yager's MacBook Pro's battery died during this deadening keynote, I'll add to this."

Submission + - Plants recognize their siblings (mcmaster.ca)

Submitted by

Anonymous Coward

on Wednesday June 13, 2007 @01:56PM

Anonymous Coward writes: "Researchers at McMaster University have found that plants get fiercely competitive when forced to share their pot with strangers of the same species, but they're accommodating when potted with their siblings.

Though they lack cognition and memory, the study shows plants are capable of complex social behaviours such as altruism towards relatives. Like humans, the most interesting behaviours occur beneath the surface."

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