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Microsoft

Submission + - Tablets: Jean Girard Jobs vs. Ricky Bobby Ballmer 1

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: In NASCAR, you can finish a race in the Top 3 by leading the whole way or by having spectacular crashes take out those ahead of you. The same may hold true for the tablet race, where Apple has led the whole way, but Microsoft could advance into 2nd or 3rd place as those once ahead of it crash and burn ($99 TouchPad, anyone?). 'Microsoft tablets based on Windows 8 won't be ready until next year,' notes SplatF's Dan Frommer. 'Unexpectedly, that might not be too late to matter.' In Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, the big race ends with all cars being wrecked and Formula I racer Girard and NASCAR driver Bobby running on foot to the finish line. Could we see something similar in 2012 between 'Jean Girard' Jobs and 'Ricky Bobby' Ballmer? Far-fetched as it may seem, Ars Technica's Peter Bright explains why the Windows 8 tablet invasion might work.
Education

Submission + - Most People Have Never Heard of CTRL+F 1

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Google search anthropologist Dan Russell says that 90 percent of people in his studies don't know how to use CTRL/Command + F to find a word in a document or web page. "I do these field studies and I can't tell you how many hours I've sat in somebody's house as they've read through a long document trying to find the result they're looking for," says Russell, who has studied thousands of people on how how search for stuff. "At the end I'll say to them, 'Let me show one little trick here,' and very often people will say, 'I can't believe I've been wasting my life!'" Just like we learn to skim tables of content or look through an index or just skim chapter titles to find what we're looking for, we need to teach people about this CTRL+F thing says Alexis Madrigal. "I probably use that trick 20 times per day and yet the vast majority of people don't use it at all," writes Madrigal. "We're talking about the future of almost all knowledge acquisition and yet schools don't spend nearly as much time on this skill as they do on other equally important areas.""
Iphone

Submission + - iPhone Can Diagnose Stroke (ibtimes.com)

Submitted by
gabbo529
gabbo529 writes: "According to study from the University of Calgary's Faculty of Medicine, doctors can make a stroke diagnosis using an iPhone application with the same accuracy as a diagnosis at a medical computer workstation. The study was designed by Dr. Mayank Goyal, and used iPhone software technology originally developed by Dr. Ross Mitchell, PhD, and his team at the Hotchkiss Brain Institute (HBI). Neuro-radiologists looked at 120 recent consecutive noncontrast computed tomography (NCCT) brain scans and 70 computed tomography angiogram (CTA) head scans from the Calgary Stroke Program database. Scans were read by two neuro-radiologists, on a medical diagnostic workstation and on an iPhone. Overall, the iPhone app was just as accurate as the medical workstation."

Submission + - How to Make an iPhone App and Make Money (howtomakeaniphoneappandmakemoney)

Submitted by romanholland26
romanholland26 writes: Create an Idea

Anyone can think of an idea on how to make iPhone applications, but that does not make it a good idea. The program will need to be original and suit a specific niche or type of customers. Start by finding a niche for iPhone fans by asking customers what type of applications they are looking for. Perhaps create an online poll and post it on social networks.

It would be pointless creating an idea if there are numerous similar products on the market. Unless you have an excellent marketing strategy, it will be very difficult to sell a product that is similar to thousands of others on the market. A program will gain recognition if is unique and different, which is why it is important to find out how to make an iPhone app that is apart from any other products. If your application is useful and one-of-a-kind, it is more likely to attract customers.

Tools

You will need a good set of tools. This will include an iPhone, a good computer, and an iPhone SDK for programming. You may also want to join the developer program by Apple to make your design and production job easier. If you already have a good computer and iPhone, the other tools should cost less than 200 dollars.

Skills

You will need a variety of skills for knowing how to make the app. Not everyone has these skills, so you may need to study or hire someone who can do the tasks that you cannot. For example, you may need to hire a programmer if you are primarily a designer, or vice versa. Making an iPhone app successful will depend on the skills that each person can bring to the table.

In some ways, an iPhone app is a little like building a business. You will need an advertiser, researcher, accountant, designer, architect, developer, and project manager. Although you can fulfill many of these roles yourself, some may require the help of others. It takes a team to make any product successful, including how to make an iPhone app popular. You can waste a lot of energy and time in trying to learn how to make an iPhone app by yourself when the process can be made so much easier with the help of others.

Market Research

Think about how to make an app and decide whether it brings something new to the market. If the is introducing a new concept, think about how the public will accept it. Even if a new idea seems amazing to you and your friends, the public may not always think so. Find out what the public wants by conducting surveys and asking which applications are most sought after by customers. Your customers are the most important source of marketing information, so it is essential to pay attention to their needs.

Know Your Phone

Use as many games and an application as you can to get a feel of what is already available on the market. Consider the functionality of each program and think about how you can make it better. Look for weak spots in the design and characteristics of the application and learn from other's mistakes.

Who Will Use It?

When making an app, consider your market audience.
The Internet

Army DNS ROOT Server Down For 18+ Hours 154

Posted by Soulskill from the inter-arma-enim-silent-tubulis dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The H-Root server, operated by the US Army Research Lab, spent 18 hours out of the last 48 being a void. Both the RIPE's DNSMON and the h.root-servers.org site show this. How, in this day and age of network engineering, can we even entertain one of the thirteen root servers being unavailable for so long? I mean, the US army doesn't even seem to make the effort to deploy more sites. Look at the other root operators who don't have the backing of the US government money machine. Many of them seem to be able to deploy redundant instances. Even the much-maligned ICANN seems to have managed deploying 11 sites. All these root operators that have only one site need a good swift kick, or maybe they should pass the responsibility to others who are more committed to ensuring the Internet's stability."
Idle

Growing A House From Meat 133

Posted by samzenpus from the delicious-future dept.
baosol writes "From the boundary-pushing team of archi-visionaries who brought us the fabulous Fab Tree Hab comes a new (and somewhat disgusting) way to grow a structure — using animal flesh! The In Vitro Meat Habitat is a futuristic concept home composed of meat cells grown in a lab. The creator of the concept, Mitchell Joachim, is a futurist with a twist– he says he is actually developing the concept in a lab."

Submission + - GeForce GTX 480 BIOS Update and Cooks an Egg (legitreviews.com)

Submitted by demitri
demitri writes: Hardware review website Legit Reviews has taken the heat issue of the newly released NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 Fermi DX11 video card and put a positive spin on it! They slapped a piece of tin foil and tried to cook an egg on the heatsink of the GTX 480! I don't want to completely spoil the fun, but this was prompted after a BIOS update on the card failed to fix the dual monitor heat issue LR discovered! They even had some forum members create their own George Foreman Grill spoofs featuring NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang! Check it out!
Microsoft

Submission + - Office Guardian Angel More Intrusive Than Clippy? (seattleweekly.com) 1

Submitted by ZWilder
ZWilder writes: Remember "Clippy", the annoying anthropomorphic paper clip foisted upon unsuspecting users of Office? Well according to tech blog GigaOm, Microsoft has taken the concept behind Clippy and "turned the dial up to 11" with its new, even more intrusive animated life-coach, known as "Guardian Angel." Patented in 2006, Guardian Angel is "an intelligent personalized agent" that "monitors and evaluates a user's environment to assist in decision-making processes on behalf of the user." Like a manlier Fairy Godmother. Or a similarly omniscient HAL from "2001: A Space Oddysey."
Intel

Submission + - Day 1 is here - opening up the MeeGo development (meego.com)

Submitted by Meeuw
Meeuw writes: Today is the culmination of a huge effort by the worldwide Nokia and Intel teams to share the MeeGo operating system code with the open source community. This is the latest step in the full merger of Maemo and Moblin, and we are happy to open the repositories and move the ongoing development work into the open — as we set out to do from the beginning.

Submission + - Weather Channel Builds Tornado Simulator Game (cnn.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Weather Channel built this fun tornado simulator game, presumably to promote Tornado Week. Pretty fun, especially for a promo tool.
Ubuntu

Submission + - Simmtronics, IBM and Canonical Bring $190 Netbook (engadget.com)

Submitted by suraj.sun
suraj.sun writes: Simmtronics, IBM and Canonical Bring $190 Netbook to Emerging Markets

Simmtronics' Simmbook netbook has been floating around for a few months now, but it's just gotten a considerable boost thanks to a partnership with IBM and Canonical, who have teamed up with the company in an effort to bring the netbook to emerging markets. That confluence of companies means the netbook will run on Ubuntu Netbook Remix and come pre-loaded with IBM's Client for Smart Work, which includes Lotus Symphony and access to various cloud-based services. As for the netbook itself, it's about as basic as you might expect, including the usual 10-inch display, Atom N270 processor, 1GB of RAM, three-cell battery, and a 160GB hard drive.

Engadget : http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/31/simmtronics-ibm-and-canonical-bring-190-simmbook-to-emerging-m/

Submission + - Graph-view of collaborative development (flowingdata.com)

Submitted by VindictivePantz
VindictivePantz writes: In an interesting graphical view on collaborative development, FlowingData writes: "GitHub is a large community where coders can collaborate on software development projects. People check code in and out, make edits, etc. Franck Cuny maps this community (with Gephi), based on information in thousands of user profiles."
Security

Submission + - Short Links On Twitter Aren't Malicious (net-security.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Twitter, and the URL shorteners it has helped to popularize, have long been blamed for leading users to malicious sites. A Zscaler researcher wanted to do a thorough investigation of the Twitter links both before the security scan and after. He retrieved more than 1 million URLs (1,314,615 to be exact) from the public timeline over a couple of weeks before they put any protection in place. He then ran the links through the Zscaler infrastructure to find out which links lead to malicious sites. He found much less malware than anyone could expect.

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