Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Comment It's not just sleek, they work better. (Score 1) 494

by stargazer1sd (#36221996) Attached to: Corporate Mac Sales Surge 66%

Apple, to its credit, cares about user experience. They're not perfect, but they're way ahead of the windows world. I think that's what's selling the users on Macs.

I bought a Toshiba laptop a little over a year ago. It came with Windows 7, which isn't bad. The Toshiba-supplied drivers, are terrible. It's not stuff you notice right away. It's a lot of annoying little things; scratchpad scrolling doesn't work reliably, and various problems with the sleep functions. For some reason, it thinks it should wake up when the laptop is closed and it gets movement from the wireless mouse. I have to turn off my wireless mouse before I stow the machine, otherwise, it cooks itself in the laptop bag. The audio mute button on the keyboard stopped working with the last MS security update. This kind of cr@p gets on your nerves after a while.

Our household iMacs just sit there and work. My next laptop will be a Mac. I'm running my dev software in a virtual machine anyway. I, like others here, do *nix anyway. Might as well have one in my backpack too.

Submission + - SurfSens brings surfing into the computer age (gizmag.com)

Submitted by cylonlover
cylonlover writes: In an activity that for many of its participants is akin to a religion, the merging of surfing and technology might seem a bit like blasphemy. But while surfing is still about lifestyle for many of us, these days it's also a competitive sport offering huge amounts of prize money, so it's no surprise to see the emergence of boards packing more than just polyurethane within their fiberglass shells. With the aim of "turning feelings into facts and figures", research company Tecnalia and Spanish surfboard manufacturer Pukas have teamed up to create a surfboard that packs a gyroscope, accelerometer, GPS compass, pressure sensors and strain gauges to measure the flex of the board.
Moon

Submission + - Giant Underground Chamber Discovered On the Moon (siliconindia.com) 2

Submitted by
siliconeyes
siliconeyes writes: "Scientists at the Indian Space Research Organization have discovered a giant underground chamber on the moon, which they feel could be used as a base by astronauts on future manned missions to moon.

An analysis by an instrument on Chandrayaan-1 revealed a 1.7-km long and 120-metre wide cave near the moon's equator that is in the Oceanus Procellarum area of the moon that could be a suitable 'base station' for future human missions."

Submission + - Egypt's Mordor becomes a torrent of leaks

Submitted by Weezul
Weezul writes: In what Egyptian ex-pats are calling the Egyptian Bastille Day, protesters stormed the Egyptian state security services on Saturday 5 March, freeing victims of torture there, detaining security personnel, and have started publishing secret documents on facebook and twitter.
An Egyptian Twitter poster wrote "I almost can't believe I'm witnessing this. We're inside the fortress of terror, our very own Mordor..."

Among the more amusing discoveries has been a room full of sex tapes, including Arab royals like Kuwait's Princess.

Submission + - Are Hackerspaces Going Viral? (shareable.net)

Submitted by
Shareable
Shareable writes: "Seems that hackerspaces are following a similar trajectory as coworking spaces, up and to the right fast. Both are crucibles where work and our economy are being reinvented. I see them as nodes in an emerging global economic network that's run by free agents and small enterprises that embrace sharing, collaboration, inclusiveness, and sustainability as core values. They're also one of the few places where the values and practices of net culture are lived out in the real world day in and day out."
Oracle

Submission + - Oracle's open source identity reborn at ForgeRock (internetnews.com)

Submitted by
darthcamaro
darthcamaro writes: "Oracle trashed a lot of former Sun technologies — not the least of which is Sun's open source identity platform which included OpenSSO and OpenDS. Now open source startup ForgeRock has taken those castoffs and created a business that has now been running successfully for year.

"My personal goal here is to prove that you can have an open source business that is profitable," Simon Phipps former chief open source officer and Sun and now chief strategy officer at ForgeRock said. "Having principles and having profit are not mutually exclusive."

"
Crime

FBI and NYPD Officers Sent On Museum Field Trip 70

Posted by samzenpus from the warrantless-permission-slips dept.
In an attempt to "refresh their sense of inquiry" FBI agents, and NYPD officers are being sent to a course at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Art of Perception hopes to improve an officers' ability to accurately describe what they see during an investigation by studying art. From the article: "Amy Herman, the course leader, said: 'We're getting them off the streets and out of the precincts, and it refreshes their sense of inquiry. They're thinking, "Oh, how am I doing my job," and it forces them to think about how they communicate, and how they see the world around them.' Ms Herman, an art historian, originally developed the course for medical students, but successfully pitched it as a training course to the New York Police Academy."
Google

Google Rolls Out Chrome 7 292

Posted by CmdrTaco from the bright-and-shiny dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Google on Tuesday released a new stable version of its internet browser, Chrome 7. The latest update is part of Google's promise in July to release a new stable version of Chrome about every six weeks. Chrome 7 comes with hundreds of bug fixes, an updated HTML5 parser, the File API, and directory upload via input tag. It is available in the stable and beta channels for Windows, Mac, and Linux. 'The main focus was the hundreds of bug fixes,' Jeff Chang, a Google product manager, wrote in a blog post."
Patents

Red Hat Settles Patent Case 76

Posted by Soulskill from the making-it-go-away dept.
darthcamaro writes "Red Hat has settled another patent case with patent holding firm Acacia. This time the patent is US Patent #6,163,776, 'System and method for exchanging data and commands between an object oriented system and relational system.' While it's great that Red Hat has ended this particular patent threat, it's not yet clear how they've settled this case. The last time Red Hat tangled with Acacia they won in an Texas jury trial. 'Red Hat routinely addresses attempts to impede the innovative forces of open source via allegations of patent infringement,' Red Hat said in a statement. 'We can confirm that Red Hat, Inc and Software Tree LLC have settled patent litigation that was pending in federal court in the Eastern District of Texas.'"
Image

Steve Jobs Tries To Sneak Shurikens On a Plane 661

Posted by samzenpus from the there's-a-throwing-star-for-that dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Steve Jobs, while on a family vacation to Japan in July, picked himself up some Shuriken, otherwise known as Ninja throwing stars, as a souvenir. In his wisdom he decided to put them in his carry on luggage for the return journey. As it was a private plane he probably thought there would be no issue, but he was wrong. Even private plane passengers have to have all their baggage scanned, and the throwing stars were detected and deemed a hazard. It's alleged that Jobs argued that he could take them on the plane as no one could steal them on his private jet and use them. Security at the airport disagreed and demanded he remove the stars. Jobs, clearly angry at losing his throwing weapons, stated he would not be returning to the country." Undoubtedly this is part of the iNinja project.
Businesses

Copying Trumps Creating For FarmVille Creator Zynga 319

Posted by Soulskill from the at-least-they're-honest dept.
theodp writes "The good news for Zynga is that it scored the cover of SF Weekly. The bad news is that the FarmVillains cover story starts out by describing the secret to the toast-of-Silicon-Valley company's success thusly: 'Steal someone else's game. Change its name. Make millions. Repeat.' SF Weekly says interviews conducted with several former Zynga workers indicate that the practice of stealing other companies' game ideas — and then using Zynga's market clout to crowd out the games' originators — was business as usual. 'I don't ****ing want innovation,' one ex-employee recalled Pincus saying. 'You're not smarter than your competitor. Just copy what they do and do it until you get their numbers.' Another quipped that 'Zynga's motto is "Do Evil."' Valleywag piles on with an item on the existence of Zynga's underground 'Platinum Purchase Program,' reportedly geared towards making players known as 'whales' part with a minimum of $500 at a time for imaginary credits."

Slashdot Top Deals

Work continues in this area. -- DEC's SPR-Answering-Automaton

Close