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Businesses

Submission + - iPad is Destroying Netbook Sales

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "Fortune magazine reports that sales growth of low-cost, low-powered netbooks peaked last summer at an astonishing 641% year-over-year growth rate but netbook sales fell off a cliff in January and shrank again in April — collateral damage, according to Morgan Stanley's Katy Huberty, from the January introduction and April launch of the iPad. In support of Huberty's theory, she offers a Morgan Stanley/Alphawise survey conducted in March that found that 44% of US consumers who were planning to buy an iPad said that they were buying it instead of a netbook or notebook computer. In related news, Apple announced that it sold its one millionth iPad last week, just 28 days after its introduction on April 3. “One million iPads in 28 days—that’s less than half of the 74 days it took to achieve this milestone with iPhone,” says Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “Demand continues to exceed supply and we’re working hard to get this magical product into the hands of even more customers.”"

Comment Awful Story + great effects = Blockbuster (Score 5, Insightful) 782

by Saint (#30640576) Attached to: <em>Avatar</em> Soars Into $1-Billion Territory

I feel as though I am the only one not drinking from the cool-aid on this one. The story line, apart from the apparently necessary political message, is nothing more than a rehash of a million other stories. From the noble savage to the walking armor suit so reminiscent of the suit that worn in the Aliens finale by Sigourney Weaver, this story was a soup of elements found in many other stories and movies. Were this story presented as a book, without James Cameron's name, it would have been rejected outright.

The only creative elements that exist in this movie were the special effects and associated artistry, which made the movie worth watching. They were outstanding.

Finally, why do entertainers continue to feel that they have to present their beliefs within a movie. If I want to be preached at or listen to political messages, I will go to church or read a newspaper/book. I do not want to see it in movies or hear it at concerts.
Games

Blizzard Offers Look Inside WoW At GDC 188

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the belly-of-the-beast dept.
Yesterday morning at GDC Austin, Blizzard's J. Allen Brack and Frank Pearce took to the stage to finally give a peek inside the inner workings of World of Warcraft. Tipping the scales at around 4,600 people utilizing 20,000 computer systems and 1.3 petabytes of storage, Blizzard has created a raging behemoth. The Online Network services group alone has "data centers from Texas to Seoul, and monitor over 13,250 server blades, 75,000 cpu cores, and 112.5 terabytes of blade RAM. [Pearce] points out the picture of the GNOC (Global Network Operations Center) in their slideshow, a data core that even has televisions tuned to the weather stations. They use those to ensure that conditions of the data center are up to their standards; with only a staff of 68 people they ensure connectivity across the globe for the numerous WoW servers."
Software

Submission + - New alternative to Joomla? (magentocommerce.com)

Submitted by Saint
Saint writes: No, this is not a bash Joomla post. Whatever you may think of Joomla, it has been the best solution for those of us who occasionally build web-based storefronts for clients for some time. Now it appears there is an alternative that might give Joomla a run for its money. Magento. The admin interface is really directed at running a store, with a dashboard displaying information important to a store manager, a catalogue that is easy to use and populate, a report menu and many other features. I still have not tried any performance tests or reviewed it for potential security issues, but given the feature set, useability and interface, I think it will replace future Joomla installations for storefronts. I would really like to know what others think about it. Have you used it? What problems have you run into? (BTW, you cannot login via an http://localhost/ url. Instead, use your ip address to access the site.)

Comment Forget the comparison.... (Score 3, Insightful) 240

by Saint (#27051281) Attached to: Open Source Usability &mdash; Joomla! Vs. WordPress

The real message is that joomla suffers from a lack of useability. The fact that a software component can perform complex tasks, does not require that the interface be confusing.

Comparing joomla to wordpress is silly as everyone else has noted...but it accomplished the author's goal of getting a lot of traffic....:)

I have to say that IMHO the Joomla developers would see an explosion of new users if they would just allow someone with useability experience to walk through the admin ui and suggest changes. It is repetitive. There are aspects that are not clear and thus confusing. In 2009, there really is no excuse for that.

Having said that, it is an excellent piece of software for catalogs, commerce sites, etc. I can think of none better in general...even considering drupal.

Just my opinion.
The Courts

Google Wins Agreement To Anonymize YouTube Logs 242

Posted by timothy from the have-in-my-hand-a-list dept.
Barence, following up on yesterday's news that Viacom is looking for videos uploaded by Google staff, links to an article at PC Pro, excerpting: "Google and Viacom have reached a deal to protect the privacy of millions of YouTube watchers. Earlier this month, a New York federal judge ordered Google to turn over YouTube user data to Viacom and other plaintiffs to help them prepare a confidential study of what they argue are vast piracy violations on the video-sharing site. Google claims it had now agreed to provide plaintiffs' attorneys with a version of a massive viewership database that blanks out YouTube usernames and IP addresses that could be used to identify individual video watchers."
The Internet

Paul Vixie Responds To DNS Hole Skeptics 147

Posted by kdawson from the be-afraid-be-very-afraid-then-get-patching dept.
syncro writes "The recent massive, multi-vendor DNS patch advisory related to DNS cache poisoning vulnerability, discovered by Dan Kaminsky, has made headline news. However, the secretive preparation prior to the July 8th announcement and hype around a promised full disclosure of the flaw by Dan on August 7 at the Black Hat conference has generated a fair amount of backlash and skepticism among hackers and the security research community. In a post on CircleID, Paul Vixie offers his usual straightforward response to these allegations. The conclusion: 'Please do the following. First, take the advisory seriously — we're not just a bunch of n00b alarmists, if we tell you your DNS house is on fire, and we hand you a fire hose, take it. Second, take Secure DNS seriously, even though there are intractable problems in its business and governance model — deploy it locally and push on your vendors for the tools and services you need. Third, stop complaining, we've all got a lot of work to do by August 7 and it's a little silly to spend any time arguing when we need to be patching.'"
It's funny. Laugh.

1200-Baud Archeology 211

Posted by kdawson from the when-men-were-men-and-interpreters-ran-in-4k dept.
jamie found this singularly geeky article on reconstructing Apple I BASIC from a cassette tape. It claims to offer the first confirmed perfect dump (BIN) of the 4096 bytes of this venerable interpreter. Terrific fun for the whole family. "The Apple I is extremely rare. Only 200 were built, and less than 100 are believed to be in existence. Neither Steve nor Woz own an Apple I any more, and neither does Apple Inc. The cassettes are even rarer, as not every Apple I came with one... So here is how to decode the signal. Let us first open the audio file in Audacity and look at the waveform... It is now time to write a small program to measure and dump the width of the pulses."
Supercomputing

IBM's Eight-Core, 4-GHz Power7 Chip 425

Posted by kdawson from the 100-racks-of-goodness dept.
pacopico writes "The first details on IBM's upcoming Power7 chip have emerged. The Register is reporting that IBM will ship an eight-core chip running at 4.0 GHz. The chip will support four threads per core and fit into some huge systems. For example, University of Illinois is going to house a 300,000-core machine that can hit 10 petaflops. It'll have 620 TB of memory and support 5 PB/s of memory bandwidth. Optical interconnects anyone?"
Networking

FSF Helps Launch Autonomo.us To Focus On Freedom In Network Services 45

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the save-the-intartubez-bumper-stickers-coming-soon dept.
mako writes "The FSF just announced the results of a meeting it held on software freedom and network services. They are hailing the launch of a new group called Autonomo.us to follow up on these issues and the publication of the Franklin Street Statement on Freedom and Network Services which lays out a set of recommendations and guidelines for protecting freedom for software as a service." Update 22:07 GMT by SM: Corrected language incorrectly crediting FSF with creating Autonomo.us.

Feed The Register: Court denies stay of Internet radio execution (theregister.com)

From feed by registerfeed
Three days and counting...

The Internet radio death watch continues. Late yesterday, a federal appeals court denied an emergency stay petition from webcasters, refusing to delay the arrival of massive royalty hikes that threaten to bring down online radio as we know it. The new royalty rates - which could mean a 300 per cent payment increase for large stations, 1200 per cent for smaller broadcasters - are due to kick in this Sunday.

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