MBCook - Slashdot User

Submission + - Google delays Nexus Q launch, pre-orders get it free (theverge.com)

Submitted by

MBCook

on Tuesday July 31, 2012 @06:04PM

MBCook writes: "After a mixed reaction from the press, Google will be delaying the launch of the Nexus Q. People who pre-ordred will receive the current version of the device for free."

Submission + - Android Phone or Condom Line? (intercom.io)

Submitted by

MBCook

on Monday March 26, 2012 @09:33PM

MBCook writes: "Naming a product is difficult. Branding legend Marty Neumeier says that good product names have 7 characteristics. They should be distinctive, short, appropriate, easy to spell and pronounce, likable, extendable, and protectable. Looking through this list of Android names, it’s clear that many marketing teams disagree with Marty."

Submission + - Android Orphans: Visualizing a Sad History of Supp (theunderstatement.com)

Submitted by

MBCook

on Thursday October 27, 2011 @09:40AM

MBCook writes: "After seeing the announcement that Nexus One users won't get ICS, Michael Degusta made a chart to show how current the OS version on Android phones was over time... and the results are not encouraging."

Submission + - Word Lens: Live AR Language Translation (questvisual.com)

Submitted by

MBCook

on Friday December 17, 2010 @11:39AM

MBCook writes: "A company called Quest Visual has just released Word Lens, a real time augmented reality language translator for the iPhone. It's capable of translating English to and from Spanish. The app it's self is free (the languages are downloads) so you can play with it in demo mode, where it recognizes and reverses words. I've been playing with it for 10 minutes and it works amazingly well."

Submission + - Intel wants to charge $50 to unlock stuff your CPU (engadget.com)

Submitted by

MBCook

on Saturday September 18, 2010 @07:40PM

MBCook writes: "Turnkey CPU upgrades aren't just for mainframes any more. According to Engadget, OEMs (including Gateway) are selling computers with the Intel Pentium G6951, which can have extra cache and hyper-threading enabled through a $50 software unlock called Intel Upgrade Service."

Submission + - Introducing JITB: A Flash player built on the JVM (joa-ebert.com) 1

Submitted by

MBCook

on Thursday August 19, 2010 @10:06PM

MBCook writes: "Joa Ebert has started working on a new program called JITB. Announced in a talk at FITC San Fran, it's a Flash player written to use the Java JVM to run ActionScript, and in simple graphics test case (making 1 million flash.geom.Point) was 30x faster than Adobe's Flash player. There is an impressive demo video on YouTube showing the point test."

Submission + - Is This Really The Future of Magazines? (interfacelab.com)

Submitted by

MBCook

on Thursday May 27, 2010 @05:16PM

MBCook writes: "Interfacelab has put up a review of Wired's new iPad app, and declared "The only real differentiation between the Wired application and a [1990's] multimedia CD-ROM is the delivery mechanism[.]" While providing little interactivity other than a fancy page-flip, the application is made of XML and images, including two for the text of each page in portrait and landscape mode. This seems to be why the application is 500MB. The article suggests this was done to get the app out quick after Flash was officially vetoed by Steve Jobs."

Submission + - Apple Tech Note Details H.264 Decoding Framework (apple.com)

Submitted by

MBCook

on Thursday April 22, 2010 @03:26PM

MBCook writes: "On March 29th, Apple added Technical Note 2267: Video Decode Acceleration Framework Reference. The note describes
...a C programming interface providing low-level access to the H.264 decoding capabilities of compatible GPUs [...] intended for use by advanced developers who specifically need hardware accelerated decode of video frames.

, an issue Adobe has been citing as one of the main reasons for the slow performance of Flash video on OS X."

Submission + - The sorry state of Avira anti-virus heuristics (grack.com) 1

Submitted by

MBCook

on Wednesday March 17, 2010 @07:20PM

MBCook writes: "How do heuristics detect viruses and malware on your computer? Would you believe it's as simple as a couple of string fragments? The developer of the DotSpots chrome extension, Matt Mastracci, went digging to find out why Avira kept flagging his software and discovered it was a few simple strings that many pieces of JavaScript could easily contain. The GoogleWebToolkit does contain those bits, but it isn't flagged. Why? Because it contains the word "google"."

Submission + - Hey Microsoft, Don't F*ck Up Windows Phone 7, OK? (gizmodo.com)

Submitted by

MBCook

on Tuesday March 16, 2010 @11:20PM

MBCook writes: "Dear Microsoft, you did a good job at out-Appling Apple with the Windows Phone 7. At least on paper. But instead of trying to beat them completely, it seems that you want to screw it all with two stupid decisions."

Submission + - The Bloom Box: The Working Low Cost Fuel Cell (engadget.com)

Submitted by

MBCook

on Monday February 22, 2010 @11:31AM

MBCook writes: "Last night, 60 Minutes aired a 13 minute piece on Bloom Energy and their Bloom Box, a new kind of fuel cell. Able to run on natural gas, biogas, or hydrogen, the devices have been in production testing for months at Google, eBay, FedEx, and Wal-Mart. The version to power an American house is smaller than a bread box, and a unit large enough to power a Starbucks costs about $800k."

Submission + - How the PS3 hypervisor was hacked (root.org)

Submitted by

MBCook

on Wednesday January 27, 2010 @11:29AM

MBCook writes: "Nate Lawson has posted an article explaining exactly how the recent PS3 hack bypasses the hypervisor to gain unrestricted access to memory. It seems the trick is to use a pulse to glitch the hypervisor while it's unmapping memory, leaving a favorable page table entry."

Submission + - Cut This Story! (theatlantic.com)

Submitted by

MBCook

on Monday January 25, 2010 @11:26AM

MBCook writes: "One reason seekers of news are abandoning print newspapers for the Internet has nothing directly to do with technology. It’s that newspaper articles are too long. On the Internet, news articles get to the point. Newspaper writing, by contrast, is encrusted with conventions that don’t add to your understanding of the news. Newspaper writers are not to blame. These conventions are traditional, even mandatory."

Submission + - iPhone: 46% of Japanese Smartphone Market (appleinsider.com)

Submitted by

MBCook

on Friday December 18, 2009 @12:08PM

MBCook writes: "Despite claims earlier in the year that the iPhone was hated by Japan (later disproven), the iPhone has been doing well in the land of the rising sun and the evidence is in. Apple has taken 46% of the Japanese smartphone market, cutting the 27% market share of the previous lead, Advance Sharp W-Zero3 (Japanese site), in half. The article includes a large chart of the market share of Japanese smartphones over the last 3 years."

Submission + - Revenge of the Computer Nerds: Global Warming Code (americanthinker.com)

Submitted by

MBCook

on Wednesday December 09, 2009 @10:34PM

MBCook writes: "It is fascinating to watch the mainstream media in America duck (and/or make excuses for) the greatest scam in modern history: the "science" behind man-made global warming. Even more entertaining, and far more enlightening, is to follow the analyses by the experts in computer programming of the recently disclosed methods used by the Climate Research Unit (CRU) from the University of East Anglia. [...] The bottom line is that if this kind of code were to be used by, say, an insurance actuary — or by someone writing banking software or for tracking the stock market — the programmer would immediately be fired...and probably face criminal prosecution."

Slashdot Top Deals