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Comment Obvious, not insightful (Score 1) 500

The fact that Facebook and Apple are Google's competitors in certain markets -- namely advertising and mobile eco-system -- doesn't diminish his point that a walled-garden, unsearchable web (Facebook) is a poor substitute for what we had 10 years ago, and that a walled-garden mobile eco-system that ties you to a single hardware vendor (Apple) is similarly no good. Google+ posts are searchable on Bing or any other search engine and if you don't link your Samsung Galaxy SII, you can replace it with an HTC Rezound or a Motorola Razr Maxx without losing your apps or data.

You haven't addressed the points he makes about Facebook and Apple, nor his concern about governments imposing restrictions on use of the internet and surveillance legislation that affects internet users' privacy. Stating that Facebook and Apple are competitors isn't insightful - it's obvious, and it doesn't invalidate his argument.

Comment Re:What? (Score 1) 770

by MochaMan (#37855878) Attached to: Android Orphans: a Sad History of Platform Abandonment

Not to mention they don't cover the fact that while the 3G was updated, the updates (particularly iOS4) left it barely useable. Tap camera... wait 30s... shutter opens. Tap Maps... wait 1 min... maps crashes. Tap it again... another crash... phone starting to heat up now. At first I thought it was faulty hardware, but my wife's had essentially the same problems.
Image

"Do Not Eat iPod Shuffle": 30 Dumb Warning Labels 143

Posted by samzenpus from the do-not-taunt dept.
jfruhlinger writes "You'd think that people would know electronic equipment isn't for eating, but apparently you'd be wrong. Find out what dumb things companies felt compelled to warn their customers not to do in this list compiled by JR Raphael. Some of the best include: Don't throw your mouse at a co-worker, do not attempt to stop with hands or genitals, and do not put lit candles on phone."

Submission + - Portrait of a Superproductive Programmer (softwarequalityconnection.com)

Submitted by
Esther Schindler
Esther Schindler writes: "Hollywood portrayals of computing superstars are more rooted in comic-book super-heroics than the realities of software development. Except that in programming, superpowers do exist. As Cameron Laird explains, Fabrice Bellard has them. Bellard is "a serial achiever," responsible for well over a dozen open source tools (such as TinyCC Boot Loader) and computer science/math OhBoy moments (he set world record for calculation of the digits of pi in 2009). This article gives an overview of Bellard's work and contemplates what makes one programmer so much more productive than another."
Space

Submission + - Supermoon Saturday night (npr.org)

Submitted by watermark
watermark writes: About every 28 years a "supermoon" occurs. This is when the moon's orbit is closest to earth at the same time as a full moon. Saturday night will be the biggest, brightest full moon you will see in the next 28 years.
Education

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Wireless Voting

Submitted by RabidRabbit23
RabidRabbit23 writes: I volunteer for a non-profit that organizes Model UN conferences for high school students. We need a quick and low cost way to record votes done by the students in large committees. There will be two or three committees with about 200 students in each. We need to be able to record yes, no or abstention vote and must be able to identify each student's vote. We looked into radio response clickers but it is very expensive to buy 400-600 clickers. They cost about $40 at university bookstores, which is way out of our budget, but we don't know what kind of discount we could get by buying directly from the manufacturer. We do have wireless internet but we do not have enough bandwidth to support everyone using a laptop. Does the Slashdot community have any suggestions for a better way to record the students' votes?
Social Networks

The New Reality of Gaming 122

Posted by Soulskill from the i-blame-the-schools dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Video games used to be about fighting aliens and rescuing princesses, writes Rohin Dharmakumar in Forbes, but the most popular games today have you tilling your farm, hiring waiting staff and devising menus for your restaurant or taking your pets out for walks while maintaining cordial relations with the neighbors. 'Reality, it would seem, is the new escapism.' Video games of the pre-social network era were mostly played by boys or young men but 'now the core audience of social network games are girls and young women,' says Alok Kejriwal, founder and CEO of games2win, an online gaming company. The tipping point in the US came in 2008 when women outnumbered men on the Internet. Combined with millions of parents and grandparents who're new to the Internet, the traditional face of the gamer is changing from that of a 25-year-old male to a band stretching from 16 to 40 years comprising men and women in almost equal numbers, says Sebastien de Halleux, one of the co-founders of Playfish, who predicts that someone is going to create a social game very shortly that pulls in a billion dollars a year. Gaming for this new set of players is less about breathtaking graphics, pulsating sound or edge-of-the-seat action and more about strengthening existing real world relations through frequent casual gaming. 'Think of these games as a sandbox where everybody has the same tools, yet everyone achieves different results,' says de Halleux."

Comment Re:No surprise (Score 1) 203

by MochaMan (#33002082) Attached to: Feds Bust Chinese Firm's Hybrid Car Data Heist

On further digging I call bullshit. Let's see a valid citation that claims sale of used games is illegal.

Here are some showing it isn't:
http://www.gamepro.com/article/news/22924/used-game-sales-upheld-in-japan/ [2002]

Online shopping for used games:
http://www.suruga-ya.jp/game.html

Used games flourish in Japan:
http://www.hudsonent.com/user/feature.php?f=IT_CAME_FROM_JAPAN__Used_Games_Market&feature_id=%99%A4%A7%AA%96%A5

Comment Baby earthquake in Montreal (Score 1) 560

by MochaMan (#32673536) Attached to: 5.5 Earthquake Hits Canada; Felt in US Midwest, New England

Having grown up on the West Coast of Canada, and lived in California and 5 years in Japan... this earthquake was barely even noticeable in Montreal, despite co-workers panicking. Potted plant balanced on my cubicle wall still sitting there. A lot of overreaction in a region not used to earthquakes.
Education

Submission + - Modern Day Equivalent of Byte/Compute! Magazine?

Submitted by MochaMan
MochaMan writes: I grew up in the 80s on a steady diet of Byte and Compute! magazines, banging in page after page of code line-by-line, and figuring out how sound, graphics and input devices worked along the way. Since then, the personal computer market has obviously moved away from hobbyists intent on coding and understanding their machines down to the hardware, but I imagine there must still be a market for similar do-it-yourself articles. Perhaps the collective minds of Slashdot can divine some online sources of fun & educational mini-projects like "write your own assembler" or "roll your own bootloader".

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