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An anonymous reader writes: Hi, as you know this week iOS7 was announced together with a new GUI, is anybody else annoyed by the lack of buttons? I wrote a little article about it and I was wondering if other people have noticed the potential issues of such changes. Other OSs, like Android, also present similar issues. What do you think?
Ravaun writes: What if we could go to the moon soon. Not today or tomorrow but within the next 4 — 13 years? Of course, not everyone can go (unless we all donate massive amounts of cash), but at least 1 in 32,756 of us can. And another 66 — 67 technical folks. Check it out, it's worth looking into! http://lunarpole.blogspot.com/
Sparrowvsrevolution writes: The promise of a fully 3D-printable gun is that it can spread via the Internet and entirely circumvent gun control laws. Two days after that digital weapon's blueprint first appeared online, it seems to be fulfilling that promise. Files for the printable gun known as that "Liberator" have been downloaded more than 100,000 times in two days, according to Defense Distributed, the group that created it. Those downloads were facilitated by Kim Dotcom's startup Mega, which Defense Distributed is using to host the Liberator's CAD files. And it's also been uploaded to the Pirate Bay, where it's one of the most popular files in the filesharing site's uncensorable 3D printing category.
JDG1980 writes: According to CNET and various other sources, CS6 will be the last version of Adobe's Creative Suite that will be sold in the traditional manner. All future versions will be available by subscription only, through Adobe's so-called "Creative Cloud" service. This means that before too long, anyone who wants an up-to-date version of Photoshop won't be able to buy it – they will have to pay $50 per month (minimum subscription term: one year). Can Adobe complete the switch to subscription-only, or will the backlash be too great? Will this finally spur the creation of a real competitor to Photoshop?
theodp writes: Remember New Coke? Twenty-eight years ago, Coca-Cola replaced the secret formula of its flagship brand, only to announce the return of the "classic" formula just 79 days later. Had it launched in 2013, Coke's Jay Moye suspects a social media backlash would have prompted it to reverse itself even sooner. In a timely follow-up, ZDNet's Steven Vaughan-Nichols points out that Microsoft is facing its own New Coke moment with Windows 8. 'Does Ballmer have the guts to admit he made a mistake and give users what they clearly want?' Vaughan-Nichols asks. 'While it's too late for Windows 8, Blue might give us back our Start button and an Aero-like interface. We don't know.'
alancronin writes: Valve have released Portal for Linux through the Steam platform. If you have a copy of the Windows version you will automatically have a copy of it for Linux in your account. There are also rumors of Portal 2 coming soon.
alancronin writes: Users of Android, Chrome OS, Linux, and iOS devices may not realize it, but FreeType open source software is used to render fonts on more than a billion such devices. Not only that, but the FreeType project this week got a significant update from none other than Adobe and Google. Specifically, Google and Adobe on Wednesday released into beta the Adobe CFF engine, an advanced Compact Font Format (CFF) rasterizer that “paves the way for FreeType-based platforms to provide users with richer and more beautiful reading experiences,” as Google put it in an online announcement on the Google Open Source Blog. The new rasterizer is now included in FreeType version 2.4.12. Though it's currently off by default, the technology is “vastly superior” to the old CFF engine and will replace it in the next FreeType release, the project says.
Fortran IV writes: Randall Munroe's xkcd webcomic has done some odd things before, but #1190, "Time," is something special. It's a time-lapse movie of two people building a sandcastle that's been updating just once an hour (twice an hour in the beginning) for well over a month (since March 25th), and after over a thousand frames shows no sign of ending; in a few days the number of frames will surpass the total number of xkcd comics. It's been mentioned in The Economist. Some of its readers have called it the One True Comic; others have called it a MMONS (Massively Multiplayer Online Nerd Sniping). It's sparked its own wiki, its own jargon (Timewaiters, newpix, Blitzgirling), and a thread on the xkcd user forum that runs to over 20,000 posts from 1100 distinct posters. Is "Time" a fascinating work of art, a deep sociological experiment—or the longest-running shaggy-dog joke in history? Randall Munroe's not saying.
hypnosec writes: Google has indirectly walked right into one of Middle East's most obstinate conflict by putting Palestine as an independent nation wiping off the term Palestinian Territories and replacing it with Palestine in its localized search page. Google’s move is more or less in line with the UN’s decision October to name Palestine as a non-member observer state. The status given to Palestine will allow the state to join UN debates as well as global bodies such as the International Criminal Court, in theory atleast. Up until May 1, anyone visiting http://www.google.ps were shown the phrase Palestinian Territories, which has now been replaced with the word Palestine. This change is definitely not a huge one but, it has attracted criticism from politicians in Israel. They have slammed Google for invading and getting involved in a complex issue that has not been resolved yet.
sl4shd0rk writes: Mozilla and Epic (of Epic Megagames fame) have engineered an impressive First Person OpenGL demo which runs on HTML5 and a subset of JavaScript. Emscripten the tool used, converts C and C++ code into "low level" JavaScript. According to Epic, The Citadel demo runs "within 2x of native speeds" and supports features commonly found in native OpenGL games such as dynamic specular lighting and global illumination. This concept was previously covered on Slashdot however the Citadel demo has just been released this week.
jtogel writes: This New Scientist article describes our AI system that automatically generates card games. The article contains a description of a playable card game generated by our system. But card games are just the beginning... The card game generator is a part of a larger project to automatise all of game development using artificial intelligence methods — we're also working on level generation for a variety of different games, and on rule generation for simple arcade-like games.
