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Comment My wallet says otherwise (Score 5, Insightful) 453

Haven't you seen the Star Citizen promo? Here. The PC and it's capabilities are not dead to the tune of $33.7 Million USD and counting.

Just because a newer or different technology sells well and meets one segments needs (business) doesn't mean that the old one will die. I mean seriously, how many of you are still running a tape library out there?

Android

Submission + - Revolutionary new Nokia smartphone to combat 'poorly designed' iPhone (bgr.com)

zacharye writes: In an interview with Finnish newspaper Kauppalehti, Nokia design boss Marko Ahtisaari said that the company is currently working on a revolutionary new smartphone that will make other handsets seem dated. According to the Nokia executive, Apple’s user interface on the iPhone is “poorly designed” and convoluted. “The road from the kitchen into the dining room is always through the front door,” Ahtisaari told Kauppalehti. Meanwhile, operating systems like Symbian and Android are described by the design veteran as “dollhouses,” with furniture users can pick and rearrange...
Music

Submission + - Mastering Engineer Explains Types of Compression, Effects on Today's Music (cepro.com) 1

Stowie101 writes: "Today is Dynamic Range Day, which is an event to educate the public about the “Loudness Wars” that are compressing and harming the quality of today’s music.

Ian Shepherd, a mastering engineer and founder of Dynamic Range Day, explains why music lovers should avoid MP3 files.

"The one that springs to mind is to avoid MP3, especially if it’s 128 kbps. Apple uses a more advanced technology called AAC, but if someone can get lossless files like FLAC that’s a better place to start."

Shepherd says it’s actually harder to make a good “lossy” encode of something that has been heavily musically compressed. Very heavy dynamic compression and limiting makes MP3s sound worse, so the loudness wars indirectly make MP3s sound worse.""

Iphone

Submission + - Battery life key to smartphone customer loyalty (itworld.com)

bdking writes: Smartphone owners who are highly satisfied with their device's battery life are more likely to repurchase the same brand of smartphone, compared with owners who are less satisfied, according to a new survey by J.D. Power.

Comment Mandates are the issue (Score 5, Interesting) 969

Lets move away from an hour based work schedule to a task and accomplishment based work/pay system. Base salary and flexible hours. Penalties for work not completed or as a corrective measure. We don't measure lives in hours, why should our job's measure what we do for them in hours?

Mandating an "hours per week" for employee's is the problem, not the solution.

Comment Idea's don't die (Score 2) 70

They just get hit with solar flares and fizzle out.

Seriously though, the only angle that LightSquard had was, "It's already up there, all we have to do it turn it on..." and that has just gone up in smoke. Just like their business model and momentum. It's time they go back to the drawing board and come up with a new plan, get new backers, and find a new way to do what they want to do.

Comment Memory pruning (Score 4, Insightful) 139

Part of a healthy mind is the ability to forget unimportant or no longer relevant information in favor of more recent and accurate things. If i tracked myself I wouldn't be able to forget the unimportant or push aside the less desirable. I would be governed by old data and held to means and modes of things that may not reflect current realities.

This seems more like punishment than an aid.

Comment Bias (Score 5, Insightful) 619

And once again we find that it's only true to a government if their own agencies or personnel tell them it's so. A private citizen should be able to produce evidence and have it considered with the same weight as something produced by a policing force. Providing obtaining that evidence didn't violate the law in any way.

You can bet that if it had been the police that can up with that GPS location they would have a warrant in hand tight now.

Education

Later School Start For Teenagers Brings Drop In Absenteeism 436

krou writes "Monkseaton High School in North Tyneside, UK, began an experiment in October that saw its 800 pupils ranging in age from 13-19 attend school an hour later than normal, at 10am. Early results indicate that 'general absence has dropped by 8% and persistent absenteeism by 27%.' Head teacher Paul Kelley supported the idea because he believed that 'it was now medically established that it was better for teenagers to start their school day later in terms of their mental and physical health and how they learn better in the afternoon', and he now claims that the children are becoming 'happier better educated teenagers' as a result of the experiment. The experiment is being overseen by Oxford neuroscience professor Russell Foster. 'He performed memory tests on pupils at the school which suggested the more difficult lessons should take place in the afternoon. He said young people's body clocks may shift as they reach their teenage years — meaning they want to get up later not because they are lazy but because they are biologically programmed to do.'"
Security

Report That OS X Snow Leopard May Include Antivirus 335

File this firmly in the "rumor" category for now. the JoshMeister writes (in the third person) "Mac antivirus company Intego broke the story this morning that Apple is apparently including antivirus functionality in its upcoming operating system, Snow Leopard. But which antivirus engine is Apple using? Security researcher Joshua Long discusses the likely candidates."
Space

New Paper Offers Additional Reasoning for Fermi's Paradox 774

KentuckyFC writes "If the universe is teeming with advanced civilizations capable of communicating over interstellar distances, then surely we ought to have seen them by now. That's the gist of a paradoxical line of reasoning put forward by the physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950. The so-called Fermi Paradox has haunted SETI researchers ever since. Not least because if the number of intelligent civilizations capable of communication in our galaxy is greater than 1, then we should eventually hear from them. Now one astrophysicist says this thinking fails to take into account the limit to how far a signal from ET can travel before it becomes too faint to hear. Factor that in and everything changes. Assuming the average communicating civilization has a lifetime of 1,000 years, ten times longer than Earth has been broadcasting, and has a signal horizon of 1,000 light-years, you need a minimum of over 300 communicating civilizations in the Milky Way to ensure that you'll see one of them. Any less than that and the chances are that they'll live out their days entirely ignorant of each other's existence. Paradox solved, right?"

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