Ruliz Galaxor - Slashdot User

Comment Re:What's the big deal? (Score 1) 483

by Ruliz Galaxor on Tuesday March 09, 2010 @05:44PM (#31419652) Attached to: Apple's iPhone Developer License Agreement Revealed

You're confusing only-having-AppStore with not-allowing-other-programs.

Of course the average quality of the programs is higher, because all programs are checked. However, allowing other programs on the iPhone, while still having the AppStore as an easy way to buy/sell programs, would result in the AppStore having a similar quality level, while enabling choice for both developers and consumers.

pro-consumers will likely install applications from other sources, but then they choose to get a potential lower quality application. The same is valid for developers. If you want to be able to get your app in the AppStore, you'll need your app to be of higher quality. In other words: you could also see the AppStore in this case as a quality level.

Again: having an AppStore should not exclude the possibility of developing/using apps through a different way.

Comment Re:clue for the non-iphone-user (Score 1) 268

by Ruliz Galaxor on Saturday November 21, 2009 @12:41PM (#30185254) Attached to: iPhone Game Piracy "the Rule Rather Than the Exception"

There are lots of things that I can afford but choose not to buy. It doesn't mean that no effort went into producing them, it means that their value to me is lower than their cost.

I agree. And then you even forget the opportunity costs. Even if the value of the "thing" you're considering buying is larger than its cost, you can only spend the money once. Thus, you buy the "thing" that has the highest value for the price you pay.

Scientists Build a Smarter Rat 302

Posted by timothy on Tuesday November 03, 2009 @11:22AM from the politicians-still-mostly-in-the-lead dept.

destinyland writes "Scientists have engineered a more intelligent rat, with three times the memory length of today's smartest rats. Reseachers bred transgenic over-expression of the NR2B gene, which increased communication between the rat's memory synapses. Activating a crucial brain receptor for just a fraction of a second longer produces a dramatic effect on memory, as proven by the rat's longer memories of the path through a maze."

Newly Declassified FBI Docs Reveal Predictive Data System 185

Posted by timothy on Wednesday September 23, 2009 @05:15PM from the like-a-creepy-ad-for-ibm dept.

An anonymous reader writes 'Newly declassified documents show that the FBI is developing a data-mining system to uncover terror sleeper cells. Among the 1.6 billion records in the National Security Analysis Center — tens of thousands of travel records, including hotel and airline records. Other revelations in the documents uncovered by a Wired.com FOIA request show that the feds want to expand the system for use in cyber-crime investigations, and it's already been used to scrutinize helicopter pilots and Philly cab drivers. The system has eerie resemblances to DARPA's once-banned Total Information Awareness program."

FCC Probing Apple, AT&T Rejection of Google Voice 204

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday August 01, 2009 @08:16AM from the now-you've-done-it dept.

suraj.sun writes with an update to the news from a few days ago about Apple pulling Google Voice apps for the iPhone. Their actions have raised the interest of the FCC, which is now beginning an investigation into the matter. "In a letter sent to Apple, the FCC asked the company why it turned down Google Voice for the iPhone and pulled several other Google Voice-related programs from the iPhone's only sanctioned online mart. The FCC also sent similar letters to both AT&T — Apple's exclusive carrier partner in the US — and Google, asking both firms to provide more information on the issue. The FCC's letter asked Apple whether it rejected Google Voice and dumped other applications on its own, or 'in consultation with AT&T,' and if the latter, to describe the conversations the partners had. In other questions, the FCC asked Apple whether AT&T has any role in the approval of iPhone applications, wants the company to explain how Google Voice differs from any other VoIP software that has been approved, and requested a list of all applications that have been rejected and why."

The Best First Language For a Young Programmer 634

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday July 25, 2009 @10:22AM from the what-language-do-the-binars-speak dept.

snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister questions whether Scheme, a dialect of Lisp taught as part of many first-year CS curricula and considered by some to be the 'latin of programming,' is really the best first language for a young programmer. As he sees it, the essentially write-only Scheme requires you to bore down into the source code just to figure out what a Scheme program is trying to do — excellent for teaching programming but 'lousy for a 15-year-old trying to figure out how to make a computer do stuff on his own.' And though the 'hacker ethic' may in fact be harming today's developers, McAllister still suggests we encourage the young to 'develop the innate curiosity and love of programming that lies at the heart of any really brilliant programmer' by simply encouraging them to fool around with whatever produces the most gratifying results. After all, as Jeff Atwood puts it, 'what we do is craftmanship, not engineering,' and inventing effective software solutions takes insight, inspiration, deduction, and often a sprinkling of luck. 'If that means coding in Visual Basic, so be it. Scheme can come later.'"

Comment Re:Finally (Score 1) 575

by Ruliz Galaxor on Tuesday July 21, 2009 @05:02PM (#28774825) Attached to: First New Nuclear Reactor In a Decade On Track

Clean, as in: do you know how much greenhouse gases are emitted when getting uranium/plutonium out of the ground and processed to be able to use it in a nuclear reactor?

If you would know, you wouldn't call it clean.

Cheap is also largely untrue.

See (for example): http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3250 to debunk your clean and cheap arguments.

Freshman Representative Opposes "TSA Porn" 620

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday May 20, 2009 @11:42AM from the things-we-really-really-don't-want-to-see dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Not content to simply follow the 'anything to protect American lives' mantra, freshman Representative Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) has introduced a bill to prohibit mandatory full body scans at airports. Chaffetz states, 'The images offer a disturbingly accurate view of a person's body underneath clothing ... Americans should not be required to expose their bodies in this manner in order to fly.' He goes on to note that the ACLU has expressed support for the bill. Maybe we don't need tin-foil sports coats to go with our tin-foil hats. For reference, the Daily Herald has a story featuring images from the millimeter wavelength imager, and we've talked about the scanners before."

Finnish Court Dismisses E-Voting Result 114

Posted by kdawson on Saturday April 11, 2009 @05:02PM from the go-back-jack-do-it-again dept.

wizzor writes in with a follow-up on the Finnish municipal election in which 2% of the votes were lost by a defective e-voting system, and which the Helsinki Administrative Court had found acceptable. Now the Supreme Administrative Court of Finland has rejected the election results (original in Finnish; bad Google translation here) and ordered the election to be re-run. The submitter adds, "Apparently 98% of the votes isn't enough to determine how the remaining 2% voted, after all."

Comment Re:Corporate culture (Score 1) 883

by Ruliz Galaxor on Thursday March 19, 2009 @08:10AM (#27253789) Attached to: Shell Ditches Wind, Solar, and Hydro

Once oil will not be profitable enough, Shell will just buy the company with 'the good solar array network' or some other nice green energy company.

Are Quirky Developers Brilliant Or Dangerous? 1134

Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday March 16, 2009 @10:14AM from the hey-wait-a-minute dept.

jammag writes "Most developers have worked with a dude like Josh, who's so brilliant the management fawns over him even as he takes a dump in the lobby flowerpot. Eric Spiegel tells of one such Josh, who wears T-shirts with offensive slogans, insults female co-workers and, when asked about documentation, smirks, "What documentation?' Sure, he was whipsmart and could churn out code that saved the company millions, but can we please stop enabling these people?"

Comment Re:Pff this is ridiculous (Score 1) 512

by Ruliz Galaxor on Friday March 06, 2009 @11:17AM (#27091617) Attached to: Illinois Declares Pluto a Planet

It's not just a dog; it's a _dwarf_ dog.

Hope For Multi-Language Programming? 371

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday February 28, 2009 @01:09AM from the one-and-done dept.

chthonicdaemon writes "I have been using Linux as my primary environment for more than ten years. In this time, I have absorbed all the lore surrounding the Unix Way — small programs doing one thing well, communicating via text and all that. I have found the command line a productive environment for doing many of the things I often do, and I find myself writing lots of small scripts that do one thing, then piping them together to do other things. While I was spending the time learning grep, sed, awk, python and many other more esoteric languages, the world moved on to application-based programming, where the paradigm seems to be to add features to one program written in one language. I have traditionally associated this with Windows or MacOS, but it is happening with Linux as well. Environments have little or no support for multi-language projects — you choose a language, open a project and get it done. Recent trends in more targeted build environments like cmake or ant are understandably focusing on automatic dependency generation and cross-platform support, unfortunately making it more difficult to grow a custom build process for a multi-language project organically. All this is a bit painful for me, as I know how much is gained by using a targeted language for a particular problem. Now the question: Should I suck it up and learn to do all my programming in C++/Java/(insert other well-supported, popular language here) and unlearn ten years of philosophy, or is there hope for the multi-language development process?"

We're In Danger of Losing Our Memories 398

Posted by kdawson on Monday January 26, 2009 @11:11PM from the black-hole-of-history dept.

Hugh Pickens writes "The chief executive of the British Library, Lynne Brindley, says that our cultural heritage is at risk as the Internet evolves and technologies become obsolete, and that historians and citizens face a 'black hole' in the knowledge base of the 21st century unless urgent action is taken to preserve websites and other digital records. For example, when Barack Obama was inaugurated as US president last week, all traces of George W. Bush disappeared from the White House website. There were more than 150 websites relating to the 2000 Olympics in Sydney that vanished instantly at the end of the games and are now stored only by the National Library of Australia. 'If websites continue to disappear in the same way as those on President Bush and the Sydney Olympics... the memory of the nation disappears too,' says Brindley. The library plans to create a comprehensive archive of material from the 8M .uk domain websites, and also is organizing a collecting and archiving project for the London 2012 Olympics. 'The task of capturing our online intellectual heritage and preserving it for the long term falls, quite rightly, to the same libraries and archives that have over centuries systematically collected books, periodicals, newspapers, and recordings...'" Over the years we've discussed various aspects of this archiving problem.

Edible "Intelligent Pills" 105

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday January 20, 2009 @06:51PM from the success-with-heart-failure dept.

Ian Lamont sends along a brief note from the Industry Standard about "intelligent" pills that can help doctors record information about drug dosages, heart rate, respiratory rate, and other metrics. The pills, being developed by Proteus Biomedicals, have "digestible sensors" made out of food products and are activated by stomach fluids. A receiver that is similar to a skin patch picks up the data and can be passed on to a 3G mobile network, and from there to hospitals or doctors' offices. According to the Proteus site, the sensors cost a few cents per pill. The devices, currently in clinical trials, made #8 on Wired's list of the top technology breakthroughs of 2008.

Slashdot Top Deals