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Desktops (Apple)

Submission + - Mac Flashback attack began with Wordpress blogs (eweek.com)

Submitted by beaverdownunder
beaverdownunder writes: Alexander Gostev, head of the global research and analysis team at Kaspersky, says that “tens of thousands of sites powered by WordPress were compromised. How this happened is unclear. The main theories are that bloggers were using a vulnerable version of WordPress or they had installed the ToolsPack plug-in.”
Science

Submission + - Eating meat helped early humans reproduce (latimes.com) 1

Submitted by PolygamousRanchKid
PolygamousRanchKid writes: If early humans had been vegans we might all still be living in caves, Swedish researchers suggested in an article Thursday. When a mother eats meat, her breast-fed child's brain grows faster and she is able to wean the child at an earlier age, allowing her to have more children faster, the article explains. "Eating meat enabled the breast-feeding periods and thereby the time between births to be shortened," said psychologist Elia Psouni of Lund University in Sweden. "This must have had a crucial impact on human evolution."

She notes, however, that the results say nothing about what humans today should or should not eat.
Hardware

Submission + - Why Amazon Can't Make A Kindle In the USA (forbes.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Decades of outsourcing manufacturing have left US industry without the means to invent the next generation of high-tech products that are key to rebuilding its economy, as noted by Garry Pisano and Willy Shih in a classic article Thus in "Restoring American Competitiveness" (Harvard Business Review, July-August 2009)

The US has lost or is on the verge of losing its ability to develop and manufacture a slew of high-tech products. Amazon's Kindle 2 couldn't be made in the US, even if Amazon wanted to:

- The flex circuit connectors are made in China because the US supplier base migrated to Asia.
- The electrophoretic display is made in Taiwan because the expertise developed from producing flat-panel LCDs migrated to Asia with semiconductor manufacturing.
- The highly polished injection-molded case is made in China because the US supplier base eroded as the manufacture of toys, consumer electronics and computers migrated to China.
- The wireless card is made in South Korea because that country became a center for making mobile phone components and handsets.
- The controller board is made in China because US companies long ago transferred manufacture of printed circuit boards to Asia.
- The Lithium polymer battery is made in China because battery development and manufacturing migrated to China along with the development and manufacture of consumer electronics and notebook computers.

An exception is Apple, which "has been able to preserve a first-rate design capability in the States so far by remaining deeply involved in the selection of components, in industrial design, in software development, and in the articulation of the concept of its products and how they address users' needs."
HP

Submission + - Best Buy HP TouchPad clearance pricing policy chan (tekgoblin.com)

Submitted by iceman7679
iceman7679 writes: we mentioned that Best Buy in the U.S. would not be featuring the same HP TouchPad price drops of $99 and $150 that HP had initiated on their own online store. In fact, they were stopping the sales of the devices and sending them back to HP. But we stumbled upon a Best Buy Community Forums link where a corporate Best Buy representative just gave an update to someone nearly an hour ago that seem to change that decision.
Games

Submission + - Star Wars The Old Republic Sales Limited At Launch (gamergaia.com)

Submitted by Calidreth
Calidreth writes: The ranks upon ranks of troopers in this picture may turn out to be artistic license after all, as it turns out Star Wars: The Old Republic will have a deliberately limited number of copies on sale at its launch. The publisher says it hopes this will ensure a smooth launch and a better experience for all involved. Is this a considerate act towards prospective players by EA, or is it a way to drive preorders for a game that has yet to even announce a release date higher still? Strange as it may seem, we might all look back on this as the start of a new best practice for MMOs.
IBM

Submission + - IBM Chief: All CEOs Reluctant to Invest in R&D

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: In his Centennial Conversation at the Computer History Museum, IBM CEO Sam Palmisano emphasized the importance of investing in R&D, even in a down economy. 'Shareholder expectations for higher returns don't diminish when the economy stutters,' said Sam. 'And yet, Tom Watson Sr. actually increased research investment during the Great Depression.' Palmisano added, 'I will tell you that my own instinctive reflex isn't to continue investing $6 billion a year during the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. In that regard, I'm like all CEOs.' Yes, to paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen, Sam Palmisano is no Tom Watson. And while he didn't mention it in his speech, just days earlier, Palmisano exercised an option for 300,000 IBM shares at $97.59, which were immediately unloaded for more than $50 million at prices ranging from $178.72-$183.63 (IBM closed Friday at $157.54). Watson, by the way, famously refused to grant stock options to himself and other execs.
Cloud

Submission + - Changing Landscape of IT 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The IT industry is a lot different than it was 10 years ago, it underwent a huge boom in terms of labor and services requirements to keep up with the times. Now, we are entering a consolidation phase. The cloud makes it easier for companies to host e-mail, so now instead of organizations having their own exchange guy they will outsource it to the cloud, instead of having a bunch of network engineers they will deploy wireless and no longer need cabling and as much network engineering services. What do you think the long trend of this will be? What skills do you think will be useful in 10 years? Is IT going to put it's own out of work like we did with the post office and libraries?

Submission + - Massive DeviantArt Copyright Infringement (deviantart.com) 4

Submitted by
Harshmage
Harshmage writes: "Vitaly Alexius, the artist and creative mind behind Romantically Apocalyptic (www.rom.ac), has found that his art has been lifted from his DeviantArt page, and is being printed by a third party (re: not DA). Art4love.com, owned and operated by Craig Pravada and Chad Love Lieberman, is selling prints of Alexius' artwork at enormous prices. To this end, Alexius is forming a Class Action against the two. If you are an artist, please go through Art4love.com to see if you have been stolen from, screenshot your evidence, and join Alexius in this pursuit of justice."

Submission + - Hijacking the controls of a Japanese Toilet (blogspot.com)

Submitted by rtsandiego
rtsandiego writes: Mission accomplished. I've verified that the use of an "off the shelf" learning remote control is capable of learning the IR data command streams for the Toto Toilet! Have fun by starting and stopping the Bidet commands on your unsuspecting friends!

Submission + - Your own Radio Telescope

Submitted by
solune
solune writes: "I was throwing some trash in the dumpster the other day when I noticed a few DirecTV satellite dishes in the dumpster.

Over the last few days I got to thinking: is it possible to set up a distributed radio telescope array? Surely, by now, there's a way to synchronize countless small dishes to probe the skies.

Of course, it's entirely possible I have no clue as to how arrays work, and/or the frequencies involved."
Education

Submission + - Teacher Cannot Be Sued For Denying Creationism (csmonitor.com)

Submitted by gzipped_tar
gzipped_tar writes: A federal appeals court ruled on Friday that a public high school teacher in Mission Viejo, California may not be sued for making hostile remarks about religion in his classroom. The decision stems from a lawsuit filed by a student charging that the teacher’s hostile remarks about creationism and religious faith violated a First Amendment mandate that the government remain neutral in matters of religion. A three-judge panel of the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled unanimously that the lawsuit against an advanced placement history teacher must be thrown out of court because the teacher was entitled to immunity.
Microsoft

Submission + - Tablets: Jean Girard Jobs vs. Ricky Bobby Ballmer 1

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: In NASCAR, you can finish a race in the Top 3 by leading the whole way or by having spectacular crashes take out those ahead of you. The same may hold true for the tablet race, where Apple has led the whole way, but Microsoft could advance into 2nd or 3rd place as those once ahead of it crash and burn ($99 TouchPad, anyone?). 'Microsoft tablets based on Windows 8 won't be ready until next year,' notes SplatF's Dan Frommer. 'Unexpectedly, that might not be too late to matter.' In Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, the big race ends with all cars being wrecked and Formula I racer Girard and NASCAR driver Bobby running on foot to the finish line. Could we see something similar in 2012 between 'Jean Girard' Jobs and 'Ricky Bobby' Ballmer? Far-fetched as it may seem, Ars Technica's Peter Bright explains why the Windows 8 tablet invasion might work.
Education

Submission + - Most People Have Never Heard of CTRL+F 1

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Google search anthropologist Dan Russell says that 90 percent of people in his studies don't know how to use CTRL/Command + F to find a word in a document or web page. "I do these field studies and I can't tell you how many hours I've sat in somebody's house as they've read through a long document trying to find the result they're looking for," says Russell, who has studied thousands of people on how how search for stuff. "At the end I'll say to them, 'Let me show one little trick here,' and very often people will say, 'I can't believe I've been wasting my life!'" Just like we learn to skim tables of content or look through an index or just skim chapter titles to find what we're looking for, we need to teach people about this CTRL+F thing says Alexis Madrigal. "I probably use that trick 20 times per day and yet the vast majority of people don't use it at all," writes Madrigal. "We're talking about the future of almost all knowledge acquisition and yet schools don't spend nearly as much time on this skill as they do on other equally important areas.""
Iphone

Submission + - iPhone Can Diagnose Stroke (ibtimes.com)

Submitted by
gabbo529
gabbo529 writes: "According to study from the University of Calgary's Faculty of Medicine, doctors can make a stroke diagnosis using an iPhone application with the same accuracy as a diagnosis at a medical computer workstation. The study was designed by Dr. Mayank Goyal, and used iPhone software technology originally developed by Dr. Ross Mitchell, PhD, and his team at the Hotchkiss Brain Institute (HBI). Neuro-radiologists looked at 120 recent consecutive noncontrast computed tomography (NCCT) brain scans and 70 computed tomography angiogram (CTA) head scans from the Calgary Stroke Program database. Scans were read by two neuro-radiologists, on a medical diagnostic workstation and on an iPhone. Overall, the iPhone app was just as accurate as the medical workstation."

Submission + - How to Make an iPhone App and Make Money (howtomakeaniphoneappandmakemoney)

Submitted by romanholland26
romanholland26 writes: Create an Idea

Anyone can think of an idea on how to make iPhone applications, but that does not make it a good idea. The program will need to be original and suit a specific niche or type of customers. Start by finding a niche for iPhone fans by asking customers what type of applications they are looking for. Perhaps create an online poll and post it on social networks.

It would be pointless creating an idea if there are numerous similar products on the market. Unless you have an excellent marketing strategy, it will be very difficult to sell a product that is similar to thousands of others on the market. A program will gain recognition if is unique and different, which is why it is important to find out how to make an iPhone app that is apart from any other products. If your application is useful and one-of-a-kind, it is more likely to attract customers.

Tools

You will need a good set of tools. This will include an iPhone, a good computer, and an iPhone SDK for programming. You may also want to join the developer program by Apple to make your design and production job easier. If you already have a good computer and iPhone, the other tools should cost less than 200 dollars.

Skills

You will need a variety of skills for knowing how to make the app. Not everyone has these skills, so you may need to study or hire someone who can do the tasks that you cannot. For example, you may need to hire a programmer if you are primarily a designer, or vice versa. Making an iPhone app successful will depend on the skills that each person can bring to the table.

In some ways, an iPhone app is a little like building a business. You will need an advertiser, researcher, accountant, designer, architect, developer, and project manager. Although you can fulfill many of these roles yourself, some may require the help of others. It takes a team to make any product successful, including how to make an iPhone app popular. You can waste a lot of energy and time in trying to learn how to make an iPhone app by yourself when the process can be made so much easier with the help of others.

Market Research

Think about how to make an app and decide whether it brings something new to the market. If the is introducing a new concept, think about how the public will accept it. Even if a new idea seems amazing to you and your friends, the public may not always think so. Find out what the public wants by conducting surveys and asking which applications are most sought after by customers. Your customers are the most important source of marketing information, so it is essential to pay attention to their needs.

Know Your Phone

Use as many games and an application as you can to get a feel of what is already available on the market. Consider the functionality of each program and think about how you can make it better. Look for weak spots in the design and characteristics of the application and learn from other's mistakes.

Who Will Use It?

When making an app, consider your market audience.

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