16297364
submission
medcalf writes:
Is Google using its mobile OS position to suppress competition to Google's other services? According to a lawsuit by Skyhook: yes. Skyhook's claim is that Google forced Motorola and another provider, possibly Samsung, to use Google's location services instead of Skyhook's. I have not been able to find a response to the suit by Google.More at Businessweek.
14250932
submission
medcalf writes:
Tom Tom has released Star Wars voices for their GPS units. Darth Vader, C-3P0 and Yoda are currently available, with Han Solo apparently coming. The joke in the title, by the way, is from the "studio recordings" of the voices.
12545412
submission
medcalf writes:
The Guardian's Charles Arthur calls attention to an idea from Poorly Rendered for a way that Adobe can show that Apple is just wrong about Flash on the iPhone: produce a version for jailbroken iPhones. If they can do so with good performance and security and stability and good power management, Apple's largest public arguments become untenable. But could they meet that technical challenge, when they have not yet delivered Flash working well on any other mobile platforms?
12456386
submission
medcalf writes:
Lawrence Berkeley scientists have experimentally shown that plants use quantum entanglement in photosynthesis.
12412218
submission
medcalf writes:
Ars Technica has an opinion piece by Sarah Rothman Epps on the iPad and other potential tablets as a new paradigm that they are calling "curated computing," where third parties make a lot of choices to simplify things for the end user, reducing user choice but improving reliability and efficiency for a defined set of tasks. The idea is that this does not replace, but supplements, general purpose computers. It's possible — if the common denominator between iPads, Android and/or Chrome tablets, WebOS tablets and the like is a more server-centric web experience — that they could be right, and that a more competitive computing market could be the result. But I wonder, too: would that then provide an incentive for manufacturers to try to lock down the personal computing desktop experience as well?
12149518
submission
medcalf writes:
Game designer Ian Bogost enters the debate about Flash:[A] large number of developers seem to think that they have the right to make software for the iPhone (or for anything else) in Flash, or in another high-level environment of their choosing. Literally, the right, not just the convenience or the opportunity. And many of them are quite churlish about the matter.
This strikes me as a very strange sort of attitude to adopt. There's no question that Flash is useful and popular, and it has a large and committed user base. There's also no question that it's often convenient to be able to program for different platforms using environments one already knows. And likewise, there's a long history of creating OS stubs or wrappers or other sorts of gizmos to make it possible to run code "alien" to a platform in a fashion that makes it feel more native.
But what does it say about the state of programming practice writ large when so many developers believe that their "rights" are trampled because they cannot write programs for a particular device in a particular language? Or that their "freedom" as creators is squelched for the same reason?
