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Comment Re:And NYT's readership goes up... (Score 1) 127

by Rogue Pat (#35650332) Attached to: New York Times Paywall Goes Live, Loopholes Abound

they got hit by events OUTSIDE the plans (quick name me all of the quakes in that region 0.5 points below what they got hit with and greater)

Nice fallacy there.
Just because you and I don't know the names, it doesn't mean that the engineers designing the plant didn't have to take other quakes into account.
Typical such a plant would have to have to be designed to withstand an event with a 1 in 1000 years frequency.

Comment Re:Sounds like... (Score 1) 232

by Rogue Pat (#35513852) Attached to: Apple Moves To Stop Kids Racking Up iTunes Bills
Apple had a system in place for protecting against in-app purchases from the start (there was already a setting for this under Restrictions).
Also, one could simply sign out of their iTunes account before passing the iDevice on to someone else.

However, over time it became apparent that there were people that were not protected sufficiently by this either because they weren't aware of these options or because they weren't aware of the risk. So Apple included an additional protection for this when they updated iOS.

Simply a matter of progressing insight and now the "loophole" has been closed. No need to blame either Apple or the parents.
Firefox

Firefox 4's JavaScript Now Faster Than Chrome's 352

Posted by timothy from the when-browsers-jostle dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Firefox 4's JavaScript engine is now faster than V8 (used in Chrome) and Nitro (used in Safari) in the SunSpider benchmark on x86. On Mozilla's test system Nitro completes the benchmark in 369.7 milliseconds, V8 in 356.5 milliseconds, and Firefox 4's TraceMonkey and JaegerMonkey combination in 350.3 milliseconds. Conceivably Tech has a brief rundown of some benchmark figures from their test system obtained with the latest JS preview build of Firefox 4: 'Our AMD Phenom X6-based Dell XPS 7100 PC completed the Sunspider test with the latest Firefox JS (4.0 b8-pre) build in 478.6 ms this morning, while Chrome 8.0.560.0 clocked in at 589.8 ms.' On x86-64 Nitro still has the lead over V8 and TraceMonkey+JaegerMonkey in the SunSpider benchmark."
Intel

Submission + - Intel to buy smartphone chipmaker Infineon for $2B 1

Submitted by sylverboss
sylverboss writes: Intel Corp., the world’s largest chipmaker, is close to an agreement to buy Infineon Technologies AG’s wireless business, three people with direct knowledge of the discussions said. When it comes to desktop, laptop and server chips, Intel’s pretty much got a lock on the market but everyone can see the writing on the wall: mobile chips and architectures are the future of computing thanks to the popularity of smartphones, but Intel doesn’t have anything to offer in that regard. Don’t know Infineon? You should: they are the guys who have supplied Apple with their iPhone baseband chips since 2007.

Submission + - Gun buy back in Aust --stunning fall in suicides (smh.com.au) 6

Submitted by Phurge
Phurge writes: TEN years of suicide data after John Howard's decision to ban and then buy back 600,000 semi-automatic rifles and shotguns has had a stunning effect.

The buyback cut firearm suicides by 74 per cent, saving 200 lives a year, according to research to be published in The American Law and Economics Review.

A former Australian Treasury economist, Christine Neill, now with Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, Canada, said she found the research result so surprising she tried to redo her calculations on the off chance the total could have been smaller.

''I fully expected to find no effect at all,'' she told the Herald. ''That we found such a big effect and that it meshed with a range of other data was just shocking, completely unexpected.''
Programming

Submission + - Sorting Algorithm Breaks Giga-sort Barrier (google.com) 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Researchers at the University of Virginia have recently open sourced an algorithm capable of sorting at a rate of one billion (integer) keys per second using a GPU. Although GPUs are often assumed to be poorly suited for algorithms like sorting, their results are several times faster than the best known CPU-based sorting implementations.

Submission + - IE worldwide marketshare drops below 50% (statcounter.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: For the second weekend in a row the combined marketshare of all Internet Explorer versions around the world dropped below 50%
Portables (Apple)

Submission + - Apple Netbook Rumors (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by jshackney
jshackney writes: According to one of the unnamed sources, the machine will "likely" have a touchscreen between 9.7" and 10" in size. That's in line with many current popular netbook models, which have 9" screens. Beyond that, however, "other specifications and functions are still under evaluation," according to Dow Jones Newswires.
Apple

Apple Intros 17" Unibody MBP, DRM-Free iTunes 1079

Posted by kdawson from the life-after-jobs dept.
Phil Schiller delivered the keynote at MacWorld, the first after the Steve Jobs era of keynotes. Here is Engadget's live blog. The big news, predicted by many rumor sites, was the introduction of the unibody 17" MacBook Pro. As rumored, the battery is not removable, but it's claimed to provide 8 hours of battery life (7 hours with the discrete graphics): "3x the charges and lifespan of the industry standard." $2,799, 2.66 GHz and 4 GB of RAM, 320GB hard drive, shipping at the end of January. There is a battery exchange program, and there is an option for a matte display. The other big news is that iTunes is going DRM-free: 8M songs today, all 10+M by the end of March. Song pricing will be flexible, as the studios have been demanding; the lowest song price is $0.69. Apple also introduced the beta of a Google Docs-like service, iWork.com.

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