Forgot your password?

Close
typodupeerror
Cellphones

The Digital Differences In Americans 214

Posted by samzenpus
from the no-surfing dept.
antdude writes "When the Pew Internet Project first studied the role of the internet in American life, there were big differences between those who were using the internet and those who weren't. Today, differences in internet access still exist, especially when it comes to access to high-speed broadband at home. From the article: 'Virtually every U.S. household with an annual income over $75,000 is online, but that’s only true for 63% of adults who live in a household with an annual income under $30,000. The numbers look quite similar for different education levels: 94% of adults with post-graduate degrees are online, but 57% of those without high school diplomas remain offline. Beside the obvious economic barriers to entry, though, the Pew poll also found that half of those who don’t go online do so because they just don’t think “the Internet is relevant to them.” One in five of those who are not online today think that they just don’t know enough about technology to use the Internet on their own.'"
Microsoft

Windows Phone SMS attack discovered->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "As announced on the Winrumors site: "Microsoft’s range of Windows Phone devices suffer from a denial-of-service attack that allows attackers to disable the messaging functionality on a device.

The flaw works simply by sending an SMS to a Windows Phone user. Windows Phone 7.5 devices will reboot and the messaging hub will not open despite repeat attempts. We have tested the attack on a range of Windows Phone devices, including HTC’s TITAN and Samsung’s Focus Flash. Some devices were running the 7740 version of Windows Phone 7.5, others were on Mango RTM build 7720. The attack is not device specific and appears to be an issue with the way the Windows Phone messaging hub handles messages. The bug is also triggered if a user sends a Facebook chat message or Windows Live Messenger message to a recipient.""
Link to Original Source
Apple

TextMate 2.0 Goes Alpha->

Submitted by scc
scc writes "After years of waiting, TextMate 2.0 has arrived, if only in alpha. Improved scopes and indenting, new character classes, buffer completion, more control in themes, nested snippets, and discontinuous selections are just a sample of the new machinery. It's been a long time coming, but it looks like it may have been worth the wait."
Link to Original Source
The Media

Time's Person of the Year is 'The Protester'

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes "Time's editor Rick Stengel announced on 'The Today Show' that "The Protester" is Time Magazine's Person of the Year: From the Arab Spring to Athens, From Occupy Wall Street to Moscow. “For capturing and highlighting a global sense of restless promise, for upending governments and conventional wisdom, for combining the oldest of techniques with the newest of technologies to shine a light on human dignity and, finally, for steering the planet on a more democratic though sometimes more dangerous path for the 21st century." The initial gut reaction on Twitter seems to be one of derision, as Time has gone with a faceless human mass instead of picking a single person like Tunisian fruit vendor Mohamed Bouazizi who Time mentions in the story and is widely acknowledged as the person who set off the "Arab Spring." In 2006, Time chose "You" with a mirrored cover to much disappointment, picked the personal computer as "Machine of the Year" and Earth as "Planet of the Year," proving "that it should probably just be "Story of the Year" if they aren't going to acknowledge an actual person," writes Dashiell Bennett. "By not picking any one individual, they've basically chosen no one.""

Amazon Silk revisited: Is it fast(er) yet?->

Submitted by
MrSeb
MrSeb writes "When the Kindle Fire came out last month, one of the biggest disappointments users had was that Amazon’s promise of “ultra-fast web browsing” seemed to be all talk. In our original testing, almost exactly one month ago, we found that Silk was actually slower going through the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud servers than just connecting to the web directly. Amazon’s position on the whole thing was that Silk would get faster as the back end accumulated more data to cache and predict user behavior. We’ve now been using Silk for a month — and the results are... interesting."
Link to Original Source
Classic Games (Games)

M.U.L.E. Is Back 110

Posted by Soulskill
from the not-for-the-red-wings dept.
jmp_nyc writes "The developers at Turborilla have remade the 1983 classic game M.U.L.E. The game is free, and has slightly updated graphics, but more or less the same gameplay as the original version. As with the original game, up to four players can play against each other (or fewer than four with AI players taking the other spots). Unlike the original version, the four players can play against each other online. For those of you not familiar with M.U.L.E., it was one of the earliest economic simulation games, revolving around the colonization of the fictitious planet Irata (Atari spelled backwards). I have fond memories of spending what seemed like days at a time playing the game, as it's quite addictive, with the gameplay seeming simpler than it turns out to be. I'm sure I'm not the only Slashdotter who had a nasty M.U.L.E. addiction back in the day and would like a dose of nostalgia every now and then."
Programming

The State of Ruby VMs — Ruby Renaissance 89

Posted by Soulskill
from the take-your-pick dept.
igrigorik writes "In the short span of just a couple of years, the Ruby VM space has evolved to more than just a handful of choices: MRI, JRuby, IronRuby, MacRuby, Rubinius, MagLev, REE and BlueRuby. Four of these VMs will hit 1.0 status in the upcoming year and will open up entirely new possibilities for the language — Mac apps via MacRuby, Ruby in the browser via Silverlight, object persistence via Smalltalk VM, and so forth. This article takes a detailed look at the past year, the progress of each project, and where the community is heading. It's an exciting time to be a Rubyist."
Cellphones

The best Mobile Apps of 2007->

Submitted by 6
6 writes "With the launch of the iPhone, rumors of Android, and just the shear coolness value of a pocket node on a global network spanning bazzilions of text sending monkeys mobile phones are once again going to be he item of choice on many people's list to Santa this year.
If you aren't already convinced of the fun you can have on a phone; here, according to once source, is a list of the top mobile apps of 2007"
Link to Original Source

Engadget: Know Your Rights: What to do when the RIAA comes calling->

From feed by engfeed

Filed under: Features

Know Your Rights is Engadget's new technology law series, written by our own totally punk copyright attorney Nilay Patel. In it we'll try to answer some fundamental tech-law questions to help you stay out of trouble in this brave new world. Disclaimer: Although this post was written by an attorney, it is not meant as legal advice or analysis and should not be taken as such.

Preface: There's been a lot of discussion about the RIAA's, shall we say "controversial" (and we're being generous here) tactics in suing P2P users who download copyrighted content; especially this week, what with the EFF releasing its "RIAA v. The People: Four Years Later" report. But it's never been easy to find information about the nuts-and-bolts of what happens when you get that first letter from the RIAA. We're not going to get into our feelings about the RIAA and MPAA (you probably already know what we think), but since we've (read: Nilay) been involved in a couple successful defenses -- and a lot of unhappy settlements -- we thought we'd try and break down the process for you. We're not telling you how to avoid or get out of trouble with the RIAA, just how it is that trouble usually operates.

Help! I'm being sued by the RIAA!

Wow, bad luck for you. The RIAA really only sues about 6,000 people a year, mostly those who use FastTrack clients like Kazaa. Users of other networks have been sued, of course, but it's by far Kazaa users who get sued the most often, and generally those who have been unknowingly sharing files. That's a drop in the bucket compared the to estimated nine million people who use P2P software every month.

Continue reading Know Your Rights: What to do when the RIAA comes calling

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!


Link to Original Source

When you become used to never being alone, you may consider yourself Americanized.