MBCook - Slashdot User

Android Phone or Condom Line?-> 0

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MBCook

on Monday March 26, @09:33PM

MBCook writes "Naming a product is difficult. Branding legend Marty Neumeier says that good product names have 7 characteristics. They should be distinctive, short, appropriate, easy to spell and pronounce, likable, extendable, and protectable. Looking through this list of Android names, it’s clear that many marketing teams disagree with Marty."
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Android Orphans: Visualizing a Sad History of Supp-> 0

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MBCook

on Thursday October 27 2011, @09:40AM

MBCook writes "After seeing the announcement that Nexus One users won't get ICS, Michael Degusta made a chart to show how current the OS version on Android phones was over time... and the results are not encouraging."
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Word Lens: Live AR Language Translation-> 0

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MBCook

on Friday December 17 2010, @11:39AM

MBCook writes "A company called Quest Visual has just released Word Lens, a real time augmented reality language translator for the iPhone. It's capable of translating English to and from Spanish. The app it's self is free (the languages are downloads) so you can play with it in demo mode, where it recognizes and reverses words. I've been playing with it for 10 minutes and it works amazingly well."
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Intel wants to charge $50 to unlock stuff your CPU-> 0

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MBCook

on Saturday September 18 2010, @07:40PM

MBCook writes "Turnkey CPU upgrades aren't just for mainframes any more. According to Engadget, OEMs (including Gateway) are selling computers with the Intel Pentium G6951, which can have extra cache and hyper-threading enabled through a $50 software unlock called Intel Upgrade Service."
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Introducing JITB: A Flash player built on the JVM-> 1

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MBCook

on Thursday August 19 2010, @10:06PM

MBCook writes "Joa Ebert has started working on a new program called JITB. Announced in a talk at FITC San Fran, it's a Flash player written to use the Java JVM to run ActionScript, and in simple graphics test case (making 1 million flash.geom.Point) was 30x faster than Adobe's Flash player. There is an impressive demo video on YouTube showing the point test."
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Is This Really The Future of Magazines?-> 0

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MBCook

on Thursday May 27 2010, @05:16PM

MBCook writes "Interfacelab has put up a review of Wired's new iPad app, and declared "The only real differentiation between the Wired application and a [1990's] multimedia CD-ROM is the delivery mechanism[.]" While providing little interactivity other than a fancy page-flip, the application is made of XML and images, including two for the text of each page in portrait and landscape mode. This seems to be why the application is 500MB. The article suggests this was done to get the app out quick after Flash was officially vetoed by Steve Jobs."
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Apple Tech Note Details H.264 Decoding Framework-> 0

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MBCook

on Thursday April 22 2010, @03:26PM

MBCook writes "On March 29th, Apple added Technical Note 2267: Video Decode Acceleration Framework Reference. The note describes
...a C programming interface providing low-level access to the H.264 decoding capabilities of compatible GPUs [...] intended for use by advanced developers who specifically need hardware accelerated decode of video frames.

, an issue Adobe has been citing as one of the main reasons for the slow performance of Flash video on OS X."
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The sorry state of Avira anti-virus heuristics-> 1

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MBCook

on Wednesday March 17 2010, @07:20PM

MBCook writes "How do heuristics detect viruses and malware on your computer? Would you believe it's as simple as a couple of string fragments? The developer of the DotSpots chrome extension, Matt Mastracci, went digging to find out why Avira kept flagging his software and discovered it was a few simple strings that many pieces of JavaScript could easily contain. The GoogleWebToolkit does contain those bits, but it isn't flagged. Why? Because it contains the word "google"."
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Hey Microsoft, Don't F*ck Up Windows Phone 7, OK?-> 0

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MBCook

on Tuesday March 16 2010, @11:20PM

MBCook writes "Dear Microsoft, you did a good job at out-Appling Apple with the Windows Phone 7. At least on paper. But instead of trying to beat them completely, it seems that you want to screw it all with two stupid decisions."
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The Bloom Box: The Working Low Cost Fuel Cell-> 0

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MBCook

on Monday February 22 2010, @11:31AM

MBCook writes "Last night, 60 Minutes aired a 13 minute piece on Bloom Energy and their Bloom Box, a new kind of fuel cell. Able to run on natural gas, biogas, or hydrogen, the devices have been in production testing for months at Google, eBay, FedEx, and Wal-Mart. The version to power an American house is smaller than a bread box, and a unit large enough to power a Starbucks costs about $800k."
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