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+ - Six Months Developing Wearable Computing->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Twilio's Jon Gottfried has written an article about the lessons he's learned after six months of developing software for Google Glass. He has some insightful points: 'I expected it to be very similar to building mobile applications for Android. In fact, I began learning to build Android applications in preparation. My efforts were for naught, because the Mirror API is a RESTful web service. This means that developing applications for Glass is actually more similar to building a website than it is to building an Android application.' He also talks about how this fits in with the future of technology: 'I would argue that Google took the only option available to them. The only truly scalable products of the future will be developer platforms. Facebook, Twitter, Twilio, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Arduino – all of these products have been successful in large part by embracing and empowering their developer communities. No company is omniscient enough to imagine every potential use of their products. This gives developers an immense amount of power to define the success or failure of an entire product line.'"
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+ - How the smartphone killed the three-day weekend->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "As we in the U.S. settle in for Memorial Day weekend, NBC points out how our cultural addiction to technology is making it less of a vacation than it used to be. 'The average smartphone user checks his or her device 150 times per day, or about once every six minutes. Meanwhile, government data from 2011 says 35 percent of us work on weekends, and those who do average five hours of labor, often without compensation — or even a thank you. The other 65 percent were probably too busy to answer surveyors’ questions.' Even for those of us who don't have any work to do over the weekend, we'll probably end up reading all of our work-related emails as they roll in, and take time out of our day to think about what's going on — to the detriment of our weekend activities: "A study at the University of California, San Francisco, found that new experiences fail to become long-term memories unless brains have downtime for review." I imagine it's even worse for your average Slashdot reader, who's likely plugged in more technology at home and at work. How can we make our employers understand that downtime needs to remain downtime? 'It took labor unions 100 years to fight for nights and weekends off, some say, while smartphones took them away in about three years.'"
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+ - Can the Wii U Survive Against the PS4 and Xbox One?->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Now that both Sony and Microsoft have announced their next-gen consoles, and we've gotten solid information about their hardware, technology, and features, Eurogamer asks whether Nintendo's struggling Wii U will be able to hold its own once the new competition arrives. 'Wii U has tanked — there's no other way to put it — with even the release of traditional big-hitters like Dragon Quest 10 failing to make a dent in the Japanese market. If you believe certain analysts, April saw things getting even worse in the US with the Wii U shifting under 40,000 units, easily outsold by the 360 and PS3 — and, even more embarrassingly, the Wii.' If the Wii U doesn't see a miraculous turnaround, Nintendo may be left with the difficult choice of porting its software to competing consoles. It'll also serve as a bellwether to see if all the gamer complaints about the new Sony and Microsoft consoles — that they're only partly about games — are honest. 'At a time when the goal of its competitors is to own the living room, the extent of Nintendo's ambition is simply to be in it — a dedicated games console, and no more.'"
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Google News Sci Tech: Chrome 27: Talk to me - ZDNet->

From feed by feedfeeder

NDTV
Chrome 27: Talk to me
ZDNet
Summary: Google's latest Web browser, Chrome 27, enables you to say, as well as type, your queries. Alas, its first version doesn't work that well. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols. By Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols for Networking | May 23, 2013 -- 11:18 GMT (04:18 ...
Google tests enhanced notifications in Chrome browserPCWorld
Google Chrome Browser Keeps Winning Converts: 10 Reasons WhyeWeek
Google's 'conversational search' lets you chat with your search engineNBCNews.com
Digital Trends-TechCrunch-Ars Technica
all 62 news articles

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+ - Google Unable To Keep Paying App Developers In Argentina->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Google has sent letters to app developers registered in Argentina saying they won't be able to accept payments on developers' behalf after June 27th. 'The change applies to both paid apps and apps that use in-app purchases. The move appears to be related to new, restrictive regulations the Argentine government has imposed on currency exchanges.' According to the Telegraph, 'The new regulations required anyone wanting to change Argentine pesos into another currency to submit an online request for permission to AFIP, the Argentine equivalent of HM Revenue & Customs. To submit the request, however, you first needed to get a PIN number from AFIP, either online or in person. Having finally obtained your number, submitted your online request and printed out your permission slip, you could then present it at the bank or official cambio and buy your dollars. Well, that was the theory. In practice, the result was chaos. ... damming the flood has come at a huge cost to the economy, especially since the currency restrictions were coupled with another set of regulations that effectively imposed a near-total ban on any imported goods.'"
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+ - World's biggest "agile" software project close to failure->

Submitted by 00_NOP
00_NOP writes ""Universal Credit" — the plan to consolidate all Britain's welfare payments into one — is the world's biggest "agile" software development project but it is now close to collapse the British government admitted yesterday. The failure, if and when it comes, could cost billions and have dire social consequences."
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+ - BeagleBone Black Ships With New Linux 3.8 Kernel->

Submitted by DeviceGuru
DeviceGuru writes "BeagleBoard.org has begun shipping its faster, cheaper BeagleBone Black SBC with a new Linux 3.8 kernel, supporting Device Tree technology for more streamlined ARM development. The $45 BeagleBone Black runs Linux or Android on a 1GHz TI Sitara AM3359 SOC, doubles the RAM to 512MB of its predecessor, and adds a micro-HDMI port. The updated kernel gives the BeagleBone Black access to a new Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) display driver architecture, as well as full support for the Device Tree data structure introduced to streamline ARM development in Linux 3.7. The project was hesitant to move up to such a recent kernel, but decided it was time to bite the bullet and support the Device Tree. By doing the hard work of switching to Device Tree now, BeagleBoard.org and its developer community can save a lot of configuration and maintenance headaches down the line, says BeagleBoard.org co-founder Jason Kridner. Fortunately, a modified 3.2 kernel 'coming soon' should provide the necessary bridge from the old cape driver architecture to the new one."
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+ - Ask Slashdot: When Is the User Experience Too Good? 1

Submitted by gadzook33
gadzook33 writes "I had an interesting experience at work recently wherein a colleague suggested during a meeting that we were building something that would make it far too easy for the customer to perform a certain task; a task that my colleague felt was deleterious. Without going into specifics, I believe an apt analogy would be giving everyone in the country a flying car. While this would no doubt be enjoyable, without proper training and regulation it would also be tremendously dangerous (also assume training and regulating is not practical in this case). I retorted that ours is not to reason why and that we had the responsibility to develop the best possible solution, end of story. However, in the following days I have begun to doubt my position and wonder if we don't have some responsibility to artificially "cripple" the solution and in doing so protect the user from themselves (build a car that stays on the ground). I do not for a second imagine that I am playing the part of Oppenheimer; this is a much more practical issue and less of an ethical one. But is there something to this?"

+ - FiOS User Finds Limit of 'Unlimited' Data Plan: 77TB/mo->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "A California user of Verizon's FiOS fiber-optic internet service decided to put his unlimited data plan to the test. Over the month of March, he managed to total over 77 terabytes of internet traffic, which finally prompted a call from a Verizon employee to see what he was doing. The user had switched to a 300Mbps/65Mbps plan in January, and averaged 50 terabytes of traffic per month afterward. 'An IT professional who manages a test lab for an Internet storage company, [the user] has been providing friends and family a personal VPN, video streaming, and peer-to-peer file service—running a rack of seven servers with 209TB of raw storage in his house.' The Verizon employee who contacted him said he was violating the service agreement. "Basically he said that my bandwidth usage was excessive (like 30,000 percent higher than their average customer)," houkouonchi said. '[He] wanted to know WTF I was doing. I told him I have a full rack and run servers, and then he said, "Well, that's against our ToS." And he said I would need to switch to the business service or I would be disconnected in July. It wasn't a super long call.'"
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+ - Banned Developer Turns from Civil War to Drug War with NarcoGuerra->

Submitted by arclightfire
arclightfire writes "If you recall the game looking at Syrian civil war got rejected by Apple — the same developer has managed to get one about the War on Drugs called 'NarcoGuerra' past and onto the App Store. Here's the offical developer line on the new game, "Newsgame developer GameTheNews.net, today released it’s latest offering; a game about the War on Drugs in Mexico entitled NarcoGuerra. GameTheNews.net caused a huge debate following Apple’s controversial decision to reject Endgame:Syria from the App Store. This new game examines the ongoing conflict from the perspective of the Mexican authorities trying to stamp out the drug trade within their borders. In NarcoGuerra the player must attempt to retake Mexico’s regions from cartels while also dealing with corruption within the police force itself." There is a trailer here and more info here."
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+ - Possible collision between cube-satellite and old space junk

Submitted by photonic
photonic writes "The BBC is reporting about a possible collision between Ecuador's first satellite (a small cubesat) and debris from an upper stage of an old Russain rocket. If confirmed, this might be the 3rd case in recent years, after a high-speed collision of an Irridium satellite with a dead Russian satellite in 2009 and a collision earlier this year between a Russian laser reflector (which can be tracked very accurately) and a tiny piece of a debris of a Chinese weather satellite that was destroyed in a missile test."

+ - Researcher Unlocks Galaxy S4 Bootloader For AT&T, Verizon Phones

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes "Those of you who like to tinker and jailbreak Android phones should take notice of some new research conducted on Samsung Galaxy S4 Android devices shipped by AT&T and Verizon. Both device makers ship the Galaxy S4 smartphones with a locked down bootloader that prevents users from uploading custom kernels or from making modifications to software on the phone.

Azimuth Security researcher Dan Rosenberg has found a vulnerability in the manner in which the devices do cryptographic checks of boot image signatures and was able to exploit the flaw and upload his own unsigned kernel to the device. An attacker could do the same and upload a malicious kernel or software and own the device."

+ - AT&T Quietly Adds Charges to All Contract Cell Plans->

Submitted by guttentag
guttentag writes "The Wall Street Journal is reporting that AT&T Mobility, the second-largest wireless carrier in the U.S., has added a new monthly administrative fee of 61 cents to the bills of all of its contract wireless lines as of May 1, a move that could bring in more than a half-billion dollars in annual revenue to the telecom giant.

An AT&T spokeswoman said the fee covers "certain expenses, such as interconnection and cell-site rents and maintenance." The increased cost to consumers comes even though AT&T's growth in wireless revenue last year outpaced the costs to operate and support its wireless business. The company has talked of continuing to improve wireless profitability. Citigroup analyst Michael Rollins noted that the new administrative fee is a key component for accelerating revenue growth for the rest of the year. He said the fee should add 0.30 of a percentage point to AT&T's 2013 revenue growth; he predicts total top-line growth of about 1.5%.

Normally, consumers could vote with their wallets by taking their business elsewhere. AT&T would be required to let customers out of their contracts without an early termination fee if it raised prices, but it is avoiding this by simply calling the increase a "surcharge," effectively forcing millions of people to either pay more money per month or pay the ETF."
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+ - 3D printers for peace contest 1

Submitted by Bas_Wijnen
Bas_Wijnen writes "3D printing is being condemned in the media because of the potential for printing guns. Engineers at Michigan Tech believe there is far more potential for 3D printers to make our lives better rather than killing one another. To encourage thinking about constructive uses of 3D printing technology Michigan Tech Open Sustainability Technology (MOST) Lab and Type A Machines sponsor the first 3-D Printers for Peace Contest.

Designers are encouraged to consider: If Mother Theresa of Ghandi had access to 3D printing what would they print? What kind of designs could help reduce military spending and conflict while making us all safer and more secure?

Anyone in the United States may enter and there is no cost to enter."

Pushing 30 is exercise enough.

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