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Comment: Re:Those aren't the same. (Score 0) 263

by aacool (#37651798) Attached to: Was the iPod Accessory Port Inspired By a 40-Year-Old Camera?

That slot on a Polaroid camera was actually an edge connector. The flash bar was printed on a PCB and had gold trace "fingers" on a protruding section, like an ISA card. These are very cheap, as only one side of the connector even is a connector at all, the other is just a PCB. But they also aren't physically very strong and aren't good for a lot of insertion/removal cycles.

The iPod 30-pin has a metal shelled connector on both mating pieces. These are more precise, last longer and with the a latch system (present on some iPod cables, not others) physically strong. You can hang an iPod Mini easily from a latched 30-pin connector while the Polaroid flash bars fell out without even putting weight on them.

Also note Steve Jobs didn't design Apple's 30-pin connector, Donald J Novotney did.

Interesting update - thanks very much for the info

Books

B&N Yanks DC Titles After Exclusive Amazon Dea

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes "In response to DC Entertainment's agreement to exclusively offer digital versions of certain titles in Amazon Kindle format, Nook maker Barnes & Noble has begun pulling DC Entertainment's graphic novels off its shelves. Confirming the decision, B&N said in a statement, 'To sell and promote the physical book in our store showrooms, and not have the eBook available for sale would undermine our promise to Barnes & Noble customers to make available any book, anywhere, anytime.' Nice to see the pair is still able to keep their feud fresh on the 11th anniversary of the 1-Click patent infringement lawsuit."
Google

Google admits H.264 is more popular than WebM->

Submitted by jbrodkin
jbrodkin writes "Amid controversy over Google's decision to strip H.264 support from its Chrome browser, a Google official has acknowledged H.264 is more popular than the WebM video codec, but said restrictive licensing will ultimately doom H.264. "We acknowledge that H.264 has broader support in the publisher, developer, and hardware community today (though support across the ecosystem for WebM is growing rapidly)," Google Product Manager Mike Jazayeri wrote in the Chromium blog. However, Jazayeri predicted that licensing fees would stifle innovation and lead to H.264's downfall. Although H.264 has greater support today, "There will not be agreement to make it the baseline in the HTML video standard due to its licensing requirements," Jazayeri writes. "To use and distribute H.264, browser and OS vendors, hardware manufacturers, and publishers who charge for content must pay significant royalties — with no guarantee the fees won't increase in the future. To companies like Google, the license fees may not be material, but to the next great video startup and those in emerging markets these fees stifle innovation."
The H.264 license agreement can be found at the Web site of MPEG LA, which administers patent-licensing programs. According to the site, H.264 patent holders include Apple, Cisco, HP, LG, Microsoft, Polycom, Sony, Toshiba and many other companies."
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News

Dominos' Pizza India site hacked-> 2

Submitted by
aacool
aacool writes "The Domino's Pizza India site was hacked into during an upgrade and customers' information stolen. While this can happen to anyone, the company's transparency, as evidenced in the letter posted on their site, is admirable. They write:

We have come to know that someone has hacked our website with malicious intent and with the help of a script, managed to extract some information on customer phone numbers, email id and delivery address of some customers. Although the data is not classified information about our customers, still as a responsible corporate we thought it's important to inform you about this.

The letter goes on to list the measures being taken and the security of the overall ordering process. If only all corporates hacked in this manner were so transparent and forthcoming."
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Silicon Valley's new favorite: a /. competitor?->

Submitted by holy_calamity
holy_calamity writes "Question and answer site Quora is a mix of Yahoo Answers and Twitter that is, allegedly, exploding in popularity thanks to an early userbase drawn from the top engineering ranks of firms like Facebook and Google. They've been happily swapping inside information on tech news and topics like how Google image search searches by color or what Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz thought of the social network. But the attention that small-scale success has attracted may endanger its high quality content."
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Windows

Glamorous lifestyles of WP7 jailbreakers->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Cellphones, Mobile Software
Visualized: the glamorous lifestyles of WP7 jailbreakers (update: Geohot crashes the party)
By Vlad Savov posted Jan 18th 2011 3:29AM
To be a jailbreaker means different things depending on the device that you're busy hacking preinstalled walls from. If you're fiddling with consoles, a legal team would come highly recommended, but if you're tweaking mobile code, at least Windows Phone mobile code, you're in for a much sweeter ride. The ChevronWP7 guys that brought us the first jailbreak of Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 are currently in Redmond having a sitdown and a frank exchange of views with WP7 dev experience director Brandon Watson, and the amicable nature of their discourse has been evidenced by the image above. Microsoft is clearly taking a light-hearted and community-friendly approach to handling the (now inevitable) efforts at disabling limitations to its software and we can only congratulate its mobile team for doing so."
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In-Depth Look at HTML5 Data Storage->

Submitted by
snydeq
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Peter Wayner takes an in-depth look at HTML5's data storage capabilities, providing insights and caveats for HTML5 Web Storage, Web Database, FileReader, FileWriter, and AppCaching APIs. 'There is no conclusion to this section of APIs. We're not even far into the beginning of the beginning of what local persistence will do to the Web. There are many, many edge conditions to work out regarding who gets access to the data, how much data will be stored, and how long the data will live,' Wayner writes. 'Apart from the sessionStorage and localStorage objects, which all of the current leading browsers implement to some extent, browser support for the other APIs discussed here is sketchy.'"
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Privacy

Spokeo: A Definitive Guide to the Privacy Fiasco->

Submitted by Velcroman1
Velcroman1 writes "Slashdotters are well aware of information trolling site Spokeo, which pretty much every security expert calls ridiculous. Larry Ponemon, the chairman and founder of the Ponemon Institute, an organization that researches Internet privacy and security, said that sharing personal information about you is “grossly unethical” — and barely legal. He goes so far as to call Ponemon "evil." Here's the definitive story of what's available on Spokeo, what the government is doing about it, and how to keep your self safe (hint: you can't)."
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Censorship

World of Starcraft Mod Gets C&D from Blizzard->

Submitted by eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes "If you've been following the team who created World of Starcraft (an amazing mod of Starcraft to be more like World of Warcraft), their youtube video of what they've done so far has already resulted in a cease and desist from Activision/Blizzard. Evidently when you are given tools to make custom mods to games you should be careful about making something too good. The author of the mod is hopeful that it's just a trademark problem with the name of his mod but few details are out."
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We were so poor we couldn't afford a watchdog. If we heard a noise at night, we'd bark ourselves. -- Crazy Jimmy