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Comment: Re:Thought... (Score 1) 125

by nitehawk214 (#44041905) Attached to: My view of touchscreen laptops:

I haven't always found this to be the case. There's one particular webapp we use at work that involves a lot of clicking on things, often alternating sides of the screen. With a mouse I have to mouse back and forth across the screen, with a touchscreen I can just touch the links. It's one of the few cases were I've actually preferred having a touchscreen. And I voted leaning against.

One could argue it's a workaround for a poorly designed website though.

So, replace every computer in your office... or fix the broken app.

Businesses

UnGrounded: British Airways Attempts to Bottle Some Startup Spirit 117

Posted by timothy
from the brainstorming-dammit-not-barnstorming dept.
theodp writes "Bill Gates already called dibbs on polio, so British Airways had to settle for tackling the 'global misalignment of talent' problem, putting '100 of the most forward-thinking founders, CEOs, venture capitalists, and Silicon Valley game-changers' on a flight from San Francisco to London to 'innovate and collaborate to find an effective solution to this growing global challenge.' UnGroundedThinking.com showcases the winning concepts, which include Advisher (an online community to help foster women in STEM), INIT ('nutritional labels' to disclose products' 'STEM ingredients'), DGTL (rewards young women with fashionable clothes for completing coding challenges), Beacons in a Backpack (solar powered backpacks pre-loaded with videos, multimedia content, and game-powered educational tools that also serve as mobile hotspots for rural/remote areas), Tech21 (STEM education program aimed at 21-years-and-older post-college grads in the workforce), Certify.me (allows STEM talent from across the globe to audition for potential employers via standardized-quality assessments), and STEAM Truck (a mobile dance lab where STEM art installations teach kids that science is fun and valuable). 'This has the feel of Southby [SXSW],' gushed a Google Ventures general partner. "It's a serendipitous occasion. It's about time we presented engineers to kids as role models — not just firefighters, cops, doctors, detectives. Who knows? Maybe The Internship changes that.'"
Communications

Cerulean Studios Releases Trillian IM Protocol Specifications 90

Posted by Unknown Lamer
from the hey-we're-still-alive dept.
Runefox writes "Cerulean Studios, the company behind the long-lived Trillian instant messaging client, has released preliminary specifications to their proprietary "Astra" protocol, now named IMPP (Instant Messaging and Presence Protocol), which provides continuous client functionality as well as mandatory TLS encryption for clients. According to their blog, Cerulean Studios' motivation for the release is to promote interoperability among the throngs of IM services and clients available by allowing others to also use the protocol. Future concepts include federation with XMPP. While the documentation is in an early state and the protocol is claimed to still be in development, it is hoped that it will help decentralize the very heavily fragmented messaging ecosystem. It's implied that, in turn, greater options for privacy may become available in the wake of the PRISM scandal via privately-run federated servers, unaffiliated with major networks, yet still able to communicate with them."

Comment: Re:Who cares? (Score 1) 432

by nitehawk214 (#44031301) Attached to: MS To Indie Devs: You Have a To Have a Publisher

Choice of operating system is difficult, as operating systems give out base services needed to software to abstract and decouple the underlying hardware from the software logic. You still need to either virtualize the game (risking too hard performance hits) or give it an operating system that does the necessary housekeeping.

But even with the potential of vendor lock-in via obscurity with a Microsoft Operating system; Microsoft cannot come up with "xboneheaded" decrees like "You must have a publisher or you are not allowed to develop for our platform."

What are the publishers going to do, get some law passed that allows Microsoft to turn Windows into a walled garden? And even if it was possible, wouldn't this just cause developers to jump to a new platform that imposes no such restrictions?

This is why "PC gaming is dead" is such an absurd statement.

Comment: Sell! Sell! Sell! Sell! Sell! (Score 1) 302

Article is nothing more than an attempt to play with the stock market. It is quite obvious when you start off with a giant pile of bullshit line like:

Over the last decade, just three companies — Google, Apple, and Facebook — have generated most of the new ideas and most of the business momentum in the world of computing.

Right, because there are only like 5 or 6 computing companies in the world. Certainly smaller companies could never contribute anything worthwhile to society. Oops, what he really means is that smaller companies are not good for stock trading.

And even still, the premise of "Apple and Google have run out of ideas," is ludicrous at best. (I will give him Facebook, they never had any ideas to begin with.)

+ - Kickass Torrents' KAT.ph domain seized by Philippine authorities->

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes "Kickass Torrents’ wasn’t accessible since about yesterday and now it has been confirmed that the domain name of the torrent website has been seized by Philippine authorities. Local record labels and the Philippine Association of the Recording Industry said that the torrent site was doing “irreparable damages” to the music industry and following a formal complaint the authorities resorted to seize of the main domain name. The torrent site hasn’t given up and is operating as usual under a new domain name. The torrent site’s main domain name KAT.ph ran into trouble yesterday and it was believed that the control of the domain name was no longer with the original owners. The Government of Philippines has confirmed that the domain name has been seized based on formal complaints and copyright grounds."
Link to Original Source

+ - EA Pisses of Players. Again.->

Submitted by DeathToBill
DeathToBill writes "EA has done it again, the BBC reports. After EA took over operation of the online Scrabble brand, it introduced a "new and improved" version. Improvements include requiring manual refreshes to see other players' turns, irretrievably wiping players' game history and a switch to the Collins dictionary that has proved deeply unpopular with Scrabble fanatics. "EA was unavailable for comment.""
Link to Original Source
Microsoft

Microsoft Office Finally Gets iOS App 138

Posted by Soulskill
from the not-exactly-peanut-butter-and-jelly dept.
An anonymous reader writes "After years of rumors and months of bickering with Apple over revenue splits, Microsoft has finally released an official iOS app for Office 365 subscribers, allowing people to use Word, Excel and PowerPoint on their iPhones and iPads. According to a hands-on report with the software, the Office app has basic functionality, but is missing some key productivity features. 'These include: font options, text alignment, bulleted lists and, again, more color choices, all of which you can find in, say, the Google Drive app.' They say it's a fairly useful addition for current subscribers, but certainly not enough to make it worth the Office 365 subscription fee on its own. 'We can't tell if Microsoft deliberately handicapped Office Mobile for iPhone, or if it's simply saving some features for a later update. (A company rep declined to comment on what we can expect from future versions.) We're willing to believe Microsoft still has some unfinished items on its to-do list, but even so, it's a shame that iPhone users waited this long for an Office app, only to get something with such a minimal feature set. All told, Office Mobile represents a good enough start for Microsoft, and in some ways it's better than Google Drive, particularly where spreadsheets are concerned. Still, it's miles behind other office apps for iOS, including Apple iWork.'"

+ - NSA Surveillance May Have Dealt Major Blow To Global Internet Freedom Efforts->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Simply put, the US government has failed in its role as the "caretaker" of the internet. Although this was never an official designation, America controls much of the infrastructure, and many of the most popular services online are provided by a handful of American companies. The world is starting to sober up to the fact that much of what they've done online in the last decade is now cataloged in a top-secret facility somewhere in the United States. The goal has been to promote internet freedom around the world, but we may have also potentially created a blueprint for how authoritarian governments can store, track, and mine their citizens’ digital lives."
Link to Original Source

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