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Comment: Just like new coke... (Score 1) 502

by tralfaz2001 (#43275873) Attached to: Windows Blue 9364 Screenshots Show Feature Enhancements

There is an opportunity here if M$ is smart enough to take it. Just like Coke turned the New coke fiasco into a brilliant mistake, M$ could turn this Win 8 failure into a chance to actually differentiate its myriad different versions of Windows products. Win Home versions could come with Metro the default UI, with the classic desktop as an option. The pro and enterprise versions could make the standard desktop the default with metro as an option, but with the option to disable Metro all together. The server versions should not have a metro bone in them at all. Now if they basically give the home versions away, charge a fair amount for the pro/ent/server versions... profit. And the hate may die down.

I don't think they are this smart however, and hope they ride this Win8 turkey all the way to oblivion. It is really entertaining to watch.

Power

CES: Tiny Fuel Cell is Supposed to Charge a Cell Phone for Two Weeks (Video) 204

Posted by Roblimo
from the maybe-a-whole-bunch-of-these-could-power-your-house dept.
Many of us have plug-in external batteries of one sort to recharge our smart phones when we're away from power outlets. Or we have gigantic aftermarket batteries that make our phones so fat they barely fit in our pockets. So there is this company, Lilliputian Power Systems, that is just starting to market a tiny, butane-powered fuel cell they call the Nectar that plugs into your cell phone (or whatever) through a USB port and supposedly charges it for up to two weeks. That's a lot better than an add-on battery. It looks expensive, although the power "pods" aren't too pricey at $19.99 for two. But wait a minute: Why aren't fuel cells, not internal combustion engines, the "range extenders" in plug-in hybrid cars? A decade back, fuel cells were going to revolutionize our power delivery and consumption systems. A cell phone charger is cute, but is that really all we can get fuel cells to do?

Comment: Brings back memories of the 1960s (Score 1) 220

by tralfaz2001 (#40900533) Attached to: NASA Releases HiRISE Images of Curiosity's Descent
This photo is so astounding that it brings back memories of the 1960s moon landing days. I was totally enthralled by the awesome techno-wizardry it took set, not one, but two men on the moon, and bring them back to earth. The techno wizardry needed to pull this shot off seems the equal of the feats of those heady days. Well done NASA, well done.

Comment: Re:Slow on Firefox (Score 3, Informative) 356

by tralfaz2001 (#32422750) Attached to: Smokescreen, a JavaScript-Based Flash Player
I had the same experience the first time I attempted to load the page. It was absolutely glacial. Then ,I tried to load the page a second time and it seemed to run just fine. I'm guessing some timing was altered when certain chunks of data got cached on the client. Try letting the page begin rendering, then reload the page. It worked for me on FF 3.6.3 on a MacBookPro3,1 2.6GHz. Curious if anyone else has similar results.
OS X

Apple Patches Massive Holes In OS X 246

Posted by timothy
from the well-it-wouldn't-be-polite-to-patch-windows dept.
Trailrunner7 writes with this snippet from ThreatPost: "Apple's first Mac OS X security update for 2010 is out, providing cover for at least 12 serious vulnerabilities. The update, rated critical, plugs security holes that could lead to code execution vulnerabilities if a Mac user is tricked into opening audio files or surfing to a rigged Web site." Hit the link for a list of the highlights among these fixes.
Graphics

Disney Releases 3D Texture Mapper Source Code 83

Posted by timothy
from the nice-of-them dept.
dsavi writes "Ptex, Walt Disney Animation Studio's cutting-edge 3D texture mapping library which was first used on nearly every surface in the 2008 animated feature Bolt, was released under the BSD license on Friday. Quoting the announcement on monophyl.com: 'We expect to follow Ptex with other open source projects that we hope the community will find beneficial. We will soon be launching a new Walt Disney Animation Studios Technology page under disneyanimation.com. It will include links to our open source projects as will as a library of recent publications.' This looks good for open source 3D graphics."

Apple Orders 10 Million Tablets? 221

Posted by ScuttleMonkey
from the pricepoint-better-be-right dept.
Arvisp writes "According to a blog post by former Google China president Kai-Fu Lee, Apple plans to produce nearly 10 million tablets in the still-unannounced product's first year. If Lee's blog post is to be believed, Apple plans to sell nearly twice as many tablets as it did iPhones in the product's first year."
Space

Big Dipper "Star" Actually a Sextuplet System 88

Posted by kdawson
from the toil-and-trouble dept.
Theosis sends word that an astronomer at the University of Rochester and his colleagues have made the surprise discovery that Alcor, one of the brightest stars in the Big Dipper, is actually two stars; and it is apparently gravitationally bound to the four-star Mizar system, making the whole group a sextuplet. This would make the Mizar-Alcor sextuplet the second-nearest such system known. The discovery is especially surprising because Alcor is one of the most studied stars in the sky. The Mizar-Alcor system has been involved in many "firsts" in the history of astronomy: "Benedetto Castelli, Galileo's protege and collaborator, first observed with a telescope that Mizar was not a single star in 1617, and Galileo observed it a week after hearing about this from Castelli, and noted it in his notebooks... Those two stars, called Mizar A and Mizar B, together with Alcor, in 1857 became the first binary stars ever photographed through a telescope. In 1890, Mizar A was discovered to itself be a binary, being the first binary to be discovered using spectroscopy. In 1908, spectroscopy revealed that Mizar B was also a pair of stars, making the group the first-known quintuple star system."

Reunite Gondwondaland!

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