Comment Re:One Fundamental difference: (Score 0) 1123
Good thinking. *Glues webcam to his shotgun*
See? Now I have an 'electronic sighting system', it just happens to also record things.
Comment The only winning move. . . (Score -1, Flamebait) 171
So basically rely on their lawyers being caught with their pants down on your technical expertise and then actually prove they are at fault?
Comment Re:Additional layers have nothing to do with this (Score 0, Flamebait) 711
I would wager that it has to do with the way that it gets compiled, if they aren't using Apple's compiler and profiler they may not be taking advantage of the APIs needed to do all that super neato app backgrounding and such.
You call the timing dubious, I say they are pre-emptively stopping thousands of app rejections on a legit rule.
You are bashing Apple for making a system you aren't forced to buy and complaining that you can't 'hack' it in your language of choice. Apple doesn't care about JailBreaking anymore than the bare minimum for legal reasons, if you want to run any old app you can, no Apple approval required.
Fact of the matter is, Apple is a company that makes more money in an hour than you do in 10 years, they aren't stupid people.
You call the timing dubious, I say they are pre-emptively stopping thousands of app rejections on a legit rule.
You are bashing Apple for making a system you aren't forced to buy and complaining that you can't 'hack' it in your language of choice. Apple doesn't care about JailBreaking anymore than the bare minimum for legal reasons, if you want to run any old app you can, no Apple approval required.
Fact of the matter is, Apple is a company that makes more money in an hour than you do in 10 years, they aren't stupid people.
Comment Mario teaches typing (Score 1) 40
I just want another Mario Teaches Typing.
TI-Nspire Hack Enables User Programming 88
An anonymous reader writes "Texas Instruments' most recent, ARM-based series of graphing calculators, the TI-Nspire line, has long resisted users' efforts to run their own software. (Unlike other TI calculator models, which can be programmed either in BASIC, C, or assembly language, the Nspire only supports an extremely limited form of BASIC.) A bug in the Nspire's OS was recently discovered, however, which can be exploited to execute arbitrary machine code. Now the first version of a tool called Ndless has been released, enabling users, for the first time, to write and run their own C and assembly programs on the device. This opens up exciting new possibilities for these devices, which are extremely powerful compared to TI's other calculator offerings, but (thanks to the built-in software's limitations) have hitherto been largely ignored by the calculator programming community."
The 1-Second Linux Boot 156
An anonymous reader writes "Less than one second Linux boot! This video shows an OMAP3530 capturing video data from a camera and rendering it to an LCD display — the video appears on the LCD display in less than a second from reset."
Comment Hardware only? (Score 2, Interesting) 401
Yes, it has some stats that are much higher than the iPads, but it is aimed at solving completely different users.
Look at the six panel layout of the homescreen, why waste the screen with six tiny apps when you can do so much more full screen? Why focus on a Dashboard knock off that you can carry around when people have shown that isn't what they really want in a mobile computing device. Look at what apps get used on smartphones the most often, it isn't the little one off stocks/weather/recording features, they are games and content viewing apps.
TL:DR; It isn't the size of the boat, it's how you sail the ocean.
Look at the six panel layout of the homescreen, why waste the screen with six tiny apps when you can do so much more full screen? Why focus on a Dashboard knock off that you can carry around when people have shown that isn't what they really want in a mobile computing device. Look at what apps get used on smartphones the most often, it isn't the little one off stocks/weather/recording features, they are games and content viewing apps.
TL:DR; It isn't the size of the boat, it's how you sail the ocean.
Comment Re:Why? (Score 4, Interesting) 57
Most of them would be running an application done in C/C++ or some other low level language with threading. The whole advantage of super computers isn't that they have an absurd ghz rating, but an insane amount of cores. This could be useful for testing how a network of desktop computers would work, which it sounds like from the summary they are doing.
TL:DR; Normal desktop software doesn't run faster on a super computer than on your 4 year old laptop.
TL:DR; Normal desktop software doesn't run faster on a super computer than on your 4 year old laptop.
Colliding Particles Can Make Black Holes After All 269
cremeglace writes with this excerpt from ScienceNOW:
"You've heard the controversy. Particle physicists predict the world's new highest-energy atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland, might create tiny black holes, which they say would be a fantastic discovery. Some doomsayers fear those black holes might gobble up the Earth — physicists say that's impossible — and have petitioned the United Nations to stop the $5.5 billion LHC. Curiously, though, nobody had ever shown that the prevailing theory of gravity, Einstein's theory of general relativity, actually predicts that a black hole can be made this way. Now a computer model shows conclusively for the first time that a particle collision really can make a black hole."
That said, they estimate the required energy for creating a black hole this way to be roughly "a quintillion times higher than the LHC's maximum"; though if one of the theories requiring compact extra dimensions is true, the energy could be lower.
Nmap 5.20 Released 36
ruphus13 writes "Nmap has a new release out, and it's a major one. It includes a GUI front-end called Zenmap, and, according to the post, 'Network admins will no doubt be excited to learn that Nmap is now ready to identify Snow Leopard systems, Android Linux smartphones, and Chumbies, among other OSes that Nmap can now identify. This release also brings an additional 31 Nmap Scripting Engine scripts, bringing the total collection up to 80 pre-written scripts for Nmap. The scripts include X11 access checks to see if X.org on a system allows remote access, a script to retrieve and print an SSL certificate, and a script designed to see whether a host is serving malware. Nmap also comes with netcat and Ndiff. Source code and binaries are available from the Nmap site, including RPMs for x86 and x86_64 systems, and binaries for Windows and Mac OS X. '"
Comment Re:Exponential Growth (Score 0) 266
The grey goo wars have begun!
Comment Re:Bing? Really? (Score 0) 325
You can switch from Google to Yahoo on the iPhone, on desktop Safari you have to dive into the command line.
Comment Bing? Really? (Score 0) 325
I don't think Apple would make Bing the default search engine for any of its products. At the very most Apple would allow users to change their search engine. Think about it, this move would gain Apple nothing. Mobile phone searches don't happen enough for Google to worry about the lost ad revenue and Safari's market share is still pretty low on the desktop, so it wouldn't be a huge hit there either.
The only thing this would do is make users angry, Apple won't switch to Bing.
The only thing this would do is make users angry, Apple won't switch to Bing.
The Murky Origins of Zork's Name 70
mjn writes "Computational media researcher Nick Montfort traces the murky origins of Zork's name. It's well known that the word was used in MIT hacker jargon around that time, but how did it get there? Candidates are the term 'zorch' from late 1950s DIY electronics slang, the use of the term as a placeholder in some early 1970s textbooks, the typo a QWERTY user would get if he typed 'work' on an AZERTY keyboard, and several uses in obscure sci-fi. No solid answers so far, though, as there are problems with many of the possible explanations that would have made MIT hackers unlikely to have run across them at the right time."
Net Users In Belarus May Soon Have To Register 89
Cwix writes "A new law proposed in Belarus would require all net users and online publications to register with the state: 'Belarus' authoritarian leader is promising to toughen regulation of the Internet and its users in an apparent effort to exert control over the last fully free medium in the former Soviet state. He told journalists that a new Internet bill, proposed Tuesday, would require the registration and identification of all online publications and of each Web user, including visitors to Internet cafes. Web service providers would have to report this information to police, courts, and special services.'"
