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Comment Re:What the hell? (Score 2) 445

by KNicolson (#42130541) Attached to: The Coming Wave of In-Dash Auto System Obsolescence

Yup, I'll second that. For the people too lazy to click through, your in-dash unit basically becomes a thin client terminal (using RealVNC) for your smartphone server, and the phone can supply an audio stream to the in-car audio system, and read back all your presses of the steering wheel buttons, etc, etc.

Toyota/Panasonic's system will even read your Tweets to you as you drive, and I'm sure an update to the smartphone side will use whatever in-car hands-free system to allow you to dictate Tweets as you drive.

Comment Has anyone actually RTFAed? (Score 4, Informative) 354

by KNicolson (#36770978) Attached to: Apple Patents Portrait-Landscape Flipping

Stupid question I know, but Apple is NOT patenting rotation, but rather two gestures to lock the screen in either portrait or landscape mode, regardless of detected orientation. Whether or not such a matter is patentable is another kettle of fish.

On a related matter, Apple long ago bought a patent from British Telecom that appears actually to be for screen rotation.
Displays

New Apple Multi-Touch Patent Is Too Broad 310

Posted by CmdrTaco from the they-usually-are dept.
adeelarshad82 writes "Nearly three and a half years later, Apple has finally been awarded the U.S. patent number 7,966,578, which according to the patent experts should worry rivals. According to exclusive interviews with patent experts, the incredibly broad patent puts Apple in a strong position when it comes to displaying content and using certain finger gestures on smart phones. The patent is so broad that not only will Apple's legal team target iPhone competitors but will also look to go after iPad and iPod rivals. Experts also discussed the scenario of Apple licensing its patented technology or for that matter, the courts completely scrapping the patent in public's interest."
Facebook

Over 7.5 Million Facebook Users Are Under 13 194

Posted by samzenpus from the baby-book dept.
liqs8143 writes "Of the 20 million minors who actively used Facebook in the past year, 7.5 million of them were younger than 13, according to projections from Consumer Reports' latest State of the Net survey. Facebook's terms of service require users to be at least 13 years old. Also among this group of minors using Facebook, more than 5 million were 10 and under. Consumer Reports' survey found that their accounts were largely unsupervised by their parents, exposing them to malware or serious threats such as predators or bullies."
The Internet

Netflix Subscriber Base Eclipses Comcast's 333

Posted by Soulskill from the streaming-to-the-future dept.
NicknamesAreStupid writes "Netflix just announced its earnings and claims to have more subscribers than Comcast. 'Netflix's global subscriber base grew almost 70% over the past year, to 23.6 million users. ... More than 7% of Americans now subscribe to Netflix.' Does that go to show how great Netflix really is or, well, you know?"
Google

Submission + - Chrome OS has support for Trusted Computing (chromium.org)

Submitted by KNicolson
KNicolson writes: Looking at the recently-released documentation for Chromium OS, I couldn't help but notice that the Trusted Platform Module features in the specifications, and the latest source tree even has a directory reserved for a TPM emulator. Some blog speculation highlights that Trusted Boot would be trivial and fully locked-down Secure Boot is quite feasible.
The Media

Submission + - Newspapers Face the Prisoner's Dilemma with Google

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "Nicholas Carr has an interesting analysis of Rupert Murdoch's threat to de-list News Corp's stories from Google and Microsoft's eager offer to make Bing Murdoch's exclusive search engine for its content. Carr writes that newspapers are caught in a classic Prisoner's Dilemma with Google because while Google's search engine "prevents them from making decent money online — by massively fragmenting traffic, by undermining brand power, and by turning news stories into fungible commodities" if any single newspaper opts out of Google, their competitors will pick up the traffic they lose. There is only one way that newspapers can break out of the prison — if a critical mass of newspapers opt out of Google's search engine simultaneously, they would suddenly gain substantial market power. Murdoch is signaling to other newspapers that "we'll opt out if you'll opt out" positioning himself as the would-be ringleader of a massive jailbreak, without actually risking a jailbreak himself and there are signs that Murdoch's signal is working with reports that the publishers of the Denver Post and the Dallas Morning News are now also considering blocking Google. In the meantime, Steve Ballmer is more than happy to play along with Murdoch because although a deal with News Corps would reduce the basic profitability of Microsoft's search business, it would inflict far more damage on Google than on Microsoft. "Faced with a large-scale loss of professional news stories from its search engine, Google would likely have little choice but to begin paying sites to index their content," writes Carr. "That would be a nightmare scenario for Google — and a dream come true for newspapers and other big content producers.""
Robotics

Submission + - Robo-chefs and fashion-bots on show in Tokyo

Submitted by avishere
avishere writes: The International Robot Exhibition kicked off this week in Tokyo, unveiling the latest whirring and buzzing inventions from 192 companies and 64 organizations from at home and abroad — an bringing humanity another step closer to irrelevancy. Among the humanoid cavalcade was a prototype robo-chef, showing off its cooking and cutting skills, along with robots to play with your children, model clothes and search for disaster victims. There was also one made almost exclusively of cardboard. The exhibition — which opened with a human-like robot called Nextage cutting the ribbon — runs until Saturday.

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