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Android

Submission + - Australian Telco Opens 'Androidland' (theage.com.au)

Submitted by beaverdownunder
beaverdownunder writes: Aiming to take a bite out of Apple's market share, Telstra, the dominant Australian telephone services provider, has opened 'Androidland', occupying an entire floor at its central Melbourne retail outlet.
Moon

Submission + - Last Lunar Eclipse until 2014 (nasa.gov)

Submitted by althanas
althanas writes: The action begins around 4:45 am Pacific Standard Time when the red shadow of Earth first falls across the lunar disk. By 6:05 am Pacific Time, the Moon will be fully engulfed in red light. This event—the last total lunar eclipse until 2014—is visible from the Pacific side of North America, across the entire Pacific Ocean to Asia and Eastern Europe. For people in the western United States the eclipse is deepest just before local dawn. Not only will the Moon be beautifully red, it will also be inflated by the Moon illusion.
Apple

Submission + - Apple's list of work-around options for Samsung (theverge.com)

Submitted by ryzvonusef
ryzvonusef writes: One of Samsung's arguments in its defence against Apple's injunction is that Apple is trying to improperly cover various functional (utilitarian) elements required in any modern smart-phone or tablet device: essentially, that it had no other realistic design options available when it created devices like the Galaxy S, Infuse and Galaxy Tab 10.1.

Apple obviously disagrees: it argues that Samsung had many other non-infringing design alternatives at its disposal and didn't need to copy the aesthetic features of the iPhone and iPad devices. To make that argument stick Apple had no choice but to identify exactly what those alternatives were.

On the smart-phone side of things, the following is a list of some of the alternative design options Apple felt Samsung should have looked into further:
*Front surface that isn't black.
*Overall shape that isn't rectangular, or doesn't have rounded corners.
*Display screens that aren't centered on the front face and have substantial lateral borders.
*Non-horizontal speaker slots.
*Front surfaces with substantial adornment.
*No front bezel at all.

As for tablets, Apple identified a similar list of alternative designs available to Samsung:
*Overall shape that isn't rectangular, or doesn't have rounded corners.
*Thick frames rather than a thin rim around the front surface.
*Front surface that isn't entirely flat.
*Profiles that aren't thin.
*Cluttered appearance.

This isn't an exhaustive list of the alternative designs offered up by Apple, but it's a summary of the most interesting ones.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Handling and cleaning up large perso

Submitted by
txoof
txoof writes: "I have a personal email archive that goes back to 2003. The early archives are around 2 mega bytes. Every year the archives have grown significantly in size from a few tens of megs to nearly 500 megs from 2010. The archive is for storage only. It is a mirror of my Gmail account.
The archives are both sent and received mail compressed in a hierarchy of weekly, monthly and yearly mbox files. I've chosen mbox for a variety of reasons but mostly because it is the simplest to implement with fetchmail.
After inspecting some of the archives, I've noticed that the larger files are a result of attachments sent by well meaning family members. Things like baby pictures, wedding pictures, etc.
What I would like to do is from this point forward strip out all of the attachments and only save the texts of the emails. What would be a sane way to do that using simple tools like fetchmail?"
Ubuntu

Submission + - Online Backup Solutions for Ubuntu Linux (starryhope.com) 2

Submitted by jimjimovich
jimjimovich writes: Online "cloud" backups can be a great addition to our backup strategies, but many popular online backup solutions like Mozy and Carbonite refuse to support Linux. Here are 5 services that allow you to make sercure online backups in Linux.

Submission + - Carrier IQ, HTC And Samsung Facing Lawsuits For Vi (gizmocrazed.com)

Submitted by
Diggester
Diggester writes: "Carrier IQ has been everywhere. Every site we go to has a headline concerning Carrier IQ. It has been making our heads go round, to believe that all this time everything we have done on our smartphones has been tracked by this app.

Well now, the developers of this app as well as the manufacturers who put it in their devices are receiving the treatment they deserve for doing this as privacy can't be compromised: Lawsuits are being filed against them.

Now lawsuits filed against Carrier IQ, Samsung and HTC are seeking hundreds of millions of dollars behalf of all U.S residents, and they are accusing all these three of violating the Federal Wiretap Act which “protects the privacy of wire, oral, and electronic communications” of all Americans."
Games

Submission + - What Makes Skyrim is So Immersive?

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Jamie Madigan writes that Skyrim is a textbook case of a game so immersive that you are able to lose yourself in it for hours at a time because it includes a cognitively demanding environment packed with curious tales, plenty of loot and literally infinite quests; multiple, coordinated sources of sensory information where sight and sound work really well together; and extensive interactivity – you can pick up, mess with, or kill a heck of a lot of stuff. But what sets Skyrim apart is the designers have gone all out in limiting the incongruous elements on your screen. "Skyrim conspicuously omits or minimizes things like damage indicators, cooldown timers on abilities, level indicators on enemies, icons indicating effects, and HUD elements to activate powers or items," writes Madigan. "It’s super minimalistic and a far cry from something like World of Warcraft where you’ve got numbers bubbling off enemies like fireworks and half your screen is taken up with icons, minimaps, and hotkeys." However one universal complaint about the game is that the UI is awful which seems to be exacerbated by a iron clad design goal to shove everything possible off the main screen in order to increase immersion. "Despite how much I’m enjoying it, it kind of strikes me as an example of swinging too far to the other extreme.""
Privacy

Submission + - Carrier IQ's Fatal Mistake: Using legal threats to (theconversation.edu.au)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Apart from anything else, the fundamental mistake that Carrier IQ made was issuing attempting to silence a developer using a heavy-handed legal threat. Certainly this was the tipping point in terms of bring the whole incident to the public's attention.

It doesn't matter at this stage whether Carrier IQ's software is logging and reporting back — the damage in public perception has been done — the legal writs issued.

And now the Carries and phone manufacturers are running scared, distancing themselves from a company that has become toxic.

I am wondering where the IQ in their company name came from — not from how they handled this crisis that's for sure.
Power

Submission + - MPG of a human (ucsd.edu)

Submitted by
InterGuru
InterGuru writes: "Tom Murphy, blogging from UCSD in his Do the Math blog asks
' I am curious to know how potent human fuel can be. How many miles per gallon do we get as our own engines of transportation? '

He finds, after accounting for the energy intensity of American agriculture, which uses ten units of energy to get one unit of food energy, walking consumes 18-34 MPG of oil equivalent, and biking comes in at 70-130 MPG.
Maybe if we switched to a more vegetarian diet, we could improve on this."

Submission + - US Senate Declares War On Citizens (newsvoice.se) 4

Submitted by
iONiUM
iONiUM writes: "In a stunning move, the US senate passed a bill that effectively ends the Bill of Rights in America. From the article, "This bill, passed late last night in a 93-7 vote, declares the entire USA to be a ”battleground” upon which U.S. military forces can operate with impunity, overriding Posse Comitatus and granting the military the unchecked power to arrest, detain, interrogate and even assassinate U.S. citizens with impunity."
Wired magazine is also reporting this story, with similar disgust: "Here’s the best thing that can be said about the new detention powers the Senate has tucked into next year’s defense bill: They don’t force the military to detain American citizens indefinitely without a trial. They just let the military do that."
Good luck Americans. You're gonna need it."

Comment Re:Visibility is an issue for all (Score 1) 275

by Hyperhaplo (#38210168) Attached to: Does Telecommuting Make You Invisible?

He who brings the cake should be highly rewarded.

It is very true.

My currently line manager is of type 'social director'. You bring the cake, and don't make waves, you get promoted.

However, don't 'bring cake' or make waves.. and you are sunk sunk sunk.

I've recently looked into telecommuting. Problem is, if management are incapable or unwilling to do their job.. it's too easy for them to cut you loose to plug a financial hole that they created.

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