This is not new. I'm probably not citing the first instance of it, but, I was utilizing this feature fairly regularly in fluxbox 6+ years ago.

It's nice to have but I seriously doubt it will take off for general users. Tabbed browsers already confuse the average computer user beyond belief. I know people who don't even understand that their computer has windows at all.

I'm glad to see this finally show up in KDE but still... nothing special. Slow news day.

Respect for Pulitzer's form of yellow journalism was a eulogy in action for journalism 100 years ago. The fact that journalism still exists is only a testament for the public's continued desire for era-appropriate mild fiction and sensationalism. The fact that we huzzah at the awarding of a prize named after the man considered the inventor of what non-news non-journalist pundits like Bill O, and Sean H thrive on is enough evidence to show that real journalism hasn't been a public concern for a very, very long time.

So don't shed a tear for journalism now. It has already been dead for very nearly a century.

The open source community is essentially a huge collaborative composition of people with various skills and interests that drive the results in a direction that is essentially a function of all those participants.

So, if you are some clever blogger who points out that the documentation is lacking for a certain group of people then the reason for it is obvious. None of the active participating components are people who care about the type of documentation.

The fundamental problem with this style of production is that only the manufacturers will be consistently pleased with the results. Today many people are interested in the software but unable or just unwilling to participate in its creation. That includes documentation of course. So until they are able to participate somehow, their interests will rarely, if ever, be represented.

In a way this is where commercial entities could really benefit this system. A commercial entity has interests beyond their own. In fact, in most cases their interests for the production are entirely outside their personal interests. A commercial entity that wants to rely on, say, KMail for their mail client in some one-off OS based on Linux may have a customer-base that is largely non-technical. Perhaps they are selling network kiosks to elderly or something. They will be particularly interested in proper documentation or help systems that appeal to those highly uninitiated.

But what happens with those actual real commercial entities with real needs for these types of missing components? It seems that they have a tendency to branch and the work they do that would benefit the average consumer of this software never ends up back in the main lines. Maybe because the mainline maintainers don't care, don't like it, or maybe because of licensing issues or perhaps... perhaps nobody gave it any thought yet.

At any rate, it still boils down to the same thing. The a classic "OSS" community developed project will generally only have features that are desired by the contributors. If you're lucky you'll have some contributors that seek to look out for others' interests but that seems to be incredibly rare in this subculture.

If maintainers of software cited for lacking this kind of documentation care about this issue, they should be proactive about it. There is an entire class of concerns that will rarely be raised by the sort of person able and willing to contribute to an OSS project. These concerns include aspects of UI design that benefit less technically savvy individuals and, of course, user friendly documentation. If the maintainers want to excel in the production of their software they need to reach out for these types of features. Find people who can provide the materials but don't know or want to know the processes involved in making the contributions themselves. Find commercial entities that have already done the work and try to integrate what they produce, or ask them to do it.

Gizmo, entirely unlike Skype, is based on standard SIP interfaces. You don't need their proprietary client to use the service.

Just pick your favorite SIP client, preferably with a lot of codecs and STUN support, and get on with your day.

Panic over!

So apparently Slashdot is sooo out of touch they have forgotten why the word "Bulletin" precedes the word "Board" for a bazillion years before now? They never heard of a marquee?

Besides, wouldn't every single printed op-ed page in every newsPAPER be an "analog blog?"

I mean really posting news isn't even blogging, because blog is short for weblog, not webnewscaster.

Hi, I wrote an article about my observations of klez infecting a computer that was both a friend's desktop machine and a small vhost business. It was on slashdot SEVEN YEARS AGO. So this is anything but news. http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/10/23/1853219

I must admit that prior to the days when I had money to throw away on games as I saw fit I truly did pirate a game now and then for the sake of a trial period. I found it effective, but mainly in convincing me not to buy the game. And see, there is this unexpected factor I discovered, actually only recently, that severely impacts this chain of actions...

Basically it amounts to this: I find, all too often, that many games are not worth playing beyond the amount you normally get in a demo! I have downloaded so many demo games, especially racing or fighting games, on the PlayStation Network or XBOX Live and found that... well that was enough. To spend $60 more dollars simply to add a few levels and get the same experience was not a valuable prospect for me.

I won't try to claim that any significant portion of these piracy observations can be explained by what I'm describing. I would say it's not without merit though. In these days, there are so many games. I mean, honestly, I think there are more games released in a year than I could humanly play through in their entirety. Even filtering out the disinteresting games I would still never have the time, given work and other responsibilities, to finish anywhere near say, 10% of the releases in a year.

So to go from trial period to purchase, especially on a game that's likely a shallow me-too on the iPhone... well let's demonstrate the thought process with another nugget: I have downloaded probably 25 different "Light" games and never even tried them before I deleted them because I simply lost all interest.

Look, I'm all for consumer fairness. It would be nice to get better prices. But the fact is, whether you have a 5GB plan or an iPhone unspecified/unlimited plan, your averages are still well within the range of limits experienced by both parties. It hardly makes a difference.

The article is basically making the argument that somehow iPhone users should be punished because they're actually using the service AT&T has been selling everyone for a long time. This is pretty asinine. The real issue here is entirely different and entirely AT&T's prerogative. Let me enlighten you:

AT&T's "3G" network, which is actually 3.5G, HSPA... is on the tail end of its lifespan. The technology in all of these handsets depends on it, of course, but it's done. It's over. There is only one last stage of improvement to GSM tech and it's a stretch as it is. Why would AT&T want to invest in expansion of a dead infrastructure? They don't. They aren't going to any more than they have to. They will expand to the last stage of 3G in the largest markets just as they prepare to roll out the same LTE based networks that every other carrier is supporting.

That said, there's no reason to think bandwidth consumption is the primary concern here. The primary concern is one of density. The number of users each relying on the same cell is too great. It's not a matter of how much data they are transferring on that cell so much as that there must be more cells, or cells must be able to handle more concurrent users. That's just a factor of the proliferation of cellular phones and devices. You can't blame the iPhone for this. It's a problem that would occur eventually anyway as the trend towards data enabled devices existed before anyone even knew about the iPhone. Maybe the iPhone accelerated it, but that is no reason to punish people who like a good user experience.

Of course, there's another concern not addressed and that is the exact same concern that effects cable internet subscribers. Cable internet actually works in a very similar fashion to cellular internet. In the case of cable modems, customers share a download node that has a set maximum bandwidth with its uplink. You are sold rates like 12mbps but there is only a maximum of 60mbps at each node. So if more than 5 people all try to use 12mbps at once you won't get what is promised. However, because most people don't use nearly the maximum pretty much.... ever... the cable companies overprovision the network. They get away with it because the statistics generally match up. However, if you're unlucky enough to live in a neighborhood full of download happy geeks, you're going to hate your internet connection.

The same issue exists in cell towers. A give GSM cell can handle a fixed maximum number of communication slots each functioning as a statically wide band of communication. When a device ramps up from basic voice to data, to higher speed data, it will consume more slots. Or it won't, if there are none available and it will just stay slow or not connect to data, or whatever. So basically if you have 1000 slots on a given tower, and full 7.2mbps hsdpa+ requires 12 of those slots, you can see that there's a fixed number of people who can possibly access the network at full speed. Add to this the already common problem of the actual backing internet connection experiencing the exact same kind of limitation and you can see that infrastructure is a problem of density, not of actual transfer totals.

So, the lesson here is that more uplinks are needed so that uplinks are not as central a point of failure as they are today. What you'll earn is that cells are relatively evenly distributed across all markets but not all markets have an evenly distributed level of usage from consumers. People in metro areas will note the worst performance because there's simply too many people in one place. You'll note the epic failure of networks during large technical conventions with a 1000+ simultaneous attempts at liveblogging the latest digital toaster at CTIA or whatever.

Point is, you can't go blaming a single handset because this same effect can, and will occur without the iPhone involved. If you have convention of blackberry addicts all trying to BBM each other at the same time, in a convention center with 2000 of them all connected to the same cell tower, that's going to give the same bad experience even though the effective throughput is less than dialup internet.

There's a major misinterpretation of the situation regarding interpreted languages on the iPhone. Apple has absolutely no qualms about interpreted languages used on the device. In fact, a huge number of games are built around lua-based game libraries. It's a no-brainer! All you have to do is ensure a user can't add and execute arbitrary scripts by way of downloading them later.

The issue here is getting the right balance to make it through the review process. See, your game could allow for added levels for free down the road, a totally acceptable (and relatively common) occurrence. It's entirely okay if those levels are composed by your scripting language. What isn't okay is if the game will execute arbitrary scripting, to essentially distribute a target platform as an app. That's about where the line is drawn. This could be seen with the final result of the commodore 64 emulator app. They couldn't enable basic but they can allow for delivery of additional games, which are obviously interpreted. A developer might choose to use an encryption scheme or signing scheme to ensure they only execute gamescripts that should be, for example.

This relates to flash because there's nothing stopping adobe from porting the flash engine and making it possible to export individual iPhone apps that include it and execute some flash game that is packaged in with the app so long as that game can't randomly pull in more flash to execute. Of course, if you could compile the entire flash application to native code that would be more ideal in the general case assuming you have no consistency of execution problems. But that's not always the best idea. Take java, for example. Its design causes a complete native compilation effort to result in worse performance and lower reliability because the runtime optimization of the JVM is more effective than static code optimizations.

Anyway, I guess my point is that the limitations about virtual machines and script languages aren't quite what is popularly regurgitated. The issues with the iPhone and these technologies is one of post-app-install delivery of arbitrary code execution. It's not a problem with the use of VM/Script itself.

As a player of EVE Online who really likes the game but isn't that interested in the battling aspect, I have high hopes for this interesting concept. Particularly, I hope that the MMOFPS integrates with the existing game world through the market. I play primarily industrial efforts in the current game and would enjoy another vector of marketing strategies to pursue to further fatten my wallet.

Also, I think it will be cool to play the FPS as a genre diversion where I can potentially continue to forward my in-game goals from a totally different perspective. All-in-all, as an existing EVE player, I'm definitely looking forward to this game!

This behavior is explicitly unacceptable. The fact that it has been done is a failing of the app review process. It's also possible that the developers went to great lengths to hide this behavior (such as setting it up to only happen when a particular flag is flipped on on the server so that it wouldn't happen during review processes.) As a registered iphone developer who actually reads his agreement documentation, I can assure you this particular issue is specifically addressed. The application in question must make a best effort to ask the user's permission about divulging data from the device, of any kinda, to a remote server. They also must make a best effort to do so securely.

Any violation of that requirement is grounds for app store rejection. I'll be surprised if this app isn't pulled right away, unless of course, it explicitly asks your permission to do what it's doing, in that case, I'm not at all shocked at slashdot posting a non-news story of an app doing what it says it will do.

I guess we'll see.

For decades we've recognized this exact same kind of exploitation of coastal waters as pollution. Why would this suddenly be acceptable for a data-center, and how will they avoid the associate ecological devastation?

Actually WiMax and LTE use the exact same underlying network layer, with very minor differences to optimizations. Furthermore, LTE will not be IP based initially. The name itself reflects this idea that it will start with conventional wireless network design so that it's easier to do handovers between say, CDMA and LTE towers, and when the whole network segments are moved to LTE, then the next "evolution" will involve a move to IP based communication, and VoIP (though likely not what you're used to thinking of with VoIP on the Internet) for the voice parts of things.

The intermediate concept is very similar to what you get with old style soft phones that run in an ethernet network, except that it'll be sharing wireless bandwidth instead of wired, but the communication is fairly low level initially, and eventually it'll all be moved above "IP."

Research the technologies, it takes about 20 minutes, and you'll see that LTE and WiMax are nearly identical. Basically WiMax and LTE have different optimization strategies, but they operate on the same band ranges, the same equipment, etc. In nearly all cases, a firmware update could make a WiMax radio into an LTE radio.

As it is, WiMax is best suited for non-moving targets, or, alternatively, short range cells that would best suit a city with skyscrapers. It's not a big difference but it's there.

Anyway, clearwire has already made it ... clear... that they could switch to LTE if needed with minimal impact financially or technically, and minor research supports that claim.

The division by gender in athletics is somewhat of an antiquity. I'm surprised more anti-sexists don't decry it. Find a new way to categorize athletic performance for fair contests than gender and this problem goes away.