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Media

Your Next TV Interface Will Be a Tablet 210

Posted by timothy from the no-beldar-the-big-phone dept.
waderoush writes "You can forget all the talk about 'smart' and 'connected' TVs: nobody, not even Apple, has come up with an interface that's easy to use from 10 feet away. And you can drastically curtail your hopes that Roku, Boxee, Netflix, and other providers of free or cheap 'over the top' Internet TV service will take over the world: the cable and satellite companies and the content owners have mounted savvy and effective counterstrikes. But there's another technology that really will disrupt the TV industry: tablet computing. The iPad, in particular, is the first 'second screen' device that's good enough to be the first screen. This Xconomy column argues that in the near future, the big-screen TV will turn into a dumb terminal, and your tablet — with its easy-to-use touch interface and its 'appified' approach to organizing content — will literally be running the show in your living room." Using a tablet as a giant remote seems like a good idea, and a natural extension of iPhone and Android apps that already provide media-center control. Maybe I'm too easily satisfied, but the 10-foot interface doesn't seem as hopeless as presented here; TiVo, Apple, and others been doing a pretty good job of that for the past decade.
Cellphones

Video Game Consoles Are 'Fundamentally Doomed,' Says Lord British 374

Posted by Soulskill from the depends-on-your-timescale dept.
zacharye writes "Microsoft sold nearly one million Xbox 360s last week alone, but we're nearing the end of the road for video game consoles according to one industry visionary. Richard Garriott, known for having created the fantasy role-playing franchise Ultima, says converged devices such as computers, smartphones and tablets will soon render dedicated game consoles obsolete: '... the power that you can carry with you in a portable is really swamping what we've thought of as a console.'"
Software

Graphic Map of Linux-2.6.36 25

Posted by timothy from the under-the-hood dept.
conan.sh writes "The Interactive map of Linux Kernel was expanded and updated to the recent kernel linux-2.6.36. Now the map contains more than four hundred important source items (functions and structures) with links to source code and documentation."
Image

Real-Life Frogger Ends In Hospital Visit 314

Posted by samzenpus from the going-for-the-logs dept.
BigSes writes "A 23-year old man has been hospitalized after police in South Carolina say he was hit by an SUV while playing a real-life version of the video game Frogger. Authorities said the 23-year-old man was taken to a hospital in Anderson after he was struck Monday evening. Before he was hit, police say the man had been discussing the game with his friends. Chief Jimmy Dixon says the man yelled 'go' and darted into oncoming traffic in the four-lane highway. Has it come time to ban some of the classics before someone else goes out and breaks a few bricks with their heads after eating a large mushroom?"
Graphics

Company Seeks To Boost Linux Game Development With 3D Engine Giveaway 140

Posted by Soulskill from the for-services-rendered dept.
binstream writes "To support Linux game development, Unigine Corp. announced a competition: it will give a free license for its Unigine engine to a seasoned team willing to work on a native Linux game. The company has been Linux-friendly from the very start; it released advanced GPU benchmarks (Heaven, Tropics, Sanctuary) for Linux before and is working on the OilRush strategy game that supports Linux as well."
Social Networks

Inside Facebook's Infrastructure 77

Posted by CmdrTaco from the when-it-crashes-it-burns dept.
miller60 writes "Facebook served up 690 billion page views to its 540 million users in August, according to data from Google's DoubleClick. How does it manage that massive amount of traffic? Data Center Knowledge has put together a guide to the infrastructure powering Facebook, with details on the size and location of its data centers, its use of open source software, and its dispute with Greenpeace over energy sourcing for its newest server farm. There are also links to technical presentations by Facebook staff, including a 2009 technical presentation on memcached by CEO Mark Zuckerberg."
Operating Systems

OpenSUSE 11.3 Is Here 156

Posted by timothy from the lovely-little-lizard dept.
lukehashj writes "The openSUSE Project is pleased to announce the release of the latest incarnation of openSUSE, with support for 32-bit and 64-bit systems. OpenSUSE 11.3 is packed with new features and updates including SpiderOak to sync your files across the Internet for free, Rosegarden for free editing of your audio files, improved indexing with Tracker, and updates to Mozilla Firefox, and Thunderbird."
Security

A Flood of Stable Linux Kernels Released 105

Posted by timothy from the five-is-better-than-one dept.
Julie188 writes "Greg Kroah-Hartman has released five new stable Linux kernels, correcting minor errors of their predecessors and including improvements which are unlikely to generate new errors. As so often with kernel versions in the stable series, it remains undisclosed if the new versions contain changes which fix security vulnerabilities, although the number of changes and some of the descriptions of those changes certainly suggest that all the new versions contain security fixes."

Comment Re:What is to stop how ISP's peer? (Score 1) 457

by thule (#32176806) Attached to: The Telcos' Secret Anti-Net Neutrality Strategy
And companies are now doing that. All I hear is people complaining about traffic being capped. Boohoo, the people that complain the most are the ones that caused the ISP to resort to capping. They also probably have their little Internet router set for QoS so their mommy doesn't complain about browsing the intertubes when they are downloading pr0n over p2p.

At worst the government or the Better Business Bureau or whatever will push for clear advertising of caps. No need for the government to trample on configuration of networks.

Comment Re:H.264 support? (Score 1) 570

by jwhitener (#32176680) Attached to: Mozilla Reveals Firefox 4 Plans

"No. Most people hate it."

I'm not sure what type of people you work with or are friends with, but everyone I know loves chromes UI.

IT department, server admins, check.
IT department, web developers, check.
IT department, programmers, check.
Family and Friends, check.

I really like the extra space the UI gives me by not having so many of its extensions in toolbar format. For instance, the web developer add-on in Firefox is a whole toolbar. Whereas the Pendule extension in Chrome is a button, that when clicked, exposes about 35 choices. I prefer that space savings.

One row of tabs, one row with the address and five buttons to the side of it (gwave,gmail,resolution test, pendule, jquery window) is pretty perfect for most day to day stuff I do.

To each their own.

Comment Mostly agree... (Score 1) 457

by thule (#32176408) Attached to: The Telcos' Secret Anti-Net Neutrality Strategy
...though, I still don't know what the real problem is. The biggest issue I hear people talk about it capping the traffic. Okay, fine, make companies advertise the fact they cap. Do you really think net neutrality will increase or decrease the amount of companies wanting to cap traffic? The government doesn't have to stomp around defining QoS and shaping.

Have there really been issues where ISPs have purposely blocked traffic -- and if they did, I would think it would be found out pretty quickly.

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