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Comment Re:Java has one major problem (Score 1) 60

Java's popularity decline can be traced to pretty much one thing: Oracle.

This, specifically the fight with Google. I had two projects that were good candidates for a Java solution, both of which were delayed while the the supreme court case moved forward. Once the issue was settled one of the delayed projects moved forward with Java, the other had been canceled.
The delayed reaction in the surveys absolutely matches my experience. Business likes certainty, and now that we know that Oracle can't demand an intrusive license for all things that use Java APIs, business feel it's safe to swim in the Java pool again.

Comment The REAL missed opportunity: 2D game for 2 players (Score 1) 435

Both Microsoft and Sony missed a huge opportunity: two player shared / overlayed console games on a single TV. Each player sees their own 2D screen on the same shared 3D-capable TV set.
Take 2 pairs of passive 3D glasses and swap the lenses so one pair has 2 right lenses and the other has 2 left lenses. Each player then sees only one of the two stereoscopic images. The console can then show different content to each of the two players (or two "teams" if playing with more people).
For example, in a setting up your football offensive call, player 1 can make their selection, while player 2 sees their defensive screen. Then each player sees the play from their own side's perspective. It works very well for driving games, where each player sees their own cockpit and HUD, but some content like the map are the same. The best demo was a single screen game (like Towerfall), but each had their own privately visible power-ups, and when a character became "cloaked" player 1 could still see their character but the opponent player couldn't. Cool stuff.
I did some preliminary work on this a long while back, but it became clear neither Microsoft nor Sony was interested. We did some demos on the now defunct OUYA.

Comment Re:Listen to what I have to say (Score 2) 324

Did you watch the video? IT'S AN INTERVIEW. Most of it is state-of-the-industry type questions. He is asked about what to buy, he gives an answer.

In the end he recommends a 47", passive glasses technology, and smart TV features are nice but not a deal breaker. Doesn't sound like a shill to me, that happens to be exactly what I would recommend to a friend.

He is brand agnostic. Listen to the part where he talks about smart TV features - he praises Roku, Apple TV and WD. He discusses how a modern Blu-ray player makes the embedded Smart TV features irrelevant and warns against manufactures "double dipping".

Sure you can be pissed at /. for giving us a piece that is too consumer oriented, but it clearly is not endorsing any brand or sales outlet.

Watch the video. (is WTFV the new RTFM?)

Comment No. (Score 1) 382

No, now is not the time.

A new name implies a new focus, new processes, or at least a new mission attitude.

To rename it now is to embrace the department's need for PR image update, but without a clear new mandate it is just enabling 10 years of the same outdated behavior.

I appreciate the humor of the OP but this is the kind of idea I could see being promoted in the halls of DHS.

Comment Re:Wait... (Score 1) 196

If you watch any of the numerous interviews with Chandra in the past few weeks you can see this comment in context. He is bashing all other Android tablets in an effort to differentiate his new product. He readily admits he has learned many lessons from the joojoo, but "poor carbon copy" and "rip-off" are digs at what came after the iPad release.

Comment Re:Agreed (Score 2) 968

Remember this is a consumption device that can be used for the occasional tweet or post, not a programmer's device.

They made a good start by zapping the PrintScreen/ScrollLock/Pause/NumLock/Insert/CapsLock buttons. But there is so much more to be done in creating the perfect consumption netbook keyboard.

They made the up/down buttons too small and took away many of the nav keys (PgUp, PgDn, Home, End). This is a big deal. I'm actually not suggesting they return these keys but perhaps re-invent the keyboard navigation. I'd love to see a variable rocker switch embedded in the keyboard with scroll wheel functionality where a single tap is a one-line move and a strong press is equivalent to a PgUp/PgDn keystroke. I'm not an HCI expert but a new human-centric keyboard navigation paradigm is needed.

Also: Take away the programmer's keyboard keys - back-quote, square braces, and backslash keys - and move them to Alt- keystrokes (back quote on the quotes key, backslash on the /? key, pipe on the ;: key, square braces on the ,lt.gt keys, curly braces on the 9(0) keys, tilda on the 6^ key) This way they are still there but not taking up valuable real estate.

The one mistake in my mind is zapping the Delete key. I can't write a post without both backspace and delete keys.

The last big change they should have made is putting in "B"old and "i"talic keys, putting them in place of the CapsLock key. It would be fairly easy to support them in all Google's sites (just put support into their various frameworks) and the rest of the world would follow soon enough. Although this is my preference I can see why they chose a "Search" button, after all this is a search company.

As for focusing on CapsLock, this is an non-issue as the double tap Shift functionality is already well established in the Google ecosystem, but I do appreciate the way it has gotten everyone thinking about how to evolve the old keyboard again.

Comment Shortcut keys = deal breaker (Score 1) 425

I changed my key caps and switch to the Dvorak layout for a couple of months. After 2 weeks I was up to speed, and found it seamless to switch between QWERTY and Dvorak.

The killer was the shortcut keys. Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V were chosen more for their proximity on the QWERTY keyboard than for the letters they represent. I know the shortcut keys from muscle memory of their locations, not from the underlying letter keys. Even simple cutting and pasting is painful on Dvorak, and more advanced shortcut keys are a nightmare.

We may all lament the lack of foresight when the first IBM PC designers chose to use the stock QWERTY keyboard, but there was another opportunity at the dawn of the GUI. Had the assignment of shortcut keys been made location specific and layout independent, the switch to Dvorak or any other layout would have been a simple personal choice; but that day has come and gone.

I've no doubt your raw WPM will go up after a couple weeks of Dvorak use, but I'll bet your overall productivity goes down. You will either struggle with shortcut keys of find yourself resorting to using the mouse for menu selections.

I reluctantly quit Dvorak and went back to QWERTY.

Space

Space Photos Taken From Shed Stun Astronomers 149

krou writes "Amateur astronomer Peter Shah has stunned astronomers around the world with amazing photos of the universe taken from his garden shed. Shah spent £20,000 on the equipment, hooking up a telescope in his shed to his home computer, and the results are being compared to images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. 'Most men like to putter about in their garden shed,' said Shah, 'but mine is a bit more high tech than most. I have fitted it with a sliding roof so I can sit in comfort and look at the heavens. I have a very modest set up, but it just goes to show that a window to the universe is there for all of us – even with the smallest budgets. I had to be patient and take the images over a period of several months because the skies in Britain are often clouded over and you need clear conditions.' His images include the Monkey's head nebula, M33 Pinwheel Galaxy, Andromeda Galaxy and the Flaming Star Nebula, and are being put together for a book."
Piracy

App Store Piracy Losses Estimated At $459 Million 202

An anonymous reader passes along this quote from a report at 24/7 Wall St.: "There have been over 3 billion downloads since the inception of the App Store. Assuming the proportion of those that are paid apps falls in the middle of the Bernstein estimate, 17% or 510 million of these were paid applications. Based on our review of current information, paid applications have a piracy rate of around 75%. That supports the figure that for every paid download, there have been 3 pirated downloads. That puts the number of pirate downloads at 1.53 billion. If the average price of a paid application is $3, that is $4.59 billion dollars in losses split between Apple and the application developers. That is, of course, assuming that all of those pirates would have made purchases had the application not been available to them for free. This is almost certainly not the case. A fair estimate of the proportion of people who would have used the App Store if they did not use pirated applications is about 10%. This estimate yields about $459 million in lost revenue for Apple and application developers." A response posted at Mashable takes issue with some of the figures, particularly the 75% piracy rate. While such rates have been seen with game apps, it's unclear whether non-game apps suffer the same fate.
Mozilla

Mozilla Rolls Out Firefox 3.6 RC, Nears Final 145

CWmike writes "Mozilla has shipped a release candidate build of Firefox 3.6 that, barring problems, will become the final, finished version of the upgrade. Firefox 3.6 RC1, which followed a run of betas that started in early November, features nearly 100 bug fixes from the fifth beta that Mozilla issued Dec. 17. The fixes resolved numerous crash bugs, including one that brought down the browser when it was steered to Yahoo's front page. Another fix removed a small amount of code owned by Microsoft from Firefox. The code was pointed out by a Mozilla contributor, and after digging, another developer found the original Microsoft license agreement. 'Amusingly enough, it's actually really permissive. Really the only part that's problematic is the agreement to "include the copyright notice ... on your product label and as a part of the sign-on message for your software product,"' wrote Kyle Huey on Mozilla's Bugzilla. Even so, others working on the bug said the code needed to be replaced with Mozilla's own."
Games

How To Judge Legal Risk When Making a Game Clone? 270

An anonymous reader writes "I'm an indie game developer making a clone of a rather obscure old game. Gameplay in my clone is very similar to the old game, and my clone even has a very similar name because I want to attract fans of the original. The original game has no trademark or software patent associated with it, and my clone isn't infringing on the original's copyright in any way (all the programming and artwork is original), but nevertheless I'm still worried about the possibility of running afoul of a look and feel lawsuit or something similar. How do I make sure I'm legally in the clear without hiring an expensive lawyer that my indie developer budget can't afford?"
Idle

Hand Written Clock 86

a3buster writes "This clock does not actually have a man inside, but a flatscreen that plays a 24-hour loop of this video by the artist watching his own clock somewhere and painstakingly erasing and re-writing each minute. This video was taken at Design Miami during Art Basel Miami Beach 2009."

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