Comment Commit Often (Score 2) 765
I think the real question is - why was he working with a local repository / local changes for three months? You commit often so this does not happen.
Comment Apple Has Planned This For A While (Score 4, Insightful) 122
Apple has let developers know that this change was coming for about a year and a half now. We develop a VoIP application and have been making changes well in advance of Apple fully deprecating the older socket mechanism.
It does have the downside of giving Apple more control but Apple already has full control over whether you can publish to the App Store, how your UI should look (within reason based on guidelines), not duplicating system functionality, etc. However if this improves battery life and creates applications that are designed in a better fashion then it is positive change.
Comment Upgrade Stuck While Installing (Score 1) 281
I tried to upgrade yesterday, my machine has Windows 10 Enterprise and Ubuntu 16.04 on two separate disks. The machine rebooted while updating but would get stuck trying to install (once at 19%, the next time at 0%). To recover I had to power off via the power button and when booting into Windows again it would recover to a previous restore point automatically. Ubuntu stayed intact. After checking for the update again Microsoft have removed the option so it no longer appears as an available update, presumably until they either fix it or else as part of a staggered update mechanism.
Comment Placebo Thermostat Controls (Score 1) 216
In the building I work in, the temperature is set to 21 degrees Celsius. There are thermostats all over the place but most are dummy boxes connected to nothing. There have been arguments between a few colleagues as to what temperature one of the fake controls should be set to. I thought it was funnier to see them bicker over it than let them know the controls are useless.
Submission + - Doom Is Now 20 Years Old (dallasnews.com)
alancronin writes: Few video games have had the impact that Doom has on the medium as a whole. While it wasn’t the first first-person shooter out there, it was certainly one of the earliest hits of the genre, due in no small part to its revolutionary multiplayer. Today, that game is 20 years old. Made in Mesquite by a bunch of young developers including legends John Carmack and John Romero, Doom went on to “transform pop culture,” as noted by the sub-title of the book Masters of Doom.
Submission + - PCWorld magazine is no more (time.com)
harrymcc writes: After slightly more than 30 years, PCWorld — one of the most successful computer magazines of all time — is discontinuing print publication. It was the last general-interest magazine for PC users, so it really is the end of an era. Over at TIME, I paused to reflect upon the end of the once-booming category, in part as a former editor at PCWorld, but mostly as a guy who really, really loved to read computer magazines.
Submission + - Ethernet Turns 40 Years Old (theinquirer.net)
alancronin writes: Four decades ago the Ethernet protocol made its debut as a way to connect machines in close proximity, today it is the networking layer two protocol of choice for local area networks (LANs), wide area networks (WANs) and everything in between. For many people Ethernet is merely the RJ45 jack on the back of a laptop, but its relative ubiquity and simplicity belie what Ethernet has done for the networking industry and in turn for consumers and enterprises. Ethernet has in the space of 40 years gone from a technology that many in the industry viewed as something not fit for high bandwidth, dependable communications to the default data link protocol.
Submission + - How BlackBerry Is Riding iOS And Android To Power Its Comeback (zdnet.com)
alancronin writes: While a fresh new generation of BlackBerry phones fight a ferocious battle for third place in the smartphone race, BlackBerry's other big business remains in a great position in its red-hot market, Mobile Device Management (MDM). At BlackBerry Live 2013 in Orlando this week, the company rolled out a major update to BlackBerry Enterprise Service (BES) and deepened its commitment to making BES a multiplatform solution that now deeply secures its two leading smartphone competitors. Ironically, the trend that brutally undercut BlackBerry phones during the past five years—the "bring your own device" (BYOD) movement—is now driving significant sales of BES, the company's backend software. At BlackBerry Live, the company released version 10.1 of BES. BES 10.1 will support a powerful new module that will launch at the end of June called Secure Work Space, which brings BlackBerry's high security mobile solution to Android and iOS. "Our customers have been asking, 'Can you just take what you've done on BlackBerry and put it on iOS and Android?'" said Pete Devenyi, BlackBerry's SVP of Enterprise Software.
Comment So Much For Google's Corporate Motto (Score 1) 716
Their 'Don't be evil' motto seems to be wearing even thiner recently.
This seems like the kind of thing that Microsoft would do but in this case I'm with Microsoft. They have a valid argument in trying to create an experience similar to other platforms.
Submission + - Portal Now Available On Linux (on.net)
alancronin writes: Valve have released Portal for Linux through the Steam platform. If you have a copy of the Windows version you will automatically have a copy of it for Linux in your account. There are also rumors of Portal 2 coming soon.
Submission + - Google And Adobe Beautify Fonts On Linux, iOS (pcworld.com)
alancronin writes: Users of Android, Chrome OS, Linux, and iOS devices may not realize it, but FreeType open source software is used to render fonts on more than a billion such devices. Not only that, but the FreeType project this week got a significant update from none other than Adobe and Google. Specifically, Google and Adobe on Wednesday released into beta the Adobe CFF engine, an advanced Compact Font Format (CFF) rasterizer that “paves the way for FreeType-based platforms to provide users with richer and more beautiful reading experiences,” as Google put it in an online announcement on the Google Open Source Blog. The new rasterizer is now included in FreeType version 2.4.12. Though it's currently off by default, the technology is “vastly superior” to the old CFF engine and will replace it in the next FreeType release, the project says.
Comment Mostly to pass time... (Score 1) 363
Time, New Scientist, occasionally Linux Journal (or whichever Linux magazine looks most appealling while in a newsagents) but the one that take up most of my time is Slashdot itself.
Submission + - Twitter Adding Music (nytimes.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The NY Times reports that Twitter will soon launch a new music recommendation system for users of its service. The company teased the new feature and directed queries to announcement that We Are Hunted, a company focused on music recommendation through social media, would be shutting down and joining the Twitter team. 'Recommendations based on social media interactions have become common throughout digital media for things like restaurants and shopping. Many online music services offer these features as well. Spotify, for example, can broadcast its users’ playlists through Facebook. Twitter’s advantage, in addition to its size, may lie in the devotion of its customers. "Music is one of the most tweeted topics," said Ted Cohen, a former label executive who is now a consultant to digital music companies. "Discovery is critical to the growth of music, and the new gatekeeper is recommendations from trusted sources."' Oddly, those 'trusted sources' seem to be celebrities with Twitter accounts at the moment, as the system is currently invite-only and restricted to 'influencers.'
Submission + - Stephen Hawking Predicts End-Of-Earth Scenario (cnet.com)
alancronin writes: Stephen Hawking, one of the world's greatest physicists and cosmologists, is once again warning his fellow humans that our extinction is on the horizon unless we figure out a way to live in space. Not known for conspiracy theories, Hawking's rationale is that the Earth is far too delicate a planet to continue to withstand the barrage of human battering. "We must continue to go into space for humanity," Hawking said today, according to the Los Angeles Times. "We won't survive another 1,000 years without escaping our fragile planet."
Google Releases Street View Images From Fukushima Ghost Town 63
mdsolar writes in with news that Goolge has released Street View pictures from inside the zone that was evacuated after the Fukushima disaster. "Google Inc. (GOOG) today released images taken by its Street View service from the town of Namie, Japan, inside the zone that was evacuated after the Fukushima nuclear disaster in March 2011. Google, operator of the world's biggest Web search engine, entered Namie this month at the invitation of the town's mayor, Tamotsu Baba, and produced the 360-degree imagery for the Google Maps and Google Earth services, it said in an e-mailed statement. All of Namie's 21,000 residents were forced to flee after the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami crippled the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant, about 8 kilometers (5 miles) from the town, causing the world's worst nuclear accident after Chernobyl. Baba asked Mountain View, California-based Google to map the town to create a permanent record of its state two years after the evacuation, he said in a Google blog post."
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If computers take over (which seems to be their natural tendency), it will serve us right. -- Alistair Cooke
