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Comment Re:Extra things you'll need (Score 4, Insightful) 1713

by bailout911 (#30924554) Attached to: Apple's "iPad" Out In the Open

Kind of amusing that you're bashing a $500 device when your $320 netbook has been in for repair FOUR TIMES. People always rail on the interchangable battery thing, but I've never carried spare batteries for ANYTHING I've owned. If you're on the move, do you really want to lug around a couple extra pounds? They list 10 hours of battery life including video playback, which, judging by my experiences with a 1st gen iPod touch, is believable.

This thing is more a web-surfing super eBook reader than a true netbook, but in my opinion, it looks awesome. No, it's not a hacker's dream come true mega-portable computer, it's a "normal" person's digital media device. It's for eBooks, music, photos, the web and email and it's designed to do those tasks in a sleek, sexy, simple manner.

This happens with every Apple product announcement. People speculate and expect it to have every feature under the sun, cost next to nothing and be 100% open source, cure cancer, make coffee and have its only environmental by-product be rainbows. Sorry, people, this is the real world. This product looks awesome for what it's designed to be. It's not going to replace your netbook for hacking perl on your favorite geek project and it's not supposed to.
The Media

The Guardian Shifts To Twitter After 188 Years of Ink 211

Posted by Soulskill from the save-the-trees dept.
teflon_king writes with news that renowned British newspaper The Guardian will be abandoning its paper-and-ink distribution scheme and publishing all articles and news as Tweets. Quoting: "A mammoth project is also under way to rewrite the whole of the newspaper's archive, stretching back to 1821, in the form of tweets. Major stories already completed include '1832 Reform Act gives voting rights to one in five adult males yay!!!;' 'OMG Hitler invades Poland, allies declare war see tinyurl.com/b5x6e for more;' and 'JFK assassin8d @ Dallas, def. heard second gunshot from grassy knoll WTF?' Sceptics have expressed concerns that 140 characters may be insufficient to capture the full breadth of meaningful human activity, but social media experts say the spread of Twitter encourages brevity, and that it ought to be possible to convey the gist of any message in a tweet. For example, Martin Luther King's legendary 1963 speech on the steps of the Lincoln memorial appears in the Guardian's Twitterised archive as 'I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by,' eliminating the waffle and bluster of the original."
Businesses

Inside Factory China 135

Posted by kdawson from the making-it dept.
blackbearnh writes "While China is attempting to pull its industry up out of mere manufacturing mode, for now the country is the production workhorse of the consumer electronics industry. Almost anything you pick up at a Best Buy first breathed life across the Pacific Ocean. But what is it like to shepherd a product through the design and production process? Andrew 'bunnie' Huang has done just that with the Chumby, a new Internet appliance. In an interview with O'Reilly Radar, he talks about the logistical and moral issues involved with manufacturing in China, as well as his take on the consumer's right to hack the hardware they purchase."
Technology

LED Lighting As Cheap As CFLs Invented 553

Posted by Soulskill from the bright-ideas dept.
mcgrew writes "New Scientist reports that a British team has overcome the obstacles to cheap LED lighting, and that LED lamps as cheap as CFLs will be on the market in five years. Quoting: 'Gallium nitride cannot be grown on silicon like other solid-state electronic components because it shrinks at twice the rate of silicon as it cools. Crystals of GaN must be grown at 1000C, so by the time a new LED made on silicon has cooled, it has already cracked, rendering the devices unusable. One solution is to grow the LEDs on sapphire, which shrinks and cools at much the same rate as GaN. But the expense is too great to be commercially competitive. Now Colin Humphreys's team at the University of Cambridge has discovered a simple solution to the shrinkage problem. They included layers of aluminium gallium nitride in their LED design... These LEDs can be grown on silicon as so many other electronics components are. ... A 15-centimetre silicon wafer costs just $15 and can accommodate 150,000 LEDs making the cost per unit tiny.'"
Businesses

Circuit City Closes Its Doors For Good 587

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the gonna-have-a-heart-attack-and-die-from-not-surprise dept.
bsharma is amongst the hordes of people wanting us to share the news that long beleaguered retailer Circuit City has finally decided to close for good, asking for court approval to close the remaining 567 US stores. "Whalin said management mistakes over the past few years combined with the recession brought down Circuit City. 'This company made massive mistakes,' he said, citing a decision to get rid of sales people and other mismanagement. What's more, given the credit market freeze, Whalin added that no manufacturer wants to sell to any retailer who doesn't have money to pay for the merchandise. At the same time, Whalin said there's still a very slim chance that one or more firms that have expressed an interest in buying Circuit City could still buy it out of bankruptcy over the next few days."
Music

iTunes DRM-Free Files Contain Personal Info 693

Posted by kdawson from the musical-steganography dept.
r2k writes "Apple's iTunes Plus files are DRM-free, but sharing the files on P2P networks may be an extremely bad idea. A report published by CNet highlights the fact that the account information and email address of the iTunes account holder is hidden inside each and every DRM-free download. I checked, and I found I couldn't access the information using an ID3 tag editor, but using Notepad I found my email address stored inside the audio file itself."

Comment Re:Then where are they? (Score 5, Informative) 544

by bailout911 (#25439657) Attached to: Number of ET Civilizations In Our Galaxy Is 37,964

Or there is of course, another possibility: That humans are the only "intelligent" species using radio transmission as a communications medium and that any other "intelligent" species is such a great distance away and/or in a region of space where we haven't been listening that we are unable to detect them.
OS X

Mac OS X Secretly Cripples Non-Apple Software 559

Posted by Soulskill from the hand-in-the-cookie-jar dept.
spikedLemur writes "Vladimir Vukicevic of the Firefox team stumbled upon some questionable practices from Apple while trying to improve the performance of Firefox. Apparently, Apple is using some undocumented APIs that give Safari a significant performance advantage over other browsers. Of course, "undocumented" means that non-Apple developers have to try and reverse-engineer these interfaces to get the same level of performance. You really have to wonder what Apple is thinking, considering the kind of retaliation Microsoft has gotten for similar practices.
Biotech

Journal Journal: Surgery without stitches

Journal by stemceller
A new way to heal wounds has been developed that eliminates scarring from sutures by sealing surgical incisions with a laser: A thin polymer bio-film that seals surgical wounds could make sutures a relic of medical history. Measuring just 50 microns thick, the film is placed on a surgical wound and exposed to an infrared laser, which heats the film just enough to meld it and the tissue, thus perfectly sealing the wound. Known as Surgilux, the device's raw material is extracted from crab shells
Software

Submission + - First Third-party Native iPhone Application (gizmodo.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The first third-party native application ever for the iPhone is now available: a real full-fledged iPhone application with a graphic user interface and its own icon in the iPhone home screen. It is not a Web 2.0 app but the real thing, What is it? Ironically enough, MobileTerminal, 'a terminal emulator application for the iPhone. MobileTerminal.app is NOT an SSH client, nor Telnet for that matter. It can however be used to execute a console ssh-client application.' The iPhone dev revolution has just started.

Feed MPAA's New Rating System: Would Casablanca Be Smoked Out Of A PG Rating? (techdirt.com)

From feed by techdirtfeed
Remember earlier this year when the MPAA agreed to make some small changes to its movie rating system that had come under a fair amount of criticism for being arbitrary and secretive? Apparently, a part of that shift will be to consider bad habits like smoking a reason to rate a movie for adults only. This has some wondering if classic movies, like Casablanca, would be much more strictly rated today. Luckily, the MPAA won't be re-rating old movies, but at least we can all rest easier knowing that no kids will ever see anyone smoking thanks to this new rating system. After all, if they can't see it in movies, I'm sure they'll never see anyone smoking. Also, I'm sure that the fact that smoking is only allowed in R-rated movies won't make kids think its even cooler and more rebellious than before...

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