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Seinfeld's Good Samaritan Law Now Reality? 735

Posted by samzenpus from the not-that-there-is-anything-wrong-with-that dept.
e3m4n writes "The fictitious 'good samaritan' law from the final episode of Seinfeld (the one that landed them in jail for a year) appears to be headed toward reality for California residents after the house passed this bill. There are some differences, such as direct action is not required, but the concept of guilt by association for not doing the right thing is still on the face of the bill."

Comment Re:Two things. (Score 3, Informative) 278

by defjesta (#30482440) Attached to: Firefox Mobile Threatens Mobile App Stores, Says Mozilla

While you seem to have some industry experience, I think you perhaps write off the iPhone a little too easily. I can certainly see some parallels with Apple's Mac strategy in the 80's, but they have done a lot of things right (from a dev point of view), and are seeing success accordingly. 100k apps and rising speaks for itself really.

I agree that the iPhone has a small marketshare of total mobile phones, however the vast majority of mobile applications (where a web app won't do), are targeted towards smartphones. As you can see on this graph, the iPhone is currently in third place with around 13% marketshare. Not insignificant, and not bad at all for just over 2 years on the market.

As another poster mentioned, Apple has made it very easy to sell and buy Apps on this device, so most people that own an iPhone will spend money on Apps. Contrast this to Symbian where it takes a pretty dedicated and sometimes technical user to buy and install an application.

So, in the "real world" the iPhone is quite a dominant force already. It may yet prove to be a fad, and the mobile industry does move very fast, but I don't think so. I am personally seeing an increasing amount of consulting requests specifically iPhone related, and interest from corps is sky high.

With regards to your Java point; J2ME is nice (sometimes ;-), and it certainly has the largest install base of any mobile language, but the sad reality is that it is nowhere near "write once, run anywhere". For a cross platform J2ME mobile project, you will usually spend at least 50% of your project time porting and getting things running on devices that all implement it a little differently and have their own quirks. So supporting the majority of smartphones (Symbian, Blackberry, Win Mo and iPhone) will require a lot of specialised code anyway (unless you use a cross platform framework, but that has it's own drawbacks).

All iPod Touches and iPhones are essentially the same (barring some hardware differences like processor speed, bluetooth, etc), and an App written for one will almost always run on any other (I have had some obscure issues that crop up between different models, but nothing of significance). This is heaven from a dev's point of view!
Government

One Crime Solved Per 1,000 London CCTV Cameras 404

Posted by kdawson from the ready-for-my-closeup-mister-demille dept.
SpuriousLogic writes "Only one crime was solved for each 1,000 CCTV cameras in London last year, a report into the city's surveillance network has claimed. The internal police report found the million-plus cameras in London rarely help catch criminals. In one month CCTV helped capture just eight out of 269 suspected robbers. David Davis MP, the former shadow home secretary, said: 'It should provoke a long overdue rethink on where the crime prevention budget is being spent.' He added: 'CCTV leads to massive expense and minimum effectiveness. It creates a huge intrusion on privacy, yet provides little or no improvement in security. The Metropolitan Police has been extraordinarily slow to act to deal with the ineffectiveness of CCTV.'"
Businesses

Freelance Web Developer Best Practices? 438

Posted by kdawson from the like-a-pro dept.
SirLurksAlot writes "My last employer had to make a series of budget cuts, and I was laid off. I have been on the job hunt since then; however in the meantime I have begun freelancing as a Web developer. This is my first time in this role and so I would like the ask the Slashdot community: are there any best practices for freelance developers? What kind of process should I use when dealing with clients? Should I bill by the hour or provide a fixed quote on a per-project basis? What kind of assurances should I get from the client before I begin work? What is the best way to create accurate time estimates? I'm also wondering if there are any good open source tools for freelancers, such as for time-tracking and invoice creation (aside from simply using a spreadsheet). Any suggestions or insights would be welcome."
Graphics

Submission + - Carmack speaks on ray tracing, future id engines (pcper.com)

Submitted by Vigile
Vigile writes: As a matter of principle, when legendary game programmer John Carmack speaks, the entire industry listens. In a recent interview he comments on a multitude of topics starting with information about Intel, their ray tracing research and upcoming Larrabee GPU. Carmack seems to think that Intel's direction using traditional ray tracing methods is not going to work and instead theorizes that using ray casting to traverse a new data structure he is developing is the best course of action. The "sparse voxel octree" that Carmack discusses would allow for "unique geometry down to the equivalent of the texel across everything." He goes on to discuss other topics like the hardware necessary to efficiently process his new data structure, translation to consoles, multi-GPU PC gaming and even the world of hardware physics.
Communications

Verizon, Fiber Or Die? 291

Posted by kdawson from the copper-kiss-off dept.
dynamator writes "I live about 550 meters from my Verizon central office. I pay for their higher-tier 'Power Plan' DSL service, which boasts 3 Mbps down and 758 Kbsp up. For the past year, I've enjoyed excellent performance on this line. However, this past month Verizon has been hooking up my neighbors with FiOS, their new fiber-to-the-home system, and guess what, my connection speed and dependability have taken a nosedive. What can I do to build the case that this is really happening? Will anyone, least of all Verizon, care? Are they making me a fiber offer I can't refuse?" We discussed a few times last year what Verizon may be up to.
Linux Business

Why Dell Won't Offer Linux On Its PCs 628

Posted by kdawson from the D-I-Y dept.
derrida sends us to an article in the Guardian by Jack Schofield explaining why he believes Dell won't offer Linux on its PCs. In the end he suggests that those lobbying Dell for such a solution go out and put together a company and offer one themselves. Quoting: "The most obvious [problem] is deciding which version of Linux to offer. There are more than 100 distros, and everybody seems to want a different one — or the same one with a different desktop, or whatever. It costs Dell a small fortune to offer an operating system... so the lack of a standard is a real killer. The less obvious problem is the very high cost of Linux support, especially when selling cheap PCs to naive users who don't RTFM... and wouldn't understand a Linux manual if they tried. And there's so much of it! Saying 'Linux is just a kernel, so that's all we support' isn't going to work, but where in the great sprawling heap of GNU/Linux code do you draw the line?"

Nintendo's Next-Gen Arsenal 321

Posted by Zonk from the zelda's-got-a-gun dept.
Much of the coverage of the next-gen skirmish so far has focused on Sony and Microsoft. The already-impressive Xbox Live vs. the PS3. Just the same, for the first time in many years Nintendo is definitely in the running for top spot. About.com has a piece looking at what the big N is bringing to the next-gen party this November. From the article: "While Nintendo is trend setting with controllers like the Wiimote and, to a lesser extent, the nunchaku dongle, other companies will be following along. Nintendo's game plan from the genesis of the Wii has been touch and gamer-friendly games. They see the future of gaming in the Wiimote. Everyone else, at this point, seems to be just catching up."

Wii Graphics 'Better Than At E3' 400

Posted by Zonk from the details-details dept.
Gamespot and GameDaily have additional details on Nintendo's upcoming console. Gamespot reports on comments by Nintendo President Iwata that they were specifically not going for high-end graphics with the Wii. He goes on to say that some of their staff initially disagreed with the adoption of the Wiimote, but public and internal reaction has allayed the fears of detractors. GameDaily reports on comments from ATI, who says there is still a lot left to see from Wii's graphical output. What was shown at E3 was 'just the tip of the iceberg.' From the article: "Industry sources have said that the Wii GPU would be moderately more powerful than the GameCube's GPU, but how much more we don't know. Conservative estimates from developers have placed the Wii console as a whole at 2 - 2.5 times more powerful than the GameCube."

Comment Re:network support? (Score 1) 78

by defjesta (#15362183) Attached to: Carmack Considers Cell Phone MMOG
Latency on GPRS networks (and even EDGE) is unnacceptable for real-time multiplayer gaming, however, network connected apps and turn-based multiplayer games can and do work.

3G is where real time starts to become a reality. The company I work at (Spectrum Wired) recently developed the worlds first real time multiplayer mobile sports game (A mouthfull I know :-). This game is soft-launched in Australia and currently rolling out around the rest of the world. With the 3G networks we were typically getting a latency of 150 - 300ms between the client and server, and with some decent prediction code this is quite acceptable for real time gaming.

So to get back on topic, yes it is possible to do multiplayer gaming over GPRS, but only turn based can really work well enough. For something like an MMO you really need a 3G network.

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