javaski - Slashdot User

Mac Tax, Dell Tax, HP Tax 858

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday March 31, 2009 @02:04PM from the get-what-you-pay-for dept.

Harry writes "Microsoft's new Windows ad, with shopper Lauren buying a cheap 17-inch HP laptop instead of a $2,800 MacBook Pro, has unleashed the whole 'Are Macs Expensive?' debate again. I'm diving in with a pretty exhaustive comparison of the MacBook Pro against machines from Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Sony that were as comparably configured as I could manage. The conclusion: High-end laptops tend to carry high-end prices, whether their operating system hails from Cupertino or Redmond. And the MacBook Pro wasn't the priciest of the systems I compared." We looked at this question, not in as much depth, a couple of years back.

FBI Searches New Fed CIO Kundra's Former Offices 173

Posted by timothy on Thursday March 12, 2009 @04:11PM from the rent-seeking-behavior dept.

CWmike writes "While new federal CIO Vivek Kundra gave a speech here this morning on his vision for the US government's use of technology, the FBI conducted a search of the District of Columbia's IT offices — where Kundra worked until last week — and arrested an employee and another person who works for an outsourcing vendor, say reports. There was no indication that Kundra was connected in any way to the FBI's raid, which was part of a bribery sting operation. And if Kundra was aware of what was going on at his former offices or concerned about the raid, it wasn't evident during his speech at FOSE 2009, a trade show focused on government IT. The FBI would not comment on the reports. President Barack Obama last week appointed Kundra to be the federal government's first official CIO."

Dell's Rugged Laptop Doesn't Quite Pass 4-Foot Drop Test 113

Posted by timothy on Tuesday March 10, 2009 @10:49AM from the pretty-toughbook dept.

narramissic writes "Dell's new Latitude E6400 XFR laptop is designed to withstand drops, dust and high pressure water spray. The company claims the laptop, which is intended for military use, can withstand rain and wind gusts of up 70 mph, and can work in temperatures from -20 to 145 degrees Fahrenheit. It can also work for an hour at an altitude of 15,000 feet and is designed to withstand drops of around 4 feet (48 inches) when not operating and 36 inches when operational. The LCD screen floats a little bit within the LCD cover so it can take impacts and shock, said Jeremy Bolen, a Dell spokesman. But watch as the laptop that Dell used to show these features wasn't able to withstand the rough treatment that was part of the company's demonstration."

The Realities of Selling On Apple's App Store 223

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday March 10, 2009 @05:16AM from the languishing-on-the-midlist dept.

Owen Goss writes "Everyone is familiar with the story of the iPhone developer who spends two weeks of spare time making a game that goes on to make them hundreds of thousands of dollars. The reality is that with the App Store now hosting over 25,000 apps, the competition is fierce. While it's true that a few select apps are making developers rich, the reality is that most apps don't make a lot of money. In a blog post I take a hard look at the first 24 days of sales data for the first game, Dapple, from Streaming Colour Studios. The post reflects what is likely the norm for developers just getting into the iPhone development game."

Intel Envisions Shape-Shifting Smartphones 79

Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday March 09, 2009 @10:01AM from the optimus-phone dept.

An anonymous reader writes "It's not sci-fi, but rather advanced robotics research which is leading Intel to envision shape-shifting smartphones. 'Imagine what you would do with this material,' says Jason Campbell, a senior researcher at Intel's Pittsburgh Lab who's working in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University. 'If you want to carry the device, you'd make it as small as possible by making it pack itself as densely as possible. When you go to surf the Web, you're going to make it big.' The material being studied is transparent silicon-dioxide hemispheres, which can roll around each other under electrical control to create different shapes. The lab has built 6-inch long actuators, which it's working to reduce to 1-mm tube-sized prototypes. When will we see a shape-shifting phone? 'In terms of me being able to buy it, that's a difficult forecasting problem, because I have to guess about manufacturing costs,' Campbell said. 'I won't do that. But we hope the science will be proved out in three to five years.'"

Odd Planet Confuses Scientists 142

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday October 08, 2008 @07:55PM from the that's-no-moon dept.

eldavojohn writes "While there's been a lot of debate about what is a planet, there is a recent discovery that has scientists even more confused. COROT (COnvection ROtation and planetary Transits) spotted an object that appears to be the size of Jupiter yet is 21.6 times more massive ... and orbits its star in a mere four days and six hours. Now, the other piece of the puzzle is that the star it orbits is more massive and only slightly larger than our Sun. But they can't describe this thing orbiting it. So far they think it is more likely to be a 'failed star' but have settled with 'member of a new-found family of very massive planets that encircle stars more massive than the sun' to describe it accurately."

David Axmark Resigns From Sun 229

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday October 08, 2008 @07:35PM from the take-this-job-and-shove-it dept.

An anonymous reader writes "From Kay Arno's blog we see that David Axmark, MySQL's Co-Founder, has resigned. This comes on top of the maybe, maybe not, resignation of Monty. We saw earlier this year that Brian Aker, the Director of Architecture, has forked the server to create a web-focused database from MySQL called Drizzle. The MySQL server has been 'RC' now for a year with hundreds of bugs still listed as being active in the 5.1 version. What is going on with MySQL?"

Has Steve Jobs Lost His Magic? 432

Posted by Zonk on Tuesday August 08, 2006 @11:15AM from the get-more-pixie-dust dept.

TimAbdulla writes to mention a Wired article wondering if Steve Jobs has lost his magic? The keynote yesterday, author Leander Kahney says, was the most uninspiring he's yet seen out of the usually charismatic man. Accompanied by other folks from within the company, Kahney wonders what lackluster showings like this will mean for the company after Jobs steps down. From the article: "Looking very thin, almost gaunt, Jobs used the 90-minute presentation to introduce a new desktop Mac and preview the next version of Apple's operating system, code-named Leopard. The sneak preview of Leopard was underwhelming. For what seemed an interminable time, Jobs and Co. showed off one yawn after another. There's no way I can get excited about virtual desktops or a new service that turns highlighted text into a 'to do' item. Oooo."

The Next Three Days are the x86 Days 589

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday August 02, 2006 @09:20AM from the those-are-the-days dept.

Pinky wrote in to note that "Today, tomorrow and the next day are the only days we'll get dates like this: 2/8/6 3/8/6 4/8/6 like the x86 computers :-)" And yes folks, in the August news cycle vortex, even this strikes my fancy. In recent years we've seen numerical giants like 3/1/4, 6/6/6 and 1/2/3, but now really, what do any of us have to look forward to? Is our future dull and meaningless without cool numbers in dates? Oh the humanity of it all ...

MS Portable Not A Game Player? 81

Posted by Zonk on Thursday July 13, 2006 @03:19PM from the conflicting-reports dept.

Though Microsoft's 'Argo' (now known to be bearing the name 'Zune') is most assuredly a shot at the iPod, it may not be going after the handheld gaming market. Gamespot explores rumours stating that the 'Zune' is simply a first step on Microsoft's road into that particular sector of the games industry. From the article: "The Zune could also just be the first step towards something bigger. People are already speculating about Xbox 360 integration with the device, beginning with streaming audio, like the iPod currently does. But add a few buttons, a thumbstick, and a little more horsepower, and the Zune could soon be singing gamers' tunes." I'd imagine we'll see some simple Xbox Live Arcade style games, which will impact your Xbox gamertag via Live Anywhere. With Vista pushed out to January, they've got to have something to show this Christmas.

Microsoft, Yahoo Finally Merge IM Networks 299

Posted by timothy on Thursday July 13, 2006 @08:29AM from the intarweb-communications-changed-4evr dept.

WinBreak writes "Marketwatch is reporting that, nine months after their announcement, Microsoft and Yahoo! are finally ready to roll out beta IM clients of MSN Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger that will be able to talk to each other." The Windows Live Ideas and Yahoo! Messenger pages have more information; the companies say that the resulting user community will be the world's largest, at around 350 million accounts, and that they'll be using SSL to encrypt the traffic between the systems.

DS Claims EU Dominance 172

Posted by Zonk on Tuesday July 11, 2006 @10:51AM from the winning-the-war dept.

Gamasutra reports that, at least in the EU, the Nintendo DS has the portable war pretty much locked up for the time being. 200,000 units of the DS Lite were sold in the ten days after its launch. From the article: "According to Nintendo of Europe, the Nintendo DS has now secured the lead in the handheld market in Europe, with sales of the format exceeding 5 million. No sales figures from Sony are available to compare directly, with only a "shipped" figure of almost 6 million for all territories bar North America and Japan." Interestingly, 136,500 units were sold in the United States in just the first two days after the handheld console's launch.

Work Around for New DVD Format Protections 466

Posted by Zonk on Friday July 07, 2006 @10:34AM from the oops dept.

An anonymous reader writes "For the new Blu-ray and HD-DVD formats, Hollywood implemented a complete copy protection scheme; almost everything has to be encrypted and authenticated. Despite the crypto-stuff in Advanced Access Content System and High Bandwidth Digital Content Protection, they left the backdoor wide open — they forgot about the PrintScreen button. Using this function you can create exact digital copies of a film picture-by-picture and reassemble them into a stream."

RAID Problems With Intel Core 2? 284

Posted by Zonk on Thursday July 06, 2006 @03:49PM from the arr-aye-eye-dee dept.

Nom du Keyboard writes "The Inquirer is reporting that the new Intel Core 2 processors Woodcrest and Conroe are suffering badly when running RAID 5 disk arrays, even when using non-Intel controllers. Can Intel afford to make a misstep now with even in the small subset of users running RAID 5 systems?" From the article: "The performance in benchmarks is there, but the performance in real world isn't. While synthetic benchmarks will do the thing and show RAID5-worthy results, CPU utilization will go through the roof no matter what CPU is used, and the hiccups will occur every now and then. It remains to be seen whether this can be fixed via BIOS or micro-code update."

Comment Re:Don't ask us (Score 1) 161

by javaski on Monday February 20, 2006 @12:57PM (#14761737) Attached to: Being School District Admin?

I had the exact same thing happen. I found out a relatively simple way to completely bypass the schools security software and brought it to the attention of the school's network admin. Her response? "Oh.. umm... Well, we were obviously already aware of that and have been working to fix it. You realize I could have you suspended from school and possibly press legal charges, right?" Needless to say, before leaving my senior year, I disabled the security on a dozen or so computers in the library.

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