Comment Re:Uff Da (Score 1) 226
17th of may is constitution day. It is a celebration of the norwegian constitution and independence from Denmark in 1814. (Never mind the 91 year union with Sweden which was forced upon Norway few months earlier that year).
Comment Re:FUD (Score 1) 304
That is quite simple. Download the data in the format of my choice and carry on using MS Office, Libre Office or whatever product that suits my needs. It is not like they do a rm -rf / before they announce the closing of Google Apps.
Comment Re:Android 2.2.1 can be non-intuitive. (Score 1) 532
1. You cannot forward text msgs on Android.
2. You cannot open pics that someone MMSs to you outside of the txt app.
4. If you receive a txt, you cannot click and call them. You have to exit the txt app, and find them in your contacts.
Hold your finger on the message and menu popup that allow you to do all these things. It works on Android 1.5 and it works on 2.3. I am sure 2.2 can do that as well. Point 3 should be fixable if you install an app. Point 5 really does not work if you have hundreds of people in you contact list. You do not remember their names?
Comment Re:Won't sell. (Score 0) 330
How about this guy? http://dcurt.is/2011/10/03/3-point-5-inches/ This blog post was refered to by the tech press a while ago. Many people seemed to agree with Apple that 3.5" should be enough for anybody with this reasoning.
Comment Re:Encrypted (Score 1) 434
That is not true. Credit card companies offer a token, a hashed edition of your credit card number, that can be used for subscriptions or stored credit cards at their servers. The hash is combined with the merchant id making it useless outside of the single merchant. Encryption cabbot ptevent credit card numbers from being copied, Hashing does.
Comment Re:Bing (Score 0) 274
What are the chances he wrote that up in 1 minute? Look at the submission time for the article and the post. As the other guy said there recently was a similiar post about windows phone 7.
Comment Re:Epic Win, Or Pyrrhic Victory? (Score 1) 311
Google has done this before. They made bids on US wireless frequencies with the intension of driving up the price and add clauses to the use of the frequencies. The bids where all mathematical puns of some sort. While Larry Page kind of liked the idea of owning wireless frequencies the rest of the board very much did not want to win the bidding war with Verizon and AT&T.
While this fact does not prove that the Nortel bidding was a bluff to drive the price up it shows that Google is very much capable and willing to do so.
Comment Re:Linux Version (Score 1) 153
You can use Google Talk with the video and voice plugin.
Balancing Choice With Irreversible Consequences In Games 352
The Moving Pixels blog has an article about the delicate balance within video games between giving players meaningful choices and consequences that cannot necessarily be changed if the player doesn't like her choice afterward. Quoting:
"One of my more visceral experiences in gaming came recently while playing Mass Effect 2, in which a series of events led me to believe that I'd just indirectly murdered most of my crew. When the cutscenes ended, I was rocking in my chair, eyes wide, heart pounding, and as control was given over to me once more, I did the only thing that I thought was reasonable to do: I reset the game. This, of course, only led to the revelation that the event was preordained and the inference that (by BioWare's logic) a high degree of magical charisma and blue-colored decision making meant that I could get everything back to normal. ... Charitably, I could say BioWare at least did a good job of conditioning my expectations in such a way that the game could garner this response, but the fact remains: when confronted with a consequence that I couldn't handle, my immediate player's response was to stop and get a do-over. Inevitability was only something that I could accept once it was directly shown to me."
Problems With Truncation On the Common Application 135
jaroslav writes "A combination of rigid caps on space and poor documentation of the space limits is adding stress on students applying for college using the Common Application, the New York Times reports. The story explains that the application lists word limits for questions, but actually enforces space limits. As a result, an answer with wide characters, such as 'w' or 'm,' may run over space even without reaching the stated word limit. It is not explained why an electronic submission must have such strictly enforced limits."
Navy Uses Railgun To Launch Fighter Jet 314
Phoghat writes "In 2015 the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford will take to the seas and the plan is to use a railgun to launch planes, instead of steam powered catapults. From the article: 'The Navy developed its Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System as a replacement for the steam catapults currently used on aircraft carriers. The EMALS is a linear induction motor that's capable of accelerating a 100,000 pound aircraft to 240 miles per hour in the space of 300 feet. Compared to a steam catapult, the railgun catapult is much smaller, more efficient, simpler to maintain, gentler on airframes, and can deliver up to 30% more power. It's also capable of being cranked down a whole bunch, meaning that it can also launch smaller (and more fragile) unmanned drones.'"
Raising a Botnet In Captivity 60
holy_calamity writes "Technology Review reports that researchers installed 3000 copies of Windows XP on a high performance cluster at a Canadian university and set loose the Waledac botnet on them. It's the first time researchers have built and operated their own botnet as a strategy to better understand those at large on the internet. Doing it inside an experimental computing cluster removes the legal and ethical complications of experimenting with live botnets that control innocent users' machines."
Meg Whitman Campaign Shows How Not To Use Twitter 147
tsamsoniw writes "California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman's campaign team attempted to share with her Twitter followers an endorsement from a police association. Unfortunately, the campaign press secretary entered an incorrect or incomplete Bit.ly URL in the Tweet, which took clickers to a YouTube video featuring a bespectacled, long-haired Japanese man in a tutu and leggings rocking out on a bass guitar. And for whatever reason, the Tweet, which went out on the 18th, has remained active through today."
OnLive CEO On Post-Launch Status, Game Licenses 121
CNET has a lengthy interview with OnLive CEO Steve Perlman about how the service is shaping up almost a month after launch. Demand seems to have outstripped their expectations, and it required some quick server expansion to compensate. He also addresses a common concern among gamers — that the licenses for games could expire in three years. Perlman says, "It's less of an issue about the licenses evaporating, and more of an issue of whether or not we continue to maintain the operating systems and the graphics cards to run those games. If a game is tied to a particular Nvidia or ATI card, or if it's relying on a particular version of Windows with different drivers, we can't be sure that those will continue to be available as our servers age and need to be replaced. If it's a popular game that can't run on old hardware anymore, the publishers can do an upgrade for the game. Also, servers usually do last longer than three years, so chances are we'll keep running them. But we have a legal obligation to disclose what might happen. I think the probability of us pulling a game in three years is on the order of 0.1 percent. It's also highly unlikely that a game server will evaporate after three years, but we have to allow for that possibility." He also goes into future plans for expanding OnLive, both in terms of the content they offer and the devices they may support. The Digital Foundry blog followed up the latency tests we discussed with a full review, if you'd like an unbiased opinion of the service.
