lunarmoon - Slashdot User

Comment bluray was born dead (Score 1) 1162

by lunarmoon on Tuesday April 19, 2011 @04:57PM (#35873502) Attached to: Why Has Blu-ray Failed To Catch Hold?

I once wrote as an introduction to one of my books: "In the past we used to create high quality content in low resolution. Today we create low quality content in high resolution". I work with CGI, but regarding a movie, I prefer to watch a low-res high quality content movie than the contrary.

Comment Apple is right (Score 1) 381

by lunarmoon on Wednesday February 16, 2011 @01:31AM (#35218170) Attached to: Apple To Keep 30% of Magazine Subscription Revenue

Apple is right for one reason. Imagine you have a store and one day a man comes to you and say. Hey, I represent a free magazine. Can I put a stand on your store to distribute my magazine for free for your customers? You see that the magazine is cool and allow the guy to put a stand there for free. One day you notice that the guy is now offering a paid subscription service to those who come to him. He is now mounting a business inside your store and profiting for it. WIll you allow this guy to continue? Obviously not. Apple was clear. Free apps cannot sell anything and paid apps must deliver digital content to users and the content must be in one of two forms: already inside the application or on a server outside. If the user chooses the second option, the server must be prepared to talk to Apple's servers acknowledging the delivery of the digital content. What these guys were doing were mounting a store inside Apple's store. No business in planet would ever allow that. Try to make your stand inside Barnes & Nobles for free and tell me if you was successful.

Micro-USB Cellphone Charger Becomes EU Standard 302

Posted by timothy on Saturday January 01, 2011 @03:11AM from the wish-they-seemed-stronger dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The European Commission has put into effect a June 2009 agreement stating that major cellphone manufacturers should standardize their charging/data connection ports to the popular Micro-USB format. CEN-CENELEC and ETSI provided the standards by which these 14 companies will abide to make cell phone recharging and data transfer easy." Apple may even bring the next-gen iPad along for the ride.

Programmable Magnets 120

Posted by kdawson on Friday October 22, 2010 @09:13AM from the spooky-action-at-a-distance dept.

Martin Hellman writes "A few weeks ago Popular Mechanics awarded one of its Breakthrough Awards for the invention of 'programmable magnets.' Instead of having a single North or South pole, these clever devices have an array of North and South poles. If a matching device with exactly the same array is aligned with the first one, they will experience strong repulsion, just like two single North poles do when brought near one another. If the matching device has the complementary array (North and South interchanged), with correct alignment the two devices will attract. But a slight misalignment will cancel most of the force. Other configurations are possible as well, allowing frictionless magnetic gears and exploding toys. The inventor, Larry Fullerton, used techniques similar to those from CDMA modulation. (Watch the intro video for a brief explanation. While I don't understand magnetism that well, I do understand CDMA and carrying over those ideas to magnetic arrays does make sense to me.)"

How Google Avoided Paying $60 Billion In Taxes 1193

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday October 21, 2010 @12:56PM from the just-not-good dept.

bonch writes "Google only pays a 2.4% tax rate using money-funneling techniques known as the 'Double Irish' and the 'Dutch Sandwich,' even though the US corporate income tax is 35%. By using Irish loopholes, money is transferred legally between subsidiaries and ends up in island sanctuaries that have no income tax, giving Google the lowest tax rate amongst its technology peers. Facebook is planning to use the same strategy."

Fermilab To Test Holographic Universe Theory 166

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday October 21, 2010 @07:57AM from the getting-some-answers dept.

eldavojohn writes "Scientists at Fermilab have decided that it's high time they build a 'holometer' to test the smoothness of space-time. Theoretical physicists like Stephen Hawking have proposed that space-time is not smooth but it's been a lot of math and no actual data. The Fermilab team plans to build two relatively small devices that act as 'holographic interferometers' to measure the shaking or vibration in split beams of light traveling through a vacuum. If the team finds the shaking in their measurements and records them, the theory of a holographic universe will have some evidence of non-smoothness in space-time and perhaps a foothold in bringing light to the heavily debated theoretical physics."

India To Build Neutrino Observatory 102

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday October 21, 2010 @05:18AM from the look-closely dept.

TeriMaKiChooth writes "Only the fifth in the world, the facility is being called one of the biggest and most ambitious scientific projects ever undertaken by India. About 90 scientists from 26 organizations will be involved in the Indian Neutrino Observatory (INO), organizers say. Neutrinos are elusive, nearly mass-less elementary particles, sometimes called 'ghost particles.'"

Apple Announces iLife '11, FaceTime Mac, Lion, Mac App Store, MacBook Air 827

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday October 20, 2010 @02:05PM from the get-an-ilife dept.

Apple once again streamed their latest keynote where they unveiled iLife '11 (more fullscreen and Facebook in iPhoto, Audio editing and automatic trailers in iMovie, Rhythm correction and lessons in Garage Band). FaceTime for the Mac will connect video chat to phones with a Beta starting today. Next we get a preview of OS X Lion which will have an App Store and new UI bits shipping this summer. The Mac App Store will launch on Snow Leopard in 90 days. The New MacBook Air is under 3lbs, 13.3" screen, Core 2 Duo, solid state only storage. There's also an 11.6" version starting at $999 with 64gb of storage shipping today.

Antenna Arrays Could Replace Satellite TV Dishes 183

Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday October 19, 2010 @02:28PM from the yes-have-some dept.

Zothecula writes "There was a time not so very long ago when people who wanted satellite TV or radio required dishes several feet across. Those have since been replaced by today's compact dishes, but now it looks like even those might be on the road to obsolescence. A recent PhD graduate from The Netherlands' University of Twente has designed a microchip that allows for a grid array of almost-flat antennae to receive satellite signals."

Pirate Bay Down; Police Raids Across Europe 325

Posted by timothy on Tuesday September 07, 2010 @09:00AM from the knock-knock-joke dept.

Stoobalou contributes a link to this story at Thinq.co.uk, from which he excerpts: "Torrent-tracking site The Pirate Bay is currently unavailable as reports come in of co-ordinated police raids against file sharers across Europe. Police in up to 14 countries carried out raids against suspected file-sharing servers this morning. According to file-sharing news site TorrentFreak, the bulk of police action seems to have taken place in Sweden. Swedish Internet service provider ISP, which hosts both The Pirate Bay and whistle-blowing site WikiLeaks, earlier denied rumours of a police raid, saying that officers had visited them to ask questions over two suspect IP addresses, and that no computers or other goods had been seized."

Comment Re:crazy (Score 1) 496

by lunarmoon on Tuesday February 24, 2009 @11:37PM (#26978333) Attached to: The Hard Upgrade Path From XP To Vista To Win 7

M$ choose to make windows that way, i.e., to carry all crap from the eighties in order to be compatible with most part of everything. This was theory but never worked in practice after windows 98. Now they are being haunted by all the crap they are carrying around. In fact they are already dead, as stated by John C. Devorak a few years ago. Who cares?

Slashdot Top Deals